Posted on 11/20/2009 10:03:17 AM PST by autumnraine
More than 50 oil tankers are anchored off Britain - pieces in a game in which the only winners are market speculators.
The losers are the millions of British motorists paying over the odds for their petrol and diesel.
After yesterday's report in the Daily Mail on how several so-called 'oil shark' tankers were moored near the Devon coast, dozens more vessels were revealed to be loitering off-shore.
Some are carrying aircraft fuel or fuel for homes. Others are empty, waiting to be restocked before setting off around the globe.
But according to industry experts, a significant number are 'oil sharks' - tankers that have been cynically told to wait for crude prices to be driven up before they unload their cargo.
With values soaring on the international markets, fuel made from their oil is unlikely to appear on a petrol station forecourt any day soon.
Paul Watters of the AA said: 'Tankers are off the UK coast and also off the U.S. They are acting as storage tanks. As always, motorists are the victims in this. They are at the end of the food chain.'
he Daily Mail has learnt that 54 tankers are anchored around the British Isles.
Six are off the Essex and Kent coasts, five are moored in Lyme Bay, while four are lurking next to the Isle of Wight.
But the biggest fleet - around 30 ships - lies around ten miles from Southwold, Suffolk in the only waters around the UK where ship-to-ship transfers of oil are allowed.
They come from as far afield as Malaysia, Liberia and Singapore - and include 1,000ft vessels capable of carrying more than 300,000tons of oil.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
So?
Can I get a 'Duh!' from the crowd, please?
They said the same thing in the 70’s. No ship captain is going to sit on the high seas. It’s dangerous for ships to do so. Everyday that ships sit, it is a day lost to the owner.
Start charging “RENT”....high rent...make it cheaper to unload their oil rather than drive it around...
Might be a so for you, but the Brits are ticked that they see tankers off their beaches just waiting to make more cash off of them.
“Locals in Suffolk watched with growing anger over the summer as more and more tankers dropped anchor.
Southwold mayor Susan Doy said: ‘It is wrong that tankers should be left off our coast for reasons of profiteering. Ordinary people are left to suffer as petrol prices go up.’
Andrew Reid, of ship owners and managers Charles M Willie & Co, said the flotilla off the Devon coast, pictured in the Mail yesterday, was ‘a drop in the ocean compared to the much bigger fleet full of crude oil off Suffolk’.
He added: ‘They are all just waiting there for the price of crude oil to rise, enabling huge profits to be taken. If all this crude were to be delivered there would doubtless be a fall in the crude price and petrol prices.’
Try and find gasoline at any price in socialist countries like Cuba, China, or North Korea.
(as posted to the site)
Big deal.
Oil companies and refiners make about **10c a gallon ** profit on fuel. That’s after doing all the work of bringing the oil to the surface, cracking it and refining it.
Whereas the British Treasury makes **351 cents per gallon ** and does nothing whatever to earn this.
Who are the sharks again? Hint: its not “market speculators”. It’s the British Government.
ping
How is this different than farmers who store corn waiting for the price to go up? Why aren’t farmers criticized for doing the same thing. We should have a wind-fall profit tax on any farmer who stores grain and realizes a profit.
You can not play with Mother Nature and sooner or later an accident WILL HAPPEN!
..are showing a fundamental ignorance of futures and delivery contracts.
Tankers are floating warehouses.
Production is not constant...rigs go down for maintenance, storms whatever every day, new ones come on line every day.
Consumption is not constant and goes up and down seasonally...us yanks will be unreasonably consuming petrol this Thanksgiving week of travel to grandmas.
As long as those two are not equal, and they can't be, then there will be a need for a physical warehousing of the excess, and a futures market to prime the delivery during a shortage.
You cannot tell if a supply chain is working from the prices. You can only tell if it has failed when there is a shortage.
Tells me there’s certainly not a shortage, peak oil, or whatever the new catch prhase is...
Tells me there’s certainly not a shortage, peak oil, or whatever the new catch prhase is...
Exactly, Lib bell.
http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/index.cfm
“...While oil shale is found in many places worldwide, by far the largest deposits in the world are found in the United States in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable; however, even a moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proved oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years...”
Until recently, extraction looked to be extremely complicated and very expensive. Shell has developed an in situ extraction process that requires almost no excavation, only drilling. The big issue was how to power the projects. LOOK AT THIS!
http://hyperionpowergeneration.com/
The Hyperion Power Module
When you think of the Hyperion Power Module (HPM), you can discard much of what know about nuclear power.
Hyperion is different.
Think Big Battery…
I think there’s a bit of a false bit of chicanery here.
We’ve got a similar situation at refineries in Texas. It’s not that they’re “holding product off the market” - its just that there is a glut of supply and every possible container that can hold refined product is full.
(source:BP refinery workers in Texas City)
Yep, cant’ criticize this at all. Just a few freemarket operators doing what they can to make a few extra bucks with their Trillion Dollar FED bailout. /s/
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