Oil - the new war on the US?

I can't believe it! another pipeline attack in Nigeria.... could this be the new war on the US? hurting the consumers pockets? or is someone behind the scence pulling the strings?

Just the other day we had the Iranian president spill out "Oil is too cheap at $115"...

Obviously this hurts all consumers, but probably more so the US given the recent credit problems... who knows It seems all a little crazy and wrong!

This sort of thing has been going on for ages. What's changed is that the world no longer has surplus oil production capacity with which to offset supply disruptions.

so do you think we will ever see oil back below $110? or are they just going to keep bombing those pipelines?

Whether it will go below $110 is anyone's guess. My point is simply that production seems to be running flat out so there is no longer an ability to "set" a price and adjust production to maintain it. Now it's a case of fixed production with price adjusting itself according to how much goes wrong (pipelines blown up etc) and demand.

If you buy 100 litres of petrol tomorrow and just set it on fire, that's 100 litres less that gets used for something else (brought about by price). We're no longer in the situation where it means 100 litres more taken from the ground.

ShareIt said:

so do you think we will ever see oil back below $110? or are they just going to keep bombing those pipelines?

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Not soon... First the Grangemouth refinery strike, then fresh militant action in Nigeria affecting supply. A skirmish between US and Iranian boats in the Gulf overnight, and now there is news from Dow Jones that Iraq insurgents have bombed an oil pipeline S. of Baghdad ... should help underpin oil prices into next week??.

Cheers
...........Kauri

And it's running out, and we have no alternative right now.

If you think the oil situation is bad, worse is to come
Jad Mouawad
April 26, 2008

OIL prices nearly broke through $US120 a barrel this week, setting another record for the world's most indispensable energy commodity.

What was striking was what did not happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot. Some attacks on oil pipelines in Nigeria was all it took.

The weak US dollar, worries about terrorism and speculation on commodity markets certainly played a role. But, of course, so did demand. Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations such as China and India, the two most populous countries.

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How did this get centralised?

We may not have a replacement for oil yet but there are many technologies in their early stages.

Before we can develop these the world could easily reduce its demand for oil by
1. Increasing efficiency: We could reduce oil demand for cars by about 25-40% by firstly dumping huge wastefull vehicles then moving to hybrid of fuel efficient small cars
2. Public transport: We need a world wide revolution in public transport the europeans are pretty good so far.

As for replacement technologies I don't think that we will ever find an efficient all liquid replacement for oil. Its just so energy intensive to create a liquid fuel with the same potential energy. I think many cars in the future will be mainly electric with some sort of fuel system to extend its range if needed.
Most people use their cars to do the daily trip to work of 10-50km's them use them less often for long trips.

I believe in 50 years time everything will be electric its just much more efficient.

Kauri said:

Not soon... First the Grangemouth refinery strike, then fresh militant action in Nigeria affecting supply. A skirmish between US and Iranian boats in the Gulf overnight, and now there is news from Dow Jones that Iraq insurgents have bombed an oil pipeline S. of Baghdad ... should help underpin oil prices into next week??.

Cheers
...........Kauri

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Actually, the shutdown of the pipeline feed begins tomorrow (Apr 26th in UK). The strike starts on the Sun 27th (UK) and is planned for two days (finish Mon 28th UK time inclusive) then will take another day (or two?) to ramp up the feed pipeline again which means they won't be back up to speed until about Thu 1st May (our time). So, increasing prices past the US$120 mark would be no surprise next week until at least Thu our time.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=a6jDOgijlSG8&refer=energy



PS: Further down the page referred to in the link, commentary suggests other fields will have to shut as well and won't resume production for at least a week after the line re-opens!

Aussiejeff said:

Actually, the shutdown of the pipeline feed begins tomorrow (Apr 26th in UK). The strike starts on the Sun 27th (UK) and is planned for two days (finish Mon 28th UK time inclusive) then will take another day (or two?) to ramp up the feed pipeline again which means they won't be back up to speed until about Thu 1st May (our time). So, increasing prices past the US$120 mark would be no surprise next week until at least Thu our time.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=a6jDOgijlSG8&refer=energy



PS: Further down the page referred to in the link, commentary suggests other fields will have to shut as well and won't resume production for at least a week after the line re-opens!

