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The road to fuel choice — businesses’ role

Fuel choice has always suffered from the age-old chicken and egg problem: Businesses don’t want to provide alternative fuels, and the vehicles that can run them, unless there’s a demonstrable demand. Meanwhile, consumers won’t (or can’t) show businesses there’s a demand for these vehicles and fuels until they’re readily available. Read more

Plastic-powered cars are on their way

Picture this: It’s a regular day at the grocery store. You choose some products, go to the register, and accept some plastic bags from the cashier to carry your groceries home. When you get home, a bag wriggles out of your grasp and floats through the air. Your simple plastic bag has now joined the legion of un-recycled plastic that contributes to some frightening statistics. Read more

E85: Can it break through as an alternative fuel?

Harry_S._TrumanPresident Harry S. Truman once said, “A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.” Over the past few weeks, my colleagues at Fuel Freedom Foundation and I have spoken with and read about several optimistic owners of E85 fuel stations.

Our selection wasn’t random. We focused on chains or fuel stations that apparently overcame literature-defined problems in marketing E85 and, according to their owners or senior managers, were on their way to success in securing profitable market penetration. Frankly, we wanted to find sufficient cases that testify to the fact that E85 can compete successfully with gasoline. Succinctly, we wanted to respond to a question that’s frequently asked of us, which goes something like this: “Assuming no major policy and feedstock changes (at least in the near term), can E85, in light of the current price of gasoline, provide consumers and the nation with a real competitive choice of alternative fuels that are safer, environmentally better and cheaper than gasoline?”

Future articles will provide mini case studies of some of E85 retailers. But for the present, based on many phone calls and Google descriptions, we found at least four or five stations (relatively quickly) with prices ranging from 60 cents to just over a $1 below the price of gasoline, despite the current, relatively low gas prices. The lowest price described was below $1.50 a gallon. All stations seemed committed to the continued sale of E85, and each one expressed conviction that they have sufficient price flexibility to build a vehicular fuel market able to meet cash flow and profit expectations. Their optimism was based on their present sales and future forecasts of sales.

Clearly, we need to know more. But what we heard deflated (at least partially) conventional wisdom suggesting that while a large pool of newer FFVs s and older vehicles that can be converted to FFV status exists, increased sales of E85 is unlikely because of the decline in the price of gasoline.

The E85 retailers we talked to and reviewed online appear to be using some of the following strategies to take on gasoline successfully in the market place. They are paraphrased and summarized from direct quotes for brevity:

Loosen Ties with Brand Names: Loosening ties with major brand-name franchisers provides the ability to sell E85 and permits more flexibility to set prices based on market perceptions.

Share Value of RINs: RINs are tradable and are valuable, particularly when their value is high. The ability to secure RINs from members of the supply chain is an incentive. Producers and blenders have a stake in retailer success; retailers have a stake in feedstock. The RINs help make the price right at the pump.

Amend Supply Chain: By incorporating blending as a function, retailers are able to manage costs and, indeed, lower costs. By avoiding the need to contract for transferring E85 from terminal to station and doing it themselves, retailers are able to also better manage costs.

Intuitive Marketing: Choosing an easily accessible location within which there is a high density of FFVs, along with recognition that price matters, are threshold needs to penetrate the fuel market. Smaller fuel stations often make their locational decision, in part, based on intuition and not on expensive market studies. Some might do a study…but those who did appeared to keep the costs low. They saw the possibilities in diverse locations by talking to the market and marketing folks and checking available data concerning FFVs in the area, as well as watching traffic patterns. They also had a feel for the area.

Anecdotes and small samples should not generate formulaic or prescriptive “one size fits all” market or marketing strategies. Maybe we were lucky in our calls! Maybe we were fortunate to quickly find the right articles or presentations. One of my colleagues fortuitously drove by a fuel station on his way to the airport and saw a sign touting a very low E85 cost per gallon. Clearly, economic, social, environmental, political and cultural variables are different in different areas of the country, and could very well negatively affect predictability of retail success, particularly concerning location, price and consumer acceptance. Just as clearly, supply-chain differences between and among retailers in different parts of the nation could well impede or facilitate success. What is important at this stage is to recognize that there are individuals and groups out there who own or manage fuel stations, and whose early market achievements should generate a positive bet concerning their intermediate and long-term success. Borrowing from Harry Truman, they appear, at least at first glance, to be making opportunities out of what others perceive as difficulties. If they succeed and generate copycats or variations on a theme, it will be good for the nation, its communities and consumers.

By health check or economic necessity: A tale of two oil industries and their response to illness

By John Hofmeister and Marshall Kaplan

shutterstock_118647259A bad cold starts with a tickle in the throat and a languid day. It grows to painful swallows, stuffed sinuses and likely a fever. Does the patient treat the symptoms? Does he or she transform to avoid illness in the future?

