American gasoline prices are now climbing at a rate of a penny($0.01) a day

(.. where's the cheap gas in town...)

It probably will.

1 litre @ 88p ~~ $6,095.12!!!

..6.26283 USD, actually. So quit our bitchin'.

Of course, in general we have more efficient cars.

Honda is SO dropping the ball right now. They need to go back to their 60's "bikes are fun & cute" campaign, and away from garish crotch rockets for 23 years old jocks. With gas prices soaring, motorbikes seem rational and smart again.

any info on the percentage of UKers who use public trans compared to USers?

also our policemen are not armed:

http://www.guthrie.k12.ok.us/~jcleaver/beefeaters.jpg

Interest rates be rising, too.

You're not wrong aimless, but the market does push in favour of more efficient transportation now, and also towards locally produced goods. So fewer air freighted sugar snap peas.

Aimless OTM — I get occasional emails from UPS saying, "Oh, remember those overnight packages you sent last week? Here are your revised charges for those."

well, yeah, that's what i was referring to in my original post. here in portland, bus/train fare has gone up twice(from $1.30 in late august to $1.40 on friday) just to cover fuel costs, so err'body paying the price for this.

at least they have a lot of electric ones in San Fran

http://www.film-o-holic.com/widerscreen/pictures/1999/4_1999_hullu_maailma_pic8.jpg

"we want all the gas. give us the gasoline, and you can just walk away..."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050907/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices_46

"Oil Prices Fall; Gasoline Prices Decline"

Next media-worthy high will be $80 for christmas. February 2006 at the very latest.

....The weighted average price for all three grades surged more than 38 cents to nearly $3.04 a gallon between Aug. 26 and Sept. 9, said Trilby Lundberg, who publishes the semimonthly Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations around the country.

[...]

Adjusted for inflation, the nation's previous high weighted average for all three grades was $1.38 a gallon in March 1981. That would be $3.03 in current dollars...

to the few economists in our crowd, these numbers look right to you, right?

I'm not an economist but my econ teacher in grad school (a commie from Russia, actually) always pointed us to bls.gov for inflation stuff. Which would mean that we passed historically high prices four cents ago.

September 11, 2005
Storm Stretches Refiners Past a Perilous Point
By JAD MOUAWAD

For the nation's oil refiners, Hurricane Katrina was a disaster long in the making.

Analysts and industry executives had for years feared the consequences of a storm ramming into the country's largest energy hub - a complex infrastructure that spans most of the coastline between Texas and Alabama, where nearly half of the nation's refineries are located.

Hurricane Katrina confirmed the worst predictions. Wreaking havoc along the coastal states, drowning New Orleans and leaving many dead, the storm shut down nearly all the gulf's offshore oil and gas production for over a week. Racing to restore operations, the industry has brought about 60 percent of that back.

But even more crucially, it knocked off a dozen refineries at the peak of summer demand, sending oil prices higher and gasoline prices to inflation-adjusted records.

The events of the last two weeks have demonstrated how close to the edge the country's refining system had been operating, even before the storm. Because the last American refinery was built nearly 30 years ago - with only a single new one now in the works - the problem is unlikely to disappear quickly.

As a consequence, even though crude oil prices have fallen back to pre-Katrina levels, prices for gasoline, heating oil, diesel and jet fuel are expected to remain higher than they were before the storm for a much longer period of time.

"There is now a greater realization that we don't have much extra capacity," said Edward H. Murphy, a refining specialist at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade and lobbying group. "It doesn't take a Katrina, but even a smaller event can create a dislocation in the market. Disasters like this can give you a billboard on the need to address this. We need more capacity."

The rapid run-up in oil prices over the last two years has translated into a boon for refiners after many years of meager returns. This year, the refining margin - the difference between the cost of buying crude oil and selling refined end products - has exceeded $20 a barrel, far above the long-term average of $6. That has meant record profits for oil companies and refiners and above-average stock performance on Wall Street.

With profits soaring, the nation's refiners are now being blamed by many drivers and politicians for contributing to the run-up in prices. Indeed, to critics of the industry, the higher profits are evidence of a policy to intentionally limit refining capacity to improve the bottom line.

"Oil companies have jacked up gasoline prices through a simple mechanism: reducing inventories and refining capacity," said Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, an advocacy group, whose views are widely shared by industry opponents.

"They are supposed to compete and bring the lowest price to consumers," Mr. Court said. "But the truth is that a small number of oil companies cheat by working together by artificially reducing supplies."

But that argument misses the point, said Bob Slaughter, the president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.

"What's happened can be explained by the higher cost of crude oil, the difficulties in building new refineries and the disaster that cut right through the heart of the industry," Mr. Slaughter said.

Currently, four major refineries, owned by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Murphy Oil, are either flooded or without power, and are likely to be out of commission for several weeks, perhaps months. Together, these refine 880,000 barrels a day, or 5 percent of domestic capacity. "It's very significant," said Colm McDermott, an oil analyst at John S. Herold Inc. The loss is equal to 1 percent of the world's refining capacity. "It's a global market and that's certainly enough to have an impact on a global level."

