ECON 2011 - The 1st IASTED International Conference on Economics of Unconventional Oils ~ECON 2011~

The 1st IASTED International Conference on Economics of Unconventional Oils (ECON 2011) will be a major forum for international researchers and practitioners interested in all areas of unconventional oils, including oil and tar sands, oil shales, heavy oils, and other hydrocarbons that do not flow. It will be an opportunity to present and observe the latest research, results, and ideas in these areas. Recovering oil from tar sands is more expensive than drilling wells into existing liquid oil fields. When oil was cheap and supply outstripped demand, oil companies experimented on the tar sands in Canada and Venezuela. However, the Middle East oil embargo in the 1970s changed the equation. Oil prices rose, and recovering oil from the tar sands became a potentially profitable venture: a comfortable profit margin exists for oil sands recovery projects when oil prices exceed $24 per barrel. Though experts do not believe that unconventional oil-producing regions will displace the Middle East as the lowest cost or highest volume suppliers of oil to world markets anytime soon, calculating the cost of extraction, remediation, and the value of risk taken by companies involved in unconventional oil remains a flexible formula that has always been considered problematical and open to debate.

Scope
The topics of interest to be covered by ECON 2011 include, but are not limited to:

Economic value of unconventional oil
Employment and labour income
Financing
Forecasting
Government revenues through royalties
Historical analysis and future projections
Implementing controls
Project management
Putting water in the cost equation
Quality control
Real timelines and real costs
Supply chain management
The value of risk
Vulnerability and threat assessment