cant build a refinery without government permission.
no governemtn official is going to ok building a refinery in their district. atleast not if they want reelected.

 

Maybe I just have a strange way of looking at the oil situation, but if it were up to me we would keep buying oil elsewhere and leave our supplies in reserve.

Oil is power and when it runs out elsewhere, we will be the ones holding the reserves and the power and security that goes with it.

Sure it costs us at the pump but for the security of my Grandkids and our Nation, I don't really mind it all that much.

 

considering the oil supplies that are available in the north slope area and the outter continental shelf, we are sitting on some massive reserves that aren't being developed at the moment. Canada is also sitting on some really large deposits.
There are only two countries that aren't producing at a rate comparable to their reserves. Russia and China. Russia isn't being developed because of corruption. No one is sure if they will have their equipment when it gets into the country. China is working on their oil development, but it is alot farther behind than russia.

 

$3.09 would be nice we are still seeing $3.79 in parts around here.

 

5 years before it becomes useable...

That would give us time to DOUBLE our oil refining capacity -


- this assumes, of course, that we are naive enough to believe that the environmentalists will let us de EITHER.....

 

Not strange at all, that has been my position on ANWR for years.

When the rest of the world runs low save our domestic oil for things that can only come from petroleum such as plastics and many pharmaceuticals, use alternative energy sources for transportation and power generation.

 

WOW, where are you living??? In montana I just filled our van up at $2.95/gallon, (that's for 85.5) and the diesel up for $3.25/gallon, that's down about .15 cents in the last 2 weeks.

 

I don't think the world is going to run out - too many new oil deposits discovered in recent decades when the gloom & doomers keep saying it's about all dried up...

 

XLR, think you'll have to admit that most of the easy to get oil has been got.
Drilling 27,000 feet deep, 150 miles offshore with 7,000 foot deep waters inbetween or drilling in the frozen arctic isn't easy or cheap.
I don't think anyone is claiming we'll run out of oil, just that it will get so difficult to recover that it would be prohibitively expensive.

 

EXACTLY!!! Take some of those record profits and put it back in your company like the rest of us do.

 

Maybe I'm missing something here??? Why would you prefer to send our Dollars to a region full of nations that want to kill us??

I truly hope that by the time your grandchildren are in our position now that the the U.S. Private industry has devised a renewable energy source that does not require us to deal with the middle east whatsoever! Such as Bio- diesel, Solar, Hydrogen...........whatever!

U.S. Dollars are power!! Take the U.S. dollars out of the middle east and suddenly those nations become benign!

We as a nation have always been a leader in technology and I would hope that we continue that trend!! Look at the advancements in mileage just in the past 20 years as an example.

Rick

 

Actually, Infidel - I never considered all of the new "exploitable" oil deposits due to advancing technology... I was thinking about both the older (sometimes previously pumped dry) fields naturally replenishing and the new deposits that leak/well up through the earth's crust; usually on the seabed but almost always on the continental shelf where getting the oil to shore is relatively easy.
Yeah - drilling in those severe conditions and environments must cost the oil companies gazillion of $$$ - no wonder we can't get a break at the pump!

 

Low, yes-- but not nil.

If the market thinks the supply is ample (and accessible in a single large deposit that allows some economies of scale for the producer), then the emotional element of "reduced supply" is lessened.

In truck-ese, what effect on price would you expect if the truck you want was only being produced at a limited but steady rate compared to if they had 12 copies of the exact truck you wanted??


It's probably insignificant, but it's not zero.

 

Justin,

I don't know of a lot of 3-5 year contracts on the commodities market for crude oil, so since this oil won't be available for at least that long (they are estimating 2012 in today's Houston Chronicle), I'll stand by my posit that this new discovery isn't having a significant impact on current oil or refined product prices. Nil, as I used it, was synonomous with negligable.

Rusty

 

Rusty,

I agree that the new discovery's effect on energy prices won't be something we can directly measure at the pump; however Justin's basic premise re: the downward pressure on price any find such as this will exert due to the emotional aspect of the energy futures market is incontrovertible.

Mike