TT Gas Milage

Tequila wrote:

A friend of mine in the oil industry in Louisiana explained it all to me. Oil is an international commodity. Apart from taxes, countries really do not control it. You can drill all you want in the US or Canada, the oil will go onto the international market to the highest bidder, not be used to lower domestic prices. It's a bummer, but the way it is. It also acts opposite to most other commodities where supply & demand control prices. With oil extra supply often means more demand which means higher prices. You can sort of see how this happens by looking domestically at what happened when prices were low. Conservation went out the window, and people went out & bought gazs guzzlers like Hummers, and the price went up. Mind you on a global scale, cheaper oil means more expansion in manufacturing (esp in China) which in turn raises the price.

Bingo. The US is actually the largest oil producer in the world. We overtook Russia and Saudi Arabia recently because of all the shale fracking going on in North Dakota and Texas. Now there's a ton more smaller companies exploring and extracting oil out of the ground than ever before. It doesn't matter where the oil comes from really, it's always sold internationally to the highest bidder. There's no one country or president that could even control the price if they wanted to. What people have to remember is oil gets pulled out of the ground by oil companies. They take those barrels to market and say, "Who wants it," and the bidding starts.

What happens on the Gulf Coast also affects prices. The US is also the worlds largest refiner and 40% of that capacity is on the Gulf Coast. This is why oil prices rise when we get hurricanes down here. When platforms and refiners shut down because of storms, the prices suffer. Then there's speculators who exist purely to make money off the change in price of oil. It gets pretty complicated quickly. Bottom line, the only way to lower the price of gas is to do it personally and the only way you're going to do that is by using less of it. When RVing you're going to use a lot fuel; there's no doubt about that. But there are steps you can take to reduce how much you use which in turn helps your pocketbook.