America’s Own Oil Bank No Help At The Pump

Todays spiraling gas prices appear to be as much America’s fault as well as “Big Oil” or any of the Islamic Oil producing nations.

A large part of the blame can be shouldered by a program established 32 years ago designed to buffer Americans from the threat (imaginary or otherwise) posed by volatile governments in many oil producing nations. President Bush in his State of The Union speech proposed to spend $65 billion from the government’s general fund to double the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

For most Americans, the reserve, where 700 million barrels of oil have been stored since the late 1970s, is mostly an article of faith: Few know that it’s located deep underground in four sites on the Gulf Coast, and because those sites are considered vital to national security, hardly anyone has seen them.

But it’s time to take a closer look at the reserve’s purpose, its usefulness and its cost.

Before we invest another $65 billion in this underground bank of oil, we should ask ourselves what we’re really getting for the money.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve sites are remote and not open to the public.

The oil sits far out of sight, some 2000 feet below ground, in caverns located in thick salt deposits.

The caverns are made by a technique called “solution mining,” which basically involves running water down into the salt and sucking out saltwater until a significant hole has been hollowed.

The salt wraps itself around the oil like plastic, so the caverns don’t leak. They are, in fact, a miracle of salt engineering, and if it were possible to see them, they’d probably be as big a tourist draw as the Hoover Dam.

But the petroleum reserve is pretty much invisible — and so is its ambiguous history.

The government chose to put the oil near the Gulf of Mexico because there are many oil refineries nearby and because shipping is readily available.

The sites are Bryan Mound near Freeport, Texas; Big Hill near Winnie, Texas; West Hackberry near Lake Charles, La.; and Bayou Choctaw near Baton Rouge, La. Most of the oil in the reserve comes from Mexico and the North Sea.

It costs the federal government $21 million a year to maintain the oil reserve, and about 1,150 people work for the oil reserve. About 125 are government employees, and the rest are contracted workers.

The reserve was established in 1975, after the first Arab oil embargo cut exports to the United States, as a way to fight back against any future threats to our energy supply. Some called the reserve our own “oil weapon.”

By the time it was completed in the early 1980s, however, embargoes were no longer a threat. Significant amounts of oil were being traded on the open market, so oil producers could no longer control who bought their oil.

Then the Strategic Petroleum Reserve gained a second life as an insurance policy against oil shortages and high prices.

During the 1991 gulf war, the reserve stood by ready to pour more oil into the market in the event the conflict paralyzed production in the Persian Gulf. By allaying fears of a shortage, it theoretically could keep oil prices from spiking.

Since the election of George W. Bush, administration officials have resisted using the reserve at all.

At the start of the Iraq war, rather than tap into the reserve, the Bush administration asked Saudi Arabia to pledge to put an extra 2.5 million barrels of oil a day on the market, if needed. Ironically, the reserve had been created to free the United States from the influence of foreign oil producers, but our unwillingness to use it created a new type of dependency.

Saudi Arabia has indicated it will work to keep oil prices lower, at least in part to further American diplomatic goals with Iran.

This raises a new question about the reserve: If we didn’t use it in 2003, when it might have come in handy, will we be any more likely to use it once we’ve made it twice as big?

Some people say the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more important as a psychological aid (like the stashes of food survivalists keep in case of catastrophe) than as a practical solution to energy security.

In many ways, it is a relic of cold-war thinking living on even though the very idea of energy security has changed.

We now import about a million barrels of oil a day in the form of goods from China. China imports the oil, uses it to make products, and we depend upon those products.

The reserve can do little to protect us in this more complicated modern world. If we double the size of the reserve, we will be paying $65 billion for more of the same psychological reassurance, and little else.

Rather than increase the size of our petroleum reserve, we should address its problems. One of these became obvious in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita:

The reserve is located on the Gulf Coast where America has 60 per cent of its oil production and refineries. Natural disasters (or terrorist attack) that affects our active energy supply will affect our backup supply as well.

The president’s current doubling plan would keep the entire reserve on the Gulf Coast, which means we would go from having all our eggs in one basket to having paid for twice as many eggs and put them all in the same, hurricane-prone basket.

