You have to be careful when your "researching" this topic. If you are only getting information from popular sources (CNN, any broadcast news, the paper, or heaven forbid: hollywood) than you are working with some very diluted and poor info. As a general rule: if it's the popular notion, than it's probably been exaggerated and/or fabricated.

The media is notorious for sensationalizing everything and blowing even minor events out of proportion. I was on a commercial flight two weeks ago that had to shut down an engine and make a 'emergency' landing in Albany New York. Everyone on the plane (with the exception of one flight attendant who seemed a little nervous) was very calm and cool, no one panicked, and we would not of even known one engine on our 757 was shut down if the captain had not made an announcement. After our perfect landing, I almost laughed out loud when I saw the media already set up along the perimeter fence of the airport with cameras and reporters. Checking the net for news the next day, I found video clips with reporters showing video of our approach to land and claiming that the condensation coming off the wings and flaps was smoke from the shut-down engine. One reporter even said the passengers were "biting there nails", and that it was a "really rough landing" HA HA HA!!!!! Then she said, "Lets look at some video of that rough landing" and showed a video of a perfect one engine 757 landing. Honestly, these so called "reporters" don't do any research and just say what they think will sound good.

I'm concerned about the cost of gas, bust mostly because I think the publics perception of supply/pollution/etc. is so off, that suppliers get away with high prices more easily. Alternative energy sources are very appealing, but at the end of the day fossil fuels have a much denser energy content and are easier to use. We'll be relying on them until they are well and truly depleted.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the feasibility of using solar powered sterling engines to generate power on a residential scale. As much as I wanted my idea to work out, I could not get the numbers to come out as cost effective. At the end of the day, it is soooo much easier to extract energy from GAS.
 
My kid got a job managing the local FBO. I'm hoping he remembers the old man for putting him through collage, and gives me the wholesale price on avgas.:D
 
Very Little

johnp said:
did you count the cost of disposal of the bulb when it finally fails? (it _does_ contain mercury, you know). tanstaafl
Click to expand...

I think in ten years when mine start burning out, the problem of disposal should be solved. If its not I will just throw them in the garbage can. Billions of these bulbs will be sold over the next ten years and someone will figure out what to do with them. As the price of electric continues to rise in the coming years these bulbs will become more and more popular, especially if congress mandates electric utilities to obtain at least 15% from renewable energy sources.

I'm not telling anyone to run out and buy these. I just did the math and found them to be economical for me. If you don't like the idea of tossing them in the local dump these bulbs might not be for you. All the cleaners you or your wife use in the bathroom (that go down the drain) are probably way worse than a few micrograms of mercury.

I do NOT want to go into a discussion/flame war about haz. mats. but think a lot of builders would be able to save some bucks on their utils. if they put CF's in their RV factory and home. I love having LOTS of light when I'm building so I imgaine other builders do too. These bulbs will save you money. Money you can spend on avgas later.:D
 
Oil Price rises ..... a good thing

Future generations will think we were mad to burn oil as a source of energy, as it has so many potential uses that are as yet to be realised.

I recently paid ?2 / $4 a litre in Holland for Avgas ( or about $12-14 US gallon). On the face of it, this is an incredible price, but in reality it makes me (and other users) very aware of the environmental impact of flying.

Hopefully these prices will soon reach the USA too, and influence the development of new engines that will be more economic and fuel efficient.

JadeAir in the UK are developing a new diesel three cylinder to replace the ubiquitous Rotax 912S, and within ten years I forsee that many of the existing Avgas powertrains for Vans aircraft will be completely defunct unless they can be modified.

The reality is hard to face, but fuel has been too cheap, for too long and only economic impact will force alternatives. Increased oil consumption in China and India are now the driving forces for this equation linked directly to the West's insatiable desire for cheap goods produced in the Far East.

Rgds, Nic






wrongway john said:
Besides me. Seen today where crude prices are over $87 a barrel, and the sky still seems to be the limit. Some years back, a wise aviator told me not to be concerned about aviation fuel, it will be the least expense of your airplane budget. After I thought about that a bit, I figured he was right. Today, that old adage might not still hold up. Maybe it depends on how many hours one flies each month.

