Posted on 08/11/2014 6:51:27 AM PDT by MNDude
Just four months ago, a conference here on electric cars drew four times as many people as expected. District fire marshals ordered some of the crowd to leave, and the atmosphere was more like that of a rock concert than an energy conference. A brief film depicted an electric car owner driving off with a beautiful woman to the strains of "The Power of Love" while her original companion struggles to pay for gasoline. The audience cheered.
One discordant note in the series of enthusiastic speeches came from Bill Reinert, one of the Toyota Prius designers. He cautioned that designing and ramping up production of a new car takes five years.
"If oil goes down to $60 or $70 a barrel and gasoline gets back to $2.50 a gallon, and that very possibly could happen," he said, "will that demand stay the same or will we shift back up?"
It didn't take five years to hit those numbers. One type of oil shock has given way to another. Even more swiftly than the price of oil rose, it has tumbled to the range that seemed far-fetched when Reinert spoke and oil was more than $130 a barrel. Now that drop threatens a wide variety of game-changing plans to find alternatives to oil or ways to drastically reduce U.S. consumption.
"Declining oil prices can give us an artificial and temporary sense that reducing oil consumption and energy consumption is an issue we can put off," said Greg Kats, a managing director of Good Energies, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm that invests in global clean energy.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What is the minimum barrel profit price for fracked oil?
I once heard that it is $70/barrel. If so, our “oil boom” could be short-lived.
Does anyone know?
Only if we use Tax Dollars to subsidize gasoline. Which is the only reason it happens anywhere else in the world down to those prices.
Gasoline is made from crude oil. Crude oil isn't that cheap.
The only time they're happy is when there is something that makes them unhappy.
And there is always something that does just that.
There is no magic price level. As oil gets cheaper, fewer and fewer fields will become economic to produce, reducing the supply in lots of little steps. Same for rising price, more and more fields become economic to produce.
The gamble the oil companies take is how long either condition might last. Many will ride through a dip if they believe the price will recover. Others will have to sell out to those that do.
When oil prices rise the price at the pump goes up immediately.
When oil prices drop the price at the pump drops too - next month or the month after that.
Because as we all know it’s not about ‘alternatives’.
It’s about the peasants not using the elites’ resources.
As gas prices fall, we will hear demands from politicians to raise fuel/gas taxes to pay for _______.
Unless you happen to own a Delorean with a big hook on the back to capture electricity from a bolt of lightning, you don’t own a car that runs entirely on electricity.
Several mornings a month during my commute to work I see a guy who has a Nissan Leaf plastered with green energy logos. And feast in the irony that the big coal powered electrical plant’s plumes can be clearly seen off in the distance.
I’ve often wondered, given EVs’ limited range and dependence upon a functioning electrical grid, whether there’s an element of control to the big push for them. It’s easier to limit access to electricity, at least in the short term.
Over the last decade it was posted here often that the for fracking to be profitable, oil would have to consistently be over $60 a barrel. May have went up.
Silly, we have to save all that electricity so we can power them cars.
Ow, ow, ow. That hurt.
I’m a planner/scheduler/estimator for those refinery maintenance outages. Refinery units for the most part have to be shut down for maintenance at the most after a four to five year run. The outages are scheduled as much as tem years in advance.
Regulatory inspections drive many of the outages; every pressure vessel has to be inspected at least once evry ten years.
Believe me, if the refineries could figure out a way to run them forever without shutting units down they would. Production loss costs them more than the actual maintenance work. Money is almost no object when trying to shorten an outage duration.
I hope this doesn't sound like nit-picking, I just want to explain to help avoid more confusion.
Fracking, Hydraulic Fracturing, is done when oil is priced far lower, going back to the 1940s.
What is too expensive to produce at low oil prices is the shale fields that are so tight they require extensive hydraulic fracturing to get enough oil to flow.
Hydraulic fracturing would still be done if oil dropped down to $40, but they would not bother on most shale fields, rather just more traditional fields.
In days past, we could use the same recipe across most the nation. The multiple different recipes required for differing EPA requirements in different locations is the real price impact in those shutdowns.
Nope. Because if someone can truly develop an alternative that works and is cost effective it’s a trillion dollar product.
Both fracking technology and drilling practice have improved substantially over the last few years, so i wouldn’t be surprised if the break-even oil price has come down.
Not sure where you are, but gasoline was $4 and now it’s $3.20. So that’s definitely a drop.
I want to stop kowtowing to the GD Saudis.
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