Tuesday 13 January 2009

Watching the oil business go down the drain

Anybody who sells oil that they're pumping at the moment for the present price per barrel of about $37 dollars should have their head examined. The oil should be stored in tanks and if the oil keeps going down, maybe the wells should be capped until oil goes up to at least $80 per barrel; what I'm talking about in particular is oil that has been produced from wells that have been drilled this year. Instead of offsetting drilling expenses with income from oil sold all of those costs should be taken as a tax loss: Those costs will never be recouped from production for a very long time until the price of oil goes up to a reasonable level of $80+ per barrel. Basically all of the badmouthing of the oil industry by the Democrats during the the past presidential election has done is to damage our country's vital interests in being able to have people that can invest in drilling oil wells with a good likely-hood of making a small profit from their investment at the end of it. They're right. It is a matter of national security to be able to produce our own oil domestically. There are a number of permits to drill on government owned lands already issued, so that should be done before we do anymore drilling in the Arctic or the Gulf of Mexico. But nobody's going to drill if there's no chance of making a profit. And nobody should have to sell oil at a loss.

We've seen many businesses ruined in the United States over the years: the steel business, the auto business, the railroads, farming and now oil. The trouble with our representative government is that they're all lawyers with a couple of exceptions and they've never had to find a product that had a reasonable chance of finding a market, founding a business to produce it, which means investing capital at great risk, then keeping that business solvent and weathering the ups and downs of any venture. And the Bush family in particular has done everything possible to destroy our freedoms, upon which our democracy is based! In other words when politicians start playing politics around an issue such as the high profits of the oil business this past year which will be offset by some of the lowest profits that they've ever had as we go into '09, they may not know it, but they are playing with fire and there are dire consequences from their bullshit. They have never understood the oil business and that includes a lot of Republicans.

Friday 2 January 2009

oil

We should have a fixed minimum price $80 per barrel and a law that states that American refineries have to buy American oil first from American suppliers for their needs and thereafter can buy on the world market for whatever price they can get it once American suppliers have sold their supply and can't supply anymore until the next month. I'm sure there's a reason that wouldn't fly. But why be subject to speculators setting the price per barrel? It's totally irrational. Why was nobody in the oil business a year ago able to predict that there would be an over-supply from September '08 to the present, which back in January of '08 would have affected the futures delivery price for these last four months? Are they unable to use their computers or their probability theory calculous to make predictions? I think this is the biggest failure of the math geniuses who have not been able to apply math to the economy. And the banks! Barney Frank, Harry Reed! Putting an added 175 billion in pork barrel, which was a big issue during the election...I don't think Obama's going to do anything about any of this. Maybe superficially. Whatever that means. What else is new?