As many as 15 other refineries, also affected by the storm, are resuming production, but some are still operating at limited capacity.

"There's going to be a lot of pressure on these people to get things up and running and deal with the maintenance issues as they come up," said James W. Jones, a vice president at Turner, Mason & Company, a refining consultancy in Dallas.

Many parts of the industry are recovering rapidly. The most damage offshore was sustained by Royal Dutch Shell, which said Friday that its production, usually about 450,000 barrels a day, would be down by 40 percent through the end of the year.

But even as oil and gas production returns in the gulf, the time that it will take refineries to get back to full speed will be a key factor in determining how long product prices will remain elevated.

Under normal conditions, because of the close proximity of volatile materials, high pressure and fire, restarting a refinery is a dangerous process that can take anywhere between three to seven days.

In the refinery, oil is heated to around 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit, turned into vapor and then collected at various temperatures, creating products that are further refined to remove impurities, allowing for the production of gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel and kerosene.

For the four damaged refineries - three are in the vicinity of New Orleans, and the fourth is in Pascagoula, Miss. - restarting will involve a much longer process. First, power must be restored. Once that happens, generators, pumps and other electrical equipment flooded by brackish water will need to be dried out. Removing salt sediments will add to the ordeal. Then the operators must check that none of their main systems have suffered any structural damage before firing them back up.

So far, none of the refineries have provided an estimate of how long all that will take. In its latest report, Chevron, whose 325,000 barrels-a-day refinery is the largest of the four, said "it will be days before a full estimate of damage is known or when operations can be safely brought back online."

Most Americans now pay more than $3 a gallon for gasoline - matching inflation-adjusted highs reached after the Iranian revolution in the late 1970's and early 1980's and the equivalent, on a per-barrel basis, to $126. Oil prices, which touched a high of $70.85 a barrel last week, now trade around $64 a barrel, still about $20 short of the record set in 1981.

"If we lose three or four refiners for two or three months, that shortfall is going to be very difficult to make up," said William E. Greehey, the chief executive of Valero, the nation's largest independent refiner. "I don't know how anyone can blame it on us when we've just had the worst natural disaster in the United States' history."

The refining outages prompted an international response from industrialized nations to send emergency stocks of oil and gasoline to the United States to plug the shortfall.

But that is only a temporary solution to a crisis that has been waiting to erupt for years.

Since the 1980's, the number of refiners in the United States has been cut in half. From a peak of 324 in 1981, the industry has shrunk to 149 as the smaller, less efficient and less profitable operators once protected by price controls closed, leaving mostly larger companies in place.

Refining capacity has fallen about 10 percent, to 17 million barrels a day, while oil consumption rose by 33 percent over the same 24-year period, to 20.8 million barrels a day.

Meanwhile, refiners have been increasing their skill in turning crude into useful products; efficiency improved by 27 percent between 1981 and 2004. Still, the difference must be made up by direct imports of refined products, with gasoline imports now at 1 million barrels a day.

As their numbers dwindled, most remaining refiners expanded their plants and added equipment to process more oil. Many refiners now typically run at 95 percent of capacity, a level that is dangerously high and that has led to a growing number of accidents in recent years.

In March, for example, a blast at BP's Texas City refinery, the country's third-largest, killed 15 and injured 170 people. The company was blamed by investigators with the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board for "systemic lapses."

Following the agency's recommendation, BP appointed an independent panel last month to review the "safety culture" of its American refining operations.

Only one project to build a new refinery is currently under way. For the last six years, Glenn McGinnis said he has been struggling to line up the permits, funding and oil supplies to build a refinery from scratch in a remote patch in Southwest Arizona.

"The fundamental reason why there has not been a new refinery built for years is really two reasons - economics and uncertainty," Mr. McGinnis said.

Traditionally, the profit margin for refineries has averaged about 6 percent, a rate of return too low to encourage much new investment. Added to that is the lengthy process involved in securing the permits from state and federal agencies. "If you take permits, and engineering, and building," Mr. McGinnis said, "you're talking about a 10-year horizon from the time you decide to build to the day the refinery is completed."

Another issue that has slowed expansion, refiners said, was the cost of complying with environmental regulations set in the 1990's under the Clean Air Act. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that refiners have spent $47 billion over the last decade to meet carbon-emission standards and low-sulfur regulations, with more investments needed through 2007. That, refiners say, is money not spent to raise capacity.

It has been cheaper to add refining capacity through acquisitions rather than new projects. Valero recently bought Premcor for $10,000 a barrel of capacity, a price many analysts deemed high. But that is well below the $16,000 a barrel that Arizona Clean Fuels, Mr. McGinnis' project, expects to invest.

Elsewhere in the world, some oil producers are planning to build new refineries. Saudi Arabia is one of them. "We cannot keep producing oil with no refineries," Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, told the industry newsletter Petroleum Argus a few months ago. "There is a limit."

While helpful, such moves abroad would mostly serve to shift the country's increasing reliance on foreign oil producers to a greater dependence on refiners abroad.

