[AirlinePilot]

Watching the spiraling price for gasoline this last week or two has left me with the ugly realizaton that the next few months have the potential to be much worse than I had thought. It is becoming apparent that the market moves a good bit after we think it should as evidenced by this whole gasoline inventory issue. The market is beginning to wake up and as we move along I predict that what I had thought was going to go down is actually going to be quite worse than I thought. I guess I still have this tiny shred of hope inside that things might slacken a bit. At leat for the next year or so.

I could see gasoline reaching 4$ gallon rather quickly if this continues the trend of the last few weeks. The supply of gasoline seems to be reaching that critical point where very small bad news means big upticks in the price. The news about the Congo oil field fire seems particularly bad because it points to the fact that light sweet crude is even more of an issue than I thought it was.

I guess it's just another nail in our coffins and i dont like it. More bad news and no good stuff is going to take it's toll on this market rather quickly. Especially with SA beating around the bush about depletion.

[syrac818]

Dude, seriously... Lighten up. For a guy who's got a wife, kids, a nice job, and a lot ahead of you, you're just way too much of a downer.

The other folks on here, cool. A lot of them are survivalists, or hyper green, or socialists, or a little fucking crazy, or just sick of the gross Consumer driven American lifestyle. I like their posts.

But I think you're getting caught up in the "everything is bad news and I'm upset about it because we're all doomed" shit, and that's reserved for the types listed above. Oil is what, like $61/barrel today? Isn't the S&P just ticks away from an all time high? Not like any of this means everything is fine and dandy, but just pointing out that there is just as much reason for a person to be super optimistic.

Just my two cents.

[frankthetank]

I wish the price would just jump to $4.50 or more. Yeah, it might hurt some industries, cause some pain, but consumption needs to be cut and fast.

[MC2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AirlinePilot', '
') I could see gasoline reaching 4$ gallon rather quickly if this continues the trend of the last few weeks. ... I guess it's just another nail in our coffins and i dont like it. More bad news and no good stuff is going to take it's toll on this market rather quickly. Especially with SA beating around the bush about depletion.

[hippiepanda718]

Things are exactly the way we created them to be. We didnt realize this would happen at first, and now we gaining more and more speed heading downwards.

This isn't a wake up call. This is good old nature coming back around.

Everything moves in circles....did we really think that oil would be here forever?

Why base your entire economical standing on a resource that has a very steady depletion? Oh well, right? What are we going to do about it now? Change?.....that's about as likely as gas prices DROPPING this summer!

[hippiepanda718]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MC2', '
')The market is in "ignore" mode. One day very soon, Wall Street will wake up and realize the party's been over for awhile now, but the kegs are still flowing, so they're still rolling along with their "growth" stocks.

[ChadP]

The upside of gas prices going up this fast is that maybe, just maybe, people will wake up and cut consumption enough and our chances of getting through this summer without shortages goes up.

At least unless a major hurricane shows up in the gulf and they have to shutter refineries...

[strider3700]

I'm not just a doomer. I'm an escape from the debtor prisons to watch out for the radiation zones while getting in running gun fights with MZB's while most of the world is starving kind of doomer.

A few months back I made a prediction on the local high gasoline prices this summer. It was a 10 cent range. A month before we're entering peak driving season we're 5.1 cents away from the low end of it. I had no idea that 25% increase in prices could happen so quickly.

The fact that I was overly optimistic scares the piss out of me. Will we even be driving next summer?

[AirlinePilot]

syrac,

I reserve my real doomer stuff for in here. While I dont believe things long term are going to be ok, for now I AM living life and enjoying myself. I try really hard now to check my deep down feelings dealing day to day, especially with family but it will be important to be knowledgeable and prepared.

I dont think hard times are that far away. As I have said before maybe 3-5 years. I refuse to bury my head in the sand.

I don't forget that for all intensive purposes at least for a while I have it pretty damn good and Im not losing sight of that. It just seems that things are not going even as well as I wished they would so maybe there are a few more years of the status quo. So far I dont see it.

Just because I'm from a slightly different side of the tracks than some of the posters in here does not mean I am sheltered from seeing what is going down.

[pup55]

Wikipedia re: 1973

I dunno.

In 1973, we just kind of went along like normal all summer, and the first crisis kind of snuck up on us by October. By November, everybody knew what had hit us.

The difference was, at the time, that the government admitted fairly early on that there was a problem and tried to do something about it.


