How else do you recoup "stolen" monies through "provable gouging" if said investigation proved accurate? Short of nationalizing/seizing/nat sec temp control?
Biden to Float Windfall Tax on Energy Producers
- Thread starter kmgilroy89
- Start date
Are you suggesting that the oil price - which is determined on the worldwide market - is inflated by some means, or the gas price in this country is? Or both?
If you ask any Republican/Trumper on the forum they’ll tell you we should nationalize energy production through a myth they call “energy independence.”
On the other hand the government certainly has the authority to fine, sue and end business practices that are counter to the law.
Oil is probably too high right now but not alarmingly but yes gasoline itself is out of bounds.
Ok, so if the problem is with refiners, why go after drilling companies?
I have no idea. The spread between crude and gasoline is actually outside of historical norms. It would be nice to actually know why that is. I get a lot of people are blaming refiners/refining capacity but nobody actually knows this for sure.
Diesel and home heating oil spreads are outside traditional norms as winter approaches.
US Refiners Eye Unusual Winter Windfall
Heating-oil cracks have blown out, inventories are at multidecade lows and plant outages have crimped capacity — all positive signs for profits.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...inter-windfall-as-crack-spreads-gain-l9iefc13
Like many of us, oil refiners in the US love summer and put up with winter. Gasoline demand, which accounts for roughly half of overall oil-product consumption, rises in the warmer months as Americans head on vacation. After Labor Day, diesel and fuel oil reassert themselves, and refining margins tend to draw in along with the nights.
This winter looks very different. In the 10 years ending 2019, benchmark Nymex 3:2:1 crack spreads — a margin comparing three crude-oil contracts versus two gasoline and one diesel — averaged around $3 a barrel higher in the second quarter than in the fourth. This year, futures imply that relationship will flip. More important are the absolute numbers: Winter cracks average almost $41 a barrel, more than double last year’s level.
This is all distillate. While margins on gasoline collapsed in August as demand faltered in the face of high pump prices, heating-oil cracks blew out this month to more than $80 a barrel (the front-month spread is around $74 currently). Inventories are at multidecade lows and the closure of refining capacity during the Covid crisis, exacerbated by a spate of recent outages, has created a perfect storm.
Refiners stateside are also benefiting from whiplash in the natural gas market, where benchmark Henry Hub prices have almost halved since hitting double digits in August, reducing the cost of a key input. At the same time, even though panic in Europe has eased somewhat, the benchmark Dutch TTF gas price is still almost seven times Henry Hub. That nets US refiners a competitive advantage and, as European consumers seek alternatives to expensive natural gas, creates extra demand for diesel across the Atlantic.
The wildcard here is politics. US President Joe Biden specifically called out refiners in his latest attempt this week to jawbone energy prices down, even if he did focus on more election-adjacent gasoline. Amid midterms and proxy war, export bans still can’t be ruled out. In the meantime, however, refiners are heading into an unusual year-end windfall.
Refiners know it for sure. When they operate at 99% capacity and postpone much needed maintenance to keep producing, they have accidents and all sorts of interruptions that occur - and when they occur, they are more impactful given the overall shortage.
Releasing crude from the SPR just floods the market, but if you're shutting down refineries and not building new ones, well you get higher gas prices. Then, when you also start exporting distillates at some ridiculous rate, you get a shortage in diesel.
Its really not difficult to see how we got where we are. But the populist line of "go after excess profits" is really clueless, in my opinion.