A different way to think about whether it's worth getting oil of out of the ground:
"#Oil in the #NorthSea is expected to be net-energy negative by 2031. This means that in 2031, it’ll cost more energy to extract the fossil fuels than we would gain by using them, rendering extraction unfeasibly expensive.
Globally, it will cost more energy to extract oil than we would gain from using it before the end of the 2030s."
Usually the question is "How much money does it take to produce a barrel of oil?" If the answer is less than the oil price, drill baby drill.
EROEI (Energy return on energy invested) asks "How much ENERGY does it take to produce a barrel of oil?"
In the old days, oil was cheap to produce: EROEI > 100. But it's getting harder to get it out of the ground. For some tar samds, EROEI = 3. Add that you get only one barrel of useful energy out of that. Looks pretty grim.
The article says "floating wind turbines are now being built in the North Sea to power oil rigs in a bid to decarbonise them."
They talk about de carbonisation, which sounds pretty, but really it's using free wind energy to help keep down the cost of producing the oil.
"The North Sea’s oil is technically already net-energy negative but is artificially propped up with energy subsidies from fossil fuels and renewables (like those wind turbines)."
In this figure, NER_oil approximates EROEI, and "Brent" is the North Sea oil mentioned in the Resilience article. Several other fields also have NER_oil close to 1, including in California, (Midway-Sunset) and in Indonesia (Duri).
For those fields, I bet the CO2 emissions per Joule is higher than for coal.