[Newsbot]

Title: Oil prices rise as investors fret over Mideast unrest
Category: World
Posted By: Hyack
Date: 2011-02-22 17:43:53
Canadian

[gerv]

Any excuse to drive up the price

[Guy_Fawkes]

Im pretty sure this one is founded in fact.

[gerv]

2% of the worlds oil comes from Libya. Saudia Arabia said they can make it up. Speculators driving up the price to make a nice profit on the future trading. Ya think it's founded.

[CommanderSock]

Investors don't like uncertainty.

[EyeBrock]

Investors like easy profit and Libya is a good excuse to make easy profit on the backs of us consumers.

[bootlegga]

It all goes back to supply and demand. If supply is higher than demand, prices should fall, if demand is higher than supply, prices should increase.

I don't agree with it, but if it affects supply (which it may given that oil production in Libya is down), then that's why prices are going up. At least, that's what people are speculating.

[gerv]

People speculate to drive up the future commodities in oil. They don't take possession of the barrels just cause the price to go up. They buy low get the world to panic then sell high. Collect the nice profit. Then turn around and do the same thing when the price stabilizes. They've been doing this for years on the backs of consumers.
They're looking at laws to stop this,they just aren't in place yet

[PostFactum]

As we were waiting for. They'll go down when the situation will be stable there, I hope so...

[Choban]

Opec's chains tighten around our necks, The great part is that while prices are extremely quick to jump they are extremely slow to drop, we'll be feeling this looooooong after the crisis is over and production is back to or avbove normal

[DerbyX]

What? Are you saying the oil companies are unscrupulous and will stick it to the consumers? That is so unlike them.

[gerv]

The production of oil hasn't changed. If it has the Saudies can make up the difference. That's the futures price that's driving up the price at the pumps.

[andyt]

The production of oil has changed, the Saudis can make up the diff except that their oil is lower quality and there's some problems with that. Speculators are driving up the price, and as Derby points out, even it the price per barrel drops again, the gas price at the pump wont. That's what people should be looking into, not oil speculation. But then higher prices reduce consumption = pollution, so it's all good.

[CommanderSock]

Not one person seems to have mentioned that China and India's demand for oil is growing rapidly, something along the line of 20% per year. Oil prices will continue to rise. For diesel alone, China's imports grew by a staggering 76%!

[u]China Stays Net Importer of Diesel to Build Fuel Inventories
[/u] 24 February 2011. Bloomberg <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-24/china-stays-net-diesel-importer-for-second-month-in-january-1-.html>

We just have to keep digging.

[andyt]

CommanderSock CommanderSock:

We just have to keep digging.

Good luck with that.

$1:

The world is using up its reserves of conventional crude oil at a prodigious rate. Ninety percent of the oil produced today comes from fields more than 20 years old, and 70 percent from fields more that 30 years old. (1)

At the same time, despite exceptional advances in petroleum geology and the technologies employed in the search for petroleum deposits, discovery rates of new oil reserves are falling — for every four barrels used today, only one new barrel is found.

Thus, the lines of cumulative production and remaining reserves will inevitably cross — the question is not if but when...

Factor 2 - Additional Oil Discoveries: The earth has now been so extensively explored for petroleum that virtually all its prolific producing trends have been identified. Figure 1, which displays the amount of oil discovered per decade, shows discoveries peaked during the 1960s, verifying the advanced state of worldwide exploration.

http://www.petroleumequities.com/OilSupplyReport.htm