High oil prices hurt OPEC's influence

The continuing surge in oil prices is proving OPEC's limited influence on the market despite the cartel committing to increasing its production ceiling, analysts said... "OPEC does not have the capacity to influence the oil market ... which did not react to its decision to increase its production ceiling," said Kuwaiti analyst Kamal Abdullah al-Harmi. "OPEC is no longer able to impose a balance on the market, on which the cartel has lost its influence because it no longer has the spare production capacity" sufficient to do so. According to Harmi, the market needs light crude, produced notably by Libya, Algeria and Nigeria, and that Western refineries, notably American, don't want to use the heavy crude produced by Gulf states and which constitutes OPEC's spare capacity.

In related articles from the same period and same online news source as this next excerpt, Yamani said, "the stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones." He then cited increases in proven reserves (20 fold since 1973), and technological developments including fuel cells. Yamani is a commoner, and his title is an honorarium from the King. He's a great deal smarter than the people for whom he used to work.

Yamani predicts oil price of $10
by Sophie Barker
Wednesday 1 November 2000
The former Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani has predicted that oil prices will crash from current levels of around $30 a barrel to $10 by the end of 2001.

"I would be happy if I am wrong, but I know, as surely as ABC, that it is coming," Sheikh Yamani said in an interview in the forthcoming edition of Forbes Global magazine. His most recent comment comes almost two years after oil prices last plunged to $10. Since 1998, they have steadily risen, reaching $35 a barrel this year.

Sheikh Yamani, who played a key role in the 1973 oil crisis, forecast that the perceived shortage of oil would soon swing into a surplus once increases in both Opec and non-Opec production filter through. On Monday Opec members agreed to boost output by 500,000 barrels a day, prompting the benchmark Brent crude oil contract on London's International Petroleum Exchange to drop 62 cents to $30.52 yesterday.

The Centre for Global Energy Studies, which Sheik Yamani chairs, expects world production to increase by 1.4m barrels a day to 75.7m barrels between the third and fourth quarters this year. He argued that this will send prices crashing. Adam Sieminski, oil market strategist at Deutsche Bank, said Sheik Yamani's prediction was "possible". He said: "You would have to see the global economy slowing down enough to curtail demand."

Deutsche Bank has predicted that crude oil prices will plummet to a relatively modest $20 a barrel by the second half of next year, as Opec countries are forced to cut production to avoid a price crash.

reprised from FR topic How Long Will the Oil Age Last?

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

The main impediment to new energy sources (including new sources of old types of fuels) is the Congress, the courts, and the blue jean millionaire enviros. Fuel cell powered vehicles are one way to increase fuel economy without a multibillion$ outlay to construct an entirely new infrastructure. Changing the fuel (not unlike the leaded to unleaded transformation, but of a much greater degree) may take place over time, but mandating a single new standard would be necessary in order to ensure the lowest possible cost (IOW, avoiding struggles analogous to the format wars -- 33 vs 45, quad vs quad, 8track vs cassette). That requires a gov't role.

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

Toyota Shines at Tokyo Show With Gasoline-Fuel Cell SUV
"The company, fuel cell r&d development partner with General Motors, unveiled its new FCHV-5 at the 35th Tokyo Motor Show Oct. 27-Nov.9, the fifth-generation experimental vehicle in its fuel cell hybrid series. The new vehicle employs a reformer to extract hydrogen from a still to be developed 'clean hydrocarbon' fuel... 'Clean' hydrocarbon fuel is a euphemism for gasoline from which sulfur has been removed."
The Week for January 18-24 2002 has a number of things of interest. The website showed the previous issue when I checked this morning, and there are no online articles.
The car of the future (p 9) has a picture of the fuel cell powered vehicle from GM, the Autonomy, but is far better than some articles on this technology. Apparently not written by a cheerleader, the article notes (for the first time I've noticed in years in a popular magazine) that "even in compressed form, hydrogen gas takes up so much space that a car's tank would have to be 3,000 times the size of a standard gasoline tank to store the same amount of energy." This is because liquid fuels are always more dense by definition than gaseous fuels. Toting the hydrogen around in liquid form -- at minus 422 degrees -- would require energy for refrigeration and "robots to work the pumps, so motorists' hands wouldn't be in danger of freezing and breaking off."
Fuel-cell future for gasoline?
by Miguel Llanos
March 15, 2000
"We've demonstrated that we can run a fuel cell directly on hydrocarbons like gasoline and diesel," researcher Ray Gorte told MSNBC. "In the past, everyone assumed you had to use hydrogen." ...The new process not only gets around the problem of delivering and storing hydrogen, Gorte says, it means a fuel cell that produces "less carbon dioxide for a given amount of energy" than other fuel cells because higher efficiency can be achieved... [I]t could provide a valuable interim technology that's easier to deploy and still provide much cleaner and higher mileage than internal combustion engines... Gorte, head of chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the research as a "breakthrough," saying an earlier attempt to use gasoline essentially required putting "a refinery in your trunk" to get the hydrogen... Gorte's team used a "solid oxide fuel cell," while others have tended to focus on "proton-exchange membranes." ...One hitch is that the cell is sensitive to sulfur, so that gasoline would have to be cleaned further to make it a viable fuel... Gorte is optimistic about its potential, saying his team hopes to work with a major car company that has created a solid oxide fuel cell division. He would not identify the company, saying he wasn't sure if it was willing to go public yet... Kevin Kendall, a chemical engineer at Britain's University of Birmingham, writes in a Nature article accompanying the study that while hydrogen is "the ultimate clean power source of the future" it is still expensive to extract it, difficult to store and prone to explosion.

(another reprise)

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

Dog & pony show to maintain fleet MPG at present rate(which hasn't change since the last century).

It's a carrot on a stick to keep the jack-ass public at bay.

Just review how long this "new tech" has been right around the corner.

Now remember the flying cars in the 1960's Popular Mechanic magazines.

It's all crap!

If anyone cared, really cared about MPG, simple cheap & easy high pressure fuel injection would have been showing up in the showroom years ago.

On such a car you could hold a cold glass up to the exhaust and get a drink of distilled water from the condensing vapor.

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