Gooner

My thought process is fairly simple. In the Months since the world voluntarily decided to limit who it bought oil/gas products from how much has use gone down? I’ll admit I don’t have those numbers, but let’s say 33% for argument’s sake. Now due to the nature of supply markets the change probably didn’t impact for months, but I seem to remember oil going up quite fast. As the supply chain finally started to reveal a change in where everything comes from, the oil reserves were tapped(thanks Biden) to keep oil on the market. Other than demand having odd spikes like toilet paper in 2020 at localized levels demand has been generally met by supply. Yet costs for oil are up 57%. Sounds like taking advantage of a supply/demand curve to me.

Now I’m not saying this isn’t within the oil companies remit. I’m not saying Biden Administration hasn’t stapled it’s feet to the ground unnecessarily. But claiming an oil CEO is right and blameless is like telling me John Laughter knows the best recovery strategy for Flight Ops.

I’m sure the oil executive blames the government for not subsidizing more exploration, and blaming executive compensation taxation. Lots of government blame for capitalists.

Bottlen0se

This is a very short sighted comment, and I hear this quite often from a certain crowd. If I had to guess, in the early 1900’s there were plenty of people with this mindset that said airplanes were a pipe dream.. or going to space.. etc. Big money is betting on EVs. In fact, I will bet that my children who are 2 and under wont even be driving vehicles by the time they are of driving age because in 10 years from now new vehicles will come standard with high fidelity autopilots. The world is changing fast. I am putting my money where my mouth is.

JustNarced

Self driving will be a privilege for those that can afford the insurance.

Bottlen0se

Actually I would argue that self driving, as it improves will likely decrease insurance costs. That’s one of the goals of Tesla. Do you think in a hypothetical situation, Boeing without an autopilot would be cheaper or more expensive to insure?

Trip7

He saying it's a pipe dream in the near future not the long term. Putting your money into Green Energy/EV equities now is like putting your money into Airlines in the 60s, or Internet stocks in 2000s. Unless you happen to pick the winner and hold thru out a mostly VOLATILE 20 year period, you're bound to lose your shirt, shoes and socks like Cypto folks.

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JustNarced

I probably wrote that wrong. What i meant to get across is that those that want to drive their own cars will have to pay dearly. Everyone else will summon and schedule with an app.

Trip7

Even without the Russia/Ukraine War Oil would have been over $100 a barrel. Let me give you a quick and dirty breakdown of the oil industry, there's upstream(drilling) midstream(transport ie pipeline/shipping) and downstream(refining). The industry is supplied constrained at upstream and downstream. Both this a helacious amount of capital to increase capacity/production. Moreover, it takes at least 2 years before those capital outlays meaningfully increases supply.

To make matters worse, refineries are a lower margin sector of the industry where profits are decided not by the price of oil but by this forum's favorite metric, the "crack spread". The COVID19 induced downturn forced many Refineries and who Refinery enterprises to go out of business. So now we have a severe shortage of refining capability thats driving... Ahem...crack spreads(difference between price paid per barrel of oil bought vs sold to gas stations etc) thru the roof and increasing prices even more. Now the poor gas station owners, mostly small business franchisees, where an overwhelming amount of their profit comes from convience items in the store, are the scapegoat for the Biden Administration, which seems to either be Brain dead with no understanding of economics or just playing blame politics for the mid terms.

There's only one way out of this mess and it's going to be painful. The Biden Administration needs to work with the Oil companies and make it wortg their while to drill more and build more refineries. Simply put, the Biden Administration needs to implement policies that gives Oil company executives and BOD confidence that they will get a reasonable Return of Invested Capital over the next 7-10 years for spending Billions on growth.



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DeltaboundRedux

Pilotless airplanes, like driverless cars, are the planes/cars of the future….and always will be.

Everyone thinks pilotless planes in the near future are ridiculous; somehow though, cars in infinitely more complex operating environments are just around the corner.

Uh uh. Sure. If there’s that kind of quantum leap in AI, 90% of all workers are instantly redundant and out of work forever.

chrisreedrules

There is a very logical argument for just this. Very smart people in those industries are warning people now that this is coming. While I don’t agree with much of his politics, Andrew Yang got 1 thing right. We’re too busy dithering with the here and now when we should be looking at what’s coming that will change our society forever: Automation and A.I. making human workers obsolete.

As for green energy and EV’s, I think they’re good ideas. I just think there needs to be some reality injected into the conversation. We aren’t going to see any meaningful shift away from fossil fuels for the next 20-30 years. Many of us will likely be gone by then. Personally I think solar power is the future, I just think the way we currently harvest it and store it will have to be transformed. Maybe space-based solar arrays and a way to beam the energy back to earth to be stored in large batteries? Hell I don't know. It all sounds like science fiction, but as another poster above pointed out, so was air travel and nuclear power at one point.

Gooner

So the oil companies have outsourced refining and gas stations, then need governments to make it worth their while and guarantee them a decent rate of return. No wonder you’re investing in energy. Your investment strategy is to have the government insure all downside risks of energy, let the corporations shed the losing parts, then reap the profits with stock buy backs and dividends. And this is our government’s fault somehow?

Look, I’m not a bleeding heart liberal, I’m not a communist. Western capitalism is the best system going, but to cry for the oil companies to be assisted to make ends meat and our government as the root of all evil is so over played. I think you are right about some pain, a calling card of free markets. The world is dealing with an unexpected recovery from a pandemic nobody did well with, an untimely war in a high resource part of the world. Pretty sure there’s not a QRH for that.

The frustrating part is, they will get all the assistance you want. They will make far more than a reasonable profit, stock buy backs a sure bet. They will continue to not assist in any kind of infrastructure improvements to profit from changing technologies. We will repeat this again as we do every 5-7 years it seems.