Latestarter's ramblings/musings/gripes and grumbles.

[Bruce]

spots ears leaned forward more

She's been gone awhile and I don't think a single snapshot necessarily shows the ears' "normal tilt". COULD be Spot if the rest of her patterning looks right! Catch her and @Latestarter can give it another go. If it isn't Spot, he still gets a hog ... with bonus babies.

Small rant. Gas went up $0.40 in 3 days, now generally $2.70 to $2.80. Gas in TX where the refineries are down is at or much less that we were paying at the beginning of the week. Our gas doesn't even come from TX.

 

[Baymule]

@Bruce there is supposed to be laws against price gouging, unless it is gasoline. One of the small towns between Houston and Livingston had a doughnut shop that was price gouging, a dozen doughnuts for NINE DOLLARS. The shop got put on a popular facebook site....... Karma is a Beach!

 

[Bruce]

So why is profiteering gasoline OK??? I know it isn't the stations, it has to be up the distribution line. Happens every time there is a hurricane a'coming. Platforms MIGHT get shut down, the refineries MIGHT get shut down, there MIGHT be a shortage (*) ... jack the price of gas. Never mind that up here I have NEVER seen stations close for lack of gas.

* And if there is it is most often due to people storing it all in their tanks rather than at the stations. Self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Alaskan]

I know that during past hurricanes gas stations in Houston have run out of gas...




but I know nothing about how or why with the pricing.

 

[goatgurl]

@Bruce, unless spots big ole belly pulled down and made her ears stick up it's not spot. her ears lean much further down over her face and this sow's don't. I looked at pictures of both and compared them. I have several pictures of miss prego. color pattern is really close tho. i'll wait for you and LS to come and catch her. remember me, i'm the gal who is afraid to go in the pen with my own pig much less a wild one. those things will eat you up.

 

[babsbag]

Glad that I am not the only one that respects a pig.

 

[greybeard]

Small rant. Gas went up $0.40 in 3 days, now generally $2.70 to $2.80. Gas in TX where the refineries are down is at or much less that we were paying at the beginning of the week. Our gas doesn't even come from TX....

So why is profiteering gasoline OK??? I know it isn't the stations, it has to be up the distribution line. Happens every time there is a hurricane a'coming. Platforms MIGHT get shut down, the refineries MIGHT get shut down, there MIGHT be a shortage (*) ... jack the price of gas. Never mind that up here I have NEVER seen stations close for lack of gas.

Doesn't matter where your refinery/source of gasoline is located. Even if yyou had a refinery right accross the street from you in Vt, your retail prices would still go up the same as everyone else (maybe minus some transport/pipeline costs) Gasoline (and crude oil) are commodities--traded on the open market just like cattle, corn, gold, and currencies. Traded (bought and sold) every day.
Your local station has to buy it from someone, and that someone is a jobber or local/regional distributor. What you pay for retail gasoline/diesel today is not reflecting what it cost your retailer to buy what is in their underground tank. It is reflective of what it is going to cost to replace each gallon of fuel in that tank..whether that tanker truck is going to roll up tomorrow or next week.
As an event unfolds, and anything that might adversely affect wholesale price of refined product is foreseen, the market forces on New York Mercantile Exchange cause the price of bulk fuel to go up. (It's traded in lots of 1000 barrels or 42,000 gallons)



Same with crude oil the refineries have to buy to make the fuel from..even if they are "buying it from themselves". Not all refineries have their own crude production division..oil wells.

If an event unfolds, and a shortage or bottleneck is seen, the perceived shortage causes bulk prices to go up each day. This is reported by NYME at 5:30 Eastern time to the major distributors, and each of those distributors adjusts their prices accordingly to the smaller local distributor and the local distributor informs the stations what their retail price should be to keep from selling fuel for far less than what the replacement fuel is going to cost. This is done so no one in the line gets stuck delivering fuel that costs them more to obtain than what they can get for it.

The biggest price hikes happen in states that have more strict emission standards and require special 'boutique' blends..these products are called Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending (RBOB) fuels.
Garden variety gasoline I believe is still referred to as Reformulated Regular Gasoline Blendstock for blending with 10% denatured fuel ethanol and is traded as US RBUB7.

