Fuel Freedom Staff

Oil prices have dropped nearly 10 percent in two days

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Oil analysts must be asking, Where’s the bottom of the oil-price plunge?

Crude dropped again Tuesday, as Brent was off $2.01, to $51.10 a barrel. In the first two trading sessions of the week, it’s down $5.32, or almost 10 percent.

More from Reuters.

U.S. crude closed down $2.11, or 4.2 percent, to $47.93.

By comparison, Brent was at $115 and U.S. crude at $107 last June.

Phillip Streible, a senior market strategist at RJO Futures in Chicago, told Reuters that “$46 to $45 is quite likely. … People, I think, are further understanding that the U.S. is becoming a powerhouse in creating crude oil and that’s not going to change anytime soon.”

But Saudi Arabia also shows no sign of reducing production quotas, an effort some OPEC members want to prop up prices. Forbes’ Nathan Vardi quoted a Saudi expert named F. Gregory Gause, a professor at Texas A&M University, who said:

“The most important thing for the Saudis is market share. They are not going to sacrifice it, they will play chicken with other producers, whether Iranian or American shale producers, in order not to lose market share and the only way they will cut production is if they get an agreement with a broad array of OPEC and non-OPEC producers to take a fair amount of oil off the market.”

CNN Money has a story about the thousands of workers supporting North Dakota’s oil boom who’ve been laid off in recent weeks, as drillers delay expansion because the cost of extracting oil from shale-rock formations is too steep compared with the going rate of crude.

Jeff Sharpe got the bad news 10 days before Thanksgiving. He and 21 coworkers at a rig in Wyoming were laid off due to depressed oil and natural gas prices.

“All my friends and family keep talking (positively) about low prices. When I say, ‘We’re all out of jobs now,’ they say ‘Oh,'” Sharpe, 32, told CNNMoney. “I don’t think they realize what’s going on in the big picture.”

Fuel Freedom Staff

Obama, Congress draw battle lines on Keystone XL

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On the same day two Republican senators introduced a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil-pipeline extension, the White House said President Obama would veto such a bill if it reached his desk.

“If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

Republicans took over control of the Senate as the 114th Congress was sworn in Tuesday. The GOP, and some Democrats, have supported the pipeline project for much of the past six years that it’s been in limbo, and the party wasted no time in sponsoring a bill to pressure the Obama administration to approve it: Sens. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, introduced the Senate bill, and a committee hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

The House is expected to begin deliberations on its own Keystone bill on Friday.

The last time the House passed an authorization, in November, it was blocked from proceeding by Senate Democrats. But with fewer numbers, the measure has a greater chance of passing this time.

However, the Senate needs 67 votes — two-thirds — to override a presidential veto. As BusinessWeek reported, Hoeven says he has 63 votes in favor of approval, four shy of a veto-proof majority.

Reaction to the White House announcement ran the gamut. House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement:

On a bipartisan basis, the American people overwhelmingly support building the Keystone XL pipeline. After years of manufacturing every possible excuse, today President Obama was finally straight with them about where he truly stands. His answer is no to more American infrastructure, no to more American energy, and no to more American jobs.

By contrast, environmental activist Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, praised the effort that led to the veto threat, considering the pipeline once was considered a shoo-in for approval.

Keystone’s not dead yet – feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal later this month or later this year, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline – but it’s pretty amazing to see what happens when people organize.

The State Department has concluded that the 1,179-mile pipeline extension, which would carry oil-sands crude from western Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t significantly add to carbon emissions, but the project would create only 35 permanent U.S. jobs.

Regardless of what happens between Congress and Obama, the final decision on Keystone rests with the State Department, which reports to the president. State has responsibility because the pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., would cross the Canada-U.S. border.

The Post added:

“I think the president has been pretty clear that he does not think that circumventing a well-established process for evaluating these projects is … the right thing for Congress to do,” Earnest said.

Obama rejected a Canadian firm’s application to build the pipeline in 2012.

At a year-end news conference in December, Obama sought to downplay the benefits of the pipeline. He said the benefits for U.S. citizens and workers from the pipeline would be “nominal.”

“I think that there’s been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy,” Obama said.

Fuel Freedom Staff

Despite cheap gas, EV sales were strong in 2014

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One narrative for 2014 is that cheap gasoline reduced the incentive for energy-efficient vehicles.

Tell that to all the people who bought electric cars during the calendar year.

With sales data still coming in, it appears certain that U.S. sales of EVs, including both all-electric and plug-in hybrids, surpassed 100,000 units.

That marks the third straight year of sales increases, since the electric vehicles we know today first went on sale in December 2010, according to Green Car Reports. The growth rate won’t come close to 2013, however, when 97,000 EVs were sold, nearly doubling the 2012 total of 53,000.

Nissan is emerging as the sales champion for the year, having moved 30,200 all-electric Leafs, a new U.S. record for an EV. That’s up nearly 34 percent over 2013, when 22,610 Nissan Leafs were sold.

Compare that figure to the Chevy Volt, of which 18,805 were sold — down 19 percent from the previous year, when 23,094 were sold.

According to the Auto Blog, Volt sales really tailed off in December, with just 1,490 units, a 38 percent falloff from the same month in 2013. Nissan sold 3,102 units for the month, up 23 percent from December 2013. The federal government’s $7,500 sweetener might have played a role, as new-car buyers sought to grab that tax savings before the calendar turned.

More Auto Blog:

The Leaf outsold the Volt every month in 2014. The closest gap was 215 units, in February. The biggest was 1,612, in December.

One theory for the Volt slowdown is that potential buyers are waiting for the redesigned 2016 model. Although the car won’t be officially unveiled until the Detroit Auto Show next week, Chevrolet opened the kimono to allow journalists a peek Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Check out stories here, here and here.

What about sales of the Tesla Model S, you ask? The company doesn’t post monthly sales reports, so we’ll have to wait until later in the winter for its annual report. But Inside EVs mentions both Nissan and Tesla “hitting it out of the park” in December.

Inside EVs also has a breakdown of how other anticipated models sold during the year. For instance, Cadillac moved 1,310 units of its plug-in ELR. And BMW moved 6,092 units of the i3, “not bad considering it was only available for 7 full months in the US.”

Also:

Current owners got some good news this month as earlier, long standing issues surrounding the onboard chargers being muted to avoid failure incidents has now been rectified and BMW has a recall/repair bulletin out for owners to now get new units installed. 7.4 kW charges again for everyone!

Fuel Freedom Staff

Anchorage had zero days below zero in 2014, a first

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Climate experts are worried about a strange trend in the largest U.S. state: During all of 2014, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, did not see a day when the temperature fell below zero degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the first time in recorded history that’s happened.

As The Washington Post notes, the last time the mercury fell into negative digits was Dec. 26, 2013. Since then, the low has been above zero every day except one, Feb. 11, 2014, when it was exactly zero.

The Los Angeles Times says that in 2012, Anchorage had 32 days when the low temperature was below zero. In 2013 there were 14 such days.

Seven other cities in Alaska had record-warm years as well.

That doesn’t mean it was hot, per se. The average temperature in Anchorage during 2014 was 40.6 degrees, which to Southern Californians would feel like the next Ice Age. But that threshold was far above last year’s average temperature of 37 degrees.

The Times reported:

“These are definitely red flags that are very consistent with climate change,” said Chris Krenz, senior scientist at Oceana, an international conservation group. “These are anomalies … that show our climate system is off-kilter.”