Current Events > These gas prices are some bullshit

(+) Yeah! (+)

Sackgurl posted...

how many was that? domestic drilling leases continued to be sold in 2020 and 2021, but oil companies reduced their drilling in response to the demand drop from the pandemic. my recollection was dems running on energy independence via solar/wind/hydroelectric, not 'banning drilling'.

similarly, shale extraction was fundamentally unprofitable at oil prices below ~90/bbl. dems didn't need to run on this, oil companies did it on their own

Banning frac'ing has been popular for a while among democrats. Here is a vote from 2021 where 43 D senators voted to ban it:

https://www.newsweek.com/seven-senate-democrats-opposed-fracking-ban-symbolic-vote-1567146

Where did you get your info for $90 oil being the necessary price for a shale well to be profitable? I am a petroleum engineer, and we can drill profitable wells as low as $40 oil. We have been doing it since the bottom fell out on oil prices in 2014. Oil production and profitability varies from basin to basin, but oil has been below $90 for a long time and companies have still been drilling a ton of shale wells.

Zurich posted...

I know who I'm voting for in November.

Giant meteor?

It's all a long-game to nudge a critical mass of electric adoption - then suddenly plop down a mileage tax.

Sackgurl posted...

it's perhaps worth asking: how many people are making minimum wage, exactly?

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm

about 1.1 million, if we count tipped workers

And that's 1.1 million people getting screwed if we only count the absolute minimum and not everyone between the minimum and the median.

Plus, telling me that only over a million people are absolutely having a terrible time is not a very good defense.

AngelsNAirwav3s posted...

Where did you get your info for $90 oil being the necessary price for a shale well to be profitable? I am a petroleum engineer, and we can drill profitable wells as low as $40 oil. We have been doing it since the bottom fell out on oil prices in 2014. Oil production and profitability varies from basin to basin, but oil has been below $90 for a long time and companies have still been drilling a ton of shale wells.

i got my info from deloitte, who your employers hired to help them figure out how much money they wasted operating those wells over the last decade

their estimate was 300 billion dollars

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/energy-and-resources/articles/covid-19-implications-for-us-shale-industry.html

DrizztLink posted...

And that's 1.1 million people getting screwed if we only count the absolute minimum and not everyone between the minimum and the medium.

Plus, telling me that only over a million people are absolutely having a terrible time is not a very good defense.

how about we compromise: all people earning less than half the median wage get half their gas bill paid for, and all people earning the median wage or higher who whine about it get slapped in the face with a fish

it wouldn't be very hard to pay for half the gas costs of the bottom quintile of earners, frankly. they're not the biggest gas users--the median and upper two quintiles use much more.

I mean, we need to start abandoning oil yesterday, but the prices are only like this because the oil companies are allowed to run the world. Neither party in America is actually preventing them from doing shit.

But I love when people do somersaults to try and prove that corporations would love to pass on savings to the consumer if only big gubmint stopped giving them so many oppressive rules to follow.

Cocytus posted...

Civic or Accord Sport or Si?

Sport, nah si only if manual. Everything else should just rake regular. Even the SUVs. Especially the SUVs.

Questionmarktarius posted...

to nudge a critical mass of electric adoption

Yeah, well, they have to produce those vehicles first and make them affordable.

hockeybub89 posted...

but the prices are only like this because the oil companies are allowed to run the world

the oil companies really don't run the world very much at all. the oil sector has been hemmorhaging money at an exceptionally fast rate, and have had to undergo multiple mergers to survive the effects of the last decade's energy-efficiency improvements

it's only just now that they're making 'record profits' again.

case in point, take a look at CVX's chart.

https://tinyurl.com/kfxcv9c3

they had negative free cash flow multiple years in a row, and basically zero in 2020. it's much higher this year, no surprise! because now the wells they have, which they're continuing to operate, are able to sell the same product at much higher prices--because russia isn't selling any, anymore.

hockeybub89 posted...

But I love when people do somersaults to try and prove that corporations would love to pass on savings to the consumer if only big gubmint stopped giving them so many oppressive rules to follow.

Race-to-the-bottom pretty much ensures that happens. If not, there's probably collusion involved, which is already illegal.

last week it was 2.35/L where I live. 97 dollars Canadian to fill up the tank.

Sackgurl posted...

https://tinyurl.com/2p92havx
(marketwatch)

i keep saying this, but people are really eager to believe that they're not stupid, i'm just out of touch

While the data on this isn't wrong, it's hardly a good message to say "be okay with things being less good now because they were worse 40 years ago!!!!!!"

The data is right but the message is wrong.

Thank God I work from home

Oh and let's not forget that this is also Putin's fault

tripleh213 posted...

