“If you are using heating oil, you are probably in the Northeast, maybe even New York where hydraulic fracturing is outlawed. Who hurts what, there?”
Nope, much further north. In our first house, to avoid using oil (because we couldn’t afford it) in the mid ‘70s and early ‘80s we cut, split, stacked and burned ten cords of wood a winter. Our friends did the same. When we moved to the family house, we went to oil. In the winter of 2007-2008 we burned 2300 gallons of oil and we were cold. That spring we switched to local wood pellets and last winter burned 11 tons of them. I unloaded every single bag from my old F150 into the cellar and lugged every bag up the cellar stairs and through the house to the pellet stove, in the dead of winter, five bags a day. And we were pretty warm, providing work for our forest products industry up here but it wasn’t easy for any of us. I’ll be 65 years old this year and have lived here in Maine my whole life and for every winter as long as I can remember back, two or more people, almost always old people, have frozen to death.
We survived without your oil; the cost of oil killed people up here while you guys got rich. It killed much of our industry. It drove up the price of electricity and put more employers out of business. But if the price goes up again, we’ll survive again. No sympathy at all up here for you guys...no more than the oil industry ever showed us!
Put the crack pipe down, willya?
I work in the exploration and production end of the industry. We find places to drill, drill wells, and produce crude oil.
I am a consulting Geologist, and my job these last 35 years has been to identify oil bearing strata and indicate where oil may be produced from.
Now, to sort some things out.
First, it isn't MY oil.
I found a lot of it, to be sure, but I don't own it.
The people who own most of it are farmers and ranchers, ordinary landowners who have the mineral rights to their land. Some is under Federal Land, and the royalties paid for that oil go to the Government, who owns those mineral rights.
Second, the owners don't set the price of crude oil. The oil produced is purchased in commodity trading on bid. The buyers set the price, not the sellers.
So, on my end of things, we're not freezing anyone out. While I got paid pretty well over the last five years of 12-14 hour days with very few days off, (average 6 days per week, every week), I'm not rich by any standard.
What I have is modest, but paid for. It is because it is modest that it is paid for. We live within our means.
I have heated through winter here (one of the most brutal of the last century) with wood. I know full well getting up and filling the firebox on the stove every two to three hours. At the time, I had no running water, and an outhouse was the 'facility', with temperatures reaching past fifty below zero (not counting wind chill).
Considering we don't have a forest products industry here, we were thankful people elsewhere had sent that hardwood up in strips between layers of casing and drill pipe--that scrap was what we burned.
During that time period, one friend froze to death on her doorstep. She was found sitting there in the morning, in town, by a neighbor.
It was in a warmer year a friend froze on his way to his ranch when he slid his vehicle into the ditch and got out to check if he could get it out (guessing, we really don't know). What we do know, is that the wind likely blew the door shut and the automatic door locks killed him by locking him out, miles from help (before cell phones, not that there was any signal out there).
I guess people here are better at surviving in winter, because we don't lose so many people here. That isn't because oil is cheap, it isn't because we are rich. People here in North Dakota take winter very seriously.
I'm not sure how the price of crude oil killed your industry, and yes, when crude prices went up, it made ours. We drilled enough wells in 10 years in the Bakken and Three Forks formations to increase production from 100,000 BOPD to 1,100,000 BOPD. I won't go into the paroxysms small towns go into when they triple or more in size in a couple of years, but they are considerable, and only eclipsed by the inevitable contraction when the boom is over.
I'm not complaining, just explaining.
Since you would not have burned crude oil (which wasn't mine, anyway), I am sure you survived without it. Refined oil? Take that up with the refiners and the distributors and local marketers who all get a profit. Shame on them for making a living.
But to vent your little hissy fit on those of us who busted our asses so there was enough supply that the price of crude oil came down and wish us ill is way out of line. I don't know anyone who worked the hours in the conditions we did, anywhere, with the exception of combat troops and commercial fishermen in the Bering Sea who have it worse, but we did this for years on end.
We got paid well for that, but there were damned few who could keep up.
We didn't cause anyone to freeze, we busted our asses to increase supplies for ungrateful wretches who ever bitch if we do well, and then thumb their noses at us when things go downhill.
As for the price of electricity, there are bloody few places where there are oil fired power plants.
Maybe you should google the war on coal for information on that, but it sounds to me like the real greedy people are the ones selling electricity and refined products to you all, and they are your neighbors, not those of us on drilling locations.