Has high gas prices slowed you down?

LPG gas ("autogas") is usually way cheaper than gasoline/petrol and makes your car run more efficiently. It's quite widely available in Britain and Australia for example but unfortunately not so in the US. Best part is a regular gas/petrol engine will take it without modification, all you need are modifications to the tank and fuel line.

Just curious if anyone is using it and how much you're saving.

Also curious if anyone is using gas additives.

I prefer the idea of getting gasoline from Canada -- except I hate the idea of digging up half the boreal forest to get it. At least with sucking it out of a hole in the sand there isn't a lot of collateral damage, other than what arises from CO2 emissions.

Some day we'll have electric or fuel cell cars for local trips, and electric trains for long distance ones, and we won't be fretting over this any more.

Thanks to the money I made from buying stock in oil companies a few years back I've been able to quit work and spend more time taking photographs.

Pretzel said:

Kaj E said:

Energy has been too cheap.

Click to expand...

You're kidding, right?

Click to expand...

Of course he's right! Energy is so bloody cheap that everybody can afford wasting it as they please. This is true not only in the US, but also in Europe. If people can afford driving cars that use 20 liters of gas per 100 km driven (that would be 6 gallons for 60 miles or so; 10 miles per gallon), energy is definately too cheap. If people can afford flying across the atlantic ocean for a weekend shopping trip, energy is definately too cheap. If people can afford to build houses without insulation and just heat the whole athmosphere in winter, energy's too cheap. There are countless examples of how energy is simply being wasted. It's too cheap.

BG

I think we were paying [in the US] $1.60 a gallon. 5 months ago we were paying $2.95 and now $3.95. Ticks me off because a fare share of this money is doing nothing but making oil people richer. Something stinks around here when an oil company made a profit 5 years ago of 11 billion and last year 42 billion. I’m sure what we pay is nothing to you, I would think the same. But what both our countries pay in gas prices is a joke compare to what they pay in the some mid-east countries. There gas is dirt-cheap compare to ours.

Brd Lauris Heitmann said:

But I am not complaining : )

--
http://foto.heitmann.net/

Click to expand...

--



This is me Post Processing. If only I can get it right the first time!

Full time auto tech, part time photographer. Mark Thompson/MTT
Louisville, KY. USA

Why do you have to 'put your two cents in'.. but it's only a 'penny for your thoughts'? Where's that extra penny going to?

http://markthompsonphotos.com

I agree with 90% of what you are saying except for 2 points.

The oil companines are not controlling the price of oil through limiting their refining capacity. If you were to look at the balance sheet of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, or any of the other majors, you will see they are making very little money in the refining business. They are buying high priced crude and refining it into gasoline. The lion's share of profit for the oil companies is coming from the upstream portion of their business (I should know as I am in this business). What people fail to realize is the huge amount of capital involved in developing large projects. It is not unusual to spend hundreds of millions of dollars drilling wells, setting platforms, and laying pipelines. Even when you find a new source of oil, it can take years (4 to 5 years is not unusual) for the new finds to come online. When the projects do come online, sure they throw off huge amounts of money, but they normally take years to recoup the initial investment.

Second point, I would not say that oil is running out tomorrow, but I would say that oil is becoming much harder to find and produce. Most of the giant oil fields have been found. The ones that have not been found are in areas that are off limits to drilling or are in areas that are too expensive at todays prices to explore in. The fields that are found now are smaller and hence take more $ bbl recovered to develop. There will be a day in the future (I might not see it but my children will) where we will have to rely on something besides hydrocarbons to fuel this world.
--
http://www.panoramio.com/user/109464

the train station. And when I don't feel like taking the train, I ride my beautiful carbon fiber Specialized Tarmac road bike to work.

--
Allen
http://www.pbase.com/artist/people_in__passing
http://www.pbase.com/artist/my_favorites
Schilke and Vintage Benge (my other loves)

FrankG said:

I think the future is worrying. I might take up cycling again!

Click to expand...

Frank, I've been recycling for probably close to 20 years. I recycle paper, glass, plastics & cans (and other metals).

My husband just sold his Volvo & got a Toyota Corolla. We were going to get a Prius, but due to the Writer's Strike & him being without a single day of work for 6 months the Prius would have cost us double the money. So he decided on a Corolla. It gives him about 40 miles per gallon.

