Apologies Akenaton, I did not make my point clear enough. The £1 billion I mentioned was direct revenue from oil, one of the major companies who had to pay for it's extraction and take on all the risks involved made £350 million.

The Government then continued to gather in revenue in addition to that £1 billion from the sources mentioned in my earlier post.

Yo Bobert,

To fund all those things you mention how many revenue streams are available to Government? The oil company only makes money out of what it extracts and what it invests in, those companies then pay a heafty chunk of that to the Governments they had to buy their licences from in the first place.

Guest petr,
You make some very good points in your post that, as you so rightly say, others tend to forget completely.

MGOH,
Guest petr above mentioned, "vast reserves", to which you responded, "that's just a few more years putting off the inevitable". Petr also mentioned the Alberta Tarsands. Looking at the USA alone, there is an estimated 400 year supply of oil bearing shale in the Rocky Mountains. As Petr rightly points out it is the cost of recovery, that precludes its extraction, plus the environmental impact such extraction would cause.

Originally by using oil production and supply as an economic "weapon", OPEC caused it's own circumvention by the West. It now exists solely to maintain the price and ensure supply to their customers according to their needs. They could never use oil as a weapon again, it was a "one-off" event that was responded to without the use of force. It hurt OPEC more than those OPEC was targeting.