Wikipedia re: 1979

in 1979, we knew for months that we were in for some sort of problems, because even the Iranians that were over here in the US were protesting against the Shah, so it was not a surprise at all that the whole thing turned into a class 5 feces storm. I think the main difference at the time between then and now was that we had inflation, and Volcker had just started the process of multiple 1% interest rate increases to try to slow the economy down, which was really successful.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')AUL VOLCKER: If you had told me in August of 1979 when I became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board that interest rates, the prime rate would get to 21.5 percent, I probably would have crawled into a hole and cried, I suppose. But then we lived through it

[Wolfeman30]

My dumb ass state legislature (Texas) is about to pass a $.20 tax cut for the summer driving season. It completely stinks of 'stunt'smanship. How much help is twenty cents really going to make at $4.00 a gallon? I guess I shuld just be a happy motorist and motor on!

Its sending the wrond signal to the people. One lady in the local ABC new article was saying "I thought Texas was an oil state, shouldnt we have alot or something?"

Sheesh!

[MacG]

Nahh, don't worry. The IPCC says that we have unlimited oil and gas for at least a hundred years to come. At least they base their climate models on that assumption.

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AirlinePilot', 's')yrac,

I reserve my real doomer stuff for in here. While I dont believe things long term are going to be ok, for now I AM living life and enjoying myself. I try really hard now to check my deep down feelings dealing day to day, especially with family but it will be important to be knowledgeable and prepared.

I dont think hard times are that far away. As I have said before maybe 3-5 years. I refuse to bury my head in the sand.

[DantesPeak]

It now becoming clear that the 1,000,000,000 barrels of various grades of crude oil held in US commercial and Strategic Petroleum Reserve inventories will not prevent a shortage of gasoline from occurring. If this gasoline crisis had a sound it would no longer be like distant thunder but like the deafening sound of a freight train rapidly approaching.

There is a small chance this train could be derailed by a recession or some other event we can not foresee, but I wouldn't bet on that happening right now.

Even though we follow these events daily, it's still not clear what will happen when the reality of peak oil slams into a public still dreaming of cheap and limitless transportation fuel. More specifically, it doesn't appear that many will understand this problem is much bigger than "price gouging", filling the SPR, and actually even militarily securing the Mideast – and possibly other countries.

No, the chaos that follows PO won't be understood by most. We'll just have to react as fast as possible to the developments as they unfold.

[Jester]

Here, my area has already passed the Katrina highs by around 9 cents a liter, or around 34 cents per gallon. Without a real *problem* to blame and prior to the summer driving season.

When the Katrina pricing hit, the port here was shut down by truckers demanding more money to cover fuel costs. Weeks went by, and tonnes of produce rotted, sitting in containers at the port. Some goods started to run out... They got an increase, and goods began to move.

But, we're now a fair bit above that pricing, what happens this summer if we're significantly higher ? This is THE port for western Canada... I'm worried about how things could go, unless the contract was set up to escalate in case of fuel costs continuing to rise. Though I expect when they negotiated it, the truckers thought they were going to be sitting pretty with a 15% increase, which they probably expected to end up being extra cash when the oil prices come down...

Jokes on them... and us I guess... *sigh*

[Mechler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ChadP', 'T')he upside of gas prices going up this fast is that maybe, just maybe, people will wake up and cut consumption enough and our chances of getting through this summer without shortages goes up.

[strider3700]

Baring a major disaster (hurricane, terrorist...) shortage crisis is going to happen around end of july mid august. minor inventory builds make it closer to the end of august, lack of inventory builds makes it earlier in july. If we all drove exactly the same as we currently do for the rest of the summer we'll sldie through fine. Thats not likely to happen unless prices go way up

[TreebeardsUncle]

Relax. The maximum average gas price per gallon this summer in the US should be around $3.30 to $3.50 and maybe $3.70 to $3.80 in Ca. As folks here know demand for gasoline is very inelastic in the US (with a 14% price increase required to lead to a 1% decline in demand), so we will have bau (business as usual) easily up through $5/gallon in today's dollars. People will just ignore it or complain and put the amount on their credit cards. What will make the difference economically in the US will be when people can no longer make their debt service payments. So, when will that happen? Anyone have any ideas on that?

Lates.
Geoff

[keehah]

Looks like the refiners decided to restrict gasoline even more than Peak Oil is restricting crude.

No everything is not fine because crude is way off its highs. Because gas in my area is making new highs now!

http://www.vancouvergasprices.com/retai ... chart.aspx

[DantesPeak]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mechler', '
')I think Pup's latest graphs showed that we may have 3-6 weeks of small inventory builds. If this is proven true, then isn't a "crisis" at least that far off? Also, you posted an article about, if I remember right, reformulated gasoline stocks being 50+% lower then one or two summers ago. How does that factor in?