By Rod Adams •
August 18, 2008
One of the more important things to understand about Georgia - the small country that recently engaged in a deadly struggle with Russia - is that it is one of the hosts of a relatively new, 1 million barrel per day capacity oil pipeline called Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC). That pipeline was constructed with the active encouragement of the EU and the US starting in the late 1990s despite strenuous objections from Russia.
If you take a look at a map of the [...]
By Rod Adams •
June 9, 2008
On Friday, the benchmark oil price increased by its largest single day total ever, nearly $11.00 per barrel to nearly $140.00. To put that into perspective, the trading price for a barrel of oil in 1998 - just ten years ago - was less than $11.00, Friday’s price change.
Though there are plenty of reasons to believe that oil will never again cost anything close to $11.00 per barrel, there is also a growing recognition that the current state of the oil market bears some resemblance to a number of other over excited markets like Dutch tulips, Internet stocks, and new home prices in Fort Myers or outside Las Vegas. The similarities include daily headlines, constant water cooler discussions, and fears of missing a big boat.
Unlike some of those other bubbles, however, the recent rapid increases in oil prices are painful for almost everyone but those involved in selling or transporting crude oil. Even though they bear the brunt of consumer anger, oil refineries producing gasoline and gasoline retailers are actually being squeezed as badly as most of the rest of us by high prices. The wide spread nature of the pain caused by rapid oil price increases was brought home to me on Sunday as I visited the Newseum in Washington, D. C. and saw that oil prices were front page news on at least half of the world’s Sunday newspapers.