I agree the future is worrying.....

Lil

--

The beginning of a gallery, showing my progression with help from caring friends especially on DPR, can be visited by friends & family at

http://lilknytt.zenfolio.com/

LilKnytt said:

FrankG said:

I think the future is worrying. I might take up cycling again!

Click to expand...

Frank, I've been recycling for probably close to 20 years. I recycle
paper, glass, plastics & cans (and other metals).

Click to expand...

Well (showing my age I suppose) I actually meant cycling as in "bicycle" riiding !-)

Re-cycling - that's been getting more intensively and progressivley applied with various local schemes in the UK these days I'm very glad to say (although still some way to go to further develop this I think). I have had two colour coded bins for several years (trying to sound virtuous here).

LilKnytt said:

My husband just sold his Volvo & got a Toyota Corolla. We were going
to get a Prius, but due to the Writer's Strike & him being without a
single day of work for 6 months the Prius would have cost us double
the money. So he decided on a Corolla. It gives him about 40 miles
per gallon.

I agree the future is worrying.....

Lil

Click to expand...

I just had to fill up again this evening - Diesel now £1.29 per litre - that's about 6p a litre more than last time. Ouch! This had to happen though - there is no way the age of cheap fuel can last forever. Hopefully this will give even more incentive to car manufacturers to compete to achieve seriously better fuel economy.

• Frank

Ralph,

Thank you for your kind thoughtful remarks. I am not in the oil business, so I have a high degree of respect for your statements. My implication was not that the oil companies make money on the refining process. But you may agree that the refining process is a bottleneck in flow from the oil fields to the gas pump. Since there is less a supply of refined products (gasoline), the price escalates. It simply appears on a different line item of the balance sheet. Notice that everytime a refinery shuts down, from hurricane Katrina for example, prices jump. In california, even the rumor of a refinery outage spike gase prices. Those increases are realized directly on the bottom line of the oil companies.

In reference to your second point, I'll stand by my original statement, but with a bit of modification. And that is in consideration of the 'price point' you mentioned in exploring sources other than 'sweet crude'. I intentionally did not mention (admittedly for my own convenience in making the argument) that the cost of deriving oil from shale, for example, with current technology would make the current price of oil pale in comparison. But the resource is there, were we only more cunning in extracting it.

I would be very curious to know your thoughts in this regard.

Ralph Telford said:

I agree with 90% of what you are saying except for 2 points.

The oil companines are not controlling the price of oil through
limiting their refining capacity. If you were to look at the balance
sheet of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, or any of the other majors, you
will see they are making very little money in the refining business.
They are buying high priced crude and refining it into gasoline. The
lion's share of profit for the oil companies is coming from the
upstream portion of their business (I should know as I am in this
business). What people fail to realize is the huge amount of capital
involved in developing large projects. It is not unusual to spend
hundreds of millions of dollars drilling wells, setting platforms,
and laying pipelines. Even when you find a new source of oil, it can
take years (4 to 5 years is not unusual) for the new finds to come
online. When the projects do come online, sure they throw off huge
amounts of money, but they normally take years to recoup the initial
investment.

Second point, I would not say that oil is running out tomorrow, but I
would say that oil is becoming much harder to find and produce. Most
of the giant oil fields have been found. The ones that have not been
found are in areas that are off limits to drilling or are in areas
that are too expensive at todays prices to explore in. The fields
that are found now are smaller and hence take more $ bbl recovered to
develop. There will be a day in the future (I might not see it but
my children will) where we will have to rely on something besides
hydrocarbons to fuel this world.
--
http://www.panoramio.com/user/109464

Click to expand...

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.' -Ansel Adams

I do agree about the bottleneck. The reason for the bottleneck is twofold. The first part is getting govt approval for a new refinery. There have been expansions of existing refineries recently, but nothing much new. The second reason is money. The oil companies can make a better return on their investment in the upstream sector vs. midstream (refining) or for that matter downstream (gas stations etc).

As far as the oil shales go (bear in mind this is a little out of my area of expertise in the business), there are Billions of barrels of crude to be recovered there. Canada and Venezuela have more than anyone else by far. The cost to extract this crude is quite high and does take a very large toll on the environment to extract it. One high point is that with the Canadian oil shale projects, recovery is 100% (nearly) as opposed to conventional oil projects leave 1/3rd to 1/2 of the oil in the ground at abandonment.
--
http://www.panoramio.com/user/109464

I could not agree more. Let the government get involved only if you want to make things worse!
--
http://www.panoramio.com/user/109464

Basil,

Energy is, in fact, free. If we do not use it, it is simply unused. We do not have the capacity to create it. We can only use it as we find it, or convert it to a form more amenable to our liking.

Using energy is not the issue. The issue is the environmental footprint our current energy conversion technologies leave behind.

If you believe that driving a SmartCar or a Prius is significantly better for the environment than driving an SUV, I would submit that you are misguided. And it is almost incalculable in the number of ways - from the manufacturing engines that currently produce the raw materials from which the vehicles are forged to the amount of energy it takes to produce the fuel used for locomotion - whether it be gas, clean diesel, electric or hydrogen, or any hybrid thereof.

In any case, I am not willing to exist in my well insulated house paying exorbitant energy prices restricting my travel to the distance my bicycle will take me in a day, a sentiment that seems to be shared by at least the majority of the civilized world.

But I will agree and support any paradigm changing the current energy production/consumption cycles to one which leaves as close to a zero footprint on the environment as possible.

BasilG said:

Pretzel said:

Kaj E said:

Energy has been too cheap.

Click to expand...

You're kidding, right?

Click to expand...

Of course he's right! Energy is so bloody cheap that everybody can
afford wasting it as they please. This is true not only in the US,
but also in Europe. If people can afford driving cars that use 20
liters of gas per 100 km driven (that would be 6 gallons for 60 miles
or so; 10 miles per gallon), energy is definately too cheap. If
people can afford flying across the atlantic ocean for a weekend
shopping trip, energy is definately too cheap. If people can afford
to build houses without insulation and just heat the whole
athmosphere in winter, energy's too cheap. There are countless
examples of how energy is simply being wasted. It's too cheap.

BG

Click to expand...

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.' -Ansel Adams

If you are upset about the money the oil companies are making, why don't you buy some of their stock and then you will be one of the people making money?

As far as the gas being cheap in the mid-east, it is because their government subsidizes the cost of gasoline. Instead of selling on the open market, they sell it to their own people at a much reduced price. We could do the same, but I don't think the we (the taxpayers) could or would foot the bill.
--
http://www.panoramio.com/user/109464

Pretzel said:

Energy is, in fact, free. If we do not use it, it is simply unused.
We do not have the capacity to create it. We can only use it as we
find it, or convert it to a form more amenable to our liking.

Click to expand...

Well, free. How did you come to that conclusion? Yes, it comes from the sun for free (that's where the energy stored in the oil comes from), and it comes from the earth's interior for free. But there's a limited amount of it available to us in which ever form - and where there's a limited amount, there's a market, and there's a price to pay for the stuff.

But that's only half of the point. The other half is that oil is in fact a raw material for numerous things - from plastics to drugs. Oil is an incredible source of reduced carbon compounds, and it took enormous amounts of energy to get all that carbon reduced. That's why we like to burn it - to release that energy again. IMO, it's an outrageous insanity to burn gazillions of tons of it, instead of using it to manufacture goods from it, and use some alternate energy source.

Pretzel said:

Using energy is not the issue. The issue is the environmental
footprint our current energy conversion technologies leave behind.

Click to expand...

Of course. However, there's currently no way to use energy without creating that footprint (well, there are ways that reduce the footprint, but they're not at all wide spread), so in my use of language, they're the same.

Pretzel said:

If you believe that driving a SmartCar or a Prius is significantly
better for the environment than driving an SUV, I would submit that
you are misguided.

Click to expand...

It's not significantly better. It's not good for the environment in any sense. But it's only half as bad (or a third, or whatever the ratio of their gas mileage is). Only a rough approximation. But of course, leaving your car at home, or not buying one, is even better.

Pretzel said:

But I will agree and support any paradigm changing the current energy
production/consumption cycles to one which leaves as close to a zero
footprint on the environment as possible.

Click to expand...

Good. Then we agree, after all. But until that is achieved, isn't it a wise idea to treat our resources in a careful and sensible way?

BG

A local filling station close to where i live in Essex, England is charging £5.77 per gall for petrol and £6.18 per gall for diesel.

That's about US$11.35 and US$12.17

Gonna invest in a good pair of walking boots and blow the cobwebs off my 23yr old bicycle.

FrankG said:

Well (showing my age I suppose) I actually meant cycling as in
"bicycle" riiding !-)

Click to expand...

LOL - - had I been back home in Sweden cycling would have meant bicycling for sure. Even in Stockholm. But living in Los Angeles, the distances are just too far & even the grocery store is a good drive away for me & would mean uphill going home. Any frozen goods would melt away before I got home. No bus available either really. I have to drive.

FrankG said:

Re-cycling - that's been getting more intensively and progressivley
applied with various local schemes in the UK these days I'm very glad
to say (although still some way to go to further develop this I
think). I have had two colour coded bins for several years (trying
to sound virtuous here).

Click to expand...

I have now four different colored bins. Green for garden stuff. Black for house stuff. Blue for recycling & brown for horse manure. These four have been in effect for almost 13 years, but the blue bin used to be a yellow crate.

FrankG said:

I just had to fill up again this evening - Diesel now £1.29 per litre

• that's about 6p a litre more than last time. Ouch! This had to

happen though - there is no way the age of cheap fuel can last
forever. Hopefully this will give even more incentive to car
manufacturers to compete to achieve seriously better fuel economy.

• Frank

Click to expand...

Well I don't use diesel so I have no idea at the price. I do hope governments go after the car manufacturers about emissions & better fuel economy.

This is out of control ...

Lil

--

The beginning of a gallery, showing my progression with help from caring friends especially on DPR, can be visited by friends & family at

http://lilknytt.zenfolio.com/

LilKnytt said:

...I do hope
governments go after the car manufacturers about emissions & better
fuel economy.

Click to expand...

Why don't YOU, as a consumer, take control? We bought a Prius and regularly get 50 MPG. I can get 60 MPG, but am afraid of being run over by PU and SUV drivers!

LilKnytt said:

This is out of control ...

Click to expand...

Only because you are too (fill in the blank) to care enough. You must be a democrat? ;-)

I try to keep philosophy out of these camera discussions, but it's important. Nobody has mentioned the REAL cause of our problems: There are simply too many people. We don't seem to have any natural enemies...except ourselves. The solution is obvious! We are not smart enough to restrict births, regardless of race, nationality, and religion. The solution is famine, disease, insanity, war, etc. We will try to stop this, but ultimately, if the population continues to soar, we will fail!

Heck, global warming may be the solution? We may let Al Gore and his buddies try to "fix" it and they will destroy everything for about 100,000 years. In case it's not obvious, I think Al is an idiot.

We should devise a way to document everything we are doing so that if supposed intelligent life rebounds, they will have a clue what NOT to do...

I recommend the Ishmael trilogy by Daniel Quinn...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Quinn

--
Charlie Davis
Nikon 5700, Sony R1, Nikon D300
HomePage: http://www.1derful.info
Bridge Blog: http://www.here-ugo.com/BridgeBlog/
'Experience: Discovering that a claw hammer will bend nails.
Epiphany: Discovering that a claw hammer is two tools...'

chuxter said:

I try to keep philosophy out of these camera discussions, but it's
important.

Click to expand...

Huh? Camera discussion? Where?

chuxter said:

Heck, global warming may be the solution? We may let Al Gore and his
buddies try to "fix" it and they will destroy everything for about
100,000 years.

Click to expand...

How should reducing CO2 emission cause such an event? But yes, I don't think ole Al is helping much here because he generates so much hatred among Fox News viewers (which is detrimental to the cause he's fighting for). Let the scientists do their work. They don't need Al Gore to help 'em out.

BG

I will plan better. I will look at some of the places I would like to go this summer and evaluate the cost of getting there. I suspect that the closer places will be put at an higher priority. I have neglected downtown Chicago the past few years, but I can get there by train cheaply (compared with driving). I will not neglect it this year. Also local Zoos will be weekend destinations. The Chicago Botanic Garden will be visited several times. The Bristol Renaissance Faire is close, and a lot of nice photos are there. I don't see any long driving trips.