Each step along the way, each entity involved is allowed by federal and state regulators to make a set profit margin, Whether the product is cheap or expensive to provide that margin remains approximately the same.
Some mysterious and never actually identified entity often referred to as "Big Oil" always gets the blame, but the truth is, the entity most often causing the visible pain are the market traders on NYME, as the traders hedge against losing $$ on tomorrow's costs. Right now, Sept fuel is significantly higher than Oct contracts.

IF the event happens just before a futures contract expires (monthly) it throws things really out of kilter as we are seeing right now because the flood happened right at the end of the month.

There is some relief in sight, as several of the large refineries have begun to resume operations.

U.S. Gulf Coast refineries and fuel distribution terminals started to reopen on Saturday, a week after Tropical Storm Harvey knocked out nearly 25 per cent of the nation's refining capacity and sent gasoline prices spiking.

While much of the region's refining infrastructure still remained offline from Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane last week, the restarts were a first step in alleviating concerns about U.S. fuel supplies.

Exxon Mobil Corp said on Saturday it was restarting its 560,500 barrel per day (bpd) facility in Baytown, Texas, America's second-biggest oil refinery, after it was inundated by flooding.

Phillips 66, meanwhile, said it was preparing to resume operations at its storm-hit 247,000 bpd refinery in Beaumont, Texas.

The announcements come after Citgo Petroleum Corp said on Friday it would restart its 157,500 bpd refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas.

And, as soon as refining capacity increases, the Colonial Pipeline should reopen as well. Because of design components, if there is little or nothing to flow thru it, it has to shut down to avoid damage to it's own infrastructure.

"The refineries were built on the Gulf Coast with the idea that we're going to import," said Sandy Fielden, director of oil and products research at Morningstar in Austin, Texas.

"That's why we're having problems today because that's where they were all built."

The reduced availability of fuel forced the Colonial Pipeline, which provides fuel from refineries near the Gulf of Mexico to the U.S. Northeast, to reduce supplies.

But some crude oil pipelines had restarted. Magellan Midstream Partners announced late Friday that it resumed operations on its BridgeTex and Longhorn crude oil systems. The two pipelines transport around 675,000 bpd of West Texas crude to East Houston.

The company said it expected to resume service on its Houston crude oil distribution system over the weekend.

As of Saturday, the volume of offshore U.S. Gulf of Mexico crude production still shut in had declined to about 106,000 bpd.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/harvey-refineries-texas-1.4273519

 

[Bruce]

the perceived shortage

Exactly ... PERCEIVED shortages, not ACTUAL shortages. They jack the price because there MIGHT be a shortage ... and they cash in on that. I've also noted that the price never goes down nearly as fast as it went up. I know it isn't the local stations doing this, as you said, it is the people "at the top" that decide the prices.

 

[greybeard]

The 'percieved' part is in the mind of the public, not in the supply chain. Saw a pickup truck today at the little convenience store up the road filling up two 55 gal drums. Next week, when he's burning that higher priced fuel and the pump prices have already started back down, he's not going to look so smart. Panic buying creates a shortage where none really existed.

And no, it is NOT the "people at the top". It's the people in the middle.
The market demand itself sets the price, not the refiners. It's the same as any commodity and any stock. No company gets to set what the price or value of their company's stock sells for. The buyers set it.
When the public and the major distributors 'perceive' a shortage, the distributors start bidding up what they will pay for refined fuels and the higher price they are willing to pay gets passed immediately down to the retailer, which then raises his price at the pump the same hour he gets word from his distributor, and all this usually happens within a few hours of the closing bell at NYME, every day.

 

[Bruce]

It's the people in the middle.

True and I guess what I really meant to say. If the refineries are down, they couldn't set a price anyway, they have nothing to sell. Whatever is "in the pipeline", however many, many millions of gallons of gasoline that is, is ALL there is for the moment. Jack the price! even though under normal circumstances that gas wouldn't be sold for some time.

And yep, a LOT of the available gas is sitting in drums, cans, gas tanks of private individuals trying to buy before it goes up "too much more". And yes that does cause a temporary shortage. Of course most people aren't using any more gas per day than they were before the "shortage". They bought several days earlier than they wouldn't have otherwise (and do it again as soon as they are down a quarter tank) thus reducing the quantity "in the pipeline" below "normal". "Shortage"!