Oil Refiners See Profits Sink as Consumption Falls

[charrison]

Originally posted by: Engineer

Originally posted by: charrison

Originally posted by: Engineer

Originally posted by: charrison

I agree it is not going to get us off opec, but it will give us more power to bargain with them. As long as we say we are not going to go after anwr or offshore it means what we have decided to be on opec tit for sure.

My vote is to agressively do what Brasil did and that is to develope something alternative and run with it. I'm sure that the brainpower is here....and if we're going to be paying outrageous prices for fuel, I would just rather pay it to man made alternatives made right here in the USA. Oil isn't going to last forever (in any usable quantities) so why not say fuck em now?

You do know that we make more ethanol that brazil does?

While I agree it is time to get off oil. it is not a trivial problem we are going to solve in a short amount of time. If we mandated everyone had a drive a scooter to work, it would still take a long time to produce them for everyone. So if we want to get away from opec, we need to decrease demand, increase supply or both.

Increasing supply will give us a short term price drop (maybe???) but will do nothing except that. It will turn off developments of alternatives as cheaper fuel always does.

Well if it were not for surging world demand, I might agree with you.

Doesn't matter that we produce more ethanol than Brasil does. They do it with a more efficient process and make enough to serve their country's needs.

They dont have a more efficient process, they just have more land suitable for growing sugarcane. This is something we cannot fix. The best we can do in this department is drop the tariff on sugar. Until we can make cellulistic ethanol work, we are basically stuck with corn and 1.3x return on energy investment.

There would also need to be significant upgrade to distribution of ethanol as there currently is a condensation problem when it is transported in the current pipelines.

We could have done the same by now. Every year we wait is one year closer to the real peak oil and once on a decline, the scramble begins. Sure, if we can keep the price high and produce more oil domestically, it will help lower our dependence on OPEC and imported oil but it will do nothing for the long term energy needs of this country.

We are not anywhere near a peak oil. There are plenty of the stuff left in the ground, we do appear to running out of the easy to get stuff.

Why not start now....the price is currently high enough to do just that, IMO.

The price is high enough to make alot of things happen and OPEC should keep this in mind as well.

 

[ZzZGuy]

Yeay for oil exploration job sector (exploration>refining>final product). More jobs, higher pay (there is already a labor shortage in the development of the oil sands in Canada and there is a boom starting with the high oil prices) and I have hardly any living expenses (only apt rent) where I stay in a work camp.

High oil prices are not bad for everyone. I'm off to work tomorrow to facilitate the flow of oil to the US, if all goes well I'll be back in 1 to 2 months. (IIRC that is where the oil from the site I will be working on goes to).

And if you're going to something like "Yes, help pollute your country to save us a few bucks", at least state what you consider the problem to be and how it is and isn't addressed. Well, doesn't matter anyway as I won't be around to read it.

 

[wwswimming]

R U S T

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/OTC%202008.pdf

 

[NeoV]

""Our problem in America gets solved when we aggressively go for domestic exploration. Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancing of alternative energies as well as conservation," he said. "

The biggest problem there is the order he states things - Our problem in America would already be solved if we HAD a strategy for the advancement of alternative energies - and it should have been in place 25-30 years ago.

We can go back and forth all day about prices at the pump, but as long as there are hundreds of thousands of new drivers each month in India and China, the global demand isn't going down anytime soon.