gas prices

[bd8802]

2.49 in Lawrence KS for 87 octane ... 2.56 on the turnpike between Lawrence and Topeka.

[mmbt0ne]

Gas has gone up about 30¢ here in the last week. This is crazy.

[MagicMan08]

I want the moped in dumb and dumber right now...

[Jules22]

2.70 a gallon in northern california. am i the only one who thinks this is the precursor to some serious civil unrest. i mean what is joe schmoe gonna do when gas is 3.50 a gallon in like 4 months??

[cbfair]

[ QUOTE ]
2.70 a gallon in northern california. am i the only one who thinks this is the precursor to some serious civil unrest. i mean what is joe schmoe gonna do when gas is 3.50 a gallon in like 4 months??

[/ QUOTE ]

You're not the only one and this goes much, much deeper than expensive personal transport. Think about everything we depend on daily which requires petroleum...

Electricity, plastics, fabrics, heating oil, fertilizers and pesticides, transportation of food 1000's of miles to the store; the list goes on and on.

This is a long read but its a well researched and footnoted article. While I want to be more optimistic than this author, I'm not sure his case isn't solid. I keep reminding myself that we were able to launch a ship to the moon and build the atomic bomb faster than we thought we could, surely there's a way to dig ourselves out of this mess.

All the same, I didn't sleep well after reading the article and truly wonder what the future holds.

[cbfair]

I know that this is often considered a fringe issue and people scoff at the idea of "running out of oil". To underscore that we are looking at significant shortfalls in the coming years and that we will be facing tough times ahead, here's what Dick Cheney had to say in 1999 when he was chairman of Halliburton.

[ QUOTE ]
Dick Cheney:

From the standpoint of the oil industry obviously - and I'll talk a little later on about gas - for over a hundred years we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you've got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you've got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is as true for companies as well in the broader economic sense it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It's like making one hundred per cent interest; discovering another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months or finding two Hibernias a year. For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer greet oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greeter access there, progress continues to be slow.

[/ QUOTE ]

Cheney is talking about demand rising by 2% per year and supply declining by 3% per year. Big deal, you might say, whats a couple of percent here and there? Well, here's a graph of oil prices over the years (adjusted to 1999 dollars)... pay particular attention to the section between 1970 and 1980:



See that big spike around 1979? Thats what happened during the Iranian revolution when world output was disrupted by around 4%. Read more here

Here's what Harry J. Longwell, director and executive VP of ExxonMobil had to say in 2002:

[ QUOTE ]
The catch is that while demand increases, existing production declines. To put a number on it, we expect that by 2010 about half the daily volume needed to meet projected demand is not on production today – and that’s the challenge facing producers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Both of these quotes are properly sourced here .

[Chaostracize]

Nantucket is currently highest in the nation. The cheapest gas you can get is at around 3.16.

[CrashPat]

2.69 here, it has jumped 40 cents in the past week. I wish I did not drive 300+ miles a week in a vehicle that gets 17mpg right now. Oh well, it is only money.

[wonderwes]

BTW- What in the world is the 9/10 you see in front of every price listed on the gas station sign. I have never actually found out what the point of the 9/10 value means on those prices.

[Cancer Merchant]

Wow, I didn't know you could still get full service. Anybody still do this?