Because Donald Trump isn't president.

I feel kind of lucky right now looking at some other areas gas prices, last night when I filled my tank it was 3.87 and it took about $45 dollars to fill it up. Of course summer time around here is horrendous due to all the tourist.

Just went up to $4.29

It's 4.54 /gallon (1.20/litre) in Southern Alberta... gotta love how we pay more than a lot of states.

I remember we thought it insane that prices should hit 2$.. now its 4. It'll hit 6$ and we'll be asking the same thing.

ps its 4.21$ here.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=untapped+oil+in+America&fr=chr-swat02 is what makes me shake my head in disgust...

inflation
politics
supply pinching

I think inflation is a really big factor at the moment, though. Due to politics and the Fed's policies, the dollar's value is declining; the recent interview with Bernanke, he's not changing policy (printing money, low interest rates) at all, so everyone sees that the dollar is going to stay weak for the foreseeable future.

You don't see this immediately with some items because the prices are already locked in (like with food at grocery stores), but the pressure on food has been going on for at least a year, and companies are caving in to raising the prices of certain things to pass on increased costs to consumers.

But, yeah, such a large increase (almost +$1 in a month, and it never goes down) doesn't make sense. I don't think the prices reflect current costs, but are in anticipation of future potential problems, such as political upheaval in oil-exporting countries that would disrupt the flow of supply. Sometimes I think these investor people make self-fulfilling prophecies.

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I feel that the really hard part is that our entire urban and suburban and rural planning assumes that people can drive and can drive often. I live in a town that doesn't even have a grocery store, I have to drive about 10 miles to get to the nearest one. I have to commute to college because there is no reliable public transportation that can get me there when I need to get there (and when I want to leave). You have to travel long distances to get to the places you need, because there isn't much of an alternative that is less expensive (when factoring the cost of time, too). I can't walk to the nearest grocery store - nevermind that it is far away, but there are no margins (unless 2 inches counts) to walk in safely at all!

man, i payed 4.35 this morning at friggin Citgo/7-11.... some of the most expensicve gas in the country right now.
Gotta love speculators

Yah but there is environmental and helth impacts of drilling for oil in somones back yard.

There wa this lady in Alberta who basically filled up 2l bottles with water, the took a match to them to burn off all the excess natural gas that was in her bottles, it can be dangerous, very dangerous, hazardous etc.. for the people living there.

I was listening to NPR last week and they were talking about all the reasons that nautral gas inst as green as everyone thinks.

really, tehre is no free lunch.. too many people wanting too many things. gotta come from somewhere, and there will always be waste and pollution as a result

Do people actually think that natural gas is a green energy, I mean it sgreener but not green :facepalm:
t

well from the piece i listened to, its not really even greener.. it burns cleaner. but theres a huge carbon cost associated with making it available.
you know, kind of like electiric cars needing electricity provided majorily by coal burning plants.

Cornell did the study.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/37390/?p1=A2&a=f

most "green" technology is [censored]. electric cars as you mentioned would draw more power from coal plants and good luck trying to get nuclear plants now after the japan quake. CFL bulbs with mercury in them that ends up in the ground water. ethananol that reduces your mpg and thus you end up using more gas. also i used to work for a gas wholesaler and the ethonal is stored in a large container and is vented which means its constantly evaporating into the air. wind energy has turned into a flop. the only one that looks good now is solar and that cause they finally managed to get solar panels over 40% efficiency but thats is still aways away from becoming availabe to residential areas. they also are experimenting with solar salt towers in spain where mirrors heat up a salt solution that stores energy.

frankly there isnt much we can do anymore since our air and water quality are better than they were when the EPA was started due to advances in technology. the ball is squarely in china and india's court since they have the worlds largest populations and fast growing economies.

Solar is a joke since you need 2.5 million panels to generate the power equivalent to a medium sized nuke plant or large Coal/Natural gas plant. And that is for a a city of 700,000 people. Seriously there are more viable (is that even teh right word) options than solar.

Well, I hate to say it, but if your not near a major fault line, nuclear power looks to be one of the better adn cleaner options.

First you need to break down the wholesale price of gas. Crude oil is priced about $112 per barrel, from which the refining process (which will cost $12-$13 per barrel) will extract 42 gallons of oil. So you're looking at almost $3 a gallon just to break even. Here in the U.S. the federal gas tax is 18.5 cents per gallon, the state gas taxes range from 4-5 cents (Alaska) to 40-45 cents per gallon (New York, California) and add to that 5-10 cents per gallon for the station itself. Add to that the cost of transportation and administration (payroll, health benefits, advertising, ect) and you see where the cost of gas goes. In the end the net profit for oil companies is about 4 cents per gallon (pre-tax), so even if an oil company were willing to cut their profits by half it would only knock off a few cents.

I've been hearing about "Peak Oil" for 30 years and it always seems to have-just-happened, is-about-to-happen or will-happen-in15-20-years, so I'm not buying that idea any more. Just look at the study a little closer, are they talking about Oil Reserves, Oil Supply or Oil Resources. Oil Reserves means crude oil that has been pumped and is sitting in a barrel (consistently about a 5-10 year supply), Oil Supply is oil sitting in a well waiting to be pumped (consistently about a 50 year supply) and Oil Resources is all the rest of the oil in the world that we know about but don't know how to get (over 1000 years worth but if we can't get to it then does it matter?). Oil is a big business and there is constant technological advances allowing access to more of the proven resources, the world firs oil well (in Pennsylvania I believe) only went down 69 feet, versus 30K today.

OPEC does have strict control over the price of oil, and those countries get together on a regular basis to decide how much each will pump to keep the prices where they want. Every other oil producing country mostly goes with the price OPEC sets. But right now the prices are being set in American dollars. With the dollar weakening all commodities priced by the dollar (Gold, Silver, Oil) are going up in price. Right now the world runs on oil, so even with some people cutting back on driving it's not enough to even register on the global market. The price of crude is high because companies are willing to pay those prices.

What can be done about it? Without getting to deep I'd say either to strengthen or abandon the US dollar on the global market, mass produce alternative energies (I'd like to take the kind of power plants used in US Navy ships and hook them up in small towns across the US, but thats just me) or find a country(s) with enough oil to produce and set their own global prices as a counter to OPEC. However the humanitarian in me feels that the people in the OPEC countries need that income more that I need cheaper gas, but it's not a perfect world where that is actually happening.

thorium nuclear reactors.......uranium reactors svck balls. im doing my engineering paper on them and the best part is that i got the idea when someone linked an article about thorium reactors on this forum.

SteveDog made a quick anolysis of the price. However, I do not agree with the resources evaluation. I think this is rather 200-300 years maximum and how much will the consumer be ready to pay for more and more expensive oil ?

We need Thorium reactors!