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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (41769)	9/17/2005 4:44:07 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

You could say we have been running out of crude oil since we first started using it in the 1800s. Drake drilled for oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 and established a producing well -- after drilling to an astonishing depth of 69 feet. Before you knew it, we had to drill even deeper than 100 feet! I can't begin to tell you the last time we found a major oil deposit at a depth of less than 100 feet -- it might have been more than a hundred years ago. Today we are so desperate for oil we even drill down several miles. We ran out of shallow deposits a long, long, time ago. Yet the inflation adjusted price of gasoline has declined. home.pacbell.net . . home.pacbell.net Even in 1859, the only reason they had to drill the Drake well was because they needed more oil than could be supplied by siphoning the oil out of surface pools -- which is how they originally obtained oil for kerosine production. After refining out the kerosine, they threw the rest of the refined petroleum into the creek. Today we are so desperate for oil that we use all of the refined product. We even have alkylation units to make short molecules into long ones, and strands into rings, so they can be used in gasoline without heavy doping from MTBE or lead. With the phase-out of MTBE, even a straggler like Valero is going to have to invest in alkylation units -- or they can simply dump their light refined fraction into the creek, just like the old days. .