Analysts predict $10.00 a gallon gas

Originally posted by philosopherrose
Regular gas in the bay area today is about $3.98. Premium is about $4.15.

San Francisco is even higher...

What gives? And when is it going to end?

I'm in the Midwest and we use a percentage of ethanol(~10%) in our fuel, that is why many areas in the Midwest have prices on gas that rival big cities on the west and east coasts.

Ethanol is actually less efficient in an engine than gasoline. Its going to be hard to convince people to use ethanol in their E85 cars when they realize that its more expensive than gasoline and gets you fewer miles per gallon.

It is sooo stupid that we are using corn to make ethanol when we could just as easily be using any cellulose plant. If you are going to use corn for fuel, just extract the oil and use it as bio-diesel(more efficient than ethanol) and then use the cellulose in the kernel for animal feed and the cellulose in the stalk and leaves for waste ethanol.

The US has some serious transportation infrastructure problems and it will be our demise. What happened to the train?

We use oil to sow the seeds, we use oil to fertilize the plants, we use oil to harvest the plants, we use oil to ship the fruits and veggies. The increasing cost of oil is a multiplier across everyone of those steps.

Good luck getting citrus fruits outside of Florida and Cali when the price per gallon of gas is over $6.

I'm just outside Seattle, and it's almost $3.75 right now. If this keeps up, I'll have to start walking to work.

Not trying to be alarmist about this, but I got a bad feeling in my guts on this one...

TheBorg

reply to post by TheBorg


Me too, Borg... nothing good coming from this.

I ride my bike locally, and it's a little scarry, with all the maniacs driving
so fast!

'Gas-n-Dash' might become popular again, like in the 70's!!! or syphoning!

I just got back from the gas station. $140.00 to fill up our 2 vehicles this week. $3.69 @ the pump.

reply to post by Karlhungis


So sorry, Karl, what a drag... Hope your vehicles are little four-cylinders!

I have to go somewhere in a few min, got $10 bucks, and a fist full of
silver change; my Ford Ranger will sip at least,, not so bad!

Really, you guys do not know when you are well off.
Here in the UK, we are being charged £1.30 PER LITRE.
That is around £6 ($12) per gallon.
Now - at this time.

66% of this is going straight to the treasury in taxation.
The rest is Oil Company GREED.

So - please - do not copmplain about paying £2 per gallon as I am reading above.
$10 a gallon? We DREAM of $10 a gallon here.

My husband has a 1 and half hour drive to work each way, so it is really killing us. Especially on his income when hes the only income earner. We have to wait until next year when they finish building the new facility that is 40 miles from us, that we have to put up with this. We have no choice, we cant move, we cant afford to! You can t even rent in the city for what we pay for our mortgage in the county. Being ill though, he is the only one to work to support the entire family. It is getting to where I am going to have to give up my computer and bottled water , and Arizona tap water is the worst!
We are already giving up a lot of food with the increase of price. We buy an energy efficient home , to save money, and APS raises the rates 30 percent and we are back to square one! Now they want another 10 percent raise. Cant win for loosing.

Theres nothing left to give up. We gave up living in a nice suburb to the middle of nowhere, food, etc,.... next it will be living in Arizona 120 degree with no air!

Ama

Originally posted by space cadet
Me and my family could not absorb this cost, it just wouldn't fit into the tight budget. We would definately have to cull something to pay for the gas, I suppose this is when we would have to consider dissing the cable or phone, any higher and we might be talking about losing our home gas for heating/hot water, maybe even lights. That is how close it is for those of us who live paycheck to paycheck. I imagine those with little ones in the house are already at that point.

I hear ya SC...I just moved into an apartment, and with utilites paid its 465 a month. I kill off 2 paychecks a month just to save for this, then car payment, insurance, cable/internet, and they take out $$ for insurance. I have a pretty small gas tank, and I find that I actually try to stay home more/go the speed limit/keep my car from idleing for more than a few min. it gets to the point where an $11/hour job, working 40 hours a week just isn't enough! the first thing that goes for me is movie channels, then my car! I will get fit and ride a bike everywhere in town if I must! I am lucky to live in a mid size town in the midwest, and ethenol helps the price here, about $3.50/ga. What I wouldnt give for it to be like back in the 90's...with $1-ish prices!

reply to post by neil wilkes

Hi Neil,

Without looking things up, I did research gas prices in the UK versus here in the states a while back. If taxes were taken out of the equation your gas was cheaper than ours, but keep in mind, this was months ago, and maybe really a year or two ago. Your government is raping you more than ours is, in the form of direct tax.

