POLITICS Inflation /General Finance Insanity

You're right. Increasing supply of oil would probably raise the price of crude.

 

They won't increase supply. Supply itself is controlled by price points. They don't take it out of the ground if it isn't the right price for that well.

 

Somebody should have told this guy.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129...ls of oil from the,in the future if necessary.

 

People must have been afraid to price gouge when Trump was president.

 

15 million barrels. In other words, what the US produces and uses in a single day. Ya, that took them to their knees.

 

They were getting their back scratched with securing deposits.

 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing...-and-address-lack-of-supply-around-the-world/

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0887

Someone should really have let them know.

 

So something can be done to lower gas prices? Let's do that.

 

The only way to lower them is to not be reliant on it. I know that isn't a popular opinion here, but it's the truth. It's not a sustainable technology.

 

I think everyone here is fine with not being reliant on it. Saying it doesn’t make it feasible in 2023.

 

Saying "let's do everything we can do to make it cheaper now" makes us reliant on it until we collapse.

 

I don't disagree but that takes a pretty long time. In the meantime let's get back to Trump gas prices for awhile.

 

In a way that is a supply issue. Reserves waist but not enough supply (at that price) to support a lower price.

It’s also incredibly complicated by international trade, OPEC, monetary considerations.

Amd oil is roughly 80 dollars. That’s actually not expensive, particularly considering inflation.

What is the national average gas price right now and how does that compare to 2012-2016?

The period of 2017-2020 was an insane period of growth in US oil. We increased production from entrance to exit by 2 million barrels a day - that’s a ton considering what we were producing. The tailwinds of that suppressed oil - but even more so natural gas (which uiu largely see in power price but also home heating). I don’t think we will see those nat gas prices again.

 

And back then, I was literally told that natural gas will be that cheap for the foreseeable future. Turns out the foreseeable future was 4 or 5 years.

 

That’s probably about right. The oil growth was expected to continue until about 2025 at a very healthy rate so foreseeable future probably meant more like 8-10 years. But nobody is putting hedging positions on longer than 5 years in the circles I know because the unknowns just get too huge.

Nat gas doesn’t need to be 8.00 in the US but it also can’t sustainably be 1.75. Prices in the 3-4 range are a realistic long term view. And for the record it was my job at the time to do such forecasts and I was placing nat gas forecasts in that range in the 2025 period. But I had to defend why I wasn’t putting it below 2 dollars so you aren’t wrong there were the sub-2 forever crowd.

But there is a lot of instilled nat gas under 4. The one thing that could kill that is if you see persistent service cost inflation (steel, cement, horsepower)

 

But I’ll also admit if you had told me back in 2018 that nat gas would trade over $5 as long as it did in just 2-3 years time, I wouldn’t have believed it.

 

All we need is another pandemic to kill the demand side.

 

And I am not saying I predicted a price, just that I assumed it would be more expensive at some point in the following 15 years. This was a project considering future electric grid mixes. In 2017, natural gas was the nick saban of electricity generators. Now, it is... well, the 2023 nick Saban of generators. Still a dynasty, but no longer appearing perpetually dominant. It is going to fade at some point. Not tomorrow, but eventually.

 

It will have some impressive staying power unless we can find a way to massively scale global battery production or fundamentally shift energy density of batteries. The first will take dollars and time (and policy). The second isn’t really understood. More of a positive swan.

 

They were really low before the pandemic. What were we doing different?