Those evil Saudis are flooding America with cheap oil, trying to drive down the price of gasoline, aided and abetted by treasonous ‘Americans’ who want to pay less for gas.
1 Like
In the long run they’re going to come out ahead. Yet another reason why we should get off of our oil dependency.
In the near future I suspect that electric vehicles will become more economical than IC powered vehicles even without the subsidies. And as that occurs IC vehicles will become relics. What will tomorrow’s Rockefellers and Jett Rinks do then?
Unfortunately that doesn’t get is all the way off our dependency of oil. We still have over 1,000 oil power plants in the US.
If getting carbon out of electricity is your goal, I’d be MUCH more concerned about the coal-fired plants: 23% of our electricity comes from them, less than 1% from oil-fired plants.
Oil is used for far, far more things than just fuel. Look around where you are sitting right now and consider everything made from plastics, rubber, and vinyl.
1 Like
And all, or nearly all, of the crude oil imported into the USA come from Mexico and Canada.
If the market for motor fuels dries up the price of crude oil would drop like a rock and only a small number of currently high producing wells would remain profitably operating.Texas would be facing a $teep decline.
Once the well is drilled, it costs a lot less to operate. Certainly exploration would drop to zero. Maybe ocean wells would be shut down because of high cost to operate off shore. OTOH, if the amount of oil produced is high enough, the cost to operate off shore might not mean much. It’s all about whether they can make money or not.
Many Coal plants are being converted over to NG because NG is cheaper then Coal right now, and even less of a Carbon Footprint then Oil.
Currently a great deal of natural gas is being burned off to get rid of it @MikeInNH.
Unintended consequences are such an annoying result of poor planning.
I’m not sure it’s poor planning. How does the drilling company really know how much methane and crude oil are there, and is the amount of methane present enough to pipe it out to a distribution center? Certainly removing the methane could be made part of the permit, and then we are back to the tussle between business and environmental groups. It may also be true that CO2 and water are less polluting than the methane it came from.
There are now dozens of natural gas wells within a short drive for me that are shut off for the foreseeable future because the price of the gas is too low for the owners of the mineral rights to let it go. My grandfather sold a a section of land in the late 1930s but kept the mineral rights which were passed on to my father and his siblings who received checks monthly for many years but shut it off. The 3 well heads are still visible from the highway and connected to a pipeline but the feeder pumps are missing and somehow the ownership didn’t continue to my generation so I’m out of the loop.
If you are really interested, the contract must be somewhere. Maybe check the courthouse. The mineral rights may have been signed over to the well owner after a certain number of years. Up to you.
One of my cousins checked and was told that when the number of descendants grew to more than a dozen and the monthly checks would have been just a few $ for each the mineral rights were relinquished to the well owner.It seems state law was written to cover such a situation.
Yeah, not all royalty interests generate a lot of money. I worked on a project covering one section - over 400 royalty owners, 5 generations after the wells were first drilled…