It’s time to fight back, time to stop the exploitive and predatory practices of the oil companies and their investment bank cronies. The whole world has been held hostage by greedy, oil rich countries, and their partners the big oil companies. This year these businesses have made more profits than any other companies or industry in all of history. And all of it at our expense!
It has been difficult to find solutions to this problem, politicians have been slow and ineffective to respond, and the oil companies have been rapacious. When asked at a congressional hearing; since they had made such enormous profits, why hadn’t they passed on that to the consumers and lowered the price of oil? Blank stares, they had no clue! Now they want to drill, not in the places where they already have approved permits, but in sensitive areas which we have protected for decades. No guys, this crisis is not an opportunity for you to rape our environment and steal more of our money. You’ve gotta be stopped!
The international investment community speculates on the price and value of oil. It has markets around the world that factor in geopolitical events and their impact on the price of oil. Oil has risen based on tensions in the Middle East, Hugo Chavez’s threats, dissident tribesmen in Nigeria, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, take your pick. Big oil’s argument is that the emerging countries are creating peak oil demand and there is only so much oil left on the planet. Supply and demand control the market.
But is that true? “Americans are being taken advantage of not only by OPEC but by speculators right here in our own country,” says Senator Ted Stevens. Jesus Reyes Heroles, the chief executive officer of Petroleos Mexicanos says, “Excluding the effect of speculation, oil would be around $80 a barrel.” The CEO of British Petroleum stated on NPR that the real price of oil is around $40 a barrel.
We’re just finding out how these markets have been manipulated. “ Optiver Holding BV, a Dutch trading fund, allegedly manipulated and attempted to manipulate energy markets on the New York Mercantile Exchange, At least five of those attempts were successful, “causing artificial prices,” according to Bloomberg.com.
OPEC and the big oil companies think that we are helpless as they arrogantly continue to pick our pockets. But you know, they’re right about one thing; the price of oil is determined by supply and demand.
We are the largest consumer of oil on the planet, and 75% of all the oil that we use goes for transportation; fuel in our trucks and cars. The rest goes for heating and electric generation. This winter due to the price of heating oil, many of us will be making an obscene choice, heat or eat!
When we don’t consume oil it is immediately reflected in the price of oil, the price goes down. So let’s all take a few days off from driving and reduce that demand.
Starting on August 17 let’s just stay home, walk, ride our bikes, canoe, whatever, but don’t get in your vehicles. Not using your car for a day in the summer is easier than not turning on your heat in the winter, so we need to start now. You can stock up on your milk, bread, beer and newspapers on Saturday, but on Sunday, none of us ride in our cars. That includes trucks and boats too.
It would be great to get everyone in a whole town to participate, but wouldn’t be awesome to have a whole state, a country, the whole globe, stay home on Sunday? Yes we can people, we can do this. Just send this email to 10 people and have them send it to 10 more. Make sure that newspapers and web sites get a copy, send it to politicians, clergy, businesses, activists, students seniors, everyone. If you have friends abroad make sure that they get a copy. It’s important that this movement goes international. Write letters to the editor and put up posters. Organize! Then sit down with your family, friends and neighbors and plan and prepare for SNOIL. (Sunday No Oil.) You might rediscover your community and your family and best of all you will make a real dent in our oil consumption. And the price of oil and gas will go down! Supply and demand controls the market remember? If we’re serious and committed we can stop these predators from destroying our economy and impoverishing us. http://www.snoil.com

Also is the U.S. environment anymore important than that of the rest of the world?

I buy your argument that there are supplies outside of OPEC and perhaps even in the US that are not currently being produced. However, it seems that bringing them back into production will be a slow enough process in the big scheme of things that it will have little effect on overall prices.

The natural gas condensates that you mention – are they actually turned into gasoline or some other petroleum product?

Your basic point and mine are the same – our current prices are definitely not an accident. They are being controlled by people with a good deal of experience in both up and down markets. Those people LIKE high prices, especially since they are pumping about all they can pump without making enormous capital investments.

We need to educate ourselves on this issue. Most Americans do not realize that more than 24% of the total gasoline production in the U.S. comes from sources other than crude. Therefore, we need to ask where is the justification for gasoline prices being so influenced by crude oil barrel pricing. Our Congress knows this is going on but they instead choose to parade the oil industry CEO’s in a mock investigation to pacify us.

This 24% that I referenced above comes directly from domestic natural gas wells. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2006 the USA used 9.253 million barrels of gasoline each day. There were 811 million barrels of natural gas liquids produced in the USA in 2006, including both condensate extracted at the lease (the field facility) – 182 million barrels – and liquids extracted in later processing – 629 million barrels. This is equal to 2.222 million barrels per day, which is around 24% of the gasoline consumption figure. The lease condensate production alone is equal to 0.499 million barrels a day, 5% of the consumption figure.

This natural gas condensate is a low-density mixture of hydrocarbon liquids that are present as gaseous components in the raw natural gas produced from many natural gas fields. It condenses out of the raw gas if the temperature is reduced to below the hydrocarbon dew point temperature of the raw gas. The natural gas condensate is also referred to as simply condensate, or gas condensate, or sometimes natural gasoline. This natural gasoline is what we filled our company pick-ups and cars with from storage tanks at the field facility. This gasoline was produced in the field in a small gathering facility where there was basically no refining required.

This current administration is telling the public that we need to open ANWR up for exploration to help ease the supply/pricing issue. I can’t imagine the additional expense of exploration, drilling, extracting and transporting under those harsh conditions wouldn’t somehow be passed along to the consumer in a higher price at the pump thus more profit. Why would we even need to bear those expenses anyway when production from established fields is currently so low. Of the already established 38.6 million acres of offshore territories only approximately 8 million acres are currently being produced. Of the already established 42.8 million acres of onshore territory only 12.3 million acres are being produced.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_condensate
http://globalwarming.house.gov/pubs
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/data_publications/crude_oil_natural_gas_reserves/current/pdf/ch5.pdf
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_inpt2_dc_nus_mbbl_a.htm