Unfortunately, the proposal has several land mines, according to the article:

• Even if the state gives permission for drilling in state waters, it can’t collect royalties. All royalties go to the federal government.
• In addition to rolling back tax breaks, which I’m not against, additional taxes would be assessed.
• Utilities would be required to use renewable sources of energy for at least 15 percent of the electricity they generate.

I’m not feeling a lot of sincerity on the Democratic side for increasing supplies and lowering gas prices. Even if this passed, no state would allow rigs where they couldn’t collect royalties, and the utilities would raise prices to cover the additional expense of renewable energy.

More analysis, with numbers, here.

BusinessWeek reports that Ford will sell a 65mpg car called the ECOnetic.

In Europe.

Yet while half of all cars sold in Europe last year ran on diesel, the U.S. market remains relatively unfriendly to the fuel. Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline.

…First of all, the engines are built in Britain, so labor costs are high. Plus the pound remains stronger than the greenback. At prevailing exchange rates, the Fiesta ECOnetic would sell for about $25,700 in the U.S. By contrast, the Prius typically goes for about $24,000. A $1,300 tax deduction available to buyers of new diesel cars could bring the price of the Fiesta to around $24,400. But Ford doesn’t believe it could charge enough to make money on an imported ECOnetic.

I wouldn’t advocate a tax deduction to bring more diesel cars into the States, but we can see where artificially expensive fuel and poor national fiscal discipline prevent us from bringing together profitability and sustainability.

I’m glad nobody was hurt. UPI reports:

NEW ORLEANS, July 24 (UPI) — A catastrophic oil spill resulting from a tanker collision stretched about 100 miles from New Orleans to the mouth of the Mississippi River, officials say.

(skipping)

The oil spill occurred early Wednesday when a 600-foot Liberian tanker collided with a barge carrying 400,000 gallons of thick, marine oil. The barge was split in half, sending nearly all of its contents into the river. The barge reportedly was being pulled by the tugboat Mel Oliver, which had no appropriately licensed personnel on board at the time of the incident, the newspaper said. (emphasis mine)

I see a lawsuit in the making. Let’s hope it stays with the tugging company.

$5.97 for 30 gallons of gasoline

In addition to a bunch of things I needed to get done today, I was able to employ our accumulated Giant Eagle fuelperks!^(R) on our gasoline. I don’t think one can normally get gasoline this cheaply, even in Houston.

It’s a little funny how a program like fuelperks!^(R) can drive the purchase of red California-approved plastic fuel cans — produced with petroleum, by the way.

Can you beat 20 cents a gallon?

His point in telling me this story was that service doesn’t announce itself. True service, done out of love should not be done expecting accolades and commendations from the recipient. It is quiet, it is humble, it is often unseen, unappreciated, unnoticed. This is true of much of what our wives do each day. They do so much without anyone ever noticing, but if she didn’t do it, it would be noticed!

How many comedy routines have the husband announcing to his wife, “Hey! I took out the trash!” I am convicted.

Let’s expand the thought. We are demanded to produce results increasingly in church. The service that doesn’t announce itself is shunned for visible, hey-look-at-me service in the name of church growth accountability. Would Martha have made a decent Church Growth-er?

We talk about doing evangelism more than do evangelism. We need to look around us and see what God has given us to do, rather than create work with the intention of getting noticed.

Great post, Pastor Beisel.

The zone they fractured was 200 ft high at 60 bpm. I’ve seen plenty of those types of jobs. They threatened to run out of sand and keep pumping. The risk is that there would not be sand near the well, and the fracture would close and plug the well. Apparently this gamble paid off, for the well flowed oil after the job.

The job cost about $500,000, a little higher than they went for nine years ago.

Many opposition leaders argue the problems stem mainly from the government’s rising dependence on oil income, which has starved Pemex of cash it could use for exploration.

But the government maintains the vast bulk of the country’s reserves lie in deep waters and require technology and knowhow to develop that Pemex does not possess.

I don’t know what it takes to pass an amendment to the Mexican Constitution, which currently prevents petroleum privatization. The sooner they figure it out, the better. Until then we need to make up the difference with our own supplies.

