The AG person I’ve been speaking to sighed to me at one point that what slowed up the process was that so many of the gas station owners and their attorneys didn’t speak fluent English. I managed to refrain from snorting on my keyboard at that one. More than likely, their English is flawless when they need it to be, but when a regulator calls, their accent gets reeal thick, and their hearing not so good….

Also, given that oil is extremely fungible, if Chavez decides not to sell oil to us, we can just buy it somewhere else. And Chavez still has to sell the oil he’s not selling us to someone, or else he’s out that money, as I noted above.

I’ll bet if the Mexicans would stop being stupid about their nationalized and apparently quite decreipt oil industry, which they refuse to allow US oil companies to invest in, we could get a bunch more oil from them.

I’d love to see the stats on that claim.

Why doesn’t someone have a website where you can see daily production stats (with a delay due to reporting) of oil from each exporting nation? This kind of data HAS to be available for the oil industry managers.

Then we could see who is holding up their end of the deal and who is just holding us up.

Since we get around 15% of our oil from Venezuala, I bet Commie Chavez has his hand on the valve as we speak, slowly cutting us off as much as he can.

Another thing I would like to see is a listing of countries who sell oil with long-term contracts for delivery as opposed to just filling a tanker and letting them charge what the market will bear when they get to port. As I understand the seaborne oil logistics system, this haphazard “spot market” pricing at delievery happens all the time, because the shipping barons (mostly Greeks) like to do it that way. Every other product besides petroleum is delivered by sea according to delivery charges, without regard to the value of the cargo.

For example, there was a two-week period recently where the spot price ran up from the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s. That means that the shipping barons made at least 13% on their oil while their slow ships were enroute over that period. The oil barons have actually been known to order their tanker captains to take a less direct route and/or slow down their ships in a rising market, so that there will be more profit at the destination.

The shipping barons made the windfall profit, not the oil companies. The oil companies were victimized by it. Perhaps our most effective solution would be to build more supertankers and run them under US flags, and go get our own oil. If we announced just a few builds, you can bet that the Greek barons would shit their pants. They might even have to revert to charging for shipping by delivery charge only, instead of leverage-buying the oil in the ship and selling it when they get here. Anything that reduced the short-term volatility in the spot market, or eliminated the spot market entirely would be a huge bonus to oil-importing nations.

There are individual gougers.

I will need a tankful of boat gas next week, as much as 120 gallons. That makes shopping around mandatory, so I’ve taken the time to chart which marinas have what price differential from street gas. The marina nearest to me, Rocky Point Marina, just raised their differential from 40 cents to 70 cents. That’s pure greed.

It’s tempting to shoot from the hip on this subject, but if you do a bit of digging instead, you will come up with villains you don’t hear mentioned on the MSM, and the ones you do hear about are usually revealed to be minor players.