This is what happens when you vote for Biden

https://twitter.com/BillPascrell/status/1531630589794729985

You were saying?

making $18/hour and gas costs $4.79 here, so 16 minutes to earn a gallon
11 minutes sounds pretty nice to me, I wish I were average

Will_VIIII posted...

https://twitter.com/BillPascrell/status/1531630589794729985

You were saying?

hes not going to answer

Sackgurl posted...

please name the policies to which you refer explicitly, inclusive of data that would indicate production would be significantly higher now in the absence of those policies

the real problem is we had extremely cheap oil for a long time, which discouraged oil companies from investing in exploratory drilling on the leases they already held.

regardless of policy, we would be in this position. we could've sold every single scrap of public land, and also your face, and they'd still not have drilled for oil, because not only did we not have a supply interruption from major producers invading a neighbor, we had record low demand.

how many was that? domestic drilling leases continued to be sold in 2020 and 2021, but oil companies reduced their drilling in response to the demand drop from the pandemic. my recollection was dems running on energy independence via solar/wind/hydroelectric, not 'banning drilling'.

similarly, shale extraction was fundamentally unprofitable at oil prices below ~90/bbl. dems didn't need to run on this, oil companies did it on their own

All of this.
Biden has approved a huge number of leases for drills to open. The companies need to actually do it though and they have their own business reasons why they don't speed these things up.

Bishop9800 posted...

hes not going to answer

But he'll continue to parrot his lies

i just have such a hard time thinking this screenshot/vote is the complete and total 100% story.

can someone shed a little more detail on it? what was in the bill, why did they vote no, etc. quotes from those who voted no.

again like with the baby formula, i just have such a hard time thinking there's this room of ~200 people rubbing their hands together and thinking "making the country a better place for everyone including ourselves? NEVER!!!!! EVERYONE VOTE NO!!!!!!"

PatrickMahomes posted...

i just have such a hard time thinking this screenshot/vote is the complete and total 100% story.

can someone shed a little more detail on it? what was in the bill, why did they vote no, etc. quotes from those who voted no.

again like with the baby formula, i just have such a hard time thinking there's this room of ~200 people rubbing their hands together and thinking "making the country a better place for everyone including ourselves? NEVER!!!!! EVERYONE VOTE NO!!!!!!"

You're incredibly nave because that is what happened.

PatrickMahomes posted...

While the data on this isn't wrong, it's hardly a good message to say "be okay with things being less good now because they were worse 40 years ago!!!!!!"

the message is more "you were kinda spoiled and shouldn't have expected things to stay this way"

PatrickMahomes posted...

While the data on this isn't wrong, it's hardly a good message to say "be okay with things being less good now because they were worse 40 years ago!!!!!!"

The data is right but the message is wrong.

is the data right? seems a little outdated at best at nearly 3 months old
current average gas price seems to be $4.67 per AAA, not $4.17
median wage seems to be $1,037/week for full-time workers (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf), so I guess around $25.93? idk trying to find median wages makes my head hurt, I'm too stupid for this stuff

@AngelsNAirwav3s it's also worth noting that most companies have DUC both in and out of the US, and have to make decisions on production expansion with a limited capital pool, so just passing the threshold of a particular well not actively losing them money isn't enough. i'm aware that for a number of companies, net cashflow of 0 can be achieved at 40/bbl. i'd be happy to amend my point to "sufficiently profitable" or "competitively profitable" if you want. you get the idea, though.

if you're primarily involved in exploratory drilling you might not be seeing that since you would be moving on before they go online (and then they don't go online).

until this year basically all of CVX cashflow was from international wells for example.

Anony1125 posted...

is the data right? seems a little outdated at best at nearly 3 months old
current average gas price seems to be $4.67 per AAA, not $4.17
median wage seems to be $1,037/week for full-time workers (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf), so I guess around $25.93? idk trying to find median wages makes my head hurt, I'm too stupid for this stuff

it's not your fault. statista released a report with objectively bad data that comes first on a google search

but yes, the prices continued to rise after that piece came out. at current numbers, we're at 10.8 minutes, still lower than some historical levels. the parts of it which discuss what we actually get out of that gallon of gas remain accurate, though.

Sackgurl posted...

i got my info from deloitte, who your employers hired to help them figure out how much money they wasted operating those wells over the last decade

their estimate was 300 billion dollars

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/energy-and-resources/articles/covid-19-implications-for-us-shale-industry.html

You are misreading that $300 billion bullet point, basically an oil well is a huge up front cost and then pays back over 30 years. That $300 billion just accounts for drilled wells that haven't been completed, haven't been turned online, or haven't yet paid out their initial investment.

The industry as a whole started pivoting in 2018 from a pure oil production growth (no matter how much debt you had to take on and how negative your cash flow was) to a profit driven industry like a typical business, and COVID just accelerated this transition exponentially.

Here is an article saying half the wells in the US are profitable at $40 oil:

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/half-of-producing-shale-oil-wells-are-profitable-at-40-bbl-analyst-says-60035427

PatrickMahomes posted...

i just have such a hard time thinking this screenshot/vote is the complete and total 100% story.

can someone shed a little more detail on it? what was in the bill, why did they vote no, etc. quotes from those who voted no.

again like with the baby formula, i just have such a hard time thinking there's this room of ~200 people rubbing their hands together and thinking "making the country a better place for everyone including ourselves? NEVER!!!!! EVERYONE VOTE NO!!!!!!"

