What Happened To Our Cheap Oil?

[Janice]

What Happened To Our Cheap Oil?

When I was in high school I learned that the price of oil in England was as high as $5.00 a gallon. That meant nothing to me because I lived in Manhattan and cars were totally unnecessary because of our superb public transportation system. Years later, living in Florida in 1972 gasoline was about $.24 a gallon. Today US gas prices are close to what European prices were decades ago and the question arises-What happened to our cheap oil? It didn't disappear. It's still here. We just can't get to it so why are we being held hostage to the whims of oil rich hostile nations? I'm no expert but the villains in this situation are the "Greenies" and our own stupidity for falling for their claptrap.

There hasn't been an oil refinery built in the U.S. since 1976, ironically the same year that Jimmy Carter was elected. He was responsible for the creation of the Department of Energy and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. Hundreds of billion dollars later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That's how a bureaucracy operates - it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Rick Perry was right; this is one of the agencies that should be scrapped.

There is a real difference between the conservationists- whom we can thank for salvaging our natural resources from human negligence - to the radical environmentalists who value animals and plants more than what benefits human life. >>>

Journalists know that the United States has more oil than the entire Middle East, but we're not allowed to drill for it because of environmental activism. >>>

Militant environmental wackos have done more harm to our ecology than a million gas-guzzling Hummers. They've prevented third-world countries from achieving a higher standard of living... and for what? Hypothetical futuristic disaster tales spun by Hollywood studios that hypocritically generate enormous greenhouse emissions in the process of making and publicizing them.

One of the great truth tellers today is Irish director and journalist Phelim McAleer who challenged Al Gore's facts shown in his faux documentary "An Inconvenient Truth".

Mr. MacAleer also explored the dark side of environmentalists in his film, "Mine Your Own Business" which clearly uncovered how little these wackos care about the welfare of people in developing nations.

Destruction of our standard of living is not the only result of junk science. The cost in lives is immeasurable. In the late great Michael Crichton novel, "State Of Fear" he decried the millions of malaria deaths in Africa due to the banning of DDT thanks to the flawed research of the environmental goddess Rachel Carson's book, "The Silent Spring."

DDT was harmless to humans but may have thinned the shells of a species of songbird so it had to be banned, right? So malaria which had almost been eradicated returned with a vengeance.

Fox News reported last week: "A deadly form of malaria has developed a resistance to the most powerful drugs used to treat the disease, putting the lives of millions of people around the world at risk." Millions of humans are dying so songbirds can live is the quintessence of radical environmentalism.

We need to wake up and see what being green has really done for our lives and those in developing nations. The planet will always survive. With the green police in charge, I'm not that sure about us.

TheIrishExaminer

[Madisonian]

The cheap oil is still there and still cheap. It is the falling value of the dollar that is making it appear to cost more.
Back in the early 70's, gold was about 35 an ounce (I am talking the metal here, although an OZ of good Columbian was about the same or a bit cheaper)
Gas was about 25 cents a gallon, so 1 ounce of gold would have bought you 140 gallons of gas.
At today's price of roughly 1650 an ounce for gold (you can't get good Columbian anymore, but an OZ of some kick ass hydroponic is 300 to 400, I hear) and gas at even 5 a gallon would get you 330 gallons.
The difference is the devaluation of our currency.

This is what happens when the Fed under a D or an R is allowed to flood the market with Monopoly money. Don't look for it to get any better any time soon because Washington does not have the backbone to do things differently by any substantial degree.

[Retread]

First - Enviro-wackos.....

Few subjects have charged Chronicle readers' emotions like the legal battle over the future of the scimitar-horned oryx, a unicorn-like creature, and two of its African cousins, the addax and the dama gazelle.

Thanks to the efforts of Texas ranchers, along with the Texas-based Exotic Wildlife Association, the three animals have been brought back from near-extinction a few years ago to a point where they now roam this state in the thousands. That's the good news. Texas boasts the largest numbers of these creatures found anywhere.

But one of the tools that has been used in that process, trophy hunting to manage the herd populations, has raised the ire of Friends of Animals, a Connecticut-based animal-rights organization.

Last week, the organization won what some consider the decisive battle when the oryx, addax and dama gazelle received full protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Ironically, that's the bad news, according to those who've brought back the Texas populations. It could spell eventual extinction for the species in this state, they say.

Amazingly, that prospect doesn't appear to faze the head of Friends of Animals, Priscilla Feral. Not in the least.

Feral would rather see the species become extinct in Texas than see a single animal killed in what she calls "canned hunts," according to a recent report by the Chronicle's Tony Freemantle ("Exotics face horns of dilemma," Page A1, March 31).

Beg pardon, Ms. Feral, but your thinking strikes us as cruel and malicious folly. Simple-minded. Mean-spirited. Vindictive. Take your pick.

You seem to be saying that if these animals have to go extinct in order to be saved, then so be it.

