You Decide

That's exactly right and that's mostly due to hydraulic fracturing - fracking. You won't get the leftists or the lyin' radical tree huggers to admit to that, though...they enjoy spreading the falsehood that fracking is the premier threat to Mother Earth. I've been around the process a fair number of times when I worked in the oil/gas fields and can attest it's no more dangerous - actually less - than any of the rest of what it takes to get the oil out of the ground and turned into gasoline for your vehicle. Yes, it's best to "look before you leap" when doing something that involves the environment, but you also "can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs".

Yes, there are formations it should not be used in, ones where the oil bearing strata is close to the water table and as long as wells are completed properly and according to mandated guidelines, it's a very safe and effective process. I saw someone on Twitter lament that "they use diesel in frack fluid!" Not sure what the big deal is about that, using hydrocarbons to help produce hydrocarbons. SMH Yes, there are some chemicals in the fluid I wouldn't want to drink or have splashed on me, but they're diluted by thousands and thousands of gallons of water. I still wouldn't want to drink that water, but it's akin to having some swimming pool water in your mouth...there's pee in that, guess you know, along with flaked off skin and hairs and other "stuff" like what is rinsed off your butt.

In fact, the two major components in frack fluid are water and sand. (the latter to keep the "pores" of the formation open after fracturing). Most of the other chemicals used are those often found in food packaging or in products we use every day, even consume. (one chemical is in ice cream! Others are in makeup)

Sorry, it's just a sore point with me, dealing with ignorance. People should not argue about something they know absolutely nothing about.

Thanks Mike. That is exceptionally informative about the types of chemicals in fracking fluid. Thank you so much for setting the record straight. I would suspect we have many more chemicals in our food chain.

Bravo, Mike, well - THE TRUTH comes out!

Regarding our independence from Middle Eastern oil addiction, isn't it about time - remember the 1973 OPEC oil embargo when the USA was held hostage, that was Warning shot hot across the bow that lesson we needed to heed .

And Bye the Bye, OK it's their oil and cartel but why did our local producers have to increase prices along with the sand rats products ? ?

President Trump is spot on - Stay Free & Stand Free without any encumbrances, another step in Making America Great Again!

Glad we got Trump to stand up to them.

Thanks Eddessa. We could have remained independent from OPEC for years had the right president been in office.

I could have raved on about the subject a lot more, but I had already written more than most people care to read. TL;DR, y'know? I started to mention those people whose "water caught on fire" but decided to leave it out. Simple explanation and a funny story to go along with that ,but another time. The following will be too long, but I'll try to keep it short(er). No promises, though...sometimes I get wound up on something. <grin>

"...remember the 1973 OPEC oil embargo..." Yes, I certainly do. Just a quick backstory; I went off to college, majoring in journalism and after seeing the press hound Nixon like jackals and having to put up with the young leftists in my dept., decided to quit college, at least for a year, work a little bit and go back.

Anyway, when I got home I found out the son of the people who ran "my" gas station had cancer, so I helped them out, then later leased it from them during the latter days of the '73-'74 embargo. I never ran out of gasoline (unless I was too stoned and forgot to order more), but antifreeze was hard to come by. I think I made more money from that than anything else. (Gas was 52.9 but a lot cheaper in a nearby larger town. Sheesh, it was 32.9 just a few years prior to that and sometimes there they'd have "gas wars" where they'd sell a gallon for about 14-15 cents.)

"....why did our local producers have to increase prices along with the sand rats products ? ?" Simple answer, supply and demand but the more complex reason was due to what is called "lifting costs", how much it costs to get a bbl. of oil out of the ground and transport it. Back then, the Saudis and other OPEC nations still had a LOT of gas pressure in their fields and the oil was forced up to the surface, costing very little to produce, plus none of those picayune environmental regulations the U.S had/still has. (of course, I don't really mean they ALL are trivial, but some ARE here in America)

The last time I researched it, the U.S. lifting casts per bbl. were about $23-24 on average, as opposed to over twice that for the UK's listing costs in the North Sea. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran's lifting costs are all around ten bucks/bbl. or less...and probably only a buck or two in the early 70's.   The cost to produce our own oil took a big jump then b/c we had shut in or plugged wells or curtailed production b/c we could not match the cheaper oil from the Middle East. When it costs more to make something than what you can get for it....

