Posted on 02/28/2008 2:48:06 PM PST by NRG1973
VIENNA, Austria - OPEC decided Friday against pumping more oil in a rebuff to the United States and a possible prelude to cuts as early as next month should the wounded U.S. economy sap demand for crude.
The decision arrived despite U.S. urgings - backed by other major consumers - for more oil on the market to cool prices and relieve inflationary pressures that have contributed to fears of a global economic downturn.
Oil prices dropped nearly US$3 a barrel Friday after the U.S. said employers cut jobs in January, renewing worries that a possible U.S. recession that could eat into oil demand as OPEC ministers suggested.
The 13-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries insists that supplies were adequate and that speculators and geopolitical jitters - not oil availability - were setting prices.
OPEC said it is focused on near-term expectations: the likelihood of less demand as the Western hemisphere's heating season ends and before its summer driving season begins; the prospect of more barrels both from OPEC and non-OPEC nations, and fears that the market will shrivel if economic woes worsen.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.aol.ca ...
And OPEC would like to make it weaker.........
OPEC wants oil at $100 per barrel - period! The only way to fight this is to drill domestically.
Nuke um
OPEC wants oil at $100 per barrel - period! The only way to fight this is to drill domestically.
You don’t think it will cost a $100 a barrel here? How do you think it got to $100 in the first place?
And that will happen, when?
There is an alternative to drilling domestically.
Put a few of the technologies we already have on line, like Thermal Depolymerization of organic wastes in our daily stream of trash. The science is there, the need is there, and technology is sufficiently sophisticated to be applied to a wide range of organic materials, like sewage sludge, demolition of frame houses, cleanup of street trash, old tires, and even lawn clippings that have a nasty habit of ending up in land fills.
Or an even more high-tech method of eliminating ALL kinds of trash and waste, called plasma trash reduction.
www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage
a quite elegant way of breaking down and reclaiming the most troublesome of trash accumulations.
There are three by-products from this method of trash reduction, one of which is syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and free hydrogen, a second one of which is heat, and a third one of which is the slag.
The principle is to fire up a plasma arc, and feed ground-up trash of ANY composition through this arc. The arc, which is about 33,000 degrees F. at its heart, is about three times hotter than the surface of the sun. Any organic materical is reduced, through the Fischer-Tropsch process, and the non-organic material is molten, dropping to the base of the retort, where it is tapped off, like the slag from an iron smelter. This slag is in some cases an excellent ore, and may be used for the reclamation of various elements, like most metals and a number of non-metallic elements. When the more valuable elements are extracted, the remaining material, mostly silicates in some form, are available for use as aggregate for the making of concrete or as a base in roadbuilding.
The free hydrogen may be separated from the carbon monoxide (after these two gases have given up most of their heat energy through heat exchangers, which are used to drive steam power generation plants), and used in constructing the hydrogen fuel distribution system. The carbon monoxide, an excellent fuel in its own right, is further reburned to drive additional power generation units. All this electricity generated by this system is way more than adequate to keep the plasma arc lit up and continuously firing, and in fact, by careful attention to the engineering, it is possible to produce about three times as much electrical power as is consumed in the plasma arc.
These things cost about a quarter billion dollars a copy, but with about nine such units, New York City would not have to import one bit of electrical energy from outside their grid supply, and not export one bit of trash to landfills elsewhere, which may be at distances of several hundred miles.
The City of Tomorrow is within our reach. Clean, self-sufficient, and not imposing an economic burden on the surrounding environment.
If it takes $100 a barrel oil to make it happen, let the price rise to $200 a barrel, and it happens twice as fast.
Looks like it’s time to hike food prices to OPEC countries.
The prudent trader will do something like the following: assume WTI crude is, say $102 at the close of the day session on 4 March. Enter two orders, A) ''Sell 5 WTI April crude, $101.25 STOP'', and B) ''Buy 5 WTI April crude, $100.85 OB''.
If OPEC announce a cut, WTI runs higher and neither order is hit. If they don't (which, btw, they won't...NOBODY cuts production above $100/bbl; take that to the bank), the price increment that's now built-into the mkt due to the putative cut will leave the mkt immediately, or within a couple of hours at worst, and the orders will be hit, and the trader will be out in and out of the mkt in likely a very few minutes with a nice little 2K profit in hand.
Note that the only way that a trade such as described can lose is if A) OPEC announces ''no cut'' **AND** B) WTI April crude drops to a minimum of between $101.24 and $100.86. It can happen -- but, in this enviroment, once WTI moves $0.75-1.00 in a day, it has invariably for months moved at least $0.75 **more** in the same direction later the same day.
Feel free to check out these recent, remarkably consistent price movements in WTI crude at Time & Timing
Completely free, very short sign-up (4 items, all just for admin purposes), and VERY informative if you're interested in recent or historical price analysis of the futures mkts.
Good trading to you!
It’s too bad the USA doesn’t have any untapped resources we could take advantage of. / sarc
I guess you can’t blame them, our dollar is getting more worthless everyday.
OPEC is waging economic warfare against us, that much should be plain as day. With a weak dollar china and the EU are also waging a dollar war with us using oil as the leverage point. The euro is at 1.5 dollars to the euro meaning to the EU oil is 75 dollars a barrel thats why you dont hear the EU whining about $100 plus a barrel on the contrary they are ecstatic that our currency is in freefall. We need to send the message to OPEC that we will not stand for price manipulation. The fastest way to signal were moving away from them is to allow the totally unrestricted drilling of ALL resources inside America’s EEZ Deep water gulf of mexico, ANWR, Outer Continental shelf, heavy oil in Utah, and at the same time fund Coal to liquids immediately. That will send a message to OPEC were going to open the spigot with or without your help. America has 400+ billion barrels in known reserves, but because of POLITICAL reason not technical reasons we prohibited from using them. at $35+ a barrel EOR has made it possible to go back to old fields where only 25% via primary and secondary recovery methods has been produced, and get another 20-50% out with Tertiary and Quaternary recovery methods. supercritical CO2 being the main advance in that field. There alone is 150+ billion barrels left in existing reservoir rocks that is now technically and economically feasible to extract. The deep water and outer shelf hold HUGE amounts of petrocarbons before being ordered to stop looking the oil companys found another 200 billion barrels off our coasts. AMERICA HAS OIL let us drill it.
Bull. As you paint the picture with the rest of your excellent post, we are our own worst enemy.
“let us drill it”
Agreed. But I still hold with increased food product prices to the OPEC countries. Fight oil with food.
You are kidding right? Sure the joe schmoe over there may love it but business and the foreign leaders are PISSED that the euro is worth so much. There are several articles about it now. Airbus already said their business model falls apart if the dollar/euro rate sustains at or above $1.5/per. Many of the automakers are going to move production to the US. The high euro is killing them far worse than the low dollar is killing us.
Supply and Demand. The world energy demand is growing and the reality is that OPEC can't keep up. SA hasn't developed new fields and increasing drilling in existing fields could cause them to go dry.
So the question you have to ask is do you want third world despot controlling oil or do you want Exxon?
Arabs, and their sympathizers, on their camels, with wireless laptops, trading up the price of crude.
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