When's The Oil Spigot Gonna Open Up?

[ThomWV]

I have a feeling that the chimp will order a drawdown on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve a couple of weeks before the election just to drive down the cost of home heating oil. By the first of November a lot of this country has seen frost and some have seen their first snowfall, a lot of people in the colder regions of the country heat with oil - wait until they see the sticker shock this year. The price of that oil has almost doubled since last year and there is no reason at all to think its going to go down on its own.

Jawboneing my ass.

Thom

[MercutioATC]

1. Tapping the strategic reserve isn't necessary...

...he just needs to stop filling it to bring prices back down.

[ThomWV]

3. I had forgotten about that

You're right. I recall that a number of nations asked the Bush administration to at least slow down their fill rate because of our effect on the world price. I was thinking that I had seen that it was probably the cause of about $8 a barrel in increased cost world-wide. Personally I think the only reason they are filling it is in preparation for their all-out war on the mid-east but first the asswipe has to find a way to stay in office. Getting cheap heating oil to the cold parts (anything north of New York City and to the west) would go a long way towards saving some votes he might otherwise loose. I think the asshole will do it.

[meegbear]

2. Haven't you noticed?

Oil prices have gone way up, but the pump prices haven't. The oil companies are keeping the price down, waiting for the election results. Then they can raise them and blame President Kerry or blame the ME instability if * is reelected.

[jono]

5. The oil prices you see today

are for deliveries in Sept. and Oct. Gas prices will go up next month as refineries start taking delivery of the now-higher-priced oil.

[ThomWV]

6. Keep In Mind

Those daily prices you see all over the place are spot market prices, these are not the prices the major oil companys are paying. The majors work under contracts that are holding their prices down. There's another thing too, that absolutly no one ever seems to want to notice. The price of oil has a number of parts, profit being one of them but lifting costs being another important one. Simply put someone has to run the pumping and collection network and that cost is part of the cost of the oil. It is not the Saudis who are out their running those rigs and getting that part of the per barrel price. It is the very same majors that are then paying back the price. In a sense a very big part of the price of oil that we actually use comes from the oil companys buying their refinery stock from companys in which all the workers actually work for them - at a profit.

[Parche]

4. oil

What we really need to do is to conserve
Get rid of all of those nasty SUV's stupid utility vehicles
they waste over 1million gallons of gas per day
that is a lot.
Get all of those homes that have oil heat and change them out
to either natural gas or other means
Get electricity plants to do the same, go off of oil and on to
natural gas or other means
That is all we need to do, and we will save tons of oil.
Also use mass transit whenever possible

[ThomWV]

7. I think you need a quick education

As far as natural gas goes for this country we are basically fucked. Our own domestic production is decreasing and we import more gas than we produce. At the moment we are importing about 65% of our natural gas from Canada. Now that would be fine except for one thing. Canada's production is falling at a rate of about 8% per year. It is no accident that the spot market price for natural gas has gone up from $3 per thousand a year ago to over $6 all summer long and rising again.

Then the idea of simply using electricity to heat, isn't at all sensible. You would be hard pressed to find a less efficient way to heat a home than electric heat. In the first place the average efficiency of conversion for most our our aging power plants is only around 30%. Most of them are coal fired too. So what that means is that only about 30% of the energy contained in the coal is converted to electricity going out the door into the wires. All that sulfur, all that mercury, and less than a third efficient.

Now if you want to talk about nuclear power for electricity, that nation's greatest taboo, then you start to make sense. I came to the conclusion 5 years ago that the energy future of this country lies with nuclear power. I think we made a great mistake walking away from this technology 25 years ago. Legislation for sensible waste disposal was all that was really needed but boneheads won't put their minds to the problem. Consider this, all across our nation there are ash and gob piles from coal fired power plants that are as big as mountains. Millions and millions of tons of it have been accumulating for generations. By contrast you could take every single bit of spent fuel from every reactor ever run in this country and put in an area the size of a football field and only stack it up about 3 feet high. I can not believe that the talents of our country can not come up with a sensible way to deal with a problem of that dimension.

Now, as to solar, all I can say is good luck. Wind is good, geothermal is good, tide and current are good. They are all good, but they are not enough, particularly if you believe that our transportation system is gong to more and more rely on electricity as time goes on.

[Parche]

15. electricity

I meant the plants to be powered by natural gas or other means
We can use methane also, that is abundant everywhere, it is a
natural type of gas
If we can harness hydrogen and fusion that would solve a lot

[Kazak]

8. Reminds me of a story relayed to me by my Father-in-law...

He's an old Yellow Dog Democrat from the Laredo, TX area. Back in the (I think) eighties, he was involved in a local political race between a candidate named Goode (R) and one named Gonzalez (D). Goode held a rally in which he was giving away free beer and tamales and all of the voters went to the rally for the free stuff. The Democratic organizers were obviously in a panic, thinking they had lost all of their support, so one of them had a good idea. They showed up at the Republican rally and started a chant: WE DRINK GOODE'S BEER, WE EAT GOODE'S TAMALES, WE GO TO THE POLLS AND WE VOTE FOR GONZALEZ. Gonzalez won in a landslide. :D Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. :shrug:

[legin]

9. 2nd or 3rd week of September earlyist

1.5 million barrels a day for 45 days
my guess.

or 1st week of October,
1 million barrels a day for 30 days (like Clinton)

"a 1% change in supply equals a 10% change in price" (from an oil site)

The 100,000 barrels per day (about 0.1%) that bush is currently adding to the reserve doesn't take much off the price (50 cents ?).

However I tend not to be too right about these things. ;-)

[legin]

10. the 45 day option

does give time for the price drop to work it's way down to fore-court prices, with 2 or 3 tank fills so people can get into the 'comfy zone'.

[legin]

13. Also with oil being $47 a barrel

bush* would want to get at least $7 - $10 a barrel off the price of oil, so the 60m barrels in 45 days would be my favoured option.

[legin]

14. make that 67.5m barrels in 45 days

that's 1.5m barrels a day for 45 days.

I told you i get things wrong. :silly:

[hatrack]

11. Then this interesting bit from an Oil & Gas Conference yesterday

"Oil prices are going to climb into the $50- to $60-a-barrel range and stay there for years to come, two different experts told members of the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association during the group's annual convention at the Wichita Hyatt Hotel on Monday.

Industry analyst Henry Groppe said tight supplies and high demand will keep prices up for at least the next six years, while university professor Michael Economides blamed global political pressures, particularly in developing nations, for a surge in oil consumption that will cause prices to rise higher and higher over the next decade. "We will see gas prices rise above $50 a barrel -- and it won't be long in coming," Economides said. "And we will never see oil below $30 again."

While Economides, a professor at Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston, blamed "geopolitics" for today's energy crisis, Groppe pointed to simple supply and demand for the surge in prices that has pushed crude consistently higher. Kansas crude oil closed at $41.25 a barrel Monday.

Groppe and his Houston-based consulting firm, Groppe, Long & Littell, provide long-term forecasting, planning and development for the energy industry. He has more than 55 years of experience in the oil and gas industry and a track record of consistent accuracy in trend forecasting. "We are not out of oil," Groppe said. "We are just out of cheap, easy-to-find oil. We have spent millions of dollars and many years of exploration since the 1970s, and we have not found any major new supplies of oil." He said resources that still can be tapped will cost more to develop, keeping prices higher."

EDIT

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/business/9418549.htm

[kentuck]

12. They already have...

It would just look suspicious to drop the price .50-.75cents all at once??