Don't sweat the price of gas.
Don't buy that Prius yet. Gas at $4 per gallon is still cheap in historical terms. I recall paying $1.30 per gallon for regular gas in 1980. Adjusted for inflation (CPI was 78 in 1980 and is 213 today) $1.30 in 1980 money is just $3.55 in 2008 money. So, with gas prices today running at an average of about $3.55 per gal nationally for regular gas the price today is comparable to what we paid 28 years ago. The world didn't end in 1980 and it won't today.
Not that I enjoy forking over $80 each time I fill up, but in 1980 I was a college student making $2.25/hr part time so I was working more than 30 min to buy a gal of gas (actually, more than that if you look at net pay). Today, I only work 4 min or so to net $4 so, in those terms the price of gas today is about 1/7th or 1/8th what it was in 1980.
We need to remember that todays "high" gas prices are the direct result of 25 years of extremely low gas prices that discouraged exploration and investment in infrastructure coupled with idiotic environmental restrictions that have made it virtually impossible to expand refining capacity, develop nuclear power, clean coal technology, etc.
I was paying $1/gal for gas in 2000 which, adjusted for inflation, means the price of gas between 1980 and 2000 fell from $1.30 to about $0.65/gal (in 1980 dollars). At that price, oil companies weren't exploring for oil, marginal wells were being shut down despite having lots of recoverable oil left in them, nobody was building new oil refineries, nobody was investing in alternative energy/ clean coal, oil shale, etc. We muddled along during the late 90's and early 00's because there was a worldwide recession in the 3rd world, Japan, etc. However, now that countries like China and India are industrializing we've got to the point where demand has, very slightly, outstripped supply.
Unfortunately, people love their cars, electricity, AC, heaters, etc so it takes a big increase in oil price to result in a few percentage points decrease in demand worldwide.
What the gloom and doomers who cry about the end of the industrialized world don't realize is that we have enough "oil" in the world to sustain our consumption requirements for several thousand years. When I say "oil" I don't necessarily mean oil in the common sence of West Texas Light Sweet Crude, I mean "energy equivalents". "Energy Equivalents" means things like oil shale, biofuels, oil sands, bitumen, coal (burned as coal), coal liquifaction (coal converted chemically to gasoline), nuclear power, natural gas, etc.
What we are lacking, right now, is a shortage not of oil per se, but of oil that is economically recoverable at $10 or $15 per barrel. Most of the really cheap oil is gone, however, there is a vast amount of oil equivalents that is economically recoverable at $30 or $40/barrel.
For example, the USA alone has enough coal to fuel our economy for the next 500 years. Russia, Western Europe, China, Australia, etc all have massive coal reserves. At $35 per barrel coal can be mined and converted chemically (liquifaction) to oil (during WW2 the Germans had no oil reserves and ran their army almost entirely on oil converted from coal.).
At $35 per barrel the USA has a several hundred year supply of oil that is recoverable by mining and retorting oil from oil shale.
The northern US and southern Canada is underlain by an oil bearing formation called the "Bakken deposit" that contains somewhere between 400 Billion and a Trillion barrels of oil
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news2.13s.html (that's way more oil than is in the entire middle east). This amount of oil is enough to increase US oil reserves to ten times our current level and make us a net exporter of oil. At $40 to $60 per barrel the oil in the Bakken is profitably recoverable. It hasn't been touched to date since it costs more than the $10 or $15 /barrel historical price of oil to recover.
North of the Bakken, Canada has trillions of barrels of oil in "Oil Sands" that is economically recoverable at $30 or $40 per barrel.
Offshore, in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Mexico, etc, increases in technology have made it possible to recover oil in waters several miles deep. These oil deposits were previously not technically recoverable. It is estimated that more oil & gas exists off shore in the Gulf of Mexico alone than the US can use in 100 years. Of course, the same situation exists in Russia, China, etc.
The US hasn't commissioned a new Nuclear Power Plant in almost 40 years. What idiots we are. We burn oil & natural gas to produce electricity (which contributes to global warming) while it is possible to produce electricity for a fraction of the price from nuclear power. Chernobyl was an anomaly caused by a criminal communist regieme (the Soviet Union) grossly disregarding the most basic of safety protocols. The chance of something like Chernobyl happening in the US is non existant. We should be (and will be soon) producing most of the USA's electricity from nuclear power and we should be using our oil only for transportation, home heating, lubrication,etc.
The bottom line of all this discussion is that the USA, and the world, has a vast amount of oil equivalents that are recoverable at $30 per barrel. Prices today area around $125/barrel. It takes a year or four to bring many industrial projects (such as new refineries, new coal mines, new oil wells, etc) on line. Today, there are boomtowns all over the world in Canada, N. USA, Russia, the Gulf of Mexico, etc where companies are adding trillions of barrels of new capacity to the worlds supply. Within a year, the price of oil will plummet as millions of barrels per day of oil equivalent production capacity comes on line. We'll be seeing $1.50/gal gas again soon, perhaps $1.00.
Most of the cost of developing a new oil sands mine, oil well, coal liquifaction plant, nuclear plant, etc is in the building cost. Once the facility is on line and producing the incremental cost of production is low (maybe $5 or $10 per oil equivalent barrel). That means that once all of these new nuclear plants, mines, oil wells etc are built and producing they must continue to produce even if the price of oil drops below what is required to amortize the cost of their construction. This means that oil equivalent production will not decreas even if the cost of oil drops to $15 a barrel again.
The main reason that oil prices stayed low from 1980 to 2006 is not because the Saudis, Iranians, Nigerians, etc wanted to subsidize our economies with cheap oil and loved us so much they wanted to swap wet steamy kisses all day long. The reason they kept prices at $15 - $25 per barrel for decades is because at that price nobody was going to pay billions of dollars to build massive energy infrastructure projects (like I described above) that needed a high probability that oil prices would stay at $30 per barrel for years in order to be profitable. There was a ceiling to how high oil prices could go that was caused by the cost of alternative energy sources.
Now that this ceiling has been broken we are seeing many millions of barrels per day of oil equivalent production capacity being added. This capacity will not go away when the price of oil falls so this means that there will be an excess of supply relative to damand that it will take decades for the world economy to grow enough to utilize. The fact that the world will soon be producing way too much oil equivalent relative to world demand will mean depressed oil prices for decades.
Recalling back to the 1974 to 1980 time frame. Oil went from about $0.45 to $1.30 per gallon in the late 70's. This was a huge increase at the time and people were crying crocodile tears like today. However, this increase in oil prices caused precisely the same increase in production capacity development to occur that I described above. In fact, production capacity was increased so much that it took from 1980 to 2007 for the world to get to the point where the excess capacity was all used up. That's why we had 27 years of progressively cheaper oil. The same thing is happening again and we'll see another couple of decades of depressed oil prices occur again as a result.
So, to make a long story short, buy that new Winnebago now while they can be had for 50% of their regular price because the era of cheap gas will soon be back with a vengence.
it pings.
