Administrativia

I don't normally post stuff about work, but after watching the drivel on 60 Minutes last night about the "Ecuadorian" lawsuit against Chevron, I had to relay this: Images are of Petroecuador sites and are not Texaco-remediated sites: The images of oil pits, and oil operations in general, that “60 Minutes” used are of locations that are the sole responsibility of Petroecuador, Texaco Petroleum’s partner from the days of the consortium. “60 Minutes” knew this fact, but chose to ignore it in its reporting. No responsibility was placed on Petroecuador: Petroecuador has been the sole operator of oil fields in Ecuador since 1992 and has compiled a well-documented record of environmental mismanagement. In addition, Petroecuador has repeatedly stated that it is responsible for the remaining cleanup work that is required in the Ecuadorian Amazon and it readily admits that it has not cleaned up the sites allocated to them under the remediation action plan 15 years ago. Again, “60 M...

Speculators in the market have, rightly, been targeted for thier use of the Enron-loophole to basically compete (unfairly) in a market that is mixed between highly-regulated (see integrated oil companies) and unregulated players (see commodity brokers). This imbalance of power has led to the free flow of capital to a market from sources that a decade ago largely abandoned investment in oil companies -- in favor of the speculative bubble of the dotcom boom. That lack of capital infusion -- and the capital-intensive nature of the oil & gas business -- led to the mega-mergers of 1999 - 2001. Bear in mind that even with all that merger activity among the multi-nationals, their true competition is with national oil companies -- basically branches of their nation-state governments: Pemex (Mexico), Petrobras (Brazil), Pedevesas (Venezuala), Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Cinoco (China) ... you get the picture. On the one end, you have national oil companies -- either in OPEC or non-aligned ...

I drive a hybrid -- a made-in-the-USA, Ford Escape Hybrid. I get 32-35 MPG in normal mixed driving. My former car only got 15 MPG (on a good day), so my fuel usage has been cut in half. The economic impact? Here's a breakdown of how that impacts my bottom line: Basically, gas has to get to over $5.75/gallon for me to get back to where my annual fuel bill was 2 years ago. The savings on gas have already paid for the so-called "premium" of buying a hybrid (vs. a standard gas-powered vehicle)... and by the end of this year, will have paid for the extended service package I also bought -- which takes care of all the maintenance costs. (Well, actually, the tax credit I got for buying the car paid for that... but assuming I hadn't gotten any tax incentive, which you don't on any model that has had sales over 50K in a year.) All this means is that I'm better able to absorb the higher costs for food and other items -- to a point, of course. Price (gallon) Old Car Hyb...

Some musings on the current $100/BBL oil world... I think that, too often, we tend to be unmindful of history when looking at things that are part of our everyday lives -- things that we take for granted today. Few people give any thought to how it has come to be that w e can easily, safely and relatively cheaply fill our personal cars with gas. Imagine if you had to engineer a delivery system (from scratch) that could take the process of finding, transporting and processing a natural resource so that it basically is intertwined into all our society's energy and chemical consumption needs. It's taken more than a century of development -- and change -- to get us to the point where we expect to be able to take a toxic, flameable and volatile substance and put it into the tanks of our personal vehicles... all the while thinking nothing of it (other than to complain about the price). The complexity of having this global delivery system is only matched by the demand for the commodit...