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In fact it seems that the refinery is already down????

http://support.ukgateway.net/news/n...l&template=/news/feeds/story-template-pa.html

Cheers
............Kauri

Not a pretty picture at all! I definitely feel sorry for the people undergoing a food crisis mainly started by this oil war... this saying truly sticks

"the poor get poorer, while the rich get richer"

and what better way to show the big corporate cats and Nigerian militants sucking money out of the poor people. It's only a matter of time before we have a full scale riot (which is already starting)....my heart goes out to those people

KIWIKARLOS said:

We may not have a replacement for oil yet but there are many technologies in their early stages.

Before we can develop these the world could easily reduce its demand for oil by
1. Increasing efficiency: We could reduce oil demand for cars by about 25-40% by firstly dumping huge wastefull vehicles then moving to hybrid of fuel efficient small cars
2. Public transport: We need a world wide revolution in public transport the europeans are pretty good so far.

As for replacement technologies I don't think that we will ever find an efficient all liquid replacement for oil. Its just so energy intensive to create a liquid fuel with the same potential energy. I think many cars in the future will be mainly electric with some sort of fuel system to extend its range if needed.
Most people use their cars to do the daily trip to work of 10-50km's them use them less often for long trips.

I believe in 50 years time everything will be electric its just much more efficient.

Click to expand...

Totally agreed it can be done eventually. It's the next 20 to 30 years I'm worried about - we don't have the buses, trains, hybrids, batteries, electric cars, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal etc that we're going to be using. For that matter, we don't even have ourselves set up to build them on that scale yet.

Frist we have to accept there's a problem.

Then we need to decide what to do about it.

Then we need to build the factories to build the alternative energy devices.

Then, and only then, we start the 20 year replacement of current road vehicles with something that doesn't need oil.

I don't see all of this happening in less than 30 years at best, even when faced with outright crisis. Even that would require that we had phased out all petrol engine production a decade from now in favour of a workable electric alternative, somthing that seems difficult to imagine given the scale of the task and that it's taken far longer to achieve far lesser transitions in other areas.

KIWIKARLOS said:

We may not have a replacement for oil yet but there are many technologies in their early stages.

Before we can develop these the world could easily reduce its demand for oil by
1. Increasing efficiency: We could reduce oil demand for cars by about 25-40% by firstly dumping huge wastefull vehicles then moving to hybrid of fuel efficient small cars
2. Public transport: We need a world wide revolution in public transport the europeans are pretty good so far.

As for replacement technologies I don't think that we will ever find an efficient all liquid replacement for oil. Its just so energy intensive to create a liquid fuel with the same potential energy. I think many cars in the future will be mainly electric with some sort of fuel system to extend its range if needed.
Most people use their cars to do the daily trip to work of 10-50km's them use them less often for long trips.

I believe in 50 years time everything will be electric its just much more efficient.

Click to expand...

Switching every form of transportation over to electricity wont make that much difference (even if it was possible to revolutionaise the entire developing world quickly, which it isn't) as oil is intrinsinctly linked to food production, and as recent events show food production may struggle to meet demand in the future. This is before we even consider fuinding replacements for the petrochemicals within other areas of manufacturing (ie plastics & componentry, etc)

I would assume that converting "transport" to electricity would include all mobile energy consumption except aviation. So that means electric harvesters etc not just electric cars.

We're going to need rather a lot of electricity to make this work though given that petrol, diesel etc are a larger energy source for consuming devices than grid electricity in most places.

Smurf1976 said:

I would assume that converting "transport" to electricity would include all mobile energy consumption except aviation. So that means electric harvesters etc not just electric cars.

We're going to need rather a lot of electricity to make this work though given that petrol, diesel etc are a larger energy source for consuming devices than grid electricity in most places.

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It's not just the transportation of goods that impact the food industry - production is inextricably linked to petrochemical fertilisers, so without them some farmlands will suffer plummeting yields, some may stop production altogether. Transport, whilst economically of vitol importance, could some day pale into insignificance when we realise a reasonbable proportion of the world's population may starve due to the energy crisis.

May be the war has already started?

The End of the World as You Know It…and the Rise of the New Energy World Order

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/print/174919/Tomgram%253A%2520%2520Michael%2520Klare%252C%2520Oil%2520Rules%2521

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you've known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

In this new world order, energy will govern our lives in new ways and on a daily basis. It will determine when, and for what purposes, we use our cars; how high (or low) we turn our thermostats; when, where, or even if, we travel; increasingly, what foods we eat (given that the price of producing and distributing many meats and vegetables is profoundly affected by the cost of oil or the allure of growing corn for ethanol); for some of us, where to live; for others, what businesses we engage in; for all of us, when and under what circumstances we go to war or avoid foreign entanglements that could end in war.