Why the other two gas stations merely follow the one gas station’s lead instead of remaining low to undercut remains a mystery, but let’s examine the behavior: given one piece of information, consumers rush to the lower price gas stations because they know the price will go up. Failure to do so would cost the consumer money when they are forced to fill up at the higher price. They in fact are speculating.

Speculators are getting flack for driving the price of oil up. A speculator, gathering information about the availability of oil in the future, seeks contracts with oil suppliers to buy at a certain price. If the price goes down and they hold those contracts, they lose money. If like Southwest Airlines they lock in at a low price while everyone is forced to buy higher price fuel, they win. Their contracts are attempts to reduce risk and generally stabilize markets.

Speculators are trying to secure contracts at record levels because they believe prices will go even higher. Why wouldn’t they expect prices to go higher, with both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates looking to penalize oil companies for their “unfair” profits? While demand increases from China, India, and other countries, political forces try to hold our supplies down. The prohibition of alternative power generation such as nuclear is an unnatural push on petroleum demand. The weak dollar directly drives up the prices of oil.

If we desire speculators not to bid up oil supplies, we need to throw off our shackles and drop the restrictions on supply and demand. Speculators need a reason to believe prices will go down.

I have been on a drilling rig, but not while the rig was actually drilling. The rig does come to a stop when we cement the well.

My first impression of the show is that the show is just a tiny bit sensationalized. Roughnecks do bust their butt on the job. They do swear like it’s a second language. They do measure “rig time” cost by the day, and this leads them to weigh options such as taking time to change a drilling bit versus drilling more slowly with a worn bit.

The rigs I’ve been on, though, seem to have more of a safety emphasis that what is on display in the show. I’ve never seen the swinging chain being used to make pipe; that was always done with the tongs. Most of the rigs I’ve been on also recognize the green hard hat as one worn by someone with less than six month’s experience.

The “race” between the rigs to get to a certain depth is likely there just to get more drama for the show. The big race is not against other rigs but against the clock. The first episode showed how a mechanical failure can take a rig down for 8 hours and lose money. There are worse things than a mechanical failure, which mostly happens at surface and can be identified and fixed. When the drilling mud doesn’t come back to surface, that’s not a happy situation.

I thought it was funny how certain words would get through the audio censors but they would be erased from the closed-captioning. The web site has some footage worth checking out.

At some point I hope the show gets to detail an operation that goes as it should. Otherwise it looks like we do our job so haphazardly it’s a wonder anyone survives. I’m pretty sure our guys in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic would cringe at all the spilled fluids.

Looking at the guide for the first eight episodes, I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have any service companies visit the rigs. Maybe HAL’s lawyers got there first. If you had CourtTV, now you have TruTV, so check it out.

Ed Peterson, the co-chairman of the regional council’s Air Quality Forum, said Friday that E10 increases lower-level ozone.

“The result of that decision by the governor is that there’s likely to be more pollutants in the air in the region here, and that will result in a higher level of ozone,” said Peterson, who is also a Johnson County, Kan., commissioner. “It’s probably impossible to calculate or quantify that impact because we don’t know how much people are going to drive.”

Interesting.

photo credit: themaxsons

If Gov. Blunt had simply said, “I have to enforce the law as Governor; get the law repealed,” that would have sense. Instead:

Blunt said there are environmental, consumer and regulatory benefits to keeping the mandate intact. He said it would be difficult for Kansas City gas stations to suddenly stop selling E10 because federal and state clean air laws would require that the gas stations essentially drain their storage tanks. Also, Blunt said ethanol lowers certain vehicle emissions and could provide savings to consumers.

If the E10 mandate were lifted, gas stations would have the choice of whether or not to empty their tanks and replace with normal gasoline. They could choose whether or not they wanted to deal with the state and federal EPAs at that point. Moreover, if ethanol blends could provide savings to customers, the gas stations wouldn’t need the mandate to sell it.

The governor is right in that if E10 pollutes more than normal gasoline (ozone vs. CO, I suppose), then if the state feels like it needs to dictate gasoline markets for sake of the environment, it should ban the E10 rather than lift the mandate.

With different areas of Missouri wanting different things, the best thing to do is for the state to get out of the mandatory E10 business and let individual cities decide what they want to regulate.