Posted on 05/17/2006 12:31:46 PM PDT by saganite
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Oil prices fell below $69 a barrel Wednesday after U.S. government data showed the domestic supply of gasoline rising for the third straight week amid stagnating demand. "Perhaps the higher prices are having an effect on demand," said BNP Paribas Commodity Futures broker Tom Bentz.
Lending to the weakness in oil prices was a monthly report from OPEC, which slightly reduced its demand forecast for 2006 and predicted that the world's crude-oil supply cushion would rise significantly by the end of the year.
But oil prices are still about 40 percent higher than a year ago amid persistent market anxieties about the West's nuclear standoff with Iran, supply disruptions in Nigeria and the upcoming Gulf of Mexico hurricane season.
Light sweet crude for June delivery fell $1.33 to $68.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where gasoline futures slipped by more than 5 cents to $1.97 a gallon.
In its weekly petroleum report, the Department of Energy said domestic gasoline supplies grew by 1.3 million barrels last week to 206.4 million barrels. While that is 3.5 percent below year-ago levels, it comes at a time when gasoline consumption appears to be flattening out as a result of high prices.
The Energy Department said gasoline demand over the past four weeks was 9.2 million barrels per day, or about even with the same period last year. The average retail price of gasoline nationwide is $2.95 a gallon, or 78 cents higher than a year ago.
Other data showed crude oil inventories slipping by 100,000 barrels last week to 346.9 million barrels, or 4.7 percent higher than last year, and distillate fuel stocks also falling by 100,000 barrels to 114.6 million barrels, or 7 percent higher than last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
Hey!!! 69 is my lucky number! Whaddayknow?
Car pooling? Bicycling? Running? YEP - doing all 3!!!
The market works...
Looks like a buying opportunity.
About time to hear from the Iran A-hole
There's a quote from him at the end of this article. It's a repeat of what he said about the EU reactor gift so nothing new from him there. He also started accepting only Euros in exchange for his oil. We'll see how that works out for him.
Wish the price would drop below $30.
You won't ever see that and in fact it would be bad news. New sources of oil like tar sands and shale oil need prices above the $50 range to be profitable. The sooner we can exploit those to their fullest potential the sooner we can cut some ties to the middle east.
Yea, really great news. It went up about 6 cents a gallon around here yesteday afternoon and this morning as I drove by the local rip off stations. Averages about $3.15 here for regular unleaded.
$2.68 here and headed down.
So where are all the gold bugs?
"You won't ever see that and in fact it would be bad news. New sources of oil like tar sands and shale oil need prices above the $50 range to be profitable. The sooner we can exploit those to their fullest potential the sooner we can cut some ties to the middle east."
I agree. While I hate the price at the pump, I hate it more that our enemies are using oil revenues to spread "kill the infidel' mosques and building weapons to kill us.
We continue to go up almost every other day here in western Washington, Bremerton area of Kitsap county.
So, with all that in mind, I expect the price of gas to go up another dime. Memorial Day weekend, you know, despite the fact that a lot of folks will just stay home because of the price of gas.
I basically hijacked another thread disputing that so I might as well dispute it here too. The cost of oil sand, oil shale, coal based gas, etc, are all based on abundant and subsidized (in many cases free) energy. Just like paying farmers to waste energy planting, fertilizing and harvesting corn, these schemes are basically just ways for people to make money from the government. They don't all waste energy as transparantly as ethanol, but they all have subsidies needed for profitability. A basic rule of thumb for an energy source is it should use its own energy to produce itself in at most 1:2 ratio. That allows for other energy inputs like the workers and machines and still leaves some room for profit.
The bottom line, some energy sources are not profitable even at infinity per barrel, and most are double the current crude price (i.e. $140/barrel today).
Everything I've read says tar sands are profitable above $30 a barrel and the greatest problem there is recovering the huge sunken costs of setting up the recovery and refining process. Since oil shale isn't even to the production phase yet there's only speculation as to it's cost but I've read it would be profitable to extract it at a price above $35 a barrel.
I'm not aware of subsidies for these in the category of subsidies for ethanol but would be interested in your info in that regard.
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