And then there is the fact that, today, refined gas and diesel make up 60% of our imports. The reserve, on the other hand, stores only crude.

After Katrina, the reserve quickly released 11 million barrels of crude oil, but that couldn’t replace the millions of barrels of gasoline no longer flowing from the area’s refineries.

European tankers filled with gasoline were soon steaming toward the United States — like the “cavalry,” in the words of a government report, the United States is to be its own cavalry, it should have three or four regional reserves of gasoline at various locations around the country.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the reserve is its costs never appear at the pump.

The United States spends about 2 billion dollars a year maintaining the reserve, and billions more filling it, but because the money comes from the general fund, rather than from a “security tax” on gasoline, those costs are hidden from the consumer.

The reserve is only a small part of the larger story of hidden gasoline costs in the United States.

For the last 100 years, the government has used money from the general fund to subsidize energy to keep it as cheap as possible for Americans, ostensibly to encourage economic growth.

Now those hidden costs – which include tax breaks for the oil industry, accounting giveaways, direct subsidies for some oil and gas production and the cost of protecting oil and natural gas shipping lanes (about $39 billion) according to Doug Koplow, who studies energy subsidies for Boston-based Earth Track.

While many Americans feel current gas prices are high, they are in fact much lower than they would be if we counted in the costs of these subsidies, including the cost of maintaining the reserve.

We receive an unitemized bill for the subsidies when we pay our taxes on April 15, but we never see any sign of them at the pump.

Deceptively low gas prices discourage conservation, making Americans more vulnerable to supply disruptions of all sorts.

You could even argue this policy, which encourages Americans to produce 45 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide from auto emissions (even though we own only a third of the cars), is speeding global warming and making hurricanes more likely to swamp the refineries, oil installations and petroleum reserve sites on the Gulf Coast.

Any way you look at it, we need to stop subsidizing supply and start managing energy demand. But even if we determine that we need more oil, or gasoline, in the reserve, we should at least pay for it with a 5- or 10-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline.

2006 was the year that oil prices came close to breaching eighty dollars per barrel. This was despite the fact that there were no significant supply interruptions and oil demand actually fell in industrialized countries.

This raises the question of what caused the spike.It turns out there is good reason to believe that record oil prices may be due to our own strategic oil reserve, which the Bush administration may have been manipulating to drive up prices for the benefit of its clients.

Any finding of manipulation would go far beyond corruption and be close to economic treason. That is because when oil prices increase America must pay more for its imported oil. That increases the trade deficit and our foreign debt.

Alternatively, one can think of price manipulation as the equivalent of a tax increase on American families that is paid to foreign governments, including Iran.

While some small energy scandals are under investigation by Congress, the big enchilada is the strategic oil reserve, which may have been “strategically” manipulated to drive up oil prices. The key to understanding this manipulation is demand and supply and oil storage capacity.

The last three years have seen rapidly rising oil prices, and a tight oil market has meant that even small increases in demand have had large price impacts.

During this period the Bush administration purposely expanded inventories of the strategic oil reserve, which rose from 600 million barrels in May 2003 to 700 million barrels in August 2005. The administration therefore increased demand by 125,000 barrels per day, and oil prices rose from $30 dollars per barrel to $70 dollars.

 

As oil prices rose, Wall Street became increasingly engaged in commodity speculation This is where storage matters. As speculators entered the market the spot price of crude oil rose above the futures price.

However, buying spot oil means taking delivery, which requires storage capacity. By adding to the strategic reserve, the administration not only increased oil demand but also increased storage capacity because the oil it bought was stored in the strategic reserve’s caverns.

This helped speculators by adding storage capacity vital for cornering the market.

The oil market is full of smoke that provides perfect cover for corruption. Every price blip calls forth explanations in terms of Chinese demand, more violence in Nigeria’s delta region, cold weather, threats from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, or heightened tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.

The strategic reserve is the perfect vehicle for corruption since transactions can be cloaked in the veil of national defense.

There’s Chicken Not in The Frying Pan But Nesting in Your Gas Tank

The race is on for sure to reduce America’s dependence on oil which translates to The Middle East oil fields.

Throughout many states farmers have been growing corn and other crops to turn into biodiesel fuel with investors worldwide jumping onto the bandwagon and entrepreneurs galore gathering in their shekels.

