Stay out of the Bakken, the cost of living there is insane. I know people who have worked there and unless your company provides housing (many do now) you will not find a place to live and if you do you will pay Trump Tower prices. Same thing with food. Texas is a good place, Eagle Ford is booming and so is the Marcelles in PA. There isn't any class B work in the oil patch unless you are looking to work a wireline crew or a derrik. I'm usually over 80,000 loaded, I ran a triple axle my first year down here.
Pez, demand is up, way up. Oil is a global commodity and no matter how much domestic demand falls oil is traded on the international markets where China and India more than make up for our decline. Also in 2009 our fuel prices were higher than they are now for several months. If I remember right a barrel actually hit $125 at one point in 2009. The prices went through the floor at the end of W's term though, so your comparison makes perfect sense against today's prices. When gas sells for less than $2/gallon oil is trading under $60/barrel. Something to chew on, a barrel of oil depending on what kind of oil it is makes around about 35 gallons of gas, if a barrel of oil cost $95 then you are looking at gas at $2.71/gallon at crude oil prices. That's not taking into consideration how much money it costs to refine a barrel of oil (separating out the gasoline hydrocarbons from all the other hydrocarbons), to transport it from the oil field to the refinery, to add %10-%15 Ethanol to the gas (Ethanol costs more than gas), to add the detergants and stabilizers and octane blend to the gas, and to transport it to the distributors (the gas stations). There is very little profit margin in refining oil, the profits come from producing massive quantities which is why we export fuel (refined from oil we imported because we have the worlds most advanced and large refining capacity). Also, it costs a fortune to refine diesel because the government requires that diesel fuel have virtually no sulphur in it. That is expensive becuase crude oil has a tremendous amount of two things, water and sulphur. That's why light sweet crude is expensive (very low sulphur content) and heavy sour crude is cheap (high sulphur content). Most people don't realize how much fuel is actually diesel and not gasoline. Airplanes run on a form of diesel, trucks, ships, locomotives, diesel is a huge chunk of the fuel market.
I agree that people NEED gas, no doubt it's a national security issue the same as electricity. How do we deal with that? Again I did write a little article about how we can make progress there. As far as you not noticing any shortage of electricity, nuclear plants can be ramped up to produce more power on demand, the problem is even though nuclear is the medium term future of electricity the Democrats have blocked a national nuclear waste repository for decades even though every single electric bill we pay a federal tax for the disposal of nuclear power waste. That aside does Chicago have so many jobs it afford to lay off two coal fired powerplants worth of workers? It's a blue city so I'm sure they think they can, Springfield will just pay the difference out of the pockets of the red counties as usual and the fed will pick up any leftovers. Meanwhile those workers can now look forward to being taxed for no longer being able to afford health insurance. Lather rinse repeat.
