Why can't the US buy it's oil strictly from North or South American Countries. Why would we buy oil from mid eastern countries? I've read reports that state only 25% of the US oil imports are from the mid east. Why does the cost of a barrel of oil coming out of Canada cost the same as one coming out of the mid east. There is no tyranical leaders in Canada, the oil flow won't be impeded unless there is an earthquake. I don't understand how activities in the mid east can have such an impact on the price of crude worldwide, especially for us, the US. I wonder with our buying power in the oil field, we couldn't become the Walmart, and dictate to the suppliers what price we are willing to pay ?
He makes a very good point...
why bother buying it from there if it's 25% of what we purchase?
Hell I'd pay 25% more if it meant not to buy it from the middle east..
Wait we are paying like 25% more than it was a year ago..
Just think the money they would save just piping it up/down to us versus using oil tankers.
Buffalo Web Hosting and Graphic Design
www.onlinemedia.net - www.vinyl-graphics.com
Web hosting / Web Design - Signs, Banners, Vehicle Graphics
You're both fuzzy.
World markets.
You both would be willing to pay 25% more.
From a "safe" South American guy like Hugo Chavez?
Truth springs from argument among friends.
maybe I could ask some other questions. Why is oils value determined on the world market. Seems Canadien oil producers have to be raking in enormous profits because of this yr long spike in oil prices. If they were profitable at $50 a barrel, at $75, they must be making a killing. Is this way off base ? And I would exclude buying oil from Chavez, same way we don't buy oil from Iran.
Because only the Middle East has a big enough volume of oil. The Americas don't produce enough oil.Originally Posted by Deerhunter
Don't forget, we produce 40% of our own oil here in the US. Our demand just outstrips the supply we can produce (or actually, what we allow ourselves to produce since we won't allow drilling in many places). Canada can't fulfil it either. So we look to the largest suppliers which are in the middle east.
Police officers cost of production is virtually nil. They ought to be getting minimum wage---and that's being overly generous.
Truth springs from argument among friends.
Why would they sell it to us as 50 a barrel when the world is paying 75?
as Walmart does. Walmart tells vendors how much it will pay for products. Look no further than lawn mowers. The vendors have produced a cheaper model (lower gauge steel) to sell to Walmart because Walmart sets the price it will pay. Walmart is such a big player, as I assume the US is , the vendor has no choice but to sell it to them for that number. Biker , what has this topic have to do with Cops ?
It's a discussion about prices distorted by a cartel.
Like the PBA, right?
Truth springs from argument among friends.
There is an obvious failure to understand the commodities market and that of distribution effects on costs.
Then there is the big kicker of supply and demand.
We could always produce our own oil but that would require leftists to move out of the way so we could go and get the oil we need.
I heard its to expensive to use our own oil as cost for manpower far excede those overseas. (and I no nothing of the commiditys market)
Is this correct?
People who wonder if the glass is half empty or full miss the point. The glass is refillable.
That is one big factor, but that also changes as the price of oil rises. Now that oil is $75 a barrel instead of $30 per barrel, it becomes more viable to drill for new oil in North America again.
But I'm not sure what price they consider a breakeven point for investment.
Plus there are too many environmental issues with drilling in N. America. Just look at Alaska. No one can touch it. Who wants to deal with that political headache when you can drill elsewhere with no hassle.
I heard an interview with T. Boone Pickens about six months ago. He said the Alaska oil should be left for the next generation.
From that legendary oil genius, that's good enough for me.
Truth springs from argument among friends.
"The first thing to understand about petroleum is this: crude oil is only valuable because it can be made into other things. By itself, petroleum is virtually useless. There's very little call to seal and waterproof wooden galleons or hurl Greek fire at one's opponents. Now, all the products we distill and refine from crude oil – liquefied petroleum gas (LPG or condensate, stuff like propane and butane), gasoline, diesel, kerosene, heating oil, fuel oil, asphalt and coke – can be derived from every grade of crude pumped out of the ground. But not every grade of crude can be refined into the same spread of substances. Without a lot of work, heavier, thicker, higher sulfur grades of petroleum (the bulk of the world's crude oil, including that produced by most OPEC countries) yields very little gasoline, while lighter, low-sulfur crudes yield substantially more gasoline.
And gasoline, the motor fuel of choice for most of the world's passenger cars, is what matters. The more gasoline you can squeeze out of a barrel of crude, the greater the value of the crude.