Jerry Bagby is typical of the oil men who are prospecting for a fortune in the Midwestern biofuels boom: He’s convinced there’s oil in these hills. He’s found a well that few others are pumping.

Bagby and a longtime friend have cobbled together $5 million building a new biodiesel plant on the croplands outside a southeast Missouri town. They’re betting that their company, Global Fuels, can hit paydirt by exploiting a generally overlooked natural resource that’s abundant in these parts — chicken fat.

There’s a virtual gusher of the stuff at a nearby Tyson Foods poultry plant. The low-quality fat is shipped out of state to be rendered and used as a cheap ingredient in pet food, soap and other products.

Bagby and his partner, Harold Williams, are planing to refine the gooey substance, mix it with soybean oil and produce about 3 million gallons of biodiesel annually.

Today, only a tiny fraction of U.S. biodiesel is made from chicken fat, but this seems likely to change. The rising cost of soybean oil — which accounts for roughly 90 percent of all biodiesel fuel stock — is pushing the industry to exploit cheap and plentiful animal fats.

The nation’s biggest meat corporations have taken notice. Tyson Foods announced in November that it had established a renewable-energy division that will be up and running this year. Perdue Farms and Smithfield Foods Tyson’s competitors, are making similar moves.

As meatpackers enter the field, they bring massive amounts of fuel stock, which could make biodiesel cheaper and more plentiful.

The shift to animal fat as a fuel stock could be key to making the budding biodiesel industry a reliable fuel source for U.S. trucking fleets, said Vernon Eidman, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota who has studied the biofuels industry extensively.

Eidman estimates that within five years the United States will produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel and that half of it will be made from animal fat. By that time, soybean-based biodiesel will account for about 20 percent of the total, he said.

For fuel refiners like Bagby, the allure of animal fat is clear. Soybean oil costs 33 cents a pound, while chicken fat costs 19 cents. He plans to include soybean oil in his blend only because it adds necessary lubrication for engine parts.

“Soybean oil is more expensive than other products, so we just use enough of it to make the system run clean,” Bagby said, gesturing toward a row of pipes and vats being installed in his new refinery.

For companies such as Tyson, the attraction is simple. The nation’s biggest meat company, Tyson is also the biggest producer of leftover fat from chicken, cattle and hogs.

Tyson is keeping the specifics of its renewable-fuels division under tight wraps. But Jeff Webster, the company’s vice president, told a recent investment conference that the potential is clear: Tyson produces about 2.3 billion pounds of chicken fat annually from its poultry plants. That’s about 300 million gallons that could be converted to fuel.

The market for biodiesel and ethanol started to boom in August 2005, after passage of the federal Energy Policy Act, experts say. The bill set a standard requiring the United States to use 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels annually by 2012.

While it’s always been cheaper, animal fat was initially overlooked as a biodiesel fuel stock because of its uneven quality, Eidman said.

When the energy bill passed, soybean oil was already widely sold as a food additive. Biodiesel refiners could depend on its quality because the oil was marketed and certified under strict guidelines, Eidman said.

Animal fat also has technical drawbacks. It clouds up more at higher temperatures than soy-based biodiesel, which means it might thicken when used in colder areas, Eidman said. That might limit distribution to areas where temperatures don’t often drop below about 40 degrees.

Although these factors have kept animal fat in the background, the biodiesel industry has hit a turning point.

Increasing demand for soybean oil as a fuel and as a food is driving the price up, so it’s starting to make economic sense to invest in new technology to process animal fat into usable fuel stock.

Tyson and Perdue are experimenting with biodiesel, and both have started using it in their trucking fleets.

Perdue, based in Salisbury, Md., is also selling soybean oil as a biodiesel fuel stock through its grain and oilseed division. The company said this summer it was studying plans to build biofuel plants or invest in others.

Smithfield has established its own biofuel division. Smithfield BioEnergy is studying how to turn hog waste into fuel and has started producing biodiesel from vegetable oil. The company didn’t comment on the division, but recent financial filings show that the biodiesel program is still losing money because of start-up costs.

Having a massive new source of fuel stock is a welcome development for the biodiesel industry, said Amber Thurlo Pearson, a spokeswoman for the National Biodiesel Board.