Few oil company players will admit to it yet, but the future threatens a very bad cold for the current industry, or worse. Very few feel it coming because current business plans are robust and the workload is on overload. When they are recognized, the threats to the current business model are going to take more than treating the symptoms; there are transformative requirements to avoid getting permanently sick, including, for many, a difficult transition to alternative fuels. The industry’s investors are not likely to remain committed to oil. Neither are the politicians, the Wall Street analysts and the public who, for different reasons, some economic and some with concerns for the environment, are already shaky with respect to the future of oil. Unenthused investors actions, however, will speak much louder than concerned words.

Everyone agrees that conventional oil has peaked. Unconventional oil may be abundant, but it’s expensive. It’s so expensive that industry valuation is already being impacted by worried investors who don’t like companies borrowing cash to pay dividends. Shale formation decline rates demand evermore drilling. Drilling costs increase as more wells per amount of production are completed, raising per barrel costs. Sweet spots are finite as the majors have learned the hard way. They bought into many plays too late. The Middle East is, well, the Middle East. Don’t look for reduced tension in the near future. Do look for OPEC nations to increasingly shift oil for export into oil for local consumption — a residual of the Arab Spring. Business as usual is history. Brazilian, East African, Russian and Arctic production opportunities abound, except that the degrees of difficulty are unclear and uncertain, but are sure to be costly. The high costs and regulatory uncertainties of oil limit global growth and nourish alternative fuel prospects. Oil investors don’t like sore throats emerging from hard to swallow realities. They will want to create a new reality to protect their financial wellbeing.

The costs of carbon have yet to be added onto oil and we know they’re coming. There’s debate over the form of payment, not the reality. Take a look not only at the number of governments backing carbon constraints coming out of this year’s climate meeting at the UN, but, more importantly, count the companies! Count the crowd recently claiming the high ground from Central Park to Midtown in New York and other cities around the world. The oil industry’s low favorability gives it limited public influence. While special-interest money may run out the clock on near-term legislation in the next Congress, for the industry, it not a long term solution. Civil society and political trends are inevitably contrary to the industry’s status quo interests. The rhetoric alone will tax the bronchial capacity of oil and gas leaders; investors will cease shaking hands with infected stocks.

Cash is to oil what gasoline is to the internal combustion engine. Higher upstream costs and more expensive fuels reduce consumer demand and, inevitably, cash flow. Downstream cash can’t make up the difference for higher upstream capital (cash) outlays when consumers drive less or take advantage of increasing availability of lower-cost alternative fuels, despite the BTU and/or mileage disadvantages of alcohol fuels versus oil products.

Finally, when divestment trends start to impact the industry, perhaps initially not directly through actual shifting of resources, but because of the growing perceptions of the risk of stranded assets, opportunity costing equations will begin to hit hard. The value associated with increasing capital costs for oil development will be muted. With ever higher costs, more difficult unconventional production, more challenging resource basins and tighter regulatory scrutiny, along with environmental constraints, existing assets may never get produced. The probable reserve that never makes it to proven becomes ever less valuable with time, perhaps even worthless. Investors don’t like that. Oil price to support such production is unsustainable; the price rises until it crashes; production cannot recover from the collapse because sustainable alternative fuels will have taken increasing market share. To remain competitive, oil may not be able to climb above the $55 – 75 range. This prospect will cause full blown pneumonia for oil companies. Most still do not see it coming. For OPEC countries who are under inconsistent pressures — first to increase exports for needed revenues at home to fund services for an often restive population; second, to reduce exports to provide energy and gasoline products to larger population numbers, it could present real challenges affecting political stability.

Some companies that sense it coming will not wait for the cold symptoms to lodge in their respiratory systems. They will get out in front with natural gas, using an entirely different cost/price structure to displace high cost oil by producing natural gas for fuels, including ethanol, methanol, CNG and LNG. They’ll also embrace biofuels as a sustainable and carbon-reducing alternative to oil products only. In both cases, their cash flows and capital outlays will fund reasonable and rational alternative investments in downstream and midstream infrastructure to produce, distribute and sell alternative fuels, extending their business models and capabilities rather than risking everything on their past model. They’ll choose investor and their own health and economic necessity as the basis of a new business model transforming the mobility industry with fuels competition.

A handful of smart companies will astutely come to grips with their industry’s endemic inability to change their historic focus on oil as their base business. They’ll see diversity as an opportunity to run the race with competitive fuels, and they’ll recognize that oil and gasoline will only be able to sustain their monopoly status at the pump for a relatively short period of time. They will trade one form of steel in the ground for another, bringing the competencies of size, scale and execution to an ever-growing, oil-displacing, alternative fuels industry. In the process, they will simultaneously reduce the size of the oil upstream capital, cash, environmental and stranded asset problems that alienated investors, and, at times, the public, particularly related to emissions and other pollutants.

With a proper health check, after scanning the industry’s economic and environmental horizons, they acknowledge the inevitability of the changing critical role of investors. Their own financial health and economic necessity will redefine the role of oil and change the competitive landscape.

 

John Hofmeister, Former President Shell Oil Company (retired), Founder and CEO Citizens for Affordable Energy, Author of Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider (Palgrave Macmillan 2010)

Marshall Kaplan, Advisor Fuel Freedom and Merage Foundations, Senior Official in Kennedy and Carter Administrations, Author

Are the United States and Saudi Arabia conspiring to keep oil prices down?

As my colleague Jordan Weissmann wrote Tuesday, there are a number of factors behind the continuing global slide in oil prices, including North American production, increased energy efficiency, Europe’s economic stagnation, and China’s slowing growth. But a big one is Saudi Arabia, which, to the dismay of fellow oil -producing nations, has resisted pressure to cut production in order to stabilize prices.

Ahead of an OPEC meeting in Vienna next week, there are some contradictory theories about why Saudi Arabia is content to keep oil cheap for the time being. One is that the Saudis want to nip the U.S. oil boom in the bud. American shale oil is more expensive to produce and needs high prices to remain competitive. As one analyst put it when the kingdom cut prices for U.S. customers earlier this month, “the Saudis have basically declared war on the U.S. oil producers.”

Read more at: Slate

Religion, structural changes in the oil Industry and the price of oil and gasoline

Oil barrelAmericans — in light of the decline in oil and gas prices — don’t take happy selfies just yet! Clearly, the recent movement of oil prices per barrel below $80 and the cost of gasoline at the pump below $3 a gallon lend cause for, at least strategically, repressed joy among particularly low-income consumers, many of whose budgets for holiday shopping have been expanded near 10 percent. Retail stores are expressing their commitment to the holiday by beginning Christmas sales pre-Thanksgiving. Sure, sales profits were involved in their decisions, once it appeared to them that lower gas prices were here to stay, at least for a while. But don’t be cynical; I am sure the spirit moved them to play carols as background music and to see if in-store decorations made it easier for shoppers to get by headlines of war, climate change and other negative stuff and into, well yes, a buying mood. If retail sales exceed last year’s and GNP is positively affected, it will provide testimony and reaffirm belief that God is on America and the free market’s side, or at least the side of shopping malls and maybe even downtowns. Religious conversions might be up this year…all because of lower costs of gasoline at the pump. The power of the pump!

But, holy Moses (I am ecumenical), we really haven’t been taken across the newly replenished figurative Red Sea yet. There are road signs suggesting we won’t get there, partly because of the historical and current behavior of the oil industry. Why do I say this?

If history is prologue, EIA’s recent projections related to the continued decline of oil and gasoline prices will undergo revisions relatively soon, maybe in 6 months to a year or so. I suspect they will reflect the agency’s long-held view that prices will escalate higher during this and the next decade. Tension in the Middle East, a Saudi/OPEC change of heart on keeping oil prices low, a healthier U.S. economy, continued demand from Asia (particularly China), slower U.S. oil shale well development as well as higher drilling costs and the relatively short productive life span of tight oil wells, and more rigorous state environmental as well as fracking policies, will likely generate a hike in oil and gasoline prices. Owners, who were recently motivated to buy gas-guzzling vehicles because of low gas prices, once again, may soon find it increasingly expensive to travel on highways built by earthlings.

Forget the alternative; that is, like Moses, going to the Promised Land on a highway created by a power greater than your friendly contractor and with access to cheap gas to boot. Moses was lucky he got through in time and his costs were marginal. He was probably pushed by favorable tides and friendly winds. The wonderful Godly thing! He and his colleagues secured low costs and quick trips through the parting waters.

Added to the by-now conventional litany concerning variables affecting the short- and long-term cost and price of gasoline and oil (described in the preceding paragraph), will likely be the possible structural changes that might take place in the oil industry. If they occur, it will lead to higher costs and prices. Indeed, some are already occurring. Halliburton, one of the sinners in Iraq concerning overpricing services and other borderline practices (motivated by the fear of lower gas prices), has succeeded in taking over Baker Hughes for near $35 billion. If approved by U.S. regulators, the combined company will control approximately 30 percent of the oil and gas services market. According to experts, the new entity could capture near 40 percent relatively quickly. Sounds like a perfect case for anti-trust folks or, if not, higher oil and gas costs for consumers.

Several experts believe that if low gas prices continue, oil companies will examine other profit-making, competition-limiting and price-raising activities, including further mergers and acquisitions. Some bright iconoclasts among them even suggest that companies may try to develop and produce alternative fuels.

Amen! Nirvana! Perhaps someday oil companies will push for an Open Fuels Law, conversion of cars to flex-fuel vehicles and competition at the pump…if they can make a buck or two. Maybe they will repent for past monopolistic practices. But don’t hold your breath! Opportunity costing for oil companies is complex and unlikely to quickly breed such public-interest related decisions. Happy Thanksgiving!

Redlands to offer CNG /LNG fueling stations in town

Residents and businesses in need of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) for their vehicles will have an increased ability to fill up in town.

The city has added new Compressed Natural Gas fuel dispensers at its corporate yard to allow up to four alternative fuel vehicles to fill up at the same time.

“There’s not a whole lot of stations around that you can get that fuel source,” said Councilwoman Pat Gilbreath, adding that the availability of the fuel stations give residents more options for the types of vehicles they can purchase.

Compressed Natural Gas is a clean burning alternative fuel that helps reduce carbon emissions and costs less than fossil fuels, according to a city news release.

Read more at: Redlands Daily Facts