Oil Prices.

[surrey jim]

Pipeline - Welcome to Pipeline Card!

For some reason he's failed entirely to date despite the fact that in a significantly smaller country (Ireland) there is such a scheme - motorcard.ie . Saves me about a fiver a month on fuel as well as giving me until the 12th of the next month to pay for it - Halifax high interest current account means that saves me a quid or two too...

thats the one

 

[Spiros]

All the time a car is the best (and cheapest) way for me to get to work them I'm going to use it.

I live in Worthing and work in Burgess Hill. If I go by train the door-to-door time is over an hour each way and it costs me £14 for the return trip. If I go by car the door-to-door time is about 45 minutes (only as much as an hour if the traffic is really bad) and it costs me about £5 for the return trip with petrol at £1.13 a litre.

Even if the price doubled I'm still better off than taking the train - my only viable alternative

 

[beorhthelm]

Sadly, no it won't. These mystery "speculators" are always blamed by the non-specialist press for high oil prices, but it's always basically drivel - you can't squeeze anything other than an already-tight market. The high prices are simply driven (pun intended) by Chinese oil demand going up by around 10-12% a year, as well as industrialisation in India and Brazil, while Opec has been unable to increase production to match that, leading many to suspect that the spare capacity really isn't there in, say, Saudi. I may be wrong but I'd say get used to it - it's a finite resource that we're all burning.

how does that square with what i hear that the middle east is actually producing more oil than there the current refinery capacity can absorb, and that above something like $70/barrell the VAST oil shale desposits in Alaksa and elsewhere become economically viable to PLUNDER? and I recall that Venezula sells to friends (ie anyone but the US who suck up a bit) for somthing like $47 a barrel.

speculation accounts for at least a quater the current headline prices and there is definatly a bubble.

 

[Cian]

I remember being told in geography class in school that Rockall would become viable at about $100 a barrel. Nobodies making any moves in the battle over who owns its oil rights right now are they?

 

[Gotsmanov]

If you're worried about prices increasing further and want to hedge, you can invest in an oil exchange-traded fund (CRUD.L) which tracks light crude prices. If oil goes up, the fund price tracks up. If it goes down, your petrol will get cheaper... and you could then switch to other stocks whose profits and performance are inversely correlated to oil, eg airlines...

 

[Alex Alex Dawson oo! oo!]

All the time a car is the best (and cheapest) way for me to get to work them I'm going to use it.

I live in Worthing and work in Burgess Hill. If I go by train the door-to-door time is over an hour each way and it costs me £14 for the return trip. If I go by car the door-to-door time is about 45 minutes (only as much as an hour if the traffic is really bad) and it costs me about £5 for the return trip with petrol at £1.13 a litre.

Even if the price doubled I'm still better off than taking the train - my only viable alternative

£70 (ie 5x£14) seems a lot for a weekly season from Worthing to Burgess Hill; I think Brighton to Victoria is about £74 so I'd expect to be paying around £35?

 

[Dr Q]

I remember being told in geography class in school that Rockall would become viable at about $100 a barrel. Nobodies making any moves in the battle over who owns its oil rights right now are they?

There has been some exploration in the area round Rockall, between there and the Faeroe Islands, but nothing has been found yet. Rockall itself is just a lump of granite or similar.

Although the oil companies are making money hand over fist, their costs are rising massively. Exploration is taking place in frontier areas, such as deeper and deeper water and environmentally harsh areas like the Arctic and Eastern Russia anlong with politicaly unstable/corrupt countries. This drives the costs up massively and there is much more caution applied to drilling wells.

 

[Spiros]

£70 (ie 5x£14) seems a lot for a weekly season from Worthing to Burgess Hill; I think Brighton to Victoria is about £74 so I'd expect to be paying around £35?

It's £40 for a weekly season - so it's £8 per day assuming I go every day. However (1) it's still £3 per day more than the car and (2) assumes I do the journey every day, which I don't as sometimes - once/twice a week - I work out of the office in London or from my office at home. They need to get the weekly season down to less than £25 before I'd be interested, especially as that would be the same cost for a worse (and much less flexible) journey