“More biodiesel in the marketplace could help make biodiesel’s cost even more competitive with diesel fuel,” Pearson said.

The board estimates that U.S. biodiesel production is doubling to tripling annually, going from 25 million gallons in 2004 to 75 million gallons in 2005. The final tally for 2006 should be between 150 and 225 million, it said.

Biodiesel costs about $1 a gallon more to produce than conventional diesel, but federal tax breaks for fuel distributors help keep that cost from consumers.

Bagby said his plant would be running by the end of January. His equipment can refine soybean oil, cottonseed oil and animal fat. That gives him flexibility to use whatever is cheapest on the commodity markets. His first batches will be made from soybean oil because it’s easiest to calibrate the equipment.

After that? Soybean oil has a long way to drop before it’s as affordable as chicken fat.

“You can see the difference in cost,” he said. There was nothing mentioned about Colonel Saunders.

Take Heart Republicans, Mr. Pope Has a Lesson For You

Seattle, WA-Richard Pope says he needs a break. Running unsuccessfully for elected office 10 times in 11 years will do that to a man.

His most recent loss was this week, a run for King County District Court judge that gave him his best election numbers ever.

Failure is not on Pope’s mind, though. Every defeat gave him a chance to highlight issues, he said, such as what he sees as unfair port taxes and county property assessments. In some of the races, he was the only person willing to take on an entrenched incumbent.

“If I had been totally humiliated in something, I would have taken that as a message to never try this again,” Pope said. “I don’t think I’ve been humiliated.”

Pope, a Bellevue attorney, has run for just about every level of government, including two campaigns for attorney general, three runs for Port of Seattle commissioner, one for King County prosecutor and another for Shoreline water commissioner.

In half the races, he didn’t make it out of the primary, and until this year had never received more than 38 percent of the vote.

But in September Pope won a three-way primary in a race to unseat longtime Eastside judge Mary Ann Ottinger, who had been censured twice and then suspended by the state Supreme Court for a failure to notify some defendants of their rights. He faced substitute judge Frank LaSalata in this week’s general election.

The results are not final, but Pope will probably end up with a vote percentage in the mid-40s — his best showing. And he said he helped boot out a judge with a poor disciplinary record. “I had the idea going into this race that I could beat Judge Ottinger, and I guess I did,” he said.

Pope’s campaigns often hit serious obstacles. He usually runs as a Republican but hasn’t received much support from party leaders. In some races, the Municipal League has rated him poor or unqualified, and in this year’s judge race he also had to explain a history of sanctions and fines for his conduct as an attorney.

For all his eagerness, Pope is not the most prolific local political candidate. Mike The Mover, for one, has run for office at least 15 times, including a bid in the U.S. Senate primary this year.

But unlike Mover, who runs partly to drum up business for his moving company, Pope says he runs to win and has received a couple of million votes over the years, including primary and general elections.

For now, though, it’s time to leave the yard signs at home.”I don’t know what to think about what I will or won’t do in the future,” he said. “I’ll probably wait a while and see.”

Source: Seattle Times

“Pimp” Your Ride? No, Not These Drivers Whatever the Cost

Bubblegum and baling wire sure won’t cut it with these drivers; yes, there’s no ladies from The Red Hat Society needed either. If you’re wishing for more then “pimping” your ride, please consider the following:

The sticker on the window of a 2006 Range Rover Sport HSE lists a few choice selling points: a child seat sensor, voice-activated controls and heated windshield washer jets — all for an asking price of $59,350.

A more comprehensive list for buyers to consider might read something like this: $1,741 for a new headlight, $600 to replace a cracked windshield — and the instant respect of valets and your little brother’s friends.

Call it the financial spreadsheet of the luxury car buyer.

It’s a calculus more of us find ourselves making. Luxury vehicle sales in the United States have nearly doubled over the past decade, to 1.5 million in 2006, according to Edmunds.com, a consumer automotive Web site. For example. about 50,000 new luxury models are registered in the Washington DC area every year, according to R.L. Polk & Co., a Michigan firm tracking the auto industry.