That is outrageous. Denying ranchers and others the widely accepted wildlife management tool of culling herds when expanding populations exert unsustainable pressures on the land and resources because it offends one group's misguided sensibilities is destructive nonsense.

In Texas and many other places, it is accepted practice to use hunting as a means to keep herds healthy, as has been done with white-tailed deer in this state for many years. The practice has saved the oryx, addax and dama gazelle and brought their populations back to health. That is the humane way. The alternative is ghastly.

Orwellian.

[Starbuck]

Actually, I challenge the idea that cheap oil is still there and still cheap.

In the beginning, around 1870, it was found lying around in puddles in PA. Later, they had to drill for it, but it announced it's presence by blowing your drilling rig sky high.
Then, millionaire Indian chiefs in OK became the running joke.

Now, drilling is done in deep parts of the oceans, oil is forced out of the earth and it is not cheap. Even when oil is brought to the surface it has to be transported half way around the earth to be of much use.

On top of that, the gasoline used back when I used to buy it for 35 cents a gallon has little in common with today's EPA mandated blends. In fact, there are something like 60 different blends of gasoline and none of them have anything to do with "seasonal requirements". They're mandated by an EPA with nothing to do but fiddle around.

New refinery? We don't need one. We have - I believe - about 40 refineries in the US owned by about 35 companies. Some of them are shutting down because refineries can't make money unless they are operating at full capacity. Then, there's the old EPA, which keeps restricting refinery operations in all sorts of ways.
We have enough refineries; after all, I can buy gasoline from four different sources at every decent intersection in America. What we need is less EPA.

Hell, at 105$ per 44 gallon barrel ($2.38/gallon), it's a wonder I can buy refined gasoline at 5 dollars, let alone 4.

[Retread]

The cheap oil to find has been found. Improved technologies keep bringing down the price (comparably) to 3-4-5 decades ago but there is no more 'cheap oil.' Still, statistically, if inflation is considered, the price today ain't bad at all.

Now as to energy rather than oil. The world will never run out of oil but it will become more and more expensive until other forms of energy replace it in the public use arena. Since the sun is the single source of all the energy used in the world, until the sun goes nova we'll have more than enough energy to go around. We'll just have to modify our techniques of conversion.

Oil's biggest hold on the economy is transportation. The odd part about this is that the guvmint, with one small decision, could turn the situation around within weeks to months with no cost to the taxpayer and perhaps even to reduce his costs. See the vid at the end.

Another source for some firm knowledge of where the world is going with energy is the book "The Bottomless Well, The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy" by Huber & Mills. If you really want to know more about the industry, read the two books by the master: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power and The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World both by Daniel Yergin.

I grew up in the middle of Carter Co, OK with rigs, pump jacks and pipelines as a part of my life so when that ulcer ran me out of the classroom I ended up in the patch for the next 40 years. I've seen the changes in drill bits, mud chemistry, survey tools and refining [side note: there is a new refinery being built today and on top of that every refinery in the country has expanded it's capacity several times over. As Starbuck says, they have to run at 90% or better to make money and the margins still have to be a minimum that is sometimes squeezed badly] I've thoroughly enjoyed the challenges, been disappointed by the masses lack of critical thinking re: petroleum and the guvmint and MSM's deliberate actions to demonize the industry.

A few facts:
The guvmint collects a larger percentage of XOM's cash flow than does the company, it's shareholders and it's dividend collectors added together.
XOM IS NOT "the world's largest oil company". The last time I checked the numbers it was in fact number 14.
Non-guvmint oil companies control less than 15% of the production in the world today. (so how in hell do they control the price? answer: they don't)
The US has potentially enough natural gas to supply the country's needs for the next two centuries.
70-90% of the total oil found in the US is still in the ground.
The industry employs more people than any other industry in the world and from more countries including those with no petroleum of their own (except maybe the new, improved, expanded guvmints)*
The petroleum industry is more heavily taxed than any other in this country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJOZ--5d_68

*I cannot find the source I used before on this but - think about the number of people involved from exploring, drilling, producing, pipelining, trucking, selling, buying, advertising; working in the offices, fields, refineries, fuel stations, and those activities then spread across every nation.

[Odysseus]

Thanks to the efforts of Texas ranchers, along with the Texas-based Exotic Wildlife Association, the three animals have been brought back from near-extinction a few years ago to a point where they now roam this state in the thousands. That's the good news. Texas boasts the largest numbers of these creatures found anywhere.

But one of the tools that has been used in that process, trophy hunting to manage the herd populations, has raised the ire of Friends of Animals, a Connecticut-based animal-rights organization

Can somebody tell me how a Connecticut-based outfit knows more about animals in Texas than the Texans who brought those animals back from the verge of extinction do? Once again, the self-anointed sages of the left claim to know what's best for everybody, no matter how wrong they are.