oil price

A person might think from looking at news reports that our oil problems are gone, but oil prices are still high.Figure 1. US crude oil prices (based on average prices paid by US refiners for all grades of oil based on EIA data) converted to 2012$ using CPI-Urban data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.In fact, the new “tight oil”...[read more]

Marynchenko Oleksandr/Shutterstock

Instead of US consumers facing $5 gasoline this summer, as some analysts had predicted, we now find prices slipping well below $4 per gallon as oil prices respond to weakening demand, a stronger dollar, and steady supply growth.  Yet as welcome as this is, it's largely the result of a mountain of bad news: Not only does...[read more]

Vadim Ponomarenko/Shutterstock

Last week the Energy Information Administration (EIA) told us that U.S. crude oil production in the first quarter of the year topped 6 million barrels per day (bbl/d) for the first time in 14 years. EIA’s chart:EIA’s analysis:“Strong growth in U.S. crude oil production since the fourth quarter of 2011 is due mainly to higher output from...[read more]

Vladru/Shutterstock

North Dakota recently passed Alaska as the second leading oil producing state in the United States. It boasts one of the lowest unemployment totals in the nation, a fact that is driven by the state’s small population and very large job of building the infrastructure required to extract oil from the Bakken shale formation.[read more]

Norebbo/Shutterstock

Steady ClimbSince I first started writing about energy in 2005, I have said many times that my view on oil prices is long-term, and that if I projected five years into the future, I foresaw oil prices being higher than they were in the present.The chart below — using spot prices from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) for both...[read more]

In an interview with Austrian newspaper Kurier at the end of the month, OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem al-Badri went so far as to declare that “$100 a barrel doesn’t hurt the world economy at all.” As oil consuming nations struggle to climb out of global recession, does $100 per barrel constitute a reasonable price? Not likely.[read more]

Generally speaking, we discuss the recent article on price gouging appearing in Regulation magazine, and we agree that even if price hikes after emergencies are troubling, there just isn’t a better way to manage post-disaster private decisions about appropriate prices for goods and services than letting buyers and sellers work out prices in the usual manner.[read more]

Daniel Weiss, Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, offers his thoughts here: The $100 barrier was broken due to the same factors that lead to $97-a-barrel price levels this past Thanksgiving week. First, world demand continues to escalate. The International Energy Agency projects that oil demand will...[read more]