People vote against social issues when they literally don't harm them in anyway, and might benefit all by making society harmonious. Is it actually hard to believe politicians are assholes for no good reason? Note, I am not saying the yes votes are out of the goodness of everyone's heart either.

Will_VIIII posted...

But he'll continue to parrot his lies

The argument any time a Democrat tries to do something is: "They caused this problem and now they want to fix it? Nah, we better block it and punish society because it might get us votes. Then, we won't fix it either because we don't want to!"

profitable, as in "they'd not actively be losing money running them", but not competitive, as in "they'd rather invest their somewhat limited capital here rather than elsewhere"

i think cashflow numbers from domestic/international kinda speak for themselves. there's a magic number that gets them finishing those wells, but it isn't 40

and we didn't see steady price increases that would get them moving over time, we saw a massive drop that remained flat for several years, and then a massive spike that was quite recent, so i don't even blame the oil companies for this

their current action in spinning up shale wells perhaps doesn't say "the magic number is 90" but it does say "it's more than 40 and less than 100"

which doesn't help too many folks when prices can go from 40 to 100 in a year

Honest question, would that bill have done anything at all?

Is what we are paying at the pumps considered gouging?

Somehow I really doubt it...

Sackgurl posted...

the message is more "you were kinda spoiled and shouldn't have expected things to stay this way"

I dunno what to tell you then. It's just a weird attitude to have. "You had things good for a little bit but the joke's on you for not seeing this coming."

PatrickMahomes posted...

I dunno what to tell you then. It's just a weird attitude to have. "You had things good for a little bit but the joke's on you for not seeing this coming."

i mean, it happened numerous times before

in 2008 i remember gas prices going over $4/gal and the phrase "hurting at the pump"

Lmao you literally voted for this

Sackgurl posted...

i mean, it happened numerous times before

in 2008 i remember gas prices going over $4/gal and the phrase "hurting at the pump"

Not my point.

Here's the situation; gas was cheap due mostly to a global pandemic resulting in low demand.

Were we spoiled? Sure. But were prices this high pre-covid / post 2008? Absolutely not.

So your attitude of pointing to how things were worse in 1980 is a weird attitude to take. That's all. I'm struggling to understand how that's your takeaway.

gas prices were 80-90% of current price from 2012-2014

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m

the public reaction appears, to me, to be equivalent to surprisedpikachu.jpg

like, a major oil producer went to war and became an international pariah, did people really think we would not be impacted?

Sackgurl posted...

like, a major oil producer went to war and became an international pariah, did people really think we would not be impacted?

most people on the right dont think

Shell is $0.50 more than circle k on the same corner

Bishop9800 posted...

most people on the right dont think

far as i can tell the non-think of this extends beyond the right

On_The_Edge posted...

Lmao you literally voted for this

I didn't know Biden was President of Earth. They must have hid that in the fine print when I voted. I voted for Not Trump anyway

hockeybub89 posted...

I didn't know Biden was President of Earth. They must have hid that in the fine print when I voted. I voted for Not Trump anyway

People who say that really reveal their lack of critical thinking and even basic thinking skills.

Will_VIIII posted...

People who say that really reveal their lack of critical thinking and even basic thinking skills.

It's also funny how a "do nothing" President who doesn't know where he is has apparently also had the most prolific year and a half in political history. Truly an amazing feat for Biden to be two opposite things at once.

I love riding my bike.

hockeybub89 posted...

the most prolific year and a half in political history

wat

Trump did say this was going to happen.

https://youtube.com/shorts/veCoeYQHWyI?feature=share

creativerealms posted...

I love riding my bike.

Me too

PatrickMahomes posted...

wat

I mean apparently he got elected and did all the things to ruin not only America, but the entire planet? Pretty impressive for a senile old man.

Solid Snake07 posted...

Its been pretty funny watching democratic politicians whove pushed policies to stifle oil production scramble to blame oil companies for their lack of production.

I hope someone has pointed out to you that we aren't actually producing less oil, and lawmakers aren't blaming oil companies for production.

They're blaming lawmakers for profiting immensely from the highly speculative oil market, over which they wield a significant amount of power. Basically, if you can convince enough people that things look bad for the oil supply in the future (regardless of whether it's true) then prices go upEveryone wants to buy a commodity that will eventually be more valuable. OPEC's decisions and Russia's invasion did most of the legwork for that, though the lobbying efforts of American oil companies, who have everything to gain, played a more subversive part.

I filled up with 88 unleaded instead of 87 today and saved a quarter per gallon.

Also, I don't think I saw two gas stations with the same prices on my way home from work

creativerealms posted...

I love riding my bike.

Wish I could afford a bike.... they cost bare minimum 400 where I live. At least for something that is going to support my heavy frame.