Oil Prices Surge and May Keep Going Up

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oil31dec31,1,5936072.story?coll=la-headlines-business

The year ended in fitting fashion for the petroleum world Friday: Oil futures prices jumped higher. So did gasoline, natural gas and heating oil contracts.

And consumers can expect more of the same in 2006.

Spurred by supply worries that will stretch into next year, traders sent the cost of crude oil for February delivery up 72 cents to $61.04 a barrel Friday in a holiday-shortened session on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil prices rose 4.5% on the week and finished $17.59 a barrel, or 40%, higher than on the final trading day of 2004.

Gasoline futures jumped 5.76 cents to $1.71 a gallon, 57% higher than a year earlier. Heating oil rose 2.51 cents to $1.728 a gallon on the Nymex, up 41% during 2005. Natural gas, which ended the year more than 80% higher than it started, rose 0.2 cent to $11.225 per million British thermal units.

The closing prices were well below records set during 2005, but analysts warned that production limits and rising demand would push up the cost of oil and its byproducts in the year ahead — stretching consumer and business budgets in the process.

"We don't see crude oil coming down until there is additional supply, and we don't see that happening for four to five years," said David Hackett, president of Stillwater Associates, an industry consulting firm based in Irvine. "Our view is that it stays high and volatile."

MSM continues to ignore the Peak Oil issue. The sheeple must be kept in ignorance to continue their mindless debt financed spending sprees. Wall Street and corporate elites are well-informed and are making preparations per recent article in Fortune magazine about Texas billionaire Richard Rainwater.

would be kept 'reasonable' during the consumer holidays and then once the cash registers were fed the
gas prices would be given free flight.

I hate high oil prices as much as the next guy but let's have a little realism here.

would you like to borrow some money? I'll give you a very reasonable interest rate... :evilgrin:

if you are referencing only Fridays 72 cent increase. That one percent applied itself pretty evenly over the week at 4.5%, as the article states. Not a good year end trend, considering the unmistakable price surge of 2005 as a whole.

About time for another Saudi Aramco lie: "Yes, yes, NOW we have 500 Billion barrels, where before we had only 292 billion, where before we had only 110 billion. Thanks be to the Hummer!"

One would rather see the profit of these prices be applied to taxes - ideally for the construction of GHG free infrastructure - but irrespective of their origins, oil is too cheap, even at $3.00/gal.

It is not oil that is too cheap but rather gas at the pump. Gas should be taxed as in Europe, say $3 tax per gallon, more for cars and trucks that get less than 50 mpg on a sliding scale. A hummer would pay $8 tax per gallon. a Prius $1 tax. bob

everybody begins to get desperate, and the remaining forests are all cut down for firewood. One last, self-destructive gasp.

to encourage people to drive a Prius. Why? Because all of the oil is going to be used, whether it is by a billion Prius' or 100 million Hummers.

If people were only allowed to drive Hummers, then the facade of the egalitarian automobile would crumble and we would have to make the necessary investments in mass transit, that we should have done decades ago.

I just don't see how having more cars helps the environment, and that's what we'll have if everybody drives a Prius.

Counterintuitive, yet I have yet to hear a cogent counter-argument.

I think the whole "Prius is good" attitude came when less mileage meant more gas had to be produced. But we are no longer in this phase of the game, we are going to produce as much oil/gas as we can no matter what, improving mileage will not reduce consumption, but rather increase the number of cars.

Times have changed. What used to be smart is not necessarily smart now.

As has been demonstrated with the current model Prius, all that is needed is a bump in battery tech and a good chunk of the transportation sector can be offloaded to the electric grid. This gives an option (and additional demand) for renewable fuel use, not to ignore the existing but hard to scale biodiesel option. Such can also become a user of often wasted baseline power. They are practically electric cars at that point, with a very small gas assist for long trips.

As for the battery tech bump, it's already here, working it's way into power tools this year and from there to other sectors in the form of high-cycle-count, high power/energy, environmentally improved Lithium technologies and enhanced core heat management.

The idea that Americans will adjust to public transit is at this point in history, a fringe ideology, like unto the dream that 200+ pound Americans are going to suddenly start riding bicycles. Not that there aren't successful urban programs and not that increased funding couldn't create some additional successful systems, just that the majority of Americans won't buy into it in the long run.

If there is going to be a behavioral sea change it will be in conservation -- and by this I mean a reduction in the need to commute, e.g. telecommuting and more online commerce.

1) I agree that increased reliance on communications will be an important part of a winning formula.

2) The electric grid is challenged as it is, without additional 200 million cars charging up on it. It's one thing to charge up one car, it's another for 200 million cars. The energy has to come from somewhere.

3) The mass transit thing is not such a stretch. Less than 100 years ago we had trolleys in every urban area. It's an adjustment, but not much. Airplanes, trains and buses are all mass transit and people are used to those, just rather than once a month, they'll use it once a day.

The energy just isn't there at high enough rates to maintain the current paradim . Technology will be crucial to maintaining a quality of life as the normative behaviors of that life change, but it will not save us from having to make those changes.