A former Shell Oil executives says increasing demand and inadequate supplies will see pump prices hit $5 soon.
Americans will pay $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012, thanks to growing global demand for oil, tighter supplies and inadequate responses by the US government, the former president of Shell Oil said Sunday. Appearing on the TV news program Platts Energy Week, John Hofmeister also predicted little or no new drilling in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico for the next two years, as Washington continues to respond to the BP oil spill with tighter regulation of the oil and gas industry. “If we stay on our current course, within a decade we’re into energy shortages in this country big time,” said Hofmeister, who retired from Shell in 2008 and now heads a grass-roots group called Citizens for Affordable Energy. “Blackouts, brownouts, gas lines, rationing–that’s my projection based upon the current inability to make to make decisions,” Hofmeister said. “The politically driven choices that are being made, which are non-choices, essentially frittering at the edges of renewable energy, stifling production in hydrocarbon energy–that’s a sure path for not enough energy for American consumers.
Hofmeister’s advocacy group claims Congress is failing to act to take advantage of plentiful supplies of energy and supports a traditional centralized model of energy production rather than a more efficient decentralized approach tailored to local resources.
There is more oil available than we have ever consumed; more coal than any other country on earth; the opportunity for clean coal power production has never been better; more natural gas; more opportunity for liquefied natural gas; more oil in U.S. shale than in all of Saudi Arabia; more bio-fuels practically by the month; more solar; more wind; and more potential for hydrogen than ever before.
Hofmeister may be correct about the future price of gas but I disagree with the centralized, long distance transmission approach to keeping prices low.
