Long time ago we learned that Canada had found oil. It
was said that there was enough oil to provide North America with the oil needed
for the next one hundred years. This oil was rather dirty and difficult
to extract.
Next, new oil was found in North Dakota. It was said
that this was easier oil to extract and there was way more oil available to
pump then in Canada.
Sometime later, another even larger oil field was found in
Texas.
Last summer when the price of oil dropped, pumping was shut
down in Wyoming for the first time in years. A mechanic told us that he
never expected to have the maintenance shop where he worked to ever
close. It did. We told him that we would see what advice a friend in
the oil business could give him. That friend told us to advise him to go
back to school to work on electric turbines.
Now oil prices are up again. Do the Saudis control oil
prices? Do we by how much we pump? Someone told me that it is not
the oil that controls the price, it is the amount that refineries are able to
refine that controls the price. We cannot refine very much oil here as it
pollutes too much. Years ago, someone told me that gas company
CEO’s would get together to determine gas prices. People who own stock
in oil, love high oil prices as their stock is worth more. When prices go up, oil field workers love it as its job security. When oil prices go up, consumers complain and blame the government.
Recently President Biden released some oil reserves and
encouraged U.S. oil companies to pump more oil, but they aren't being very
cooperative--they're the most influential "member" of OPEC now, since
they (our country) pumps more oil than any other country on earth. So the
more oil costs, the more profit our oil companies make. They would prefer
to sell at as high a price as possible, so why should they pump more oil just
because Biden wants it? They would prefer that Biden DIDN'T release any
oil. On the other hand, even if they wanted to pump more oil, they
can't just immediately drill more wells and pump more oil right away.
The U.S. may not have been allowed to sell crude oil until
2015. We're now a net exporter. But we also have a lot of oil refineries
in the U.S. As far as Canadian oil sands, the break-even for extracting
oil is $52/barrel on average, so now that the price of oil has gone back up,
they are probably ramping back up. The US sells a lot of equipment to
them (especially when the price of oil is high). The quality of the oil
sands oil is not that great. Probably not the best environmentally
either, but there are a lot of tar sands.
There is SO much wealth involved. Could oil prices be used as a means for
controlling populations? Would it be good to be free of oil's influence over us...
