Typically a symptom of that kind of trading issue is that inventories go up (I.e., the supply is artificially kept down by keeping stock off the market).

Inventories are not increasing anywhere on the books, and the input of oil into refineries and the output from those refineries are at the same balance points they've stayed at for years, so there are no indications that there are well hidden stockpiles somewhere.

Off hand, I want an electric car. Sure, at the moment they need to be recharged overnight, but heck - I'm paying $50 a week for gas now, and I typically only drive to work and back - get me enough range that I can do my day to day driving and I will *rent* a gasoline vehicle when I go on vacation.

Jonnan

With apologies - oh, that's funny. Pumps won't go over $75? That makes no sense!

Surely Semi's have to use more than $75 worth of diesel on a fill up?

"Good news today - Gas prices plunged when the rate went over $256 dollars a barrel, but the markets only allowed for 8 bits in the pricing, causing prices to loop over to $1.00 a barrel, dropping Gasoline to $.03 a Gallon . . ."

Jonnan

There was actually a recent study done by a couple of scientists (don't remember the specifics) but one guy went from Chicago to New York on less than 9 gallons of gas, which averaged out to 70+ mpg. He said the trick is to coast whenever you can instead of keeping your foot on the gas, and again coast to a stop if at all possible instead of tapping on the breaks. I personally think it's a phenomenal idea.

Ethanol might be useful - despite being from Indiana, corn based ethanol really doesn't work all that well, but Brazil shows pretty obviously that a good ethanol supply mechanism can work well. It also has the advantage that it's basically compatible with our current infrastructure, which lowers the short term investment.

Hydrogen is actually workable now - the issue there is more infrastructure than technology, because it's completely incompatible as it stands now.

Personally, there is work being done on super-capacitors that combine the energy reserves of batteries with the fast charging capabilities of capacitors - if it pans out, I think the best thing would be to skip right over hydrogen to fully electric cars. Right now the big problem with electric cars is the time it takes to charge them, if the Government is smart and sets policy so they can skip recouping the R&D cost and just start mass production, a lot of this mess could be cleared up PDQ.

Jonnan

I imagine gas stations don't want to handle large sums of cash such as $100 bills or $50 bills in case of robbery. It gets exponentially more unlikely customers will be able to pay in $20s the higher it goes, so they cut it off there.

Two bad assumptions there:
A) Most of these deposits are relatively small. Best Estimates (Not the largest estimates, but the most likely, according to studies) of the Anwar reserve are six months of oil usage - at our current rates of using oil, it will either be gone quickly, or be a small percentage of the market. Sure, there *could* be more, but investing heavily there is like betting your house on drawing on an inside straight. Sure - *maybe* you end up filthy rich, more likely you end up in the street.

The heavy deposits that *are* found (like it looks like the Brazilian Deposit is) are not easy to get to. When you get to deposits like that, or shale, or oil sands, it takes so much money to get them properly that those doing so can't *afford* for oil prices to drop, or they'll never recoup the initial investments. They can act as a stopgap to keep prices from rising, but it is actually stupid for those getting to them to drain the reserves at a rate sufficient to drop prices, because they've invested so much to get the oil in the first place.


Honestly - that's a great fantasy, but it doesn't make sense really. You get energy out of chemical reactions by breaking chemicals from high, complicated energy states to smaller, simple ones, you store energy chemically by using energy to drive things from low energy, simple states to high energy, complicated, unstable ones - Our petrochemical industry only survives because so many eons of organisms used sunlight to help make bigger, complicated, unstable chemicals and died before they got a chance to use that energy the way they planned to. Oil is canned sunlight, more or less.

But water is one of the most stable chemicals in existence - that's why there's so much of it, it takes huge amounts of energy to break it down. It's a great chemical to aim for as an end product - it's so stable itself that anything that has it as an end product has probably released a fair amount of energy, but as a fuel? You'd have to find something that's an even lower energy configuration of Oxygen and Hydrogen to aim for, and frankly, there just ain't any many energy states to shoot for. Plant's use it, in conjunction with Sunlight, and we get free oxygen out of the deal as a side effect of they're chemically storing more energy than they can use safely (They don't move around a lot, and don't feel like wasting time storing the equivalent of raw jet fuel when they're not going to use it.)

But as a fuel, in and of itself? Third rule of thermodynamics, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Jonnan

Probably none. In the Fairytale-Land where that would happen, the NEXT week everyone would be buying gas at the same time...and getting pissed at the long wait.



Looking at a stock price to compare profitability of a company doesn't do much good. Stock price rise and fall on too many other factors, such as what the Street "THINKS" a stock will do, or a hint of a buyout/merger that may happen, or the furture success of a company because of a new tech or invention. I think what people freak out about is the actual number of what the profit is. They see some huge figure and think the oil tycoons are getting all that cash. But that cash is split among investors as well as being taxed at some ridiculously high tax rate. Someone who knows more about it can correct me, but I think oil companies are taxed on profits gained at like 48%. Thats crazy.

Ethanol from *corn* is a pipe dream. Brazil does quite well on ethanol from sugar cane.

Jonnan

There's one thing that a lot of people don't realize about this issue, and that is that even if we find reasonable energy alternatives to slow or even halt our gasoline consumption, we will still be a long way off from oil independence. Ever heard of petroleum products? We use so much oil to make the things that build our vehicles, buildings, tools, the list goes on forever, and those are things that are even harder to replace than our energy source.

Also, about using water as a fuel source: it's not true. What was discovered was that water, when exposed to high frequency microwaves, explosively decomposes into hydrogen, oxygen, and some hydrogen peroxide too I think. This was then used as a power converter, to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy to propel some vehicles, but the actual energy source was electricity, via a battery. Therefore this made for a neat science trick, but not even close to a new energy source.

Consider this, It may be ridiculous but we are still paying. Economics 101 oil has a price elasticity of .05.

where you at?????
its 4$ in and all around columbus, OHIO.

ima gettin 33 mpg avg right now   

Let's look at the positive side of exploding oil prices, in that it forces an inevitable change, that should have happened long ago. Oil is so vital, that without it our economy and society stops to a halt - a fact every child knows. Why then are we so foolish to let the oil take us hostage? Why do our governments trust in guessed, supposed, extrapolated or faked numbers about remaining oil reserves and production capacity?

Everybody talks about the post-industrial information age, but we still drive around by bruning fossil fuels like 200 years ago. The problem is not technology, but the political incentive and effort. Oil has been an economically viable path and has filled the pockets of many people. Furthermore, there is no immediate monetary cost associated with depleting and damaging the natural ressources of future generations.

Look, the nuclear bomb was built 1945 and the landing on the moon occured in 1969. Today our economy has grown to a multiple of the size it was then. Technological progress has accelerated at an exponential rate.

I am firmly convinced, that developed nations could have been completely independent of fossil fuels for electricity production as well as for ground transportation by the year 2000!

What went wrong? Politics is generally short-sighted. Imagine the effort and ressources of an international "Manhatten Project" put into a major energy paradigm shift. In the same time eliminating the main source of polultion in large cities and halving greenhouse gas emissions and making transportation cheaper.