Gasoline Prices Options

[Dogmeat]

How to fix gas prices:

1.) Stop allowing Barbara Streisand to dictate where we drill for oil in this country. Nobody but her gives a flying fuck if she sees offshore platforms 50 miles out into the ocean from her multimillion dollar porch in marthas vinyard while we're all paying $5.00 a gallon for gas.

It's been my experience that it does not matter where a given drilling propostion is proposed, be it on shore or off shore, that it will AUTOMATICALLY be opposed by every fucking "green" group in existance on evidence that is so whimsy and thin it just boggles my mind that the people who push it claim to be americans. seriously. I wanna know what the real motivation behind supporting some of this shit is, because for the benefits that would be created the "environmental impact" is virtually zero. It doesn't matter if it's offshore, on shore in the prarie, or the in the middle of a fucking desert, some group is going to sue to stop it for the sole purpose of garnering political power for themselves. I've seen this so many times it just fucking drives me nuts.

2.) If you're going to claim you support alternative energy, then fucking support it and stop your elitist mentality "oh well yeah wind power is great but only if the millions of wind turbines are somehwere I don thave to look at them all the time". I've seen this happen before on numerous occasions. People think nuclear power is great, but when it comes time to find a place to bury the waste a mile under ground, they flip out.

3.) If you drive anything bigger than a small sedan to commute in, you have zero right whatsoever to bitch about gas prices. NONE. you DO FUCKING NOT need a god damned truck or SUV to drive around town in, and I don't give a flying fuck what your opinion is, you DO NOT NEED IT. These are the people who piss meo ff more than anything. It is not your god-given right to drive a 6,000 pound truck around the pavement all day long for $1.00 a gallon. Get the fuck over it.

4.) If refining capacity is the problem, then expand and build more refineries. You people have no idea what a "red tape" nightmare this is. Do you realize that there hasn't been a new refinery built in this country in roughly 20 years, and the red tape you have to cut through to even EXPAND an existing refinery would take an army of lumberjacks 10 years to cut through? There are certain elements in the US government that make it so fucking hard to conduct business here it literally makes me wonder whose side some of these people are on. I mean I honest to god wonder how much of some people's campaign donations are ultimatley funneled from foreign powers. If refining capacity is the problem, expand it.....and I seriously don't wanna hear any bullshit about how "harmful to the environment" it is. I've worked in a refinery before, and it's absolutley amazing to me how little environmental impact it has on ground water and air quality considering the MILLIONS of gallons of gasoline that are produced daily.

5.) Understand what it takes to produce a gallon of gas. Most people are so incredibly naive about how the oil and gas industry works it just makes me laugh. They have absolutley no idea how in-depth the process is for actually taking a given volume of oil out of the ground and converting it to what you put in your tank....and this is just the on-shore stuff, the off-shore stuff is getting so advanced these days it's just amazing. People think all you have to do is drill a hole in the ground and oil exists in the ground in this big pools and it just comes shooting back out like in the olden days in the 1800's. Folks, it hasn't been that way in this country SINCE the 1800's. All the oil that was "that easy" to get to was found a century ago .... that's one of the reason the middle-east is so attractive .... the oil there is much easier to get out of the ground. Most people don't realize that in order to bring a given well online, it may have cost a company several million dollars .... it's not cheap to drill, it's not cheap to produce, and you don't even always know what the yield on a given well will be until it's actually flowing. believe me it's a hell of a lot more complicated than drilling a hole in the ground and sucking it out like it's a fucking milkshare.

so what can be done?

Well, alternative energy. Duh. The problem is, as i've stated, everyone "claims" they support it, but when push comes to shove, they don't, because they don't wanna look at the icky wind turbines, wah wah wah, or they dont wanna feel like nuclear waste will make them glow in the dark, wah wah wah wah...

bottom line is, politicians get elected by peddeling this shit to people because people want to be lied to. if politicians told the truth, they'd never get elected, because then the first politicain to lie about everything and paint a rosy picture that came along would win in a land slide.

you cannot have your cake and eat it too, and as a whole, the american public absolutley refuses to accept this fact, and we've been living blindly about it for so long it's gonna come back to bite us harder than we've ever been bit before in the near future.

[cupcake]

greatness

I like watching people who know more than the average internetter about something go off.

dogmeat be crazy...

[Seeker]

Dogmeat, please give me:

http://www.crystallik.com/images/misc_imag.../cliffnotes.jpg
NSFW!! AHHHH, did not expect to see that in NPR!

This post has been edited by Psykopath: May 24 2007, 01:02 PM

[Hartmann]

I am not necessarily talking about our ability to increase refining capacity. Yeah, we can say that we don't care about the environment and build whatever you want, the problem is getting the oil companies to build them. Refineries make very little money and business revolves around money.

Dogmeat, if you worked in a refinery then you know very well that the money that comes into one is eaten up by maintenance and reliability initiatives, very little goes to the company's bottom line.

[cupcake]

FUCKIN NSFW COME ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

shit is gross.

[Seeker]

Haha, when I linked it it was the "cliff notes on your post" image. Guess some guy didn't like me stealing his bandwidth.

[Divergent Realit...]

haha time magazine.

