A year ago, the shutdown of several refineries serving the Northeast and the possibility they would not reopen threatened to boost New England’s already high gasoline prices by as much as 15 cents a gallon. But an influx of cheaper crude oil extracted from shale rock formations in the United States has helped save most of those facilities and stabilized gas prices.
The revival of the East Coast refineries is another example of how the controversial drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is changing the energy equation for the region, nation, and world.
Comments
Why why is heating oil $4.25 per gallon?
Oil is high because it is a highly fungible, world-traded commodity that Chindia is drinking up like crazy.
Even though our production is up and consumption flat to down, those two facts only go so far.
Actually, US oil, as priced on the NYMEX and delivered at the measuring point in Cushing, OK, has trailed Brent (European) crude by several dollars a barrel over the past few years, after previously trading almost identically in price for decades. It isn't much of a discount, but again, if oil were that much wildly cheaper in the US and Canada, even more would flow overseas than is already moving.
The major reason that oil prices are high is the devaluation of the US dollar by Ben bernanke and te Federal Reserve. QE1, QE2, QE3. Fed prints money and buys its own US Treasury bonds. It offers basically no interest loans to banks. It buys up worthless mortgaged-backed sucurities. This is all designed to induce (if not compel) people to buy stocks. That's why the stock market keeps going up...But the devalued US dollar causes Oil prices to rise because it takes MORE dollars (oil is priced in US Dollars) to buy the same quantity of oil...This is part of a general inflation that is already causing food prices, particularly grains to rise.....Don't know about the Federal Reserve? That's becasuse the Globe NEVER talks about it.
Obama will bow to the environmental lobby and kill the fracking Golden Goose if he can. So oil prices will stay high and Iran can still sell oil to pay for nukes. But when fracking is allowed on private property that the EPA can't regulate, Obama will take credit for its success.
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I get my "impressions" about oil drilling, fracking, and the EPA by reading articles from Financial newspapers like the WSJ, the Financial Times, even the Washington Post. ..On the other hand I get the WRONG "impressions" if I read anything from the AP, Reuters, Bloomberg News, Yahoo! News, or The Economist.
Yay! Suck that planet dry. What could go wrong?
If what you mean by prices being stable is that they rise steadily -- then yes prices are "stable". But to assert that the more oil we produce here the lower our cost at the pump is a fallacy and counter-factual to ppb. The U.S. exported more gasoline, diesel and other fuels than it imported in 2011 for the first time since 1949 and yet the price at the pump has continued to increase not decrease. That's because price is based on demand -- global demand. It' why even if we allow The Keystone pipe to go online it's not going to assuage the price at the pump. So long as there is India and China to prop demand (U.S. demand has proportionally diminished) prices will remain high.
Umm. If its based on demand...increasing supply will lower cost. Or, in our case, as Ben devalues the dollar, it will decrease the growth rate.
For those of us paying, lower cost is good, and "lower than it could be" is better than nothing.
I hope you are suggesting, in any way, shape or form, that we would be better off price-wise if we weren't producing locally?
No. What I'm saying is that whether you are for the KXL or against it is irrelevent. The fact is that Keystone Pipe won't change the price of oil at the pump. Price is based on global demand. This isn't conjecture or ideology. It is a fact. I'm making a purely technocratic argument.
Liberals hate this....
They profess to want energy independence...but they really just want to give billions of unmonitored dollars to DNC hacks, like Al Bore, selling snake-oil "green energy" scams
Didn't gasoline prices just spike, about a month ago from the low $3.40's to the mid $3.70's?
The problem with fracking is what it will do to the water supply and the costs that will after it is polluted. We've go to look beyond the tips of our noses. We depend on those we elect to protect all of us. Weak reeds? I suppose. But when our kids and grandkids are paying $10 a gallon for drinkable water, what will they think? But for some the question is, "What has posterity ever done for me?"
One can always distill polluted water at home and make it fresh
Without gas and oil we would freeze.
Hey, its gonna take a lot of oil to melt the polar ice caps.
You're a number of years too late pointing that out, pvalen.
Best news in a long long time for our beleaguered economy and messed up foreign affairs.
My grandparents' home is located next to a salt-dome shallow oil field drilled at the start of the 20th century.
The homes in this uncorporated village depended on water wells drilled for each home.
The water is heavily polluted with gases, salts, and other contaminants.
Thus, they hired Culligan to run the water through individually-designed water filters before it could be used for drinking, cooking, washing, etc.
It was an expensive operation for each family.
During the Clinton administration, the whole area was set up on a common water system and the water wells were a thing of the past.
My heart goes out to those people in Pennsylvania who live in rural areas surrounded by fracking wells.
They depend upon water being trucked in each week and stored in above-ground tanks.
This has to mean they must cope with constant water rationing while they wait for their next delivery.
Also, if they keep livestock, it must be doubly difficult and expensive.
I'm in support of them when they say there must be a better way to drill than this constant spoilage of the surface land.
A rightwinger says one thing, a progressive says another what is one who really wants the truth without an ideological bent to think? Fracing SEEMS awful to me since SO much ground water is polluted by it. People's taps catch on fire (NOT it seems to me a good thing), livestock die on farms around those companies that have bought out those farmers's land for a steal. The cancer rates go up, as do the pulmonary illnesses. These things one can see with one's own eyes. Fracking sounds FANTASTIC and for the US to be the premier producer of natural gas energy and it SEEMS absolutely dizzing wonderful but I suspect it is not so wonderful because getting at it is NOT safe. Nuclear energy and god knows oil is polluting, climate change awful and is NOT safe either. The lamestream media keeps these things out of the news. Those who are invested in power want this pipeline and fracing to proceed even newspaper men who should be the Fifth Estate but are not. What they are is WHIMPS who bow in the presence of the almightly buck.
So I say beware of the powerful with Trojan Horses who say they are gifts. They may not be gifts but may be your one way ticket OUT of this disgustingly polluted world for those who are not born into money and the power it brings. It will bring the rest of us and our children a way out and that will be in a coffin.