Gas Prices

Human nature is a bitch you know. We take a hit to our supply chain and instead of perhaps laying off the gas, using the car less and easing the demand on the supply of gas to the stations we all rush like lemmings to the station and cause a panic. We took a hit to a 1/4 of our production. No word yet on how long that will last and the only other news we have for sure is that the reserves are going to be opened and fuel environmental requirements eased to speed production else where. All in all not a panic level of problem. But now we sucked out what little margin there was in the system to ease the transition to a lower supply market by rushing out to the stores en masse.

STUPID STUPID STUPID. This is a time to use LESS gas not MORE and that is exactly what happend with every one going and filling there tanks at once. And those f*****g money grubbing bastards that raised the pump prices so fast it scared everyone to death to begin with need to be held to account for this to some degree. We went from 2.40 to 3.00 a gallon here and it obviously has not seen its peak. If everyone had seen prices remaining more or less stable they likely wouldn't have paniced but no, they had to try and capitalize on the situation and the fact that oil entering the processing cycle NOW and that won't come to market for MONTHS just shot up on the stock market all because they can. Damn this is getting old. Oil has increased just over 20% per barrel over the last year before Katrina and yet pump prices rose more than 30%. Someone please explain that to me? What is the deffinition of price gouging again? Isn't that not allowed? Now it shot up a 1/6th a barrel and the prices jumped more than a 1/5th. This can't keep going like this.

On the other hand if gas prices more or less stabalize above 3$ a gallon it is going to do some interesting things to the alternative fuel markets in the US. For one thing pure Bio-Diesel just became more profitable. Somehow I doubt there will be much bio mass rotting in silos come the end of this year. Ethonol may take off like a bat out of hell as well since it can be put pretty much strait into existing engines with extremely minor modifications. Additionally this just made the Canada Tar field extraction process that much more profitable, and they have a supply of that crap to rival the middle east reserves of sweet crude.... just have to get production ramped up.

This is going to be a shock... its going to hurt. But perhaps having this shock come this way, via Natural disasster BEFORE we really just started sucking the supply dry will work to our favor. Afterall America has always worked best under the gun, always come up with more faster than any nation before it when it had to. For a long time now we havn't had to come up with anything. Europe just adjusted to insanely high oil prices. Americans won't. Hell with the distances and low population densities we have to deal with we just CAN'T.