Will the prices now or perhaps in the future slow any of you down or will you keep flying about the same amount of hours?

wj
Click to expand...
 
Skyhi said:
I recently paid ?2 / $4 a litre in Holland for Avgas ( or about $12-14 US gallon). On the face of it, this is an incredible price, but in reality it makes me (and other users) very aware of the environmental impact of flying.

Hopefully these prices will soon reach the USA too, and influence the development of new engines that will be more economic and fuel efficient.
Click to expand...

Hopefully......???

Mind if I disagree? :D
 
I currently work for ConocoPhillips or "Big Oil" and I can say that we are not going to totally run out of oil any time soon. At least not in the next 50 years. And in 50 years most of us wont be in any condition to fly. Sure all of the low hanging fruit has been picked, however that doesnt tell ust how tall the tree is. There are some interesting projects such as the canadian oil sands that are coming online as we speek. My refinery alone is investing 3.5 billion over the next 5-10 years in a huge expansion upgrade so we can handle the heavier crude. We must aslo consider the coal to oil potential. The us has an estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil in the form of coal. We burn 21 million barrels a day so do the math. There are also huge fields that are off limits at the moment, so when oil hits 150/bbl and the economy is imploding watch for those to tapped. Humans will always adapt so long as it makes economic sense. If you told a farmer on manhatten 150 years ago that 6 million people would some day live on that island he would say thats insane...there isnt enough room for their horses! Well technology changed and i think the same is true for the global energy problem.
 
I disagree, the fact that companies are going to these measures to produce oil is a sure sign of whats to come.

Oil derived from oil sands is extremely financially and energetically intensive to extract. Whereas conventional oil has an amazing rate of "energy return on energy invested" (EROEI) of about 30 to 1, the oil sands rate of return hovers around 1.5 to 1. This means that we would have to expend 20 times as much energy to generate the same amount of oil from the oil sands as we do from conventional sources of oil.


The tree of oil discovery can be plenty tall and fruitful, but if it cost 2 dollars to pick an apple worth 2 cents no company is going to make that investment. People need to wake up and face facts.
 
We could force the price of auto fuel down in just a few weeks if people would just use a little common sense and not make some many unnecessary trips to the store, etc. Turn off unnecessary lights. It's really would not take much conservation on peoples part to have a big effect.

Why do we light up the interstate highways and intersections miles out in the country? The last time I looked all vehicles have lights on them. When you fly across this country it is lit up like a Christmas tree.

Congress is our biggest problem. They won't let us drill along the coasts or in Alaska. They pay the ethanol people to produce the **** just to please some of their fat cat farmers. If we don't use the oil we have in the ground what will we do with it - just leave it there while we produce all these inefficient alternative fuels? We should drill on every square foot of available oil producing land/sea we have in the USA and begin a real Manhattan type project to develop the energy of the future. Our oil would last more than long enough to get this done and we could then stay out of the Middle East's problems. If we don't do this we have no choice but to try to manage that mess over there.

My 2 cents worth!
Danny
 
Youre absolutely right, it is a sign of whats to come...but few living people on the planet right now will see the effects because there is still alot of oil in the gound. The EROEI on oil sands isnt all that bad. When $/bbl > 30$ or so then its profitable to mine it. Coal to oil is similar. The crack spreads are actually higher for the thick nasty stuff. I just requires retooling of refineries...hence my companies 3.5 billion dallar project. You have to remember that oil prices only recently spiked. It takes 5-10 years to shift gears and retool the refineries to handle different crudes. The executives at the large oil companies wouldnt be investing tens of billions of dollars per year in expansion projects if they thought we were going to run out any time soon. I also read somewhere that there is something like 5 trillion bbl's equivalent of methane hydrate under the seabed. There are so many options...except enthanol...ethanol makes no sense!
 
I agree with you about ethanol....I read somewhere that to supply the U.S. with enough ethanol to run the countries infrastructure you would have to farm the entire continent of South America.

We should all realize though that most alternative sources of energy are just small tangents on our oil supply. We have to use oil based machinery to extract things like coal, hydrogen, methane...etc. Yes you can run coal machinery but once again nothing is easier to use than good ol oil.