Many owners quickly learn, however, that the higher cost of owning a premium ride doesn’t end with the sticker price. There are fancy-but-finicky electrical gadgets and heftier insurance premiums because of expensive parts, according to auto quality and insurance experts.

And yet, luxury automakers such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW post record sales year after year, even as non-luxury brands close the gap in quality and reliability. “There really are no bad cars or trucks sold right now,” said George C. Peterson, president of the marketing consultancy Auto Pacific Inc. “The range in research ratings . . . has narrowed consistently for the past 20 years.”

That raises an obvious question: Why are consumers choosing to upgrade to premium brands when they have more opportunities than ever to get the same quality for less money?

Market researchers say the leveling of the playing field in terms of quality is exactly what’s driving people to luxury brands. Because there’s less difference in overall quality, consumers find other reasons to buy a car, said Wes Brown, an analyst with Iceology, an auto industry consultancy in Los Angeles.

“There’s an expectation of quality whether I’m spending $20,000 or $100,000,” he said. “There are other things I’m looking for, like the power of the brand. Is it worth it to me? Do I like how it makes me feel about my station in life?” Brown said. “People nowadays are looking to have an emotional connection with their vehicles.”

Ellis Covington, 37, who runs a mortgage company in Glen Burnie,MD owns two sedans made by Mercedes, a brand he has long revered.

“It’s personal,” he said of his preference for luxury vehicles. “It’s what’s ingrained in your mind.”

Covington also owns a Hummer H2 he bought on impulse and has his eye on a third Mercedes.

Sleek styling and sophisticated features, such as 17-inch Belize wheels and a finished Burl Walnut dashboard, have always separated luxury cars from their more pedestrian cousins.

But what increasingly sets luxury cars apart are technological gizmos such as adaptive cruise control (it adjusts the car’s speed relative to the car in front of you), Bluetooth wireless technology (so you can leave that cellphone ear piece at home), and voice-activated controls (so you don’t have to lift a finger).

Living on the cutting edge, however, comes at a price. The very gadgets that make luxury cars special can become gremlins that, in some makes, keep them in the shop. Electrical problems were partly to blame for Mercedes recalling 1.3 million cars last year.

“Electrical issues are the biggest bone of contention” and are most often a source of mechanical glitches with luxury cars these days, especially in non-Japanese brands, said David Champion, senior director of Consumer Reports’ auto test division.

This year marked the first time that luxury car brands didn’t dominate the vehicle-dependability study by consumer research firm J.D.Powers & Associates. Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus was first, and Cadillac was fourth. The rest of the spots were claimed by Toyota, Mercury and Buick, said Neal Oddes, director of product research and analysis.

“The extra stuff you don’t have to have in a car — that’s what’s giving [owners] grief,” said Gus Mohammadi, owner of Eurosport Motors in Rockville MD, which specializes in Porsche repairs. “There’s no essential major problems with them. It’s the little stuff people paid a lot of money for.”

At least owners of new luxury vehicles don’t have to pay for fixing many of these glitches during the first few years. BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar cover repairs during the first four years or 50,000 miles. BMW also covers routine maintenance, such as changing the oil and windshield wipers.

Generous warranty policies have helped luxury automakers counter the perception that their vehicles prohibitively costly to own.

Of course, no matter how good the warranty, it doesn’t shield owners from higher insurance premiums, said car experts and luxury vehicle owners.

According to the Highway Loss Data Institute, an arm of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a large number of luxury models tend to have higher losses from collisions because their parts are more expensive to replace.

On a 2005 Jaguar XJ, for instance, a replacement xenon headlight with a washer costs $1,041, not including labor. The price tag for a new heated power mirror is $562. A fender bender with a luxury car can get even pricier if the collision damages the car’s adaptive cruise control, which is behind the front bumper. The IIHS estimates a new system for the Jaguar XJ costs an average of $3,239, again not including labor.

In rare cases, premium automakers turn out a lemon, and when they do, they face the wrath of the luxury lemon owner, who may have more resources to press a claim.

Wallace Ridley of Upper Marlboro MD had owned a Mercedes, so his expectations were high when he bought a 2000 Jaguar XK8 convertible. The car came from a dealer, had 25,000 miles on it and was still under warranty.