If not for fracking, our own gasoline would be upwards of $5 or 6 bucks/gallon...or more. That's pretty much what the Brits and the rest of Europe pay right now. (only they sell it by the liter/litre, so it doesn't sound that bad. <snicker>

Both the Saudis(and the rest of the ME) have tried to undermine the use of fracking. In fact, the money for the anti-fracking BS pseudo documentary "Gasland" came directly from the Saudi Royal family. They want to keep the price of oil up, not just to make more money, but mainly because their oil is running out and that they've been vastly overestimating their reserves. (IOW, "lying")

And one last thing if you've hung in this far. The oil companies aren't making "obscene profits". Well, they make a ton of money, but percentage-wise they make a lot less than do insurance, pharmaceutical, tech and most other companies, but you don't see anyone complaining about THEIR obscene profits. (or didn't use to, at least not before this socialist craze started...now ALL corporations are "evil".) They get a couple of industry specific tax breaks, but so do those other industries. They are also NOT subsidized . Those subsidies the idiots bring up are energy cost assistance programs from the govt. You can probably find those in a regular mailing in your electric/natural gas bills.

You pay more in taxes per gallon of gas (several times as much, depending upon your state taxes) than the oil company makes. (.07 cents/gallon) Federal tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents/24.4 on diesel. It's 53.5 cents in California, 31.6 cents in Georgia. It's .20 cents here in Texas, but we aren't even the lowest in the nation. Chew on that for a while, think about who really IS profiting from the "high price" of gasoline.

Thanks Sully. I shudder to think what the world could have been like without him. I think we're getting a preview here and there.

Thanks Mike. Nothing like capping wells, banning drilling just to tell us there is a shortage to drive prices up.

Well, the oil companies had no choice. My dad was a pumper and not only was the field drying up, he had to shut the pumpjacks off for half a day or so just to let the oil flow back into the cased borehole, save money and wear and tear on the equipment from letting it only pull up a few gallons w/ ea. stroke. Dad used to say things like "That #4 well ain't makin' enuff oil to grease a watch fob."

The trouble was the Arab oil embargo hit us just after we had reached our peak oil production and it was declining rapidly yet our demand was headed the other way by leaps and bounds. We had already drilled in the most accessible places and the hard-to-reach places like offshore or where they had to haul in water to drill with made it cost prohibitive to make a profit at those prices back then.

Since that time, we've developed air drilling and esp. the technology for horizontal drilling where they can drill sideways through a very narrow yet productive formation and thanks to fracking, can produce a good amt.of oil/gas and a good profit from it.

I don't know why Venezuela is having so much trouble; they have huge reserves of oil and gas and the country should be among the richest per capita in S. America, if not the world. You know all the moves China is making in the China Sea, building up their military and creating those artificial islands with dredged up sand on those reefs? IMO, they're going to stake a claim to the massive reserves off the coasts of Indonesia and esp. Vietnam.   There are huge reserves, perhaps billions and billions of bbls. in the Mekong delta.

Appreciate the education on oil lifting costs - you're a real Texas oilman :-)

Note Bene:
During WW!1 when we were bombing out the Romanian (axis) oil fields and hurting the Nazi mechanized war machine including the very thirsty Panza & Tiger tanks - they had to find oil substitute and under the direction of Minister Albrect Speer developed a viable synthetic oil product which effectively kept the enemy in the war longer.

My question, since the spoils of war like industrial patents for ex. sound recording wire & magnetic tape were expropriated by allies - was the critical synthetic oil composition too expensive for us to chemically replicate and for commercial use? - Texas Mike?

Thanks Mike. With respect to the scenarios you just talked about they seem to be in step with a lot of the stuff the X-22 videos discuss as far as long term planning to make the US a third world country. My thinking may be a bit abstract but as we discuss events of the past, it clarifies a lot of current events the MSM is not reporting.

Thanks Eddessa. Very interesting questions Eddessa. :)

While synthetic oil and fuel can be made from any number of things (such as biomass - think of today's ethanol made from corn- which has driven up the price of corn around the world and made food prices more expensive in countries who eat corn as a staple ingredient in a lot of their food), the Krauts made theirs from their abundant coal supplies.

