gas prices

[ICantSpellDawg]

i recently read that americans, on average, are spending less of a percentage of their income on gasoline then they did throughout the entire 1980's. milk as well

not counting the new orleans disaster, does anyone have any info on this?
i cant remember the link

[Red Harvest]

i recently read that americans, on average, are spending less of a percentage of their income on gasoline then they did throughout the entire 1980's. milk as well

not counting the new orleans disaster, does anyone have any info on this?
i cant remember the link

Commodities get cheaper over time as long as they don't become scarce: oil and food are commodities. Oil was at a high at the beginning of the '80's due to the Iran-Iraq war. Dairy farming was still viable for small dairies then too.

Milk has gotten cheaper by supersizing the dairies and thereby concentrating the collection. When I was milking cows in the early 80's before I could drive, one or two hundred head was about the minimum herd size to make a decent living. By the 90's it was a thousand or so. Now I hear it takes about ten thousand. Efficiencies of scale. Incidentally, I believe a fair bit of cost would be in transport (which is energy dependent.) None of the small dairies that lined the road I grew up along are still milking. Not a single one. We all used to milk, and raise calves. Most of the beef cattle in the area disappeared in the past 10 years too. Now the land is used mostly for hay to sell to the bigger herds. Or the pasture is rented out. I've noticed the same all along the hundreds of miles of highways when I drive home. Over 15+ years I've noticed fewer and fewer livestock along the road each trip.

Oil became cheaper as artificial restrictions were removed. The concern about oil is that it is now becoming scarcer while demand is rising. That is: exploration/production costs will be increasing as we exhaust the easier/better fields. We are soon to find out if this is true since the Saudi's have been the last with swing capacity and OPEC artificial constrictions have ended, while demand is growing at better than the historic norm.

[Ice]

That's probably because gas prices are through the roof here in the good old USA (Michigan atleast) so less people are driving.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Well it was cheaper until the hurricane. Now its a bit higher. I dont know if its as high as in the 70s under Carter though.

[Aenlic]

Actually, I believe that gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation, were highest under Ford, not Carter. Nice try though.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Yeah your right . But it was still Carters fault.



So you see we have now reached a new high as ths was wriiten is april. Geez look at that only a little over two dollars a few months ago.

LINK

It sure made a farce of that article.

[Aenlic]

Yeah your right . But it was still Carters fault.

Heh, Dangit! You made soda come out my nose! I'd sue, but I hate lawyers.

[BDC]

$6 a gallon here. So consider yourselves lucky.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

$6 a gallon here. So consider yourselves lucky.

I was about to say Canada and Germany had it worse...but never mind...

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Well you would if you had to drive as much as we do. Im sure the average american driver spends more on gasoline a year than anyone else in the world.

[Zalmoxis]

People used to pay just $1 for gas? Wow.

[Strike For The South]

95cents at its lowest

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Just saw something on this very topic while looking up stuff for school ( ).

How Gas Prices Work.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

People used to pay just $1 for gas? Wow.

95cents at its lowest

It used to be pennies a gallon and not all that long ago. I remember 23 cent a gallon gas as a kid and it was around 30 cents a gallon when I started . I used to fill my MG up for two dollars.

Heres a neat article with a chart various things cost in 1968 vs 2004 and whether they cost more or less now.


LINK

[Aenlic]

Used to be a great commercial on TV when I was in school, had this guy and his girlfriend in his convertible paying for gas with the proceeds from collecting empty bottles for the 5¢ recycle value. He had a barefoot-shaped gas pedal, which as a kid I thought was just the coolest thing.

[Redleg]

This was written before the Katrina - but its most likely still revelant to the discussion of gas prices.

Refining/Downstream
The United States experienced a steep decline in refining capacity between 1981 and the mid-1990s. Between 1981 and 1989, the number of U.S. refineries fell from 324 to 204, representing a loss of 3 million bbl/d in operable capacity (from 18.6 million bbl/d to 15.7 million bbl/d), while refining capacity utilization increased from 69% to 87%. Much of the decline in U.S. refining capacity resulted from the 1981 deregulation (elimination of price controls and allocations), which effectively removed the major prop from underneath many marginally profitable, often smaller, refineries.

Refinery closures have continued since 1989, bringing the total number of operable U.S. refineries to 149 in 2003. In general, refineries that have closed have been relatively small and have had less favorable economics than other refineries in their market area. Also, in recent years, some smaller, less-economic refineries that had faced additional investments for environmental reasons in order to stay in business found closing preferable because they predicted that they could not stay competitive in the long term.

