Will the price of energy and gas in particular come down and stay down if….?
I’ve heard all the mumbo-jumbo from experts, and analysts, and politicians including the media about why the price of gas is so high. For one, not one agree what others are saying so whom would you believe? Perhaps usng common sense will come up with the right answer. I’m no expert by all means but consider this. If we tap our own natural resources of oil, gas and coal while producing recyclable power from solar, nuclear plants and windmills and alike PLUS encourage out citizens to use prudence in their use of energy, do you think this concept will work? Produce more but use less, much like being on a diet, eat less and excercise more and surely you’ll lose weight.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
it’s very unlikely that energy prices will come down.
there just is not much oil left to be found around the US.
as far as conserving, that would be good.
but keep in mind, India and China will expand their use more than we save, so prices will continue to go up.
clearly using wind, solar, etc is a good thing.
however, it’s just not going to save us.
in addition, the fact that prices are going up so dramatically, may be a good thing.
it may limit the increased use in Asia.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
You got to be kidding I mean these days we shop for best deals guess what No one has good deal. Customer Service is just a joke no one cares its everyone business for themselves.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
You’re on the right track. Producing more is the only real solution. We should cut back, but oil is the fuel of progress right now and we have tons available to be drilled for, so we should go for it.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
For the time being, I can only think of two things to lower gas prices;
1) If everybody on this earth stops driving cars and use public transport.
2) A miracle that allows all vehicles and planes to use alternative gas (than will not harm our environment)
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
You have the right idea about energy. The more we restrict our development for energy, the more we suffer. I think that drilling our own oil, exploring for new oil sources on our own land is a must. Along with building new nuclear power plants like the rest of the world has been doing for the last 30 years or so at full speed.
Solar and wind are fine, but really do not add much to the overall energy inputs.
Oil is a speculative resource, just proposing to drill for oil would probably send the speculators into a tizzy and drive down the price, at least for a while.
Oil’s price is highly dependant on supply and demand. Increasing our own oil reserves and building a refinery to help with supply and capacity problems. This will bring the speculators over to seeing a better future. Also in it will add stability to our reserves in case of natural disaster and quell some fears, thereby, making oil become less of a gamble.
The price of oil will come down and stabilize if we flex some muscles by forcing our government to come to terms over energy.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
We are in for a shock. When we start to tap into those reserves, it is not going to come at year 2000 prices. We will have to be paying today’s prices to get that reserve oil out of the ground and delivered to us.
We have been switching to Canada’s high carbon tar sands crude, and it has also been much more costly that near surface conventional oil.
It would be imprudent to hold out the hope that we will get a big price improvement from increasing production.
But we are capable of cutting our consumption to bring it into alignment with world production.
We actually do that when prices go up high enough fast enough. So but for those who just burn up fuel to show how wealthy they are, we can cut consumption even if prices go down.
But American’s are not going to cut consumption if prices are going down. This will just convince them that prices can be forced down.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
The short answer: no, not really. (The price in any given currency may go down, but with a limited and shrinking supply the affordability cannot get better and the wage-adjusted price will only go up.)
People keep talking about "our supplies of coal, oil and gas", but those supplies aren’t what they think they are. Yes, there may be 400 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken shale. The problem is, shales are very tight rocks and very little of that oil will ever come out; the United States Geological Survey calculates that only 3.6 billion barrels (less than 1%) of the Bakken shale oil is even technically recoverable, and the economically recoverable amount is likely to be much less.
The US burns about 20 million barrels a day; call it 7.3 billion barrels a year. 3.6 billion barrels buys a whole 6 months, THEN what do you do? ANWR may have 13 billion barrels, or about 2 years. Get the picture?
The situation for coal and natural gas is similar. Coal tonnage keeps increasing, but the declining quality of that coal means that we actually mine less energy every year and spend more energy to get it out.
Our solution is to economize and convert. Killing the Hummer is a good idea, but it should have been done immediately after 9/11 (the Hummer should have been executed for treason, giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war). We should be making cars like the Chevy Volt, only starting with whatever batteries we have today like the Prius+. Wind electricity is now cheaper than natural gas; we installed 5.8 gigawatts in 2007, but we need to install more like 60 gigawatts a year for a while. Solar needs to catch up technologically.
There are already people driving electric cars charged by solar panels. They are the wave of the future.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
No, the reason we are importing energy is because it’s cheaper than what we have over here. Switching to local energy and renewable power sources would be better for the environment, but it certainly wouldn’t help the prices any.
July 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
This is the real spirit of the law of supply and demand which is a natural law. As we see, the supply of oil is a monopoly of the middle East and in the past the west has overlooked this fact thus there was little effort in developing other sources of energy. They were totally absorbed in developing armaments
which is somehow also dependent on the energy of oil. Now we should be weary of an undeclared war between energy and technology. The rest of the world seem to be a hostage.