The Price Of Crude Oil Essay

Another cause for the decline in oil prices is caused by an increase in consumers purchasing more fuel efficient vehicles, such as hybrid or electric vehicles. In many countries today, especially in North America, there has been an increased demand for fuel efficient vehicles. This is evident in TV commercials which are advertising more and more vehicles that get 40 to 50 miles per gallon, and by the ever increasing commercials for electric vehicles. Consumers are tired of paying outrageous prices for oil and are demanding more for their money. As this demand continues to grow, the demand for oil will decrease.

The reason of the fall in oil prices are the constant change of demand. The need for the oil is actually stagnant. Crude oil is becoming a product of the past. Today, you can harvest energy from solar, wind, water, heat, and waves. According to The Economist, “The use of fossil fuels in the rich world is mostly falling. Emerging economies are not currently taking up the slack”.

The consumption of the oil cause changes in the supply and demand. The United States produces 11 million barrels of oil every day. We are one of the biggest countries to have a big influence on the production and prices of the oil. The basic supply and demand theory explains that the if a product is produced more, the cheaper it should sell. If a country were to double the output of oil day, prices would fall and the Production is high, but the distribution of oil isn’t keeping up with the market. The United States builds an average of one oil refinery per 10 years. This is a net loss due to the fact construction has slowed down since 1970s. Since 1970s, the United States has 8 less oil refineries today. The reason why we are not oversupplied with cheap oil is because of the other countries’ higher net margin and the only operate at 62% of their capacity. Excess capacity is only there to meet future demand. With demand moving accordingly, oil prices will continue to be set mostly by the market — despite external players’ best efforts. (McFarlane)

High oil price for last few years drove the energy industry to come up with a new technological innovation and the result is a new drilling technique like hydraulic fracturing. This new technology made drilling easy in North Dakota and Texas (Timiraos, 2014). With more oil drilled domestically, U.S became net energy exporter instead of an importer. Also falling demand due to energy conservation, more efficient cars, less demand in China and OPEC opted against cutting production levels made the price go down. When Global economic growth was slowing and most economists agree that both supply and demand played role in the last year oil price plunge. Driven by the increased supply, oil price dropped from $82 to $50 between Oct'14 and Jan'15. The IMF summarizes 58% of the drop in oil price to supply and only 42% to demand.

Several oil-countries have been facing economic and political turbulence as a result of the crash in oil prices, and there is disagreement among OPEC as how to handle the situation. (Krauss) While this is happening, America’s oil production continues to rise, as it inches closer to becoming an energy superpower in production and consumption; and countries that depend on their oil exports face recession.

The consensus from the 1970s and 1980s was that there was an inverse relationship between oil prices and real economic activities. This belief later changed when the oil price crash of the mid-1980s failed to boost economic growth. Researchers then believed that increasing oil prices negatively affect the economy whereas falling oil prices have very little impact and by the 1990s this impact was assumed to be minimal (DePratto, de Resende and Maier 2009). More recently, researchers have found that increases in the oil prices adversely affect the economy whereas the impact of a decline in oil prices on GDP growth is only negligible (Jimenez-Rodriguez and Sanchez

This article “Why the Price of Filling Up Has Been Going Down” written by Alan Neuhauser stated that back in 2012. The article analyse fighters with the Islamic State group have seized oil fields, huge swathes of territory and major cities in Iraq and Syria, threatening oil supplies. On normal situation, this is going to threaten markets as it is threaten the supply of oil. Despite of the global unrest the prices at the pump in US are currently at their lowest levels in the year of 2012. According to the article there are several reason which make the price of oil fall, but the main reason which is causing this is the less use of oil crude after the Labor Day.

The United States consumes more than 25% of the world’s petroleum products which is a large percentage, considering only 3% of the world’s oil reserves are produced by the United States. Given the demand for petroleum products such as gasoline, understanding why Crude oil prices have skyrocketed in recent years, is not hard. According to the article “Ending America’s Oil Addiction,” the surge in crude oil prices can be reduced in large part to the simple concepts of supply and demand. (Cooper, 2008)

Some emergent countries have put a lot of effort to find new reservoir or find the best way to recover oil from deep seas such as The pre-salt in Brazil. America has high projections for the future with fracking. However, lower prices would put at risk investments in unconventional sources. For example, tar sands, shale oil, deep sea and fracking. Our forecast is that the crude oil price tend to slowly rise until the market balance it self to avoid oversupply especially because of the weakening in the global oil

The U.S. was supposed to be the world’s new swing oil producer, able to nimbly open and close the taps in response to market forces, thanks to its bounty of shale fields.” In the past a barrel of oil has been one hundred dollars, recently it has dropped to thirty dollars. Though some wells can be profitable at low prices it puts a serious strain on the oil industry as explained in this article.

The global price of oil has stooped to dramatically low prices as the demand for oil has died and oil companies are trying to get the demand for oil to raise and stimulate the oil trade. If the oil trade gets stimulated then the price of oil will rise making the supply higher than the demand and making more money for oil

Within the last year, oil prices in the United States have dropped significantly. As oil drilling in the United States has reached its highest level in over 30 years, consumers are reaping the benefits. Among these gains are record-low prices at the pump, and cheaper oil to heat homes. However, oil prices did not just drop on their own; multiple factors contributed to the fall. Increased domestic production, declining global demand, and competition from other oil-producing nations had led to rapidly dropping oil prices across the United States.

From 2014, the crude oil price has dropped in a sudden since the global economic downturn, oversupply of crude oil and the appearance of new energy. Global economy fatigued, and thus the demand of crude oil was not strong,

Since June 2014, oil price has fallen by more than 70 percent. Price has recovered few times last year. However, it has sunk this year to levels not seen since 2003 (New York Times, 2016). This drop of price has affected several firms in the industry which we can mention Chesapeake (CHK). In fact, Chesapeake was quoted at more than $20 until late 2014. Today, it is priced below $5. The oil industry is known for its history of booms and busts. It is not the first time that this industry is shaken. In the 1985-86, supply-driven mainly caused the fall of prices. In 2008-2009, price fallen was entirely due to the collapse in demand. However, this reason behind this recent crisis is a little bit special: “price decline appears

According to Domm (2013), the author of the first article, apart from the unrest in Egypt, several other factors such as a plunge in the inventories of domestic crude oil could drive up demand and in the end trigger an increase in the price of gas. In the opinion of the author, although the problems facing Egypt (and Libya) have affected supply