£1.25 A Litre!

[scientific steve]

Heard on the radio today that one of the countries in the world (can't remember who now) can buy petrol at, get this 2p per litre!!!!!!!! You can fill your car up fo jsut over a £1.

yup, when working in Turkmenistan they could fill up a Toyota land cruiser to the top for less than 4 dollars

mind you it was nothing like the fuel we get here, think it would be about 85 ron

[irish al]

http://fuelandtaxprotest.mfbiz.com/

[~ ~ Cal ~~]

Can't really argue as I am not fully clued up on this, but one has to wonder why a company like Shell would run at a LOSS. Seems a tad difficult to belive. Also, becasue a company is 100 old and well-established, it doesn't make them reputable on that basis alone. Furthermore, this oil price malarky is all very shrouded. Why is it $120+ /barrel? What makes it shoot up to that price in a few weeks? How many litres is in a barrell. All of these things and more are out of the public realm. Seems to me that the less the man in the street knows about such things the more wool can be pulled over his eyes.

Shell and BP sell crude oil on the world markets by and large. Market supply and demand controls the price.....pure and simple.

They dont run at a loss...............they use ROACE as way of way of tracking returns - Return on Actual Capital Employed

Return on average capital employed (ROACE)

ROACE measures the efficiency of Shell’s utilisation of the capital that it employs. In this calculation, ROACE is defined as income attributable to shareholders adjusted for Shell’s share of interest expense, after tax, as a percentage of Shell’s share of average capital employed for the period. Capital employed consists of total equity, current debt and non-current debt. The tax rate and the minority interest components are derived from calculations at the published segment level.

It sits at around 24% or so................in others words it takes a billions to make billions.

[~ ~ Cal ~~]

Interesting read w.r.t what the Welsho was saying.............

Reuters

Shell CEO says record oil not due to shortage

Thu May 22, 2008 5:24pm BST

By Karen Noack

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices at a record high above $135 a barrel are rising due to market sentiment rather than a shortage of supply, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive said on Thursday.

U.S. crude oil hit an all-time peak on Thursday, climbing to $135.09, lifted by concern about long-term supply and a host of predictions of further rises from influential investment banks and investors.

“What we say and what we see is there are no physical shortages,” Shell’s Jeroen van der Veer told Reuters television. He runs the world’s second-largest fully publicly traded oil firm by market value.

“There are no tankers waiting in the Middle East, there are no cars waiting at gasoline stations because they are out of stock. This has to do with psychology in the markets and you cannot forecast psychology”.

His view that there are no shortages chimes with that of other oil producers, such as members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Others, such as the U.S. government, say supply is tight.

While rising prices are boosting profit for the industry, the Shell CEO agreed that high oil costs were a mixed blessing.

“For many consumers in the world, this really starts to hit them. Secondly, we see that you get a kind of public outcry.

“At the same time, the only thing that we can do is use the profits we make to invest for additional supplies.”

Shell has the largest capital spending programme among its main rivals in 2008, having spent $7.6 billion (3.8 billion pounds) in the first three months of the year alone. It was also alone among its peers in boosting output.

Oil’s climb has led to rising costs in the oil industry for services such as drilling rigs and companies are increasing the long-run price assumptions they use for planning their business.

Van der Veer, asked if Shell needed a price around $80 a barrel to break even, declined to give a specific figure but said it had grown more costly to bring on new supply.

“When oil prices went up, you see that the cost for new projects for the whole industry, not only for Shell, became a lot more expensive,” he said.

“In our industry we see quite severe inflation. We don’t know if that will plateau out or go up further.”

(Reporting by Karen Noack, Writing by Alex Lawler; Editing by Peg Mackey)