This leads to a final observation: The most pressing decision facing the next president and Congress may be how best to accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to a system based on climate-friendly energy alternatives.

Look at what I dug up.... very interesting!

Almost predicted to a tee so far. Note, it was published at the end of 2007... read the part "MONEY AND THE MARKETS" followed by "USA –IRAN".

In the "MONEY AND THE MARKETS" part, note the volitile times March 7...

http://www.edtamplin.com/articles/predictionss_2008.htm

Mofra said:

It's not just the transportation of goods that impact the food industry - production is inextricably linked to petrochemical fertilisers, so without them some farmlands will suffer plummeting yields, some may stop production altogether. Transport, whilst economically of vitol importance, could some day pale into insignificance when we realise a reasonbable proportion of the world's population may starve due to the energy crisis.

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The use of oil for fertiliser is tiny compared to its use as a fuel. We don't have to move all transport to electricity but the more we do the cheaper oil will become and the longer it will last. We have to have oil for plastic and fertiliser but even with better farm management and plastic recycling we could scale back our use of oil for those as well.

We currently have technology to make diesel fuel from coal and your never going to replace all oil based technology, in fact the world must use as much oil as possible while it can because with out oil the world would be a lot worse place. Hunger and standards of living would drop dramatically and we will never ever have any comparable cheap and energy dense fuel untill we get some serious technical advancements.

Nitrogen fertilizers can be made from electricity. It's been done before, it works, but it only makes sense when the source of the electricity is something other than fossil fuels (given the inefficiency of fossil fuel power generation).

Smurf1976 said:

Nitrogen fertilizers can be made from electricity. It's been done before, it works, but it only makes sense when the source of the electricity is something other than fossil fuels (given the inefficiency of fossil fuel power generation).

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I would suggest it would be very expensive. However farmers are cutting down on nitrogen fertilisers by growing more and more nitrogen fixing crops. By growing soya beans between cane crops the nitrogen requirement of the cane is markedly reduced and there is the bonus of a bean crop. Before the advent of a lot of the nitrogen fertilisers farmers grew other bean crops and ploughed them back into the soil. Organic farmers do the same. Vetch and Lab Lab are nitrogen fixing plants used a lot as nitrogen fixing plants in pastures. Vetch was often grown with a wheat crop in the past and will be used more in the future. We stopped using these systems on some of our farms years ago as fertilisers became cheaply available but started using them again as the prices rose. Most farmers these days are fairly smart businessmen and not like the steriotype yoekel that a lot of city people imagine. They will adapt.

Oil - the new war on the US, well with the military might of the USA there are more strategic ways of hurting a nation other than bare knuckle fisticuffs.

Good tactics by USA's enemies and no doubt it would bring them to their knees quicker and have more impact than any other style of warfare so i think there is some merit to it.

But, at the end of the day i think its fair to say were are pretty much screwed at present and its not beyond the realms of reality that society today as we know it could collapse in the next 30 years.

No need to complicate things, the reality is, oil is running out, we are using more and more of the stuff every year, in about 30-50 years most of it will be gone and talk of replacement fuels at present is just nonsense.

A crisis is looming and i dont think we are capable of fast tracking our technology quickly enough to keep pace with our demand for energy. Meanwhile, as with anything that there is more supply than demand common sense and logic tell you the price will continue to increase.

We have stuffed up big time. Urban planners forgot that oil is NOT an infinite resource, DOH!!!!!

Cities have been built with endless energy in mind, our travel distances to and from work and general commuting are to long. We transport food and products over huge distance, internationally in many cases.

Our society revolves around oil. As mentioned by others, its not just fuel for cars and aviation and the like but plastics and other products derived from oil. Nearly every single thing produced has an oil component in it somewhere.

Just think about that, nearly every single thing depends on oil and lets just say we have about 50 years or less of the stuff to go. SCREWED big time!!!!

Best to have yourself some land so you can grow your own food, store your own water and do your best to be self sufficient.

Needs a huge rethink and i just dont see us digging ourselves out of the poo this time. Like most things, by the time most people realise what is going on it will be WAY to late, just like global warming.............

But, in the short term, as far as i am concerned oil stocks are where the money will be made. Trade the volatility and do it well and i believe you should be able to do well...............



JW