Please watch the videos of the Lindsey Williams story, I watched all eight videos on Monday, if what he says is true, look for WWIII soon, because I believe if we attack Iran, that will bring in China and Russia, and then all hell breaks loose. Even if it isn't WWIII we still can't sustain an attack on Iran, we just can't afford it.

The fact is that the price and oil (and thus gasoline) will not stop increasing until demand takes a drastic downturn. The oil producing countries are doing whatever they can to squeeze as much as they can from U.S. consumers. Face it, the U.S. has had relatively cheap gas prices compared to most European countries. My prediction, and I hope I'm right, is that the price of regular gasoline will increase to around $4.89 a gallon before it finally retreats and settles to around $4.25. It'll remain around $4.25 - $4.50 for a couple of years until U.S. consumers have adjusted to paying $4+ for gasoline. At this time, prices will escalate and settle above the $5 mark. This type of incremental conditioning will continue until gas hits around $7. By this time, I think we're looking at one of two possiblilites: alternative energy sources or WWIII.

Quick update from Suffolk UK.

Fuel prices rose last night diesel (DERV) by 2p and Unleaded by 1.6p.

since 1 Imperial gallon = 4.54609188 litres

We in the UK pay almost £5 a gallon if not more.

Which would equate to $10

Obviously the US pays less but it would be expected that prices will continue to soar.

Really I dont see why analysts are needed

double post...grrrrr

[edit on 30/4/08 by shadow watcher]

Northeast US
$3.60 REG
$3.70
$3.80

I rounded up because I don't fall for that stupid $0.009.
They do not fool many with that. Why not add 1/10 to the final price and be done with it?
The hydrogen technology has really caught my eye and I am anxious to try it out.

Originally posted by Karlhungis
The prices are already crippling the world wide economy. I don't think they will be able to sustain it too much longer. Demand is already decreasing and gas hasn't hit $4.00 yet. I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit $6.00 this summer, but even at that level our economy will collapse.

And I would have to agree with you. Its never going to get to $10 per gallon (unless there's a very short term spike to that price). The prices we're seeing now aren't sustainable and while its lasted longer than I thought it could, the cracks in the world's economy are starting to show. I give it about another 12-18 months like this and then the game will be up. They've just about tapped it out. Worldwide economic collapse isn't too far away, I think.

The result will probably be the biggest war this world has ever seen, mostly due to the greed and economic ignorance of a few morons in the oil exporting states.

i've seen this mentioned elsewhere and id like to bring it up here for your consideration. what is minimum wage in the UK? here at least until recently was just over $5 a gallon. after the government takes their cut you really only end up with about $4. so a person in that situation is essentially working an hour or more (depending on how far from work they live) just to pay for the drive to work and back home.

i seem to recall around 5 pounds being the figure for UK's min wage. at that point your gas really could be about twice as expensive and be no worse off than we are. the advantage most europeans have is a public transit infrastructure. if we get fed up with gas prices here we can't just hop a bus or rail to work in most places.

reply to post by an0maly33



Minimum wage I think is £5.35

most garages make 2 pence a litre on fuel...thats it, add on top VAT and wages etc they dont make a great deal.

Pretty much everything I've been reading in the paper sais that gas could be 7$ a gallon within 4 yrs. This article from the New York Times suggests that the hope that supply would increase and eventually lower prices is a fallacy. We have a problem which could eventually turn into an international crisis and probably already is due to the food shortages and rationing globally. This could throw a wrench into the U.S. economy altogether if something is not eventually done about it. So far the bush administration has not even acknowledged that action needs to be taken.

George Bush talked about creating clean coal plants when he was running 8 years ago but during his 8 years in office not one has been built. This whole time has been wasted and nothing has been done to counter our dependance on oil. There are countless measures that could have been implemented to initiate an alternative energy movement in this country but so far, for the most part, that effort has not happened yet. This is going to continue until we get a president and an administration in general which really cares about making a change for the better. It seems that everything he sais is empty. What ever happened to going to the moon and mars? It's almost like he wanted the credit for saying while at the same time he made huge cuts in the NASA budget?

www.nytimes.com...