On a side note, it seems that congress dragging its feet on Alaska might not be such a bad thing. It is a reserve. It will eventually be used, thats a promise. If the Russians have to come over here and take it after our economy crumbles it will be used. I think though that we are trying to get all we can from sources farther away and saving the closer stuff for later. It makes sense, if the gov needed it they would find ways to get it.
 
rph142 said:
....... If you told a farmer on manhatten 150 years ago that 6 million people would some day live on that island he would say thats insane...there isnt enough room for their horses! Well technology changed and i think the same is true for the global energy problem.
Click to expand...

That hits the nail on the head. All the nay sayers assume that the status quo is some how perfect and has to be preserved. They ignore the creative energy of FREE people to adapt and develop solutions to the problems that life continues and will continue to throw at us. It is why we have a standard of living far ahead of that our great grand parents ever imagined. The EAA and RV builders are a geeky, hobbyist embodiment of that spirit.

Drill deeper oil wells, extract oil from tarry sand, tame nuclear energy, harness the waves and wind, develop better methods of storing and applying electrical energy, reduce the rolling resistance of tyres and the drag and mass of moving vehicles. The list is endless, as yet unimaginable and a source of satisfying and productive endeavor for generations to come. The sky isn't falling - but beware of the scolds and bureaucrats, Nobel laureates though some may be!
 
Last edited:
Other side of the coin

Nobody is more upset about rising fuel prices than me. It has hit the pocketbook pretty hard and certainly has curtailed my driving.

On the other side of the coin, it has also stimulated significant changes in our market, many for the good. Most of the current LSA designs were initiated in Europe as a result of the high fuel prices they've put up with for a long time. Now that the US market is catching on, it has sparked dozens of new designs; some of which are quite exciting.

While the LSA designs are purposely held to modest performance (by RV standards) it doesn't mean that designers aren't likely to push the envelope past LSA criteria. There exists pretty impressive designs that already deliver very impressive speed and fuel performance. Then there are other innovators like Monnett, who are working on electrical propulsion.

So while I complain about the high fuel prices, filthy rich oil execs, complacent citizens and non performing congress as I kick the dirt, I'm thankful that there are others who see opportunity and are actively doing something more constructive.

...if only I'd bought oil stock I could have bought me that new engine by now!
 
I think low prices will be here to stay, because everyone has learned their lessons on hedging fuel contracts. The futures market is in a condition similar to the housing bubble, with lots of investors buying on margin, and now they've lost their rear ends big-time. I know guys who are in the trucking industry who are waiting for things to bottom out and they'll buy on contracts enough fuel to last them a couple of years. Can't imagine that it would be any different for the avgas suppliers.
 
Dang!, I knew I should?ve bought that V17 Abrams troop transport SUV with optional on board drill rig and refining platform to haul my ShihPoo puppy to and from the park in. Now that gas is cheap im sure they will sell like hotcakes again?. Seriously though, this cheap gas is going to ensure we drive right off a cliff when the well suddenly runs dry. The world is still burning 80 million + barrels a day. Of course I wish my plane was ready so I could burn this cheap gas!
 
Buy a big tank and fill it up

rocketbob said:
I think low prices will be here to stay, because everyone has learned their lessons on hedging fuel contracts. The futures market is in a condition similar to the housing bubble, with lots of investors buying on margin, and now they've lost their rear ends big-time. I know guys who are in the trucking industry who are waiting for things to bottom out and they'll buy on contracts enough fuel to last them a couple of years. Can't imagine that it would be any different for the avgas suppliers.
Click to expand...

Don't bet on it Bob.

Oil exploration finds have been below oil usage since the early to mid 80's and that gap continues to widen, despite improvements in exploration technology.

Oil usage while slowed a bit in the short term will continue to rise as China and India continue to raise their standard of living.

The giant reserve in Saudi are well past their prime with no replacements in sight.

Who knows when, but rising prices are inevitable.

