OIL, OIL, OIL

(sigh)

I've been thinking. I know...scary.

While I am supportive of the current administration and ALSO have a handle on the ramifications of depleting the world's oil supply, I can't help but wonder if we wouldn't be better off spending billions on energy research versus diplomatically propping up oil-rich nations or engaging in various conflicts over oil, both at home and abroad.

This subject continues to overtake my mind. The following is an email I sent to a friend a good while back, and I haven't changed my outlook.

Yeah, I know crude oil's purchased prior to refining, but everything I read indicates that there's plenty of oil being produced to meet even global needs, but supply and demand has escalated creating MOST of the higher prices per barrel for light, sweet crude. (More on this later.) China's fairly recent gluttony for oil (more than ours, from what I've read) has also produced a supply and demand situation that didn't exist even a year ago. Ok, so if we understand that oil production is at record highs but that demand is creating the competitive price of crude, we shouldn't be screaming NECESSARILY at OPEC. (Not that they aren't deserving of being chastised almost daily.)
There is an abundance of heavy, sour crude that is available and is continually being drilled, but there are few refineries equipped to turn that into the grade of oil we need. And the cost to build refineries to handle that is evidently almost prohibitive. Some of the independent oil companies (Valero, for one) which have those refining capabilities have been successful because of their ability to buy heavy, sour crude at much lower prices and utilize their re-tooled refineries to turn a product we can buy at the pump -- and because they can buy that lower grade at such a lower cost, they can pass those savings on to the consumer and be competitive with those companies having to buy light, sweet crude at market prices.
Last night I was watching a program on Fox News and heard another interesting tidbit. If we take this guy at his word, there's a predictable 20-year cycle for oil prices to spike, which results in over-production -- which we then "live off" for about 20 years. When that over-production has been dwindled, prices again soar, which results AGAIN in over-production....ad infinitum.
We all experienced gas lines in 1980 and could only buy gasoline every other day depending on the last digit on our license tags. That was 26 years ago, and we STILL haven't learned a lesson. Yes, I agree we should be drilling for oil wherever we can find it, even if it IS in a wildlife preserve in Alaska, but why haven't we devoted more time, effort and dollars to coming up with a better way to power ourselves without having to rely on an expendable source of energy? We keep talking about it, but we don't do much. We see gasoline at $2.50 a gallon today and bitch....but I think we deserve everything we get for being ostriches.

(sigh)