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They only have 4 tractors in Wyoming, and no other internal combustion engines!

Matt Higgins wrote:Now that i look at it again, can anyone tell me why there is such a drastic difference right at the border of Wyoming and Nebraska/Colorado/South Dakota?

Seems pretty ridiculous to me.

I believe that a large part of gas pump prices are state and local taxes. That could explain why prices could be very different right at a State (or county) border.

Matt Higgins wrote:Now that i look at it again, can anyone tell me why there is such a drastic difference right at the border of Wyoming and Nebraska/Colorado/South Dakota?

Seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Dunno. But I know why Missouri is 15 cents a gallon less than Illinois--tax.

I drove from Cape Girardeau in Missouri to Cairo in Illinois and back to Sikeston in Missoure last year. And at that time, the difference was more like 20 cents. There many more stations open that evening in Missouri than in Illinois--apparently the local are smart enough to know that a quick trip across the bridge is worth it.

Rick "who cannot explain why Virginia is among the most expensive, but who knows the local stations are very competitive and operating on very thin margins to stay so" Denney

Purple states. Must be the election Al Gore won.

There really is no shortage of oil--if the price gets high enough, refining of heavier grades becomes attractive--and there's a lot of heavy (sour) crude around.

What folks should be worrying about is natural gas. 70% of new homes are built to use it and a fair amount of electricity is generated with it. Have a look at domestic wellhead prices for 2005:

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9190us3m.htm

Matt Higgins wrote:
But I would say the that gas prices are high because of profit.

Might it be that profits are high because of gas prices?

This is the infamous commuter train crash that happened in January 2005 in Glendale, just north of Los Angeles. A car stopped in front of the train, which was going backwards (with the locomotive in the rear), as they generally do.

No. He had an argument with his wife. He drove his car onto the train track, then got out of the car. Quite a few people were killed, including the train's conductor and several close friends of mine. But Metrolink still insists on driving trains backwards. I grew up with trains. My dad retired from the old AT&SF. I have ridden every kind of train you can think of (but that's for another time). Had the train gone with the locomotive in front, it would have knocked the engine off the tracks but there would be few injuries. I have been in two derailments like this. In one, four persons inside a VW Bug were killed, the driver tried to beat the train over the tracks... and lost!

You beat me to this. I know the story quite well. Alvarez was found to be clinically insane.

The automatically induced ads on this page mention Amtrak fares. I think the picture of the train wreck caused that!

I got "Motorcycles For Sale"...

... and I still bet that per mile, your odds are still hugely better with public transportation than with this...

Chuck(G) wrote: What folks should be worrying about is natural gas. 70% of new homes are built to use it and a fair amount of electricity is generated with it.

For many years I've been on a western states committee that does technical studies of the interconnected electrical system. Often there are presentations on planned new generating facilities. I remember specifically someone from a Canadian utility stating that he saw in the plans for most new Western US generating plants that they were going to get natural gas from Canada; he said that Canada had no extra natural gas as all the reserves they owned were already committed to be used in Canada. He found it "interesting" that all the US planned independent producer generating plants were counting on importing natural gas from Canada, and he wondered where on Earth they got the idea that it would be available.

I should have bought natural gas futures back then....because I'd be rich now.

MA

MaryAnn wrote: He found it "interesting" that all the US planned independent producer generating plants were counting on importing natural gas from Canada, and he wondered where on Earth they got the idea that it would be available.

I've got to believe that there must be substantial tax credits or other incentives involved. A few miles north of here, one of those independents had a proposal for constructing a large natural-gas-fired generating "ranch". One of the big Canadian gas pipelines runs down the valley, so it sort of makes sense from an accessibility standpoint. But the year before the proposal was presented, wellhead prices had spiked by 400%--and we're in the BPA distribution corridor.

Eventually, given the resistance of the local community, the project went away. But I was scratching my head wondering what I'd missed...

Couple that with rebates by the gas companies for converting from other fuels to gas for heating and you've really got to wonder who's doing the thinking.

Maybe the powers that be think we'll get all of our gas on LNG tankers from Azerbaijan...

Part of de-reg that occurred was the "unbundling" of generation and transmission facilities from vertically-integrated utilities. This was to open the market for new generating facilities that weren't utility-owned, to increase competition and lower prices. You saw what happened in California. PG&E was forced to sell their generating facilities and then buy back the power from them; PG&E had to declare bankruptcy. They laid off many employees; and the California utility consumers got scalped.

What was amusing was when this whole thing started, it had already been tried in England and was a complete fiasco. But the historical evidence was completely ignored and the fiasco occurred again.

What has become clear to me as I get older, is that whoever has the money to influence what laws are passed, ends up being the recipient of the profits that those laws create.

MA

I am planning to move to the desert this summer, about 35 miles north of Palm Springs.



If you ever happen to drive on I-10 (Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway) through Palm Springs you will see these huge windmills which lower the costs of electricity immensely. They used to belong to Southern California Edison but I think they were sold a couple of years ago. This is on the Morongo Indian Reservation, where the cheapest regular gasoline in the area can be had for $3.13 a gallon. Too bad my Volvo requires premium!

While wind power is cheaper, probably, than natural gas, it probably is not as cheap as nuclear or coal-fired. In the business we call those wind power structures bird-whackers; they tend to be built in flyways because those are also the areas with consistent wind. Just like my cat who heads for the cat door when I open the closet that contains the vaccum cleaner, hopefully in time birds will learn to avoid the structures. Of course my cat didn't get killed by the vaccum cleaner the first time she encountered it.

While the more wind power the better from certain points of view, the amount of wind power in existance is a drop in the bucket compared to other types of generation. In general, alternative generation sources are only built when legislation forces that to occur, because of the cost factor.

MA