The recent tirade about the price of gas needs a few facts, and some
opinions, injected by someone who has been associated with the oil industry
during a career in their research laboratories.
1. Oil companies have for many years had a lower profit margin than grocery
stores.
2. Recently the world demand for oil has skyrocketed while production from
oil fields has declined as it does from the day it is brought on line.
3. U.S. potential drilling targets offshore California, east coast USA,
Alaska and particularly Florida are "off limits" due to reasons you can
guess. NIBY. (the Chinese are drilling between Florida and Cuba)
4. The only area with large potential available is far off shore in the gulf
in extremely deep water. Very costly to drill.
5. I believe the federal government has given special incentives to drill
there.
6. Oil company profits are now up a great deal as we all know. What happpens
to those profits? Do they go to the stockholders? No. It is rare for the
stockholder to receive a dividend of 2%. Does it go to the CEO of the
company? Some of it does,in fact I think too much of it does, but that is
still a small fraction. Is it stored in a bank somewhere? No,it is used to
look for more oil and to do research in other forms of energy.
7. There is a real bottleneck in refining capacity. We have not built a new
refinery in 17 years. It is extremely difficult to get a permit to build a
refinery and you can guess the reason.
8. Quite a bit of our oil comes from tar sands in Canada and some from shale
oil in the USA. Both are very costly to operate.
It is interesting to contemplate what would happen if a driver boycott
took place in the USA. There might be a temporary dip in price but the world
market for oil and gas would result in a flood of tankers at our ports
loading up to sell the product to China, India, and many other countries.
This topic is way off from towers and antennas but I feel our readers need
to see the other side of the story before our administrater kills it. 73,
Dan, N5AR
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