[Psykopath]

Dogmeat: Quit referring to anyone that supports LOGICAL environmental efforts as a Goddamn hippie or Socialist. That shit is tiring and completely off base, for the most part. I.E.- Quit blanket insulting anyone not on the right-wing concerning big oil.


As far as this poll:
1.) The cause of the spike is an amalgamation of factors, no one complete cause. I do feel the biggest player in the spike is the oil companies seeking ever more profits, but let's face it: They're exploiting a perfect situation right now. The demand is high, as it will obviously remain and continue to grow, until consumers finally realize that they can't afford to take their kids to soccer practice in a fucking hummer and demand better valued hybrids (which are the first step towards less oil use in the transportation arena).

2.) So yeah, people will just need to wake up eventually and see that they are being exploited/wars raise oil prices/they are demanding too much oil/refineries can only make so much/etc. and start to fix things in a logical progression.

3.) $2-$2.50, if we're lucky.

This post has been edited by Psykopath: May 24 2007, 01:10 PM

[prefix]

Can people please stop taking the refinery shortages as a fucking excuse. They've been using that for the last 3 years. But you know what, they never build a new refinery or fix one. It's just an excuse to keep prices up.

Most of the cost of a gallon of gas goes to refining, 60 cents which is about 40% because there's "too much load" on the refineries. Hey how about this, take that record profit you made last year and build another fucking refinery.

[James]

Can people please stop taking the refinery shortages as a fucking excuse. They've been using that for the last 3 years. But you know what, they never build a new refinery or fix one. It's just an excuse to keep prices up.

Most of the cost of a gallon of gas goes to refining, 60 cents which is about 40% because there's "too much load" on the refineries. Hey how about this, take that record profit you made last year and build another fucking refinery.

Gonna take a shot in the dark here. You didn't read Dogmeat's post and become educated?

[cupcake]

Haha, when I linked it it was the "cliff notes on your post" image. Guess some guy didn't like me stealing his bandwidth.

makes sense. I was wondering wtf

[Hartmann]

Can people please stop taking the refinery shortages as a fucking excuse. They've been using that for the last 3 years. But you know what, they never build a new refinery or fix one. It's just an excuse to keep prices up.

Most of the cost of a gallon of gas goes to refining, 60 cents which is about 40% because there's "too much load" on the refineries. Hey how about this, take that record profit you made last year and build another fucking refinery.

There hasn't been a new refinery built in the U.S. since 1976. You obviously did not read my post.

For one, I don't think refining capacity is the biggest problem. Secondly, refining does not make money. For the big companies (Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, etc.) the money is the exploration and production (not confused with refining). The profit margins may look great for refineries but those are before cuts are taken for maintenance and outage predictions (they level the curve). The commodity is oil, not gasoline, so the record profits are coming from that...

Also, if you think that refineries make their money off of gasoline then you are dead wrong. The bit of money that they are able to bring in comes from the high-end, specialty stuff (Jet-A, plastics, chemicals, etc.), which is another reducer in the gasoline capacity (but again, not the main problem).

I've been to 22 of some of the biggest refineries in the world and all of them have one thing in common, their budgets are shrinking and their ability to maintain their equipment is shrinking. The more they can do to preemptively fix problems, the more likely they are to stay open.

The increase we are seeing right now in prices, in my opinion, are artificial and based on poor forecasting.

[impala454]

just out of curiosity, does anyone here really do anything different now that gas prices are going up? As in walking anywhere/biking/so on?

I don't do jack shiz... but then again I don't bitch about the prices. According to inflation, they're pretty close to where they should be. I read somewhere that the average household income has increased at a far greater rate than gas prices have. I'm very happy with the mileage I get. I drive 70 miles a day, max at about 85mph, throw in 15-20 mins of stop & go, and get about 17-17.5mpg. I get right at 20mpg when driving on open highway. This is out of a 5000lb crew cab chevrolet with a 300hp 5.3L V8.

and nice post dogmeat we definitely need to drill up alaska big time. kill the treehuggers who won't let us, and nail their bodies to the top of the oil derrick to scare off other treehuggers.

I do feel the biggest player in the spike is the oil companies seeking ever more profits

So back in the late 90s when gas was like $0.85/gallon, oil companies weren't seeking profits?

until consumers finally realize that they can't afford to take their kids to soccer practice in a fucking hummer

That's just the point though... people can afford it just fine. People whine about gas prices because it takes away from their play money. OMG I had to spend an extra $50 on gas this month, now I can't go out for steak one night ! it's every american's right to drive whatever they want, but like dogmeat said, they can't complain if they chose a gas guzzler.

wars raise oil prices

Take a look at the graph. I don't see much evidence to support this. There was a major world war in the 1940s, and another major war in the late 1960s, the entire time, gasoline was declining in price. There was a war between Iran & Iraq between 1980-1988, and the gulf war in 1991, those all have steady declines in gas prices.

I'd be interested to know what everyone's vehicle is and what mileage they really get. don't be quoting the manufacturer either, if you don't keep track just say so.

[James]

2003 Ford Ranger and I get 17-20 mph, depending on how I drive. I just paid it off this week, too, so excited about that.

[moebary]

94 Crown Victoria, I think about 16-18mpg, it's old and it's a V8, so not that great