Thread: Oil Prices, Good News, For Awile Anyway

There is an even better reason to not ship oil by rail tanker cars. Just Google Lac Magantic to see what potentially can happen when you combine oil shipments by rail with deregulation. Guess who was left holding the bag financially for that one, the tax payers not the company. The company when bankrupt and you can't get blood from a stone.

Bob

Originally Posted by gooser

$1.78 here , makes me want my '95 F-250 with 3" body lift , 6" suspension lift , and 39.5" super swamper boggers on a 14" offset wheel back !!!

paid $178 again , been pretty steady between $1.78-$2.02 around me ..

As far trains and pipelines go it's simple. If extracting the oil costs you $40/barrel and refineries are willing to pay you $100/barrel when it arrives in Texas, or New Brunswick, or Vancouver, then you can bring it to them by train and have a nice profit. If they are only willing to pay you $50/barrel you're working at a loss so what you do is fire your workers, let the train company ferry something else, and live off the nest egg you've accumulated during the fat years until oil extraction becomes profitable again.

Now, if you are going to spend $7 billion on a pipeline to replace your train transportation you have to be sure that you'll be shipping enough oil through it to warrant that investment. It's insanity to invest $7 billion in infrastructure using which will keep you to losing money.

The environmental effect is not complicated either. Both the train transportation and the pipeline transportation need to include the full costs of the associated environmental damages and risks. If they don't somebody is stealing from the people who end up paying for the cleanup. The exact same thing with the extraction - if they don't pay the full cost of the pollution they cause the $40/barrel cost is fake and it's only that cheap because the taxpayers subsidize the oil company.

The numbers are made up for illustrative purposes, but profiting on the back of taxpayers through externalizing costs is fact. It may not go forever though.

Originally Posted by gugi

It may not go forever though.

Nothing does!

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Nothing does!

Yer so rong!

You must of lost your guns and with that the ability to protect your Bibles - it says right there some things do go forever!

Even if a Okie lost their gun, all they would have to do is knock on a neighbors door and they would loan one...the Bibles stay protected

Originally Posted by gugi

Yer so rong!

You must of lost your guns and with that the ability to protect your Bibles - it says right there some things do go forever!

Preach it gugi, sounds like you got religion again!

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Preach it gugi, sounds like you got religion again!

Always!

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

or

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Also there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE_oIIIwWl0