Pentagon worried about spiking oil prices(DoD is the largest consumer of oil in US)

[maddezmom]

Source: AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) — After spending 15 billion dollars on oil in 2007, the Pentagon said Tuesday it was concerned over rising prices, since for every dollar oil goes up in price, an extra 130 million has to be added to its budget.

Oil price is "a significant concern for us today," Undersecretary of Defense Tina Jonas, the Pentagon's chief financial officer, told a conference organized by Jane's defense information group.

"Fuel has more than tripled in price over the past four years," Jonas said, adding that "for every dollar increase in the cost of fuel, we end up increasing by 130 million dollars in terms of operational costs."

Oil futures Tuesday leapt to a record close of 119.37 dollars a barrel in New York, after briefly skirting the symbolic threshold of 120 dollars.

The spiraling cost of oil is especially troublesome for the Pentagon since the "DoD (Department of Defense) is the largest consumer of oil in the United States," David Trachtenberg, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, said in his presentation.



Read more: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hoWhXfm191yKaTf3CNW-YaxnAErