Oil Prices Plunge

[Brian_Reeves]

$2 by end of year, awesome, I'll be able to go fishing in '09

Seriously, I have the time, I just can't afford the gas bill to go back and forth as much as I want to.

Yeah, if gas doesn't start going down, the 09 Roadtrip might get turned into the 09 Video Conference on Yahoo IM  ;D

[Still a Bigbuckifan]

Has oil gone down today to.

[roadwarrior]

Nope.

Up 93 cents to close @ $127.55

[bassnleo]

$2 by end of year, awesome, I'll be able to go fishing in '09

Seriously, I have the time, I just can't afford the gas bill to go back and forth as much as I want to.

Man, how true that is........I really have cut back due to gas prices. For me to hook onto my ProCraft, drive 60 miles to Lake Erie, and fish for the day I drop close to $100. I just can't justify doing that....I used to go to Erie once or twice a week >

[=Matt 5.0=]

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080601/heating_oil_prices.html

[Bassn Blvd]

Has Jiffy Lube and other $19.99 quick oil change places raised their prices yet?  I haven't used those places in years sine I have a company car.

[tipptruck1]

Well Iam not sure about them places. But last time I had oil changed it was 25 bucks. Before that it was under 20. Then the dodge dealer wants almost 40. Iam gald I have free oil changes. After they run out iam going to be doing it ny self.

[Live.2.Fish]

Has Jiffy Lube and other $19.99 quick oil change places raised their prices yet?

Yes they have.  Last month they were charging $21.99.  About a week ago they raised their prices up to $24.99. I just do it myself and it cost about half.

[HesterIsGod]

A big problem with the gas price problem right now: When gas prices are high, people start to conserve and not waste as much gas as they did before, which lowers demand and in return prices. Then, when the prices are lowered people start taking weekly trips again and conserving less and less, which drives the price up again. We all do it. If gas suddenly dropped to 2 bucks tomorrow, we would all be fishing next weekend with our boats, towed by our massive trucks, to huge lakes miles away from our homes. Right now the prices are high and most of us are probably cutting down on our weekly fishing excursions or at least considering it.

In the long run it is all about demand. If everybody quit driving their cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, etc... Then gas would be less expensive than ever.

[moby bass]

What annoys me about the whole thing is that it seems like everything makes the price of oil go up, but not down.  Stock market loses, price goes up, storm forecast in the gulf, price goes up, political unrest in some third world country, price goes up.  How come the price doesn't go down when the stock market gains, or the weather is nice in the gulf?

Commodity prices are all very volatile and oil is no different. When prices go up, the media scrambles for a reason, something or someone to blame. When prices fall, it's usually not big news.

8-)

I really believe the media has had a lot to do with the price increases.  They "report" oil price rises and "predict" gas will be x number of dollars by this date, thus creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

[BadKarma42]

What annoys me about the whole thing is that it seems like everything makes the price of oil go up, but not down. Stock market loses, price goes up, storm forecast in the gulf, price goes up, political unrest in some third world country, price goes up. How come the price doesn't go down when the stock market gains, or the weather is nice in the gulf?

Commodity prices are all very volatile and oil is no different. When prices go up, the media scrambles for a reason, something or someone to blame. When prices fall, it's usually not big news.

8-)

I really believe the media has had a lot to do with the price increases. They "report" oil price rises and "predict" gas will be x number of dollars by this date, thus creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

I can buy that.  I think the media does us a diservice at times by creating panic and chaos.

[Hookem]

Probably one of the reason oil went down last week.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24877586/

[key chain bass guy]

Not to be negative but, why do I get the feeling that the market has a better chance of correcting itself way before the beaurocratic machine gets rolling.

[FishTank]

I use to change my own oil but then I discovered Mobil 1 Extended Performance and I have Wal-Mart change it for me for $50 with this oil.  I have about 1,000,000 on my car and my wife has about 120,000 on hers.  Both have had the Mobil 1 in them since it came out and I have had zero engine issues.  The Extended Performance is supposed to be good for 15,000 miles but I usually only go 13,000-14,000 or once a year before changing.  The way I look at it, I can change it myself every 3,000 for around $12-$15 or I can have Wal-Mart do it for me for around the same price with a better quality oil.

[Big T]

I use to change my own oil but then I discovered Mobil 1 Extended Performance and I have Wal-Mart change it for me for $50 with this oil. I have about 1,000,000 on my car and my wife has about 120,000 on hers. Both have had the Mobil 1 in them since it came out and I have had zero engine issues. The Extended Performance is supposed to be good for 15,000 miles but I usually only go 13,000-14,000 or once a year before changing. The way I look at it, I can change it myself every 3,000 for around $12-$15 or I can have Wal-Mart do it for me for around the same price with a better quality oil.

I do not know about your Walmart, but I would not let the store here touch my truck with a 10 ft. pole, and my wife works there. From what I understand is that they had to replace a customers motor, because they left the drain plug out or so loose it fell out. Engine blew less than two miles down the road.

[Outdoorsman60]

oil prices going down.. gas price going up

it's going to get worse, i don't see us paying $2 by years end

[roadwarrior]

** UPDATE **

June 3, 2008 4:00 CDT

NYM WTI -$3.58 @ $124.18

[roadwarrior]

News:

of Saudi-Sized Reserves Make Farmers Drillers

2008-06-03 02:26 (New York)

By Anthony Effinger

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro

Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look

like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North

Dakota's new oil barons.

Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of

dollars from a company in Houston called EOG Resources Inc.,

which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. He says the

day his first royalty check arrived was one to remember.

''I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a

beer,'' Bartelson, 65, says.

His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a

sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat

fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and

Manitoba. The Bakken may give the U.S. -- the world's biggest

importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source at a time when

demand from China and India is ratcheting up the global

competition for supplies and propelling average U.S. gasoline

prices to almost $4 a gallon.

And unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude

needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it

leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides. It's light -

-almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological

Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart

attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping

413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's

Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55

billion barrels.

                        Thin Deposit

The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is

locked 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) underground in a layer of

dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn't surrender oil the way

more-porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too,

averaging just 22 feet (7 meters) in North Dakota.

The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as

4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today's

engineering techniques. That's a fraction of the oil that Price

said should be there, but it's still the largest accumulation

of crude in the 48 contiguous U.S. states. North Dakota, where

Bakken exploration is most intense now, won't become Saudi

Arabia unless technology improves.

''The Bakken is the biggest thing in oil in the lower 48

right now,'' says Jim Jarrell, president of Ross Smith Energy

Group Ltd., a research firm in Calgary. ''And among the least

understood.''

                        Delaying the Peak

Some oil, like the 10.4 billion barrels estimated to be

recoverable in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,

remains off limits -- as a nature conservation measure -- even

as President George W. Bush renews his calls for drilling

there. North Dakota, already crisscrossed by farm roads, is

open for business.

As traditional oil fields become scarce, exploration

companies must tackle trickier ones to stay in business. Their

success will determine when the world reaches peak oil -- the

high point in production after which new supply will no longer

be there to slake new demand. It's a gloomy concept. Peak oil

theorists predict the mother of all oil shocks, complete with

famine and wars for energy.

These days, big new oil deposits often come with caveats.

Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA says its offshore Tupi field

contains as much as 8 billion barrels of oil, which the company

hopes to start pumping next year. But the field is under more

than four miles of water and rock, where pressure can crush

drilling equipment.

                        Hedge Bus

The Bakken dolomite is hardly an obstacle, by comparison.

And even if Price was too optimistic, the Bakken is big enough

to make investors rich. Some have made fortunes already.

In April, a busload of hedge fund managers drove by

Bartelson's land, ogling the metronomic pump jacks and the

devilish orange flares of excess natural gas that are making

parts of North Dakota look more like west Texas.

''There's nothing that can stop this play,'' says Mike

Reger, chief executive officer of Northern Oil & Gas Inc., a

five-person company near Minneapolis that has leased the

mineral rights under 32,000 acres (13,000 hectares) in the

North Dakota Bakken.

Reger, 32, brought the hedge fund managers up to see the

oil field. Some, like Ryan Zorn of Houston-based investment

management firm Saracen Energy Advisors LP, are investors in

Northern already. Northern shares have risen 61 percent since

being listed on the American Stock Exchange on March 26.

                        Fool's Gold

For decades, the Bakken was the fool's gold of the oil

industry. The name describes a geological formation that looks

like an Oreo cookie: two layers of black shale that bleed oil

into the middle layer of dolomite. It's named after Henry O.

Bakken, the North Dakota farmer who owned the land where the

first drilling rig revealed the shale layers in the 1950s.

All of the layers are thin -- about 150 feet altogether --

and none of them give up oil easily. In older, vertical wells,

oil would often flow for a month and then fizzle.

Now, companies like Austin, Texas-based Brigham

Exploration Co.; Denver-based Whiting Petroleum Corp.; and EOG

are drilling horizontally. They go straight down 10,000 feet

and then put a slight angle in the mud motor, a 30-foot piece

of tubing that drives the bit, so they hit the Bakken sideways,

making a horizontal tunnel 4,500 feet long through the

dolomite.

That exposes more of the oil-bearing rock. Then they pump

pressurized water and sand into the hole to fracture the

dolomite, making cracks for oil to seep through.

It eventually winds up in a pipeline that runs east to

Clearbrook, Minnesota, and then south to Chicago.

                  Where Billionaires Roam

Several billionaires are at work in the Bakken. Harold

Hamm's Enid, Oklahoma-based Continental Resources Inc. has

leases on 487,000 acres in Montana and North Dakota. Hamm, who

started out driving a truck, owns 73 percent of Continental,

worth $7.9 billion. Philip Anschutz, 68, founder of Qwest

Communications International Inc. and Regal Entertainment

Group, is there, too.

So are two sons of billionaire H.L. Hunt, the 1930s

wildcatter. Petro-Hunt LLC is owned by the trust estate of

William Herbert Hunt, who was convicted in a civil trial with

his brothers Lamar and Nelson Bunker of trying to corner the

silver market in 1979. Hunt Oil Co., another Bakken operator,

is owned by their half brother, Ray L. Hunt.

The big winner so far has been EOG, formerly a subsidiary

of bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. It drilled a horizontal

well in western North Dakota just north of Parshall --

population 1,028 -- in April 2006. The well came online a month

later and kicked out 1,883 barrels in the first seven days.

Unlike the older vertical wells, it's still going. In March, it

produced 2,305 barrels, according to the North Dakota

Industrial Commission.

                        No Slam Dunk

EOG has eight rigs running on 320,000 acres of mineral

leases in the North Dakota Bakken. The company said in its 2007

annual report that the area has the highest return of all the

places in which it operates -- including Texas's Barnett Shale,

the Gulf of Mexico coast and the Permian Basin of New Mexico.

The Bakken isn't foolproof. Far from it. Drilling there is

expensive -- about $5 million a well, according to EOG -- and

takes experience. Dallas-based Petro-Hunt's first well in the

North Dakota Bakken didn't make money, company geologist Steve

Bressler says. Brigham's Bergstrom Family Trust well came

online at 277 barrels a day -- viable at today's high oil

prices but not a gusher.

''There will be variances,'' says John Gerdes, an oil and

gas analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. in Houston.

''The rock matters. The people matter.''

                        Oil Rush

The success of EOG's Parshall well set off a land grab in

North Dakota's Mountrail County. Land men -- the experts who

move from boom to boom leasing mineral rights -- swarmed,

paying ever higher prices for ground that for decades grew

crops and concealed Cold War missile silos.

On private acreage, land men negotiate with mineral owners

like Bartelson. They offer a bonus upfront to hold the mineral

rights for three to five years, and they agree to pay a

fraction of the revenue from any oil produced each month --

often from 1/8 to 3/16. On land with a producing well, the

mineral lease lasts as long as the well does. On government

land, the bonus is set at auction.

Bartelson in 2004 granted a five-year lease on 1,400

acres, under which he owns half the mineral rights. He got a

bonus of $25 per mineral acre, or $17,500, plus one-sixth of

any oil revenue. Times have changed since then. In November,

Sinclair Oil Corp. of Salt Lake City paid $16,500 an acre at

auction for half the mineral rights on 320 acres of government-

owned land in the Parshall Field, according to the U.S. Bureau

of Land Management.

                        'No Acreage'

''That's a record for Montana and North Dakota,'' BLM

spokesman Greg Albright says.

Among the biggest companies punching holes in the North

Dakota Bakken are Houston-based Marathon Oil Corp., the fourth-

largest U.S. oil company, and Hess Corp. of New York, which is

No. 5. No. 1 Exxon Mobil Corp. isn't active in the Bakken. John

Freeman, an analyst at investment bank Raymond James &

Associates Inc. in Houston, says Exxon is looking for bigger

deposits overseas.

''Now, there's no acreage left,'' he says.

The truest believer in the Bakken might be Reger, the CEO

of Northern Oil. He's certainly the loudest promoter.

Reger is a fourth-generation oilman. His great-grandfather

managed operations for Mobil Oil, now part of Exxon Mobil, in

the Williston Basin, the 110,000-square-mile (285,000-square-

kilometer) geological formation in the northern plains that

holds the Bakken and other deposits. Reger's grandfather leased

land atop all of them. His father, uncle and brother are in the

business, too.

''It's our basin,'' Reger says.                        

[TournyFish001]

I use to change my own oil but then I discovered Mobil 1 Extended Performance and I have Wal-Mart change it for me for $50 with this oil. I have about 1,000,000 on my car and my wife has about 120,000 on hers. Both have had the Mobil 1 in them since it came out and I have had zero engine issues. The Extended Performance is supposed to be good for 15,000 miles but I usually only go 13,000-14,000 or once a year before changing. The way I look at it, I can change it myself every 3,000 for around $12-$15 or I can have Wal-Mart do it for me for around the same price with a better quality oil.

I do not know about your Walmart, but I would not let the store here touch my truck with a 10 ft. pole, and my wife works there. From what I understand is that they had to replace a customers motor, because they left the drain plug out or so loose it fell out. Engine blew less than two miles down the road.

That could happen to anyone at least they got a replacement engine, if you would have done it you would be out an engine.

[TournyFish001]

** UPDATE **

June 3, 2008 4:00 CDT

NYM WTI -$3.58 @ $124.18

d**n if gas gets to $2.00 a gallon I will buy a g loomis rod, shimano reel spooled with Yo Zuri Hybrid 8 packs of GYMCB senkos some Gammy hooks and fly down to TN and fish with you.  Well I just might buy all that stuff anyway since I am a fan of it all, well minus the hybrid lol...  Just playin but man I really hope the gas price drops a bit OR A LOT- its tuff on us bass fisherman.  When money is tight recreation is the first thing to go- that aint cool now is it?

[Jeff H]

I've heard it will be $5/gal by the end of the year.  $2/gal sure would be a relief.

[Micro]

A big problem with the gas price problem right now: When gas prices are high, people start to conserve and not waste as much gas as they did before, which lowers demand and in return prices. Then, when the prices are lowered people start taking weekly trips again and conserving less and less, which drives the price up again. We all do it. If gas suddenly dropped to 2 bucks tomorrow, we would all be fishing next weekend with our boats, towed by our massive trucks, to huge lakes miles away from our homes. Right now the prices are high and most of us are probably cutting down on our weekly fishing excursions or at least considering it.

In the long run it is all about demand. If everybody quit driving their cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, etc... Then gas would be less expensive than ever.

That's less and less true as time goes on.  Used to be that what went on in the United States had the biggest influence on oil and gas prices.  We still do, but China and India are catching up and diluting our influence.  Demand there is, everyday, at an all-time high.   That means a little reduction in demand in the US will have a much lesser effect on oil/gas prices than it used to.  We need a global demand reduction.  

[roadwarrior]

Down $2.20 @ $122.11

[Tokyo Tony]

WOW, imagine if we actually tapped into Bakken and there were anywhere close to 400 billion barrels. We'd have the largest oil field in the world on our own soil. That would be a beautiful time for us.

I wish I had a couple million to invest  :-/

[moby bass]

Down $2.20 @ $122.11

Yeh!