Why oil is cheap; what does it mean?

[Intrigued]

Well, I hate to wade in on all this, but some of the early posters must have gotten their "facts" from either old info, or from someone with an agenda, because on December 16, 2014, T. Boone Pickens said that the Bakken Fracking oil was selling for 51 bucks... T. Boone Pickens and Neil Cavuto discuss the outlook for oil prices | Boone Pickens

[niky]

Don't recall anyone saying Bakken Oil wasn't selling for that low?

The whole problem is continuous low prices hurts new developments. And for developments programmed for $80 oil, with loans taken out to that effect, it's still better to produce at a financial loss than to not produce while still having to cover those loans.

And he's right, you still have to build pipelines, because oil cannot stay at this low level forever. Once enough suppliers drop out of the game, however temporarily, the prices will climb back up.

Hopefully.

[synergy]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Doesn't even address the main reason: ISIS. They control a good bit of oil, which they can sell for whatever they can get. Since they stole it, and can keep on producing it with gunpoint labor, they don't have to worry about making a profit on investment: like any other thief, they sell for whatever they can get.

So you have two other kinds of producers: those (like the OPEC states) with proven reserves & established infrastructure. Since they need revenue, they can, to a certain extent, follow the ISIS price downwards for a while. But it won't last, because of those other producers with new reserves (like the US fracking stuff) that cost upwards of $80/bbl to extract. They can't sell that oil for $60/bbl or less for long without going bankrupt. When they do, supply contracts, producers with deep pockets will buy up the assets of the bankrupt producers (at bargain prices), and the price of oil will go right back up again.

Do you actually believe the stuff you type? ISIS can produce maybe 200k barrels a day on the global market of 90mil per day thats nothing. Yeah a "swing" producer like "isis" has crashed the markets.

What did Iran do when they were shutout a few years ago? discounted it to asian markets. We saw nothing like this collapse and Iran produces 10x the oil ISIS could every dream of making.

[synergy]

Right now is when the XXL pipeline and other like it matter MOST.

The cost for transporting oil by rail (which is how we move close to 1mil per day of it) is about 15$ from ND to NO to be refined. This puts our producers are a 15$ - starting off as far as being competitive. If we would just allow them to build the pipelines they need the cost is closer to $5 a barrel. When prices are 140$ $10 savings in transportation is only 7%. But when oil is all the way down at $40 a 10$ savings is a 25% savings.

By not allowing pipelines to be built we are taking away the ONE and ONLY advantage Domestic producers have. They are Domestic. Transporting Oil across the sea from the middle east is essentially a tarrif in itself. Why penalize our own oil companies.

People are stupid. Drill baby Drill but don't forget to build the pipelines or you end up flaring 30% of the nat gas you find producing a grand total of 0 power for Infinity pollution.

[mikeyjd]

I like the cheap prices and I don't care who knows it. It keeps money in my pocket and will force companies to become more efficient to stay competitive. God bless the free market

[bizzybody]

Due to Obama and the Democrats stonewalling the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada has begun work on a pipeline from the tar sands to a port on their east coast, which is already used for shipping out oil.

The new line and port upgrades will enable shipping out a lot more oil... to the US Gulf coast refineries where the derailment/spill/fire prone trains are taking it right now.

So, thank you, Obama, for what will eventually be a much increased chance of Disaster At Sea... unless...

...the current Congress can get enough Democrats on board (who wants to get reelected?) to veto-proof Keystone. Will a for-sure gonna build it Keystone pipeline kill the Canadian one?

OPEC pushing crude oil prices down has but one goal, to scuttle BOTH of these pipeline projects by making North American oil production too expensive to need the pipelines.

What I would love to see is an act of Congress to rescind oil leases where wells have been drilled and found to have good production potential, but have been capped or plugged. Auction them off with the caveat that within one year of purchase those wells MUST have a pump installed and operating or it gets taken back and auctioned off again.

Do the same with wells that have been abandoned where the company has gone out of business and nobody bought the assets. Many of those wells may need to be re-found because they've been lost track of. On land the well hunting could be done by volunteers. It worked for surfacestations.org to locate and document the (mostly lousy) current condition of the USHCN stations.

The thousands of abandoned underwater wells are more of a problem. They would require time consuming and expensive deep diving, submarine and ROV work to locate, check for leaks and tag so they don't get re-lost. Leakers should be at the top of the list for converting to production or if the casing has gone too bad to salvage, fill the hole bottom to top and tag it permanently plugged and abandoned.

Instead of drill, baby, drill it should be pump, baby, pump!

That's what really had me steaming over the Deepwater Horizon well. Why bother drilling such a well when they weren't planning to produce from it soon as possible? There's only a thousand or two other wells full of oil in the Gulf not being tapped.