Within the first 10,000 miles of owning it, he started to hear a noise in the engine. Every time he brought the car in for scheduled maintenance, he asked the dealer to look into it. Every time he was told the noise was normal.

The noise continued to get worse. A few days after the warranty expired, the tensioners on the timing chains — a critical engine part — came loose. Jaguar would not repair them, so Ridley paid $2,000 to fix them. About 35,000 miles later, the timing chains broke at a cost of $5,000.

Ridley believed the chains would not have broken had the dealer addressed the loose tensioners.

He looked into suing under his state’s “ lemon” laws, which are modeled after the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which requires manufacturers of consumer products to live up to their warranties.

The Maryland lemon law applies to new vehicles or ones transferred to another person while still under warranty. A vehicle is considered a lemon if it can’t be fixed after a reasonable number of attempts, which can be as few as one, depending on the problem.

Getting a lawyer involved often gets automakers’ attention faster than suing on your own, lemon law attorneys say.

“It puts [consumers] in a position equal to the manufacturer in bargaining,” said Craig Kimmel, a Philadelphia attorney who has handled thousands of auto cases, including in Maryland.

In July, Ridley chose to sue Jaguar himself in small-claims court in Prince George’s County. Without admitting liability, Jaguar settled with him in September.

“All high-end vehicles have problems. It’s how they’re addressed,” Ridley said.

Rosemary Mariniello, a spokeswoman for Jaguar North America, said that she could not discuss Ridley’s case because of company policy but that in general, “Jaguar takes . . . each case as it comes to us and takes into account the dealer’s actions and what the customer is asking us to do.”

After his battle with Jaguar, Ridley could have been expected to drive his XK8 into the Potomac. But he did no such thing. In fact, he still has it.

“My wife, she just loves the car,” he said. “It’s very unique, and it drives like a dream.”

Interviews with a dozen luxury vehicle owners indicate that it takes a lot to push them over the edge, out of their heated leather seats and behind the wheel of, say, a Honda Civic.

In 2004, after getting around by riding public transportation, Brown bought his first Mercedes, a 1999 ML320 sedan, from a dealer in Woodbridge for $18,000. It was silver with a black leather interior. It was sleek and beautiful. It also had a clean vehicle history and 89,000 miles on it.

“I struggle for my money. I think I should enjoy it,” said Brown, a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who was wounded while serving with the Army in Iraq.

Pretty quickly, Brown’s dream car started to have problems. It made a loud noise whenever he applied the brakes. The wheels fell out of alignment. And his fuel pump once went out a day after he replaced it.

“My friends always told me how nice it was but not knowing what I was going through,” he said.

After spending several thousand dollars on repairs, Brown decided to buy a new car. He looked at a Land Rover and at a Lexus but ended up buying another used Mercedes, this time a 2002 ML500 sport-utility vehicle with a sticker price of about $32,000.

“I still wanted a Mercedes,” he said. “It’s the name I love. It’s not about anything else.”

That was before the tires on his second Mercedes wore out three times in a year, costing him $900 to replace each time. After transmission troubles recently landed his SUV in the shop for nine days, Brown said “I’m not going to buy a Mercedes.”

Kevin Johnson, a business development executive for a information technology firm, in some ways preferred his last car, a Chrysler Concorde, to his current luxury ride, a 2002 Land Rover Discovery he bought in close-to-new condition four years ago. (The Land Rover brand is owned by Ford Motor. )

For one thing, on the Concorde, replacing a cracked windshield cost no more than $200 and could be done in his driveway. When the windshield on his Land Rover got dinged this year, he was told the repair would cost $600 and had to be brought to the shop because the windshield has special rain sensors.

But the Land Rover came with an intangible perk he didn’t quite expect: the reaction it provokes in other people. Valets treat him with more respect, as do his younger brother’s friends.

That became clear to him after he drove his wife’s Toyota Corolla for a few days. “It’s amazing how much nicer people are to you when you pull up in a Land Rover,” he said.

Johnson thinks driving the right car can have the same effect professionally as wearing a finely tailored suit or having a lofty title.

“My job is to get in front of people. If they don’t take me serious or don’t think our company is successful because I don’t have an appropriate car, it makes sense for me to pay a little more,” he said. “If it gets me one extra deal a year, it’s worth it.”

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