Oil Price Rise Fails to Open Tap

By JAD MOUAWAD
Published: April 29, 2008

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supplies would rise as producers drilled for more oil.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy experts are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher.

That has translated into more pain at the pump, with gasoline setting a fresh record of $3.60 a gallon nationwide on Monday. Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years.

central reason that oil supplies are not rising much is that major producers outside the OPEC cartel, like Russia, Mexico and Norway, are showing troubling signs of sluggishness. Unlike OPEC, whose explicit goal is to regulate the supply of oil to keep prices up, these countries are the free traders of the oil market, with every incentive to produce flat-out at a time of high prices.

But for a variety of reasons, including sharply higher drilling costs and a rise of nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investment, these countries are failing to increase their output. They seem stuck at about 50 million barrels of oil a day, or 60 percent of the world’s oil supplies, with few prospects for growth.

“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”

With global supplies tight, geopolitics continue to play a big role in pushing up oil prices. Oil futures closed at $118.75 a barrel, up 23 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after strikes by oil workers in Scotland and Nigeria that shut down nearly 1.7 percent of the world’s daily production.

Countries outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have been the main source of production growth in the past three decades, as new fields were discovered in Alaska, the North Sea and the Caspian region.

But analysts at Barclays Capital said last week that non-OPEC supplies were “seemingly dead in the water.” Goldman Sachs raised similar concerns last month, saying that growth in non-OPEC supplies “can no longer be taken for granted.”

At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding. Global consumption is forecast to increase by 1.2 million barrels a day this year, to 87.2 million barrels a day, with much of the growth in demand coming from China, India and the Middle East, according to the International Energy Agency, a group that advises industrialized countries.

In the United States and through much of the developed world, the higher fuel prices have led drivers to reduce their consumption, and gasoline demand is expected to drop this year. But that drop will be more than offset by the rise in energy demand from developing countries. In the next two decades, demand is projected to jump by 35 percent, and developing countries will consume more oil than industrialized countries.

Higher oil prices mean record profits for oil companies that have, to some extent, masked the supply problems. Exxon Mobil and Chevron are both expected to deliver knockout performances when reporting quarterly earnings this week, even as they struggle to increase production.

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, said last week. Oil prices might exceed $200 a barrel by 2012, he said, a level that would very likely mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001, and in Britain, output has dropped 43 percent in eight years. Production from the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska has dropped by 65 percent from its peak two decades ago.

In many other places, the problems are not below ground, as energy executives like to put it, but above ground. Higher petroleum taxes and more costly licensing agreements, a scarcity of workers and swelling costs, as well as political wrangling and violence, are making it harder to raise production.

“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”

-ChriS











[edit on 30-4-2008 by BlasteR]

[edit on 30-4-2008 by BlasteR]

I just paid £1.39 per litre at my local petrol station SW-UK

£1.39 x 3.7854118 litres = 1US gallon @£5.2141402

Current exchange rate £5.2141402 = $10.362047 USD

If it happens here, it can happen over there.

Take a deep breath and make the most of it while you got it good it is gonna get much, much worese than $10 a gallon, take my word for it!

Good luck and peace to you all S_G

Just thought I would add; you can drive a 40ton HGV petrol tanker on the roads of Europe for a UK based firm and pocket nearly £50,000 per year.

50.000 GBP = 99.3450 USD

45hours over 6 days per week, with 6 weeks paid holiday and full pension, private healthcare, life insurance and dentist.

Not even worth going to college is it?

Got to be something in that?

Sleep well S_G

There are adverts running on US TV from the oil industry saying there is more than enough oil under the U.S. All we have to do is change the laws, allow them to access, extract and process they way they want.

I have a ten spot here that's not worth the paper it's written on, that says once they get our oil out of our ground, that they charge us even more than ever for a little of it!

Here is the thing, it's not about the oil. It's about depopulation. The UN says 2 Billion are about to starve. That is one in 3 of the entire population of the planet!

We must not allow them to have the oil without locking the price to a reasonable limit. Surely we will be starved if we do. If we use the oil as leverage, we can survive the transition. If they are simply allowed to take it; they will sell it to the highest bidder which will be counted in Chinese renminbi.

Iran is working on decoupling the US dollar from the price of oil. If that is done, and the oil simply taken, your familys are dead meat!

It would be better to die fighting the free handover of the US oil and oil shale , than allowing it to happen, and dieing of pathetic starvation.