Originally Posted by D

I've often thought about that myself, but the way I reason it is that once you get past the cost of machinery and labor... the rate of extraction of an oil rig is a lot greater than the rate of extraction of your typical head of milking cattle. I figure it along the same lines of logic, though not as extreme, that explains why saffron is so expensive.

With the cost of cattle, you're factoring in many costs: feed, labor, machinery, electricity, water, packaging, homogenization, etc...

With oil, there's also significant costs: surveying, lots of labor, lots of machinery, electricity, processing, etc... but as you're basically digging into an underground "lake" of your product, and sucking it dry... performing each of these processing steps in a "bulk" sense, there's a lot more of it to divvy up your cost into.

I'm sure if there were underground lakes of milk, and we didn't have to stimulate a bovine's nipples to get every drop of the stuff, it'd be a lot cheaper.

So, yeah, without looking at the product, I'd hazard that there are a lot more costs associated with oil, but the rate of extraction's so much greater that the sheer volume of product compensates.

But then, these are just my own thoughts... I could very well be wrong.