Now, I don't have a clue how expensive or involved it is to produce it from coal, but I suspect it sort of was like the "Red Ball Express" which delivered supplies, food, ammo and fuel to the Allies as they drove deep into Europe and then on in to Germany, barely keeping up w/ the demand...and sometimes not. I don't remember the exact figures but it seems to me like they burned ten gallons of gas to deliver one, some ridiculous figure like that.

I think the analogy is apt in regards to the Nazi production of synthetic fuel; it didn't matter how much energy they expended to make it, they had to have it and besides that, they used slave labor in those refineries, so their labor costs were "low". (but horribly high in terms of human life)

We DO extract oil from shale, but it's expensive to do so and is very damaging to the environment. The Koch Bros. were heavily invested in the Canadian strip mines. I'm sure it cost a lot more to make fuel from coal than it did to drill for the oil to make "real" fuel from....and of course, you know how people feel about the coal industry now....Obama said he was going to put coal companies out of business and he just about succeeded.

That's another subject that interests me and also ticks me off at the same time. Sure, coal is "dirty" but like I said above "you gotta break eggs to make an omelet".   It was the greed on part of the coal companies that caused the ecological messes and leveled entire mountains to get to the coal. The shift from coal also played a huge part in the decline of the U.S. steel industry.   We now buy much of our steel from China, often substandard but we keep doing it. (just as we keep letting them sell us children's toys with toxic chemicals that leech out of it and seafood raised in pollution filled waters. Thanks Walmart!)

And, China is building new coal powered power plants every week, not just in their country but others. They depend upon coal so much, something to the tune of 70% of their power needs. India is next, followed by the U.S., falling far down the list in terms of tonnage burned. They have to import most of it from other countries...which are now realizing it's doing long term damage to their environments for a short term profit. Australia is particularly outraged...at least their citizens are...for selling so much coal to the Chinese.

I agree about the third world country thing, konane. Climate change and this attempt to shift the US to socialism is nothing more than an attempt at a massive transfer of wealth from the first world to the third.

I grew up in the oil field...literally, right smack dab between the "A" and "B" leases in a company house. I had two uncles, several cousins, both grandparents who worked in some aspect of the industry. I've worked in quite a few different sectors, too....well service, roughnecking and being a driller on drilling rigs, wireline survey, roustabout, oil field construction and a couple of hitches at the nearby Phillips/Conoco refinery, the second largest inland refinery in the world, or used to be.

I worked for so many drilling contractors one year that I made a book: "Mike's W-2 Forms". <grin> My pop used to get mad at me "Still with Baker & Taylor?" "No, Pop." I'd tell him. "I worked for Unit for a while , then I got on with Rig Six - again - for Hudson." He couldn't understand that since they didn't really give benefits, I couldn't see any reason to go with the last rig when it went into Oklahoma, drive 150 miles RT not when I could hire on to another rig working just twenty miles out of town. I have driven/ridden more than I ever wanted or want to again. The drive killed more roughnecks than did the rigs. If the driller pulled a bottle of Jim Beam out from under the seat, I was already thinking of finding the next rig. All the young guys got high back then, too .

I wrote an LP friend last year, telling him about what happened on that cold December day back in 1976 when I saw a guy killed just a few feet from me. It was a horrible experience, esp. when I pulled him out of the muddy ditch where he had been blasted azz over teakettle and rolled him over. Terrible, terrible sight.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread.

But yes, I DO know about the oil field. I love to read and like to think I know a little bit about a lot of things, but I have also read about the parts of the oil industry I am not familiar with and...well, I lived the rest.

Thanks Mike. This thread has been amazingly active so no problem.

You said "Climate change and this attempt to shift the US to socialism is nothing more than an attempt at a massive transfer of wealth from the first world to the third."

Yep out of our pockets and into the banksters because we've seen the direction money has been flowing in.

Gentlemen & A Lady

Do appreciate the unselfish generosity in a sharing seminar embedded with priceless knowledge, boots on the ground personal experience interlaced with wisdom - can't get that much socio/political/industrial savvy realism in any class :-)

Thanks all,
An educational read.

Thanks Eddessa. It's been great hasn't it? :)

Thanks JAP. Better than any classroom.