Posted on 11/10/2001 4:44:11 PM PST by Pokey78
I think I read on OILNEWS.COM that they cheat about 1.7 million barrels per day. That is 19 dollar oil. Imagine how much they would cheat for 30 dollar oil. They don't have the discipline to hold the coalition together and maintain high prices. When prices go up demand goes down pretty quickly and before long all the oil storage tanks get filled up and there is a glut, kind of like we have right now.
If push comes to shove, it's All Over for the Mid-East.
If they are like my company, we could not react fast enough to recover the costs as they spiked upward literally within hours at one point.
Although I lowered the surcharge,to 2%, it will still take something like 6 months at current rates to recover the costs I absorbed when prices initially went up.
When most companies operate on less than 5% net profit, there is no room to eat any costs such as fuel, taxes, and the cost of regulation compliance. As usual, the consumer is the one who pays in the end.
I think this threat is what's keeping oil prices below $30.
That's exactly right, dear lady.
What puzzles me when this subject is broached is the passing attention to natural gas as if it's not important.
It is, in fact, the only thing that IS important!
We have enough natural gas deposits on the North American continent to be completely independent of foreign sources of energy.
We need to shift the focus from oil to natural gas.
There has been no widespread effort to advertise the advantages of natural gas, and it doesn't have public recognition as THE alternative energy supply.
I guess if the public weren't innundated with pictures on TV of government vehicles blowing up as the result of natural gas explosions, there would be more acceptance.
Sarcasm off.
There are several companies working on this sort of thing. Also, there are companies working on ways to upgrade heavy grades of crude oil into more useable grades.And there is at least one company that has developed an oil well pump designed for low producing wells like we have in the US. The new pumps can pump from these wells at a cost competitive with the current price of oil, and get many wells in the us that have been capped back into production.
Actually the technology was developed during the first OPEC/Arab embargo. At that time TOSCO, Exxon and Mobil (pre-merger) devoted considerable effort, involving dozens of researchers and top executives attemptint to steal it without paying the inventors and those who developed it. An offering was floated to develop it independently of them and the money was escrowed. The Saudis pulled the plug by dramatically lowering prices in 1981 and the money was returned and the project put on the back shelf.
Afterwards the inventor and his company used the technology for other purposes involving cleaning industrial waste streams, particularly in the industrial laundry industry, food processing and, with the military, cleaning up AFFF firefighting foam, TCE, PCE, carrier waste (also can clean MTBE, it appears). In each case there were either NIH blockages, suppression attempts and even outright attempts at technology theft.
When the price of oil again began to rise at the end of 1998 and into 1999, the inventor was asked to revive the process and pursue strategic partnerships to develop it. We have just spent over a year working with and encouraging him in doing just that, since our original revelations about it in WND, and will continue to do so but with other tactics as well as with other breakthrough energy technology. The WND articles, BTW, were posted here where they met with some of the most ignorant and destructive attacks imaginable, but then uninformed scepticism is an incurable disease. Those who "know" an existing inferior technology are always experts on why a new technology that displaces that with which they are familiar won't work, just as the buggy manufacturers knew that the automobile would not work.
Unfortunately, a year of extensive negotiations has revealed that the oil business has not changed. The majors don't want the existing applecart upset and will steal and obstruct to prevent displacing technology, just as Bell fought the touchtone dial technology successfully for 27 years. What we have encountered repeatedly, at the final bargaining stage are inevitably offers to put the inventor under the "charge" of the non-productive R&D department of the oil or oil service company for an undefined number of years (an obvious stealing situation) or, worse, an insistence on two "stealing" clauses, the first of which would give the inventor/entrepreneur, supposedly, U.S. income, while "reserving" the right to steal from him in the rest of the world and the second of which would reserve to the oil or oil service company the right to do "parallel research". Don't you just love the brazen arrogance of it.
The message is clear: oil rules and you, the public be damned.
We will continue these efforts, now shifting to negotiations with related industries, relatively minor and hungry players and those in seemingly unrelated industries who might wish to enter and dominate OPEC and its allies Exxon/Mobil, Schlumberger, Halliburton and their ilk.
We have also educated and informed a substantial number of political officeholders and appointees, though we have yet to see whether they will lead by assisting the development of this technology and others complementary to it, which, had they not been obstructed, would have no doubt prevented the present troubles.
What we did not understand was how widespread the practice of obstructing what has come to be called "disruptive technology" if it cannot be stolen, has become. In fact the business writers who have identified the problem have made their living assisting the larger corporations in the obstruction by advocating internal so-called destructive remaking of the corporation which creates a culture even more destructive to paying those inventors who do develop the technology for it. It is not just oil, it infects many industries, and big government and big education.
We are now taking the facts about what has happened during this period of quiet negotiation public and it will be interesting to see how you, the public react, to actual knowledge of how your "leadership" has failed at so many levels when it could easily have prevented the Oil Weapon from being seized by OPEC, Chavez, the Arabs and the communist Chinese.
It is clear now that only concerted public will will correct this situation.
By the way our program has attracted other inventors who have had similar battles, some of whom, such as Bill Talbert, the actual inventor of the reformulated gasoline monopolized, in a pirated version, by UNOCAL, have inventions directly complementary to the surface chemical technology you mention and others of whom have breakthrough technology more indirectly related, such as that which would take us off hydrocarbons altogether. Suffice it to say, that you can almost be assured that that which is currenly touted as "the answer", such as wind mills, or fuel cells as presently advocated, are not the answer.
Nor is it the case that it would be expensive to deploy these new technologies and environmentally unsound. Quite the opposite: Complete deployment, for example, of the surface chemistry technology of which you speak so as to give us total Oil Independence in three years, would, as far as start up capital, be a fraction of the current subsidies for fuel alcohol and, if done for strategic reasons, a fraction of the cost of a single one of our most expensive bombers. Put another way, it would be less than one-sixth of the most recent quarterly loss of U.S. Air.
On the environmental side, two notes: the surface chemistry principles of which you speak, applied to oil production, would actually produce a totally clean substrate, suitable for an aquifer, so that in the most obvious applications, for example, use in mining tar sands in the arid West, useful crops could be grown and livestock supported where such is presently not the case. The CO and CO2 problems of the current technology would be eliminated. Most importantly the 300 plus square mile holding pond at the present mining sites in Alberta, which, if it bursts, would destroy the technology of the Hudson's bay, could cleaned up at a profit and the creation of such disasters waiting to happen eliminated. Moreover, Bill Talberts advanced reformulation technology would greatly reduce air pollution across the board in your car and allow us to go off diesel altogether, eliminating the worst source of NOX pollution.
Have a nice day.
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