High fuel prices in energy country

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

By Bill Sniffin

Barack Obama made a speech announcing a plan to control gas prices. After hearing this, President Bush said, ‘That’s crazy, only Dick Cheney can control gas prices.’
— Late night TV host


Despite allegedly having the lowest fuel prices in America, we are seeing signs that even here in Wyoming some people are starting to conserve.

One of my coffee buddies drives a giant diesel pickup and a big engine sports car. He just announced he is buying a 1969 Volkswagen on the Internet to deal with the high costs of gas. He apparently has decided to quit bucking the trend and will embrace the miserly VW.

Of course the car is for his wife to commute back and forth to work.
When he tried to hire a trucking company to ship the car from Long Beach, Calif., to Lander, he was told the company would charge an extra $500 to leave I-80 and make the 118-mile trip to Lander.  He ended up having it shipped to Laramie, instead. The truckers blamed the surcharge on fuel costs for leaving I-80. Go figure.

Coincidentally, another friend has been working as a dispatcher for small independent trucking companies.  He has made a decent living but says he is getting out of it.  “No room anymore for the middleman,” he said. The pressure is so intense to cut costs because of high fuel charges that his role is going away forever. He said the independent trucker is going away, too.

In a few years, there will be just 100 huge national companies doing the hauling and that’s it, he said.

So what is causing the fuel prices to be so high now? In a recent Newsweek interview, an oilman said that the reason for the high prices (and higher prices to come) is that most oil is used to power transportation.
And that means cars.

There are predictions that there will be 1.1 billion cars on the road by 2050, compared to 20 million today. Most of the growth is in India and China but demand is growing all over the world.

The article cited the pressures of increasing demand and a limiting supply as making for a very interesting future for commuters when it comes to fuel costs at the pump. Our society has used up 1 trillion barrels of oil and the world has another 2 trillion barrels in the ground – but much of that is in very difficult places, like the Arctic Circle or deep under the ocean.

That situation brings up a discussion about alternative fuels. For example:

- An Air Force general says oil is declining and coal is abundant. We will use coal, he says, when it comes to powering our military aircraft.

His exact quote was: “We’re going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time and there’s three times as much coal in the ground as oil reserves. Guess what? We’re going to burn coal.”

This was the justification for a coal-to-diesel plant being considered for Malmstrom AFB in Montana.

-  Alternative energy is not only big in Montana but Colorado and Arizona have scored some big successes, too.

One of the largest wind turbine plants in the world is under construction near Greeley, Colorado.  Hopefully that can leak over to Wyoming, which we know has tremendous wind resources.

And in Arizona, over $1 billion is being spent for a solar power plant.
Due to open in 2011, the plant is the world’s largest.  A Spanish Company (APS) is building it. The 280-megawatt plant will be able to power 70,000 homes.
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And finally, John Black reminded me that the correct spelling is “borrow” pit, not barrow as I used in last week’s column.

Actually, the historical definition is barrow pit as meaning moving dirt with wheelbarrows.  Modern definition is definitely borrow, as confirmed by Delbert McOmie, chief engineer of the WYDOT.

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High fuel prices in energy country | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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