If Barack Obama can't regulate gas prices above $4 gallon, he'll find another way.
He's resourceful like that:
Brent crude was projected by Wall Street analysts to average as much as $116 a barrel by the end of the year. Now, with violence escalating in Iraq, how far the price will rise has become anyone’s guess.
The international benchmark surged above $114 on June 13th for the first time in nine months as militants routed the Iraqi army in the north and advanced toward Baghdad, threatening to ignite a civil war. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIL, has halted repairs to the pipeline from the Kirkuk oil field to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey.
The conflict threatens output in OPEC’s second-biggest crude producer. The Persian Gulf country is forecast to provide 60% of the group’s growth for the rest of this decade, the International Energy Agency said June 13th. Global consumption will “increase sharply” in the last quarter of this year and OPEC will need to pump more oil to help meet the demand, according to forecasts from the Paris-based IEA.
“We’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop in this tightly balanced market and now it’s happened,” Katherine Spector, a commodities strategist at CIBC World Markets Inc. in New York, said June 13th by phone. “There have been lurking risks but nobody was projecting how quickly things would turn worse.”
Guess we have the answer to that question. Or, put another way, so much for Iraqi crude, at least at any remotely sane price.
You know another Middle East oil source that's, er, drying up thanks to Obamunist Middle East policy? Three guesses:
Libyan output fell by 35,000 barrels a day to 180,000 in May, the lowest level since September 2011. Production was down 87% from a year earlier.
“The roughly 3 million barrels a day that Iraq is producing accounts for about 10% of OPEC’s overall production,” Kilduff said. “The Libyan outage and the up and down in Nigerian output leave OPEC with limited spare capacity. Saudi Arabia can’t make up for a loss of Iraq.”...
The conflict has the potential to push U.S. crude and gasoline prices higher, Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston, said by phone.
Of course, it's not quite as bad in Libya, because that country is run by the now-comparatively "moderate" al Qaeda.
We could, it should be pointed out, have been taking care of all our own domestic energy needs by this time and been exporting the surplus to the rest of the world. If, that is, Barack Obama and his party would ever have allowed us to tap the vast oil and natural gas resources to be found within American territory alone. "Energy security" is the term for it, as I recall. Instead of alarmingly and corruptly ballooning the national debt via an avalanche of Solyndras, we could be reaping the riches of our God-given fossil fuel resources in like measure.
But no. That's not the Obama Doctrine. Reviving the moribund American economy is not Obamanomics. Aiding the rise of the Global Islamic Caliphate and skyrocketing domestic energy prices, however, are:
“Given the current unrest in Iraq, I expect oil prices to reach $110 here for WTI, which would mean that the national average would go towards $3.80 for gasoline,” he said. “Should we see a significant supply disruption in exports, then I expect oil prices to go to $125 and the national retail average to exceed $4 a gallon.”
It’s been almost six years since U.S. retail gasoline averaged more than $4 per gallon, in the week of July 21st, 2008, according to data from the EIA.
My friendly neighborhood "filling station" has already hit four bucks a gallon. With a bullet, if you'll pardon the intended pun. Most likely, with no end in sight.
I guess that ensures that more Americans will be staying home to watch O's world burn.
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