LTLFTcomposite:
Get an electric. We have one of each (and an electric tiller) and we absolutely love them.
A bit quieter, a bit lighter, absolutely no effort to stop it and restart, no mixing oil and gasoline, no getting oil residue over your yard or garden, no breathing in unscrubbed exhaust, etc. I'll never buy a gasoline yard tool again.
AndyH:
A lot of people like to focus on specific countries. But that makes no sense in the concept of a fungible commodity. People are going to produce it wherever it's cheapest at the time. Again, this varies with technology, but also sociopolitical issues. Just because it's no longer produced in one country doesn't mean that that country is "out of oil" -- only that there's better places to produce it elsewhere.
Now, as tech changes and sociopolitical situations change, the optimal location to produce can change as well. For example, Canada peaked in the early 1970s and was in decline... until bitumen tech advanced, and all of the sudden it started a huge second upswing much bigger than its first peak:
This sort of thing won't change in the future. Whether it's conventional crude, deepwater crude, atypical reservoirs, arctic crude, coal liquefaction, bitumen, shale oil, ultra-heavy, ultra-sour, etc, it will always be produced wherever it is most cost-effective. Oil knows no border.
The assessments by the disaster planners were downplayed, for fear of rocking global oil markets, but you can bet they are not the only people to have calculated how much damage could be done to the Saudi petroleum chain - or the global money chain - by an expedient as relatively simple as blowing one of the Abqaiq's stabilizing towers, or Ras Tanura's Platform Four, or the East-West pipeline's Pump Station One to smithereens.
You better believe it. Saudi Arabia was unusually blessed with light, sweet, shallow, massive reservoirs. To the point that they have an entire relatively shallow light sweet crude *supergiant* that they haven't even bothered to *start* tapping until just recently. They can produce it for just a couple bucks per barrel. So you can see why investors can worry about funding projects that cost $50 a barrel, $60 a barrel, $70 a barrel, or more.
In spite of the constantly increasing demand, world production appears to have been pretty flat since 2005 and decreased as the recession hit
World oil prices tend to track within OPEC's target price bands... unless OPEC loses control of the situation. This latter case happened in the oil superspike of 2008, when OPEC ran out of surplus capacity. Likewise, after the superspike, prices fell below OPEC's target pricing. We're back in it right now -- they've announced intent to keep oil at about $80 a barrel. This is much higher than their previous target of $20-$30 a barrel. Why they raised it isn't clear, but it's most likely due to less fear of demand erosion (the superspike showed that the modern economy is surprisingly resistant to erosion of demand as the price rises). Also, there's always changes in leadership. Venezuela's been lobbying for a higher price for a long time; Orinoco crude is only economical at higher prices. With Orinoco included, Venezuela's reserves are comparable to Saudi Arabia.
One thing that was a *huge* mistake was deregulating the commodities market. The last thing we need is amplification of the natural instabilities in the system.
Another thing people often don't pay much attention to that affects gas prices is refining margins, due to crack spreads. They were high from 2005-2007. They've been really low recently. Only two major refiners in the US made money in 2009, and in Q1 of this year, everyone lost money. Spreads are finally back at a reasonable level this quarter.