Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Oil at $100 a Barrel - or Higher?

It's not the projections of "environmental crackpots" or "end-of-timers" - this comes from corporate America, and is not based on "peak oil" scenarios .

So, what do you figure a gallon of gas will cost? I'm thinking around $5.00.

Of course, there are a lot of possibilities, and as soon as someome tells you they KNOW what's going to happen, you can usually figure it will be the opposite. Nevertheless, the trend is there and while gas prices could well come down significantly just prior to the election, you can bet they will go up again. The question is how much and how soon - not "if".

8 comments:

epikles said...

my guess: $4 by this labor day. $5 by next labor day. i blame it all on "increased competition from china", oh, and "supply and demand", not to mention our favorite, "addiction to oil".

but what price will it take for us to go the brazilian way and replace it with ethanol from corn and sugar cane?

John Evo said...

I am guessing $2.50 or less by ELECTION DAY...

Then it might take off to the $5 level.

I heard that we are working on ethanol, but that it is mostly corn ethenol even though sugar is 8 times as effective in producing energy. Why? We grow corn here in N. America, not sugar.

epikles said...

i think sugar grows pretty well in the gulf coast region, florida in particular, as well as hawaii. but there's plenty of corn as well. i have a neighbor who converted her car to run on used vegetable oil; she gets it from restarants. there seem to be plenty of alternatives but it seems all the tax incentives for innovation go to corporations with no other real incentive.

Script Demon said...

I think I'll go stare at Ashley on my blog. This gas thing is just too depressing.

Al said...

We are seeing the symptons of peak oil. OPEC and everyone else is producing flat out and they are not able to raise production. Another factor is the fact that the dollar is in the toilet.

I'm not sold on the ethanol as a subsititute. As John mentioned, corn ethanol is not as efficient as sugar cane.It would take all of oue farmland to even come close to matching what Brazil does. I also am m\not crazy of using food products to fill our gas guzzlers as long as there are people hungry.

I would rather see us work towards developing diesel hybrids. Diesel is generally much more fuel efficient than gas motors and diesel can be produced from many sources.

Al said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
John Evo said...

I think we should all go over to Vince's blog and look at Ashley (Screen Demons is a VERY EASY blog on the male eye).

Al, I know zilch about fuel production. How do they make diesel? I always assumed it was just a fossil variation.

Al said...

Here are a couple good sites about biodiesel:

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

http://www.nrel.gov/biomass/proj_biobased_products.html

(someday you will need to tell me how to format links when responding)