(Petroleum with less than 1 percent sulfur in it is "sweet," while crude with a higher sulfur content is "sour.")
The price you usually see quoted for a 42-gallon barrel of crude oil – what got wound up to $55.67 per barrel in October – is the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) contract and spot price for West Texas Intermediate, a fairly low-sulfur, high-gasoline content crude that is one of three major global benchmarks used by oil producers as the basis for pricing. (The other two are Dubai, which is the benchmark for fairly heavy and high-sulfur crude oil shipped, generally, to Asia; and UK Brent, which is pumped from the North Sea and is the price benchmark for roughly 40 percent of world's crude grades.) The lighter the crude and lower the sulfur content, the more gasoline you can get, and the higher the price the crude commands on the market. Conversely, the heavier and higher in sulfur the oil is, the lower its price.
For example, Light Louisiana Sweet – a grade of crude pumped from the Gulf of Mexico – usually costs slightly less than West Texas Intermediate (WTI), while Mars – Royal Dutch/Shell's unofficial Gulf of Mexico sour crude – sells at a substantial discount to WTI, what is called the sweet-sour spread.
On Tuesday, December 28, the New York Mercantile Exchange price for WTI delivered in February (the contract month) closed at $41.77 per barrel (while the WTI spot price for delivery at the huge oil terminal complex in Chushing, Oklahoma, was $41.75 per barrel). That same day, Light Louisiana Sweet traded at $41.68, Mars from the US Gulf at about $33.30 per barrel, Alaska North Slope crude (which has a fairly high sulfur and heavy metal content) for delivery to California traded at $34.97 per barrel, low-sulfur Nig-eria Bonny Light posted $40.08 per barrel, high-sulfur Dubai finished at $35.63 and Russian Urals (another moderately high-sulfur grade) closed at $37.08.
Why buy Light Louisiana Sweet when Nig-eria Bonny is $1.60 cheaper? Simple. It will cost more than $1.60 per barrel to get that Nig-erian crude to the US – possibly much more. "
---excerpt from "Peak Oil?" by Charles Featherstone.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/featherst...erstone18.html
Damn slang filter kept bleeping-out the word N.I.G.E.R.I.A, so I had to rephrase it as Nig-eria.
The difference between Wal-Mart and the USA is that Wal-mart is a retailer of products while the USA is a consumer. Not the same thing.I wonder with our buying power in the oil field, we couldn't become the Walmart, and dictate to the suppliers what price we are willing to pay ?
The fact is, everything is priced on the world market. The only restriction to that is the cost of transportation and tariffs/trade restrictions, which always fail. It just so happens that pound for pound, oil transport happens to be the most efficient freight transportation system that has ever been invented. Odd, but true. It costs next to nothing to move oil from Saudi to here.Why is oils value determined on the world market. Seems Canadian oil producers have to be raking in enormous profits because of this yr long spike in oil prices.
We Deceive ourselves into thinking our Iranian oil embargo does anything at all. Iran just sells their oil to other countries and we buy oil from countries that didn’t happen to sell it to the ones that bought it from the Iranians. It’s like if I gave a 10$ bill to Biker and he gave two fives to you, can I say “I didn’t do business with Beerhunter”?. So, when talking about commodities markets, embargoes are just exercises in empty gestures.And I would exclude buying oil from Chavez, same way we don't buy oil from Iran.
As for setting the price of oil, there’s a horrible dilemma there… The Saudi’s are blessed with the most and cheapest oil around. It costs them very little to extract oil from the ground. In many places it literally shoots out of the ground under very high pressure. Not so with most other oil. So, when the price of oil falls a lot, domestic wells begin to actually lose money, as it costs more to operate the extraction infrastructure than the oil is actually worth. Then oil companies shut these wells down, which tips the percentage of overall production in the Arabs favor.
So, it could actually be argued that low oil prices are not in the US’s strategic interests, and actually empower foreign countries via our reliance on them. Canada has gigantic reserves of heavy oils embedded in sands, but it costs a lot to get the oil out. Canada is now having an oil boom, since it is now economically feasible to get the oil out and still make a buck.
Either option sucks for Joe Six-pack here in the USA. Probably the best thing is to get off the oil crack-pipe and come up with something better….
Data is not the plural of Anecdote.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote