JulianW

I heard one station owner say he was lucky if he got 1p per litre, that was a few years ago though but I can't see that conditions have improved for him.

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papa-bear

You don't see any gas stations with out the snack bar / convenience store aspect over here any more. Some have even incorporated pared down sized versions of fast food chains, donught shops, etc... as part of their model.

MSYoung

It is not just the individual states that have widely different prices, you encounter that in different cities. I can drive 20 miles and find gas for 10 cents less. They say the US average is $3.34 but on the West coast it is around $3.70 and climbing daily. There has been a small town on the California coast that was in the news a couple weeks ago. They have one gas station in town and it is a sort of isolated community.

When the rest of the state was averaging $3.00 a gallon, this gas station was charging $5.60. The owner saw no problem with that, if you had to stop there you had to pay his price. Now he is probably well over $6 unless the state has stopped by and charged him with gouging customers.

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papa-bear

All while according to this slashdot article, we are sitting on hundreds of billions of barrels of oil right here in North America.

Anyone want to start an oil company with me?

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HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

jack

Good interim step but what about ethanol and scrub grass?

I'm starting to sound like a tree hugger here -- which I really am not -- but if this is the promise of a global economy, maybe a little protectionism might not be such a bad thing.

Can anyone say self sufficent?

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papa-bear

Read another article on a problem with farmers changing their crops to ones for the fuel market. It said something about the price of staples (rice, potatoes, etc..) doubling since they changed their focus.

This brings up a whole other kettle of fish to decide which resource to grow for and can we afford it.

gei_spot

I agree, with the farm boyz switching their crops, it has begun digging into my beer and pizza prices. Anyway here in SF has the claim to the nations highest prices avg. $ 3.45 for reg. There is plenty of oil off the coast but the gov. won't let them offshore drill.

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papa-bear

Can they set up the rig on the shore line and point the drill on an angle out into the ocean?

JulianW

Now there's the sort of "out of the box" thinking I've been looking for.

Not too sure the govt will agree though.

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