While some refineries have closed, and no new refineries have been built in nearly 30 years, many existing refineries have expanded their capacities. As a result of capacity creep," whereby existing refineries create additional refining capacity from the same physical structure, capacity per operating refinery increased by 28% over the 1990 to 1998 period, for example. Overall, since the mid-1990s, U.S. refinery capacity has increased from 15.0 million bbl/d in 1994 to 16.9 million bbl/d in September 2004. Also in September 2004, utilization of operating capacity at U.S. refineries was averaging around 90%, down from 97% in July and August. Although financial, environmental, and legal considerations make it unlikely that new refineries will be built in the United States, expansion at existing refineries likely will increase total U.S. refining capacity in the long-run.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html


Looks like DOE both called it and will have to rewrite their analysis at the same time to me.

[Aenlic]

By the time we manage to ramp up our refining capacity, we'll be hitting or have already passed the Hubbert peak. So it's a moot point.

Hah! Just when you thought that horse was dead and buried, it rises from the grave! Behold! I bring you...

The Hubber Peak Hypothesis - part II - the Revenant Equine!

(sorry, I couldn't resist - )

[Crazed Rabbit]

I have no idea what the Hubbert Peak is, but I do know that the man who correctly estimated the 'peak production' (when production starts outpacing discovery of new oil deposits (NOTE: its not really called this, but I forgot what it was called)) for the US within a month or two is predicting world 'peak production' this Thanksgiving (end of November).

Crazed Rabbit

[Aenlic]

Heh, the guy who predicted in the 1950's the peak production in the U.S. in the 1970's was a geophysicist, Dr. M. King Hubbert. The idea of peak production is named after him. The Colorado School of Mines runs the Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies (http://hubbert.mines.edu/). There is a group based in Ireland called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) which also has a lot of great info (http://www.peakoil.net/). And for one-stop shopping for the opinions of industry experts who support the theory, and links to various web sites - including the two above - go here Hubbertpeak.com

[Xiahou]

I have no idea what the Hubbert Peak is, but I do know that the man who correctly estimated the 'peak production' (when production starts outpacing discovery of new oil deposits (NOTE: its not really called this, but I forgot what it was called)) for the US within a month or two is predicting world 'peak production' this Thanksgiving (end of November).

Crazed Rabbit

Wiki has a decent article on it here. It'll give you an idea of what it's supposedly about. Personally, I don't put alot of stock in it. Not that oil wil never get more expensive to produce than it's worth to use, but that we can predict it with any real accuracy on a global scale. To me, the theory seems to make alot of assumptions- many of which haven't been true.

[Papewaio]

Aenlic are you a Rock Doc?

[Aenlic]

My father had an M.S. in geophysics and a B.S. in geology from OU (still one of the best geology schools in the country). He worked for various oil companies in my youth. I remember as a little kid, going with him bird dogging (a term for the guys who go out and do the seismic tests to find the oil deposits). He also did some freelance uranium prospecting. I used to play with his pick hammer and geiger counter. He did his master's thesis on the Morrison formation in Colorado, even discovered a fossil of a rare icthyosaur which is in the Smithsonian vaults somewhere. From my earliest memories, I went with him all over the western U.S. when I was really young. I grew up in Denver, Colorado around geologists and seismologists and engineers. I think I learned how to spell and properly pronounce Schlumberger before I learned to read. When I was little, he taught me all about the ins and outs of synclines, anticlines, and monoclines. I used to help him color in the features of seismic charts with colored pencils where the various sub-strata features like those showed on the charts. I learned all about the Permian basin, which he concentrated on when I was a bit older. This is all while I was still in elementary school. When the oil companies started closing down their Denver offices and consolidating operations in Houston, we ended up there.

In college, I ended up studying other things. First physics, then microbiology, then medieval history. I learned my abiding love for science from him, though.

[Red Harvest]

Ahhh, Schlumberger, my grandfather retired from them. He worked the Kansas fields. He's still alive and kickin', he's down to about 2 of his 9 lives remaining, and I keep havin' to move him out of the way when I'm felling trees, etc. He's a tough old marine, after a nuclear apocalypse there would be two things I would expect to find had survived it, our multi-legged "friends" and Grandpa.

[Aenlic]

Don't forget Keith Richards. It'll be Keith Richards, cockroaches and your Grandpa.

[Papewaio]

My dad was an engineer so I decided to do something different and did Multidisciplinary Science with majors in Applied Physics and Exploration Geophysics at Curtin University of Technology.

I then ended up working in Kalgoolie, Telfar, Borneo and Sumatra.

My first overseas job in Rawas, Sumatra, I get back from and talk about it with the old man. He goes and states he designed the buildings for the site... cannot get away.

Then I review the following:

My parents meet at Mt Newman... Mt Whaleback is the biggest open cut iron mine in the world.

Then later on I was born in Fiji when my parents were working at the Emperor Gold and Silver mine.

I should have picked something different.

[Aenlic]

You're cursed! Heh.

[Papewaio]

Thats why I swapped to IT