Average Regular Unleaded Price $1.13 in 1999

 

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WHARGARRBL

 

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So gas was cheap under Clinton?

 

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Inflation.

Less known remaining reserves.

Instability in many oil producing regions.

HTH

 

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Adjusting for inflation the price today would be $1.54. Hardly a massive jump.

Can't really argue the remaining reserves.

Instability, hmmm, if I'm not mistaken we caused most of that didn't we?

Isn't it cool how, like how costs go up when things affect supply? You know, like a late freeze and oranges all die so orange juice is expensive?

What the orange growers haven't figured out though, is when you want to raise prices, you just make shit up!

"Hey Phil, oil prices are a bit low."

"No problem Tom, I've got Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NBA, NFL, FIFA, GLBT, and Sesame Street on speed dial. I'll tell them that Iran wants to blow us all up and bang our pets. Since they are our bitches, they will play right along with it. We will project imaginary instability into the region and profit!"

"Hey you better also tell them that Iran will have nukes in 6 months and Syria has WMDs!"

"Do you think we might have overplayed the WMD thing with Iraq?"

"Nah, Americans are stupid assholes. It'll work."

"BRILLIANT!"

 

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Moar gas price threads plz there's nowhere near enough spam on the front page

 

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We are already tapping every known source of unconventional reserves in order to mask the global decline in production. We're only seeing the beginning of this upward trend even with another depression there's no way to keep prices down any longer. Unless we literally stop working as a nation, or planting crops.

 

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Cost of extraction is a factor too. As the easy "stick a pipe in the ground and oil bubbles out" oil goes away, we begin to access more and more expensive to extract oil. Those oil sands in Canada and the US are sure nice for local production, but they do cost more to get out (and the costs are in the energy costs to get out, not simply labor costs), and likely aren't viable at the 1999 prices. Likewise trying to go deeper and deeper drilling in the ocean gets more expansive.

I believe there are also more speculators involved in the oil markets now than there were in 1999.

 

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For speculators to impact the price they will need massive infrastructure. A speculator will need to take oil off the market to push prices up. They will collectively need to take massive amounts of oil off the market to move oil prices to a significant degree.


The only likely way to do this is for producers to be the speculators. An oil producer can leave oil in the ground and push up prices for the oil they are selling...but this has always been true.


People complain about speculators but you cant push up the price of oil on a trading floor or from a computer terminal the way these complaints seem to imply.


We have seen speculators drive the price of electricity up, but they had buy in from producers to pull electricity offline and ultimately it was the actions of the producers that made the price spike.

Production costs are rising.....


And net returns are dropping....


That simple enough for ya'll to come to terms with?

 

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