What are your Gas prices UP to?

[Smart Red]

After going down to "not low enough", our gas has quickly risen to "higher than it should be, but lower than it was." I've heard rumors of raising taxes on fuel as well.

 

[valley ranch]

The oil companies were making billions when petrol was 17cents including tax. Once the well pump is working it can pump day and night, a field of pumps will pump/ work with no one on site, I've seen that. In the late 60ies, the American people were told the world is running out of oil.
The truth was: There are seas of oil in the earth.
It was decided to pump less oil, reduce supply to slightly below demand.

In almost all other countries petrol was always more expensive.

Here's a heart warming story:

Auntie Sultana Arslanian, an American Citizen, stayed with her cousin, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, a British Citizen, for some time at his mansion in Paris. His main base of operation was Portugal.
He was known as: Mister 5%. He arranged that his payment for each service just 5% that would be transferred, should for some reason be it weather, war or strife, to the oil company operational base not with the field location or country where the service was given.


For a time he was said to be~ the richest man on earth. I never knew him or his son Nubar, they gave me a book written about him.

re: Jonathan Conlin
His greatest deal was the 1928 Red Line Agreement he negotiated be-
tween the British, Americans, and French, under which all agreed to collabo-
rate to exploit oil deposits within the bounds of the former Ottoman Empire.
This cartel, vested as the Iraq Petroleum Company (or IPC, formerly the
Turkish Petroleum Company) protected all parties from price-cutting or
sudden changes in “liftings” (the amount of oil extracted), and secured
Gulbenkian’s own firm, Participations and Explorations Inc. (Partex) a 5%
stake of total production. “Mr Five Percent” was born, and carefully
watched over his Agreement, tweaking it as circumstances demanded.

Most of his extended family was killed in the 1915-1924 Armenian Genocide as historc Armenia was taken for modern day turkey.

He choose a man, Samuel Marcus, who imported shells, to head Shell Oil. { I found him on the internet as Marcus Samuel.}

Let me diverge and tell you a story, or two, I heard regarding Calouste:

He was considered eccentric maybe crazy. Once when being interviewed he was asked: It is said, Mr. Gulbenkian, that you, a very rich man borrowed a sum of $1.00 from a bank, and gave boxes of bonds as security for the loan.
To this Gulbenkian answered: If you can find for me safe deposit for bonds and securities for less than the 2 cents per year I pay to the bank, I will store them there.

He leased, a perpetual lease, an entire floor of a Lisbon Hotel in depressed times for a small amount and never, in the years to come, let them out of the lease.

That's enough, I hate to read long posts.

I'm not going to prof read this good luck.

 

[majorcatfish]

both diesel and gas jumped 10 cents today...

 

[Ridgerunner]

One project I worked on in Kazakhstan cost one billion dollars to develop. That's $1,000,000,000.00. Do you think they are going to invest that kind of money and hope for $300 or $400 profit? No they expect to make a lot of money for that kind of investment.

It's not unusual for one exploratory well to cost several million dollars to drill. They may or may not find hydrocarbons, either oil or natural gas. That money is just lost. They have to make enough on the successful projects to pay for the unsuccessful ones. One exploratory well in Alaska several years back cost $1,000,000,000. Billion with a B. Just one well. It was a dry hole and the cost was written off. The money was just gone. With the advances is seismic technology the geologists are really good at finding underground reservoirs that could hold gas or oil, but you have to drill it to see if it is hydrocarbons or just water. Even if it is oil, it might be thin lightweight oil that flows really well or it may be pretty close to tar that does not flow at all. Tar doesn't move through pipelines or the well bore easily at all.

There is a lot of oil in the ground, there really is. What is important though is what you can get out. In some oil fields you can get a lot of it out and at not a really big cost. Most of those have been discovered and produced. Saudi Arabia has a lot of those. That's why they are so big in oil production. They have a lot of thin light weight oil in the ground and the recovery cost is extremely low. In some fields recovering 10% of the oil would be really good. Sometimes you find it but because of the geology or oil properties you just can't get it out.

Some tar sands cost as much as $80 per barrel to produce. The last I looked oil was somewhere between $50 to $60 barrel. Who in their right mind would spend that much money to produce a barrel of oil that they are losing that much money on? The reason our production went up so much was because of high oil prices. We could afford to produce those expensive barrels of oil and still make a profit. I expect that tar sand production to drop dramatically, which means prices will rise. Supply and demand.

Yes the oil companies make an obscene amount of money. They spend an obscene amount of money. Instead of focusing on how much total money that is, try looking at the rate of return they get on the money invested company wide. They sometimes do really well but sometimes they don't. If you look at historical averages they are somewhere close to the middle of the different market sectors on rate of return on money invested.

 

[Carol Dee]

Gas jumped from 2.04 to 2.29 in one day. This Sunday the 10 cent gas tax will get added. Argh....

 

[Rhodie Ranch]

Today at the ARCO cash station it was $2.87 at 11 a.m. When I drove back by at 1:45 p.m. it was $2.99. UGH>>>