DH wouldn't have had the blowout if BP had told Obama's stupid busybodies where they could shove it and done the plugging correctly instead of cutting corners to meet the Feds' schedule. 'Course BP also is to blame for installing a blowout preventer they knew had problems, instead of using a new one or doing a full overhaul on the one they used to ensure it would work. What government agency was supposed to inspect that?

People keep repeating the same kinds of errors that lead to disaster, be it miles deep oil wells, space shuttles*, dams, high rise construction cranes... "It's always worked before, let's just pile on one more straw, should work fine."

*Challenger, another case of government pushing to keep a schedule and pressuring a contractor to go outside known performance parameters to avoid "losing face". The Thiokol people should have put their collective foot down and said "We do not recommend launching at that temperature. We have no data to know what might happen. If you launch anyway and something fails, it's all on NASA. Our products have always performed as designed *at the launch temperature range originally specified*."

[Frank Lee]

I love it when dop... people think XL will benefit them in any way, shape, or form.

[markweatherill]

It would be poetic if the medium term effect of this would be that 'something' momentous would happen in Russia 100 years after the 1917 revolution...
I don't really feel sorry for any of those Russian billionaires.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Cobb

When will the price of motor oils and tires go down?

I don't know what percentage of the operating cost for motor oil and tires is dependent on oil price, but in the airline business it's about 1/3.

In late November I started looking at airline tickets to places like Kauai, Maui, and Costa Rica. The recent low fuel prices made me excited to re-evaluate the cost of flying to these destinations, and was dismayed to find that prices have all gone up $50-$150 per round-trip ticket.

Perhaps there is some truth to this article that explains where the extra money in fuel savings will go; profit for the airlines. It appears that airline mergers have reduced the competitiveness of the industry, and pricing now favor those in the business.

Originally Posted by acparker

Look for proposals to significantly increase fuel taxes. Once those pass, the price will likely rebound, plus the new taxes.

I did hear something about raising the tax on fuel, but I don't know why that is proposed. Fuel is taxed by the gallon, not as a fraction of the overall price, so the recent dip on fuel price wouldn't reduce government revenues. Quite the opposite, low prices will increase consumption and revenues.

Taxing fuel to provide infrastructure revenue is silly anyhow. A more stable and equitable system would tax distance driven, and perhaps factor in vehicle weight.

I'm against increasing infrastructure revenue because it seems to be in great condition to me. The county re-paves the quiet country road by my parent's house every few years even though I've never seen a single crack or pothole. Go drive in another country and you will see the definition of poor infrastructure.

Now, an increase in spending to address things like adding intelligence to traffic lights, and other fuel and time saving measures would get my vote. Why is traffic still being measured by those rubber hoses they put across roadways? We have inductive loops and cameras at most intersections nowadays. Instead of programming lights with information collected from rubber hoses a couple years ago, the lights could be making real-time adjustments in timing based on actual demand.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I did hear something about raising the tax on fuel, but I don't know why that is proposed. Fuel is taxed by the gallon, not as a fraction of the overall price, so the recent dip on fuel price wouldn't reduce government revenues. Quite the opposite, low prices will increase consumption and revenues.

It's being proposed (or at least mentioned) because the tax hasn't been adjusted since 1993. since then more roads have been built, cars get better mileage than they did and the dollar doesn't go as far as it did. So per gallon of gas sold we've got wear and tear being more effectively applied to the roads, maintenance is being less effectively applied and that less effective maintenance is being spread over more roads. Now that gas is suddenly a lot cheaper than we've been used to, it's a golden opportunity to say "We're spending $2 less a gallon, how about raising the tax by a dime? Nobody will notice!" For it or against it, now's the time to talk about it.

I disagree on taxing mileage, even adjusted for GVW. Why? Because we'd have to create an entire inspection and collection apparatus to back it up. The fuel tax is currently collected at the point of sale, where they're already collecting taxes on snacks, beer, smokes and lottery tickets. As it happens, fuel is a pretty good measure of how much wear and tear you're putting on the road- heavier vehicles burn more fuel per mile and everything burns more fuel the farther it goes. Okay, taxing gas penalizes things like idling, mowing and using generators, but I'm just going to ignore that. Electric cars can dodge this, so maybe we should eventually tax tires instead? I don't know.

You're right that simply increasing the amount of money available isn't helpful if it's being spent stupidly- but however they choose to spend it, they need more money. Spending it intelligently is a different issue that should also be addressed- and you can get a lot more agreement there. It's easier to raise a tax than to create a new tax, so when the thing being taxed suddenly becomes dramatically cheaper, an increase can be snuck through or legitimate arguments against an increase can easily be ignored.