"We are going to be importing more products," Mr. Murphy of the American Petroleum Institute said. "That is a certainty if we don't expand our capacity. But the problem there is that you've changed one form of dependency for another."

Barnaby J. Feder contributed reporting for this article.

i didn't see it, but was the whole "ExxonMobil just claimed $10B in profit for the last quarter, highest of any company ever" thing in there?

a summation of that article in one sentence (something those eco-plundering wingnuts have been pointing out for the past few years, I might add...)

Because the last American refinery was built nearly 30 years ago - with only a single new one now in the works - the problem is unlikely to disappear quickly.

Since we're on the subject of adjusting for inflation, maybe it hasn't been a record number (excluding the fact that there's miles of gray area in determining corporate profit numbers on a balance sheet/income statement, haha Enron et al.)

What direction can I look in this country without concluding that we are totally fucked?

"We could be looking at gasoline lines and $4 gas, maybe even $5 gas, if this thing does the worst it could do," said energy analyst Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover. "This storm is in the wrong place. And it's absolutely at the wrong time," said Beutel.

shit. i still have a year before i can get a different car and go biodiesel.

And people mocked me for not driving.

Newsnight last night said that 25% of the USA's refineries are in the path of Hurrican Rita, though, so maybe moaning will be allowed in the next couple of weeks.

it's kinda cool that the prius comes with a built-in ashtray, for the environmentally conscious smoker.

http://www.toyota.com/images/vehicles/prius/accessories/ashtray_lg.jpg

yes, and the transportation infrastructure, economic infrastructure, physical landscape & relevant distances of america & england are exactly the same.

when i still held the job when i started this thread, no.

i am required to have an automobile in my current job, so i now make a daily commute of 20 miles. Fortunately, my non-commute work-related mileage is comped, but at a rate that usually lags behind changes in gasoline prices.

I have a bike now(thank God), so i can tool around on that.

Problem is that Portland mass-transit shuts down at 12:30am on some nights. You go see a show, you probably ain't taking the bus home.

contractor tech stuff. i go hither & yon for a sizable tech company in one of the suburbs.

also, my city & state have some financial troubles...

also, my city & state have some financial troubles...

no, it's called "different economic priorities."

commuting sux.

don't i know it. the stuff i do requires me physically be there. almost a facilities-type position.

no, it's called "different economic priorities."

there's that. there's also the "argumentative state legislation filled with urban liberals vs the representatives from the rural hickville of the rest of the state," but Cas can probably articulate it better than I.

seriously though, if my work gets done, who cares? ip phones cost just as much as those fancy office telephones and i could pretend like i'm just down the hall, a phone call away. high speed internet keeps me on top of most things. i'm on the wrong side of the firewall sometimes, which sucks, but lucky for me, most of the work on that side of the firewall sucks. (most, not all tho.)

things that suck are:
-kids and wife occasionally overstepping bounds and not leaving me alone.
-being too close to responsibility in my off hours.
-being too close to leisure in my on hours.
-no office social banter etc., loneliness, cabin fever.
-seeing my family too much. [i mean that in the nicest way possible.]
-being in charge of my own phone/network/computer... having to deal with this shit and PAY for this shit when it breaks or needs upgrading. (i'm a capable computer guy, but it still sucks.)
-office politics get a little more complicated cause there's no face time where you can really read the situation. paranoia can be a very bad thing.
-out of sight, out of mind. people forget you. so you constantly have to remind people that, "hey, i need something to do jackasses!" in order to keep fresh in the boss's and client's mind that, "oh yeah, msp rules, give him a raise!" or "yeah, we can't let msp go because he's the only one that knows anything about how XYZ works. we'll put him on ABC to keep him around."

m.

I don't know how much of a chain effect that problem (not even factoring in off-line refineries or anything) will have on people elsewhere.

I've never worked for a company that wasn't willing to work around my not having a car.. even if it meant coming in on the weekend to make up for it (which can be fun sometimes.. no one around, etc.) And I've been contracting/commuting over to Redmond (at M$%$%$s45454ft) from Seattle for well over two years now.

After all, gas is down to $2.09 out here!

This will improve a bit on last year's $300+ monthly bills, plus he finally listened to me and we've put up plastic window sheeting and curtains for some of the larger bay ones.

San Francisco, CA -- If the price of oil shot to $100 a barrel tomorrow, which American cities would be able to survive economically? SustainLane, the online resource for healthy, sustainable living (www.SustainLane.com), announced this week the ten U.S. cities best suited to withstand the shock of an oil crisis; those whose quality of life and economy would remain unspoiled in the face of exorbitant gas prices. According to the list, New York City would be the best place to live and work under these circumstances. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, would be the most vulnerable to such an event.

The top ten best prepared cities are, in order:

1. New York, NY
2. Boston, MA
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Chicago, IL
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Portland, OR
7. Honolulu, HI
8. Seattle, WA
9. Baltimore, MD
10.Oakland, CA

"Your oil dollars paid for my oil armour! HAHAHAH!!"

Seriously, DC Metro is fubared if it ever comes to that, unless you live and work in the city, or maybe in Arlington or Old Town Alexandria.