Read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matt Simmons.
 
rocketbob said:
I think low prices will be here to stay, because everyone has learned their lessons on hedging fuel contracts.
Click to expand...
Bob, if you worked for me, I'd have no choice but to immediately schedule you for a "random" drug test! :D

Nobody learned during the 70's when the Arabs stopped shipping crude that we needed to change our ways, and crude going back down to $25 will reinforce that opinion yet again. I've been telling people for over a year that we would see $40 crude again, and nobody believed me. Actually made more than a few flying hours worth of avgas in side bets! At the same time, I think we'll see $125 crude again. It may take a year or two, or five, but it will get there.

And I agree with you 100% that businesses will be smarter with their energy purchases. But when you consider that of the 9,477,000 barrels per day of net petroleum imports from last WEEK alone, 8,933,000 barrels per day went into finished motor gasoline (not diesel for trucks, nor diesel for big iron turbines, not heating oil, not even avgas). And small service and delivery trucks notwithstanding, business consumption of energy is not my worry.

It's the everyday guys and girls out there driving by themselves in either the small, fuel efficient commuter, or the big honkin F350, to go the 80 mile round trip to work every day, that hold our fate in their hands.

I can honestly say I'm not very comfortable with that! :(
 
Last edited:
This recent drop in oil prices is going to hurt in the long run because the cheap & easy oil has mostly been found. Future oil will be expensive oil. We won't suddenly run out, however, because as supplies dwindle prices will rise.

Here's food for thought. As of 2004, the US was the third largest producer in the world. The US had over 500,000 wells while the rest of the whole world had only 380,000. Most of the Saudi oil came from just 1,500 wells. Does that mean that the US used to have most of the world's oil? Probably not. What it means is that there is a lot more oil to be had when the rest of the oil producing world develops as intensively as the US. And it won't be cheap oil. Oil per well will be small compared to the past, but technology will enable producers to more thoroughly exploit each well.

A recent Forbes article tells how Saudi Arabia is using hi tech to increase it's proven reserves substantially. There is a control center that monitors and controls each well from a central location and they can adjust production from that control center--engineers have the current price of oil on displays in front of them at all times. They are using technology to extract a higher proportion of the oil present from each well--you can't get every drop, but they are getting closer than they were 10, 20 years ago.

And note that reserves are defined by what can be extracted at a given price, so as the price has dropped, reserves have dropped, so keep that in mind when you see discussions of world oil reserves. When the price goes up, reserves will go up.

There are so many unanswerable questions about oil that predictions are highly questionable. For how long do we want to be shipping dollars to Iran and Venezuela so we can have oil? Will we make a national policy change that takes us away from that? A few years ago, would you have predicted that a company in India would be producing and selling a car for $2,500? Tata Motors now makes such a car. So demand will rise as they sell those cheap cars throughout the third world. 20 years ago, who would have predicted a turn around in India's economy, leading to a boom, a result of a change in government policy to less regulation (previously the only car you could buy in India was Indian produced--now the market is open)? We think we know that demand will increase substantially, but maybe not, maybe only for the next several years. What if there is a breakthrough in battery technology that would allow you to drive 200 miles on just electricity? How would that affect demand for oil? Or for electricity? How many of you, last July, predicted the oil price drop we have recently seen? Who even heard of such a prediction by a so called "expert"? Who would have made the connection between the housing bubble and oil?

Predicting oil prices and supply is such an iffy thing that no one, absolutely no one can do it reliably--as those speculators who were left last summer with commitments to buy $140 oil learned the hard way.
 
Last edited:
I predicted that prices would drop. Not how much or when. I just knew that the summer event was artificial.
 
Gov't regulations are "forcing" me to use over 400 gallons of fuel over the next 39 flying hours! I will enjoy every bit of it too!
 
The Saudis are working at getting the price to stabilize somwhere in the 70-75 dollar region. Obamas' economic advisor said recently that Obama would consider holding off of a "windfall profits tax" if oil were to stay under 80 dollars a barrell.

You got three guesses as to what price oil will stabilize at in the coming years and the first two don't count! :D
 
OK, you guys who predicted oil would drop, did you sell oil stocks short? Were you confident enough to put your money on it?

I thought oil would drop, but I put no money on it either. And I didn't pretend to know when or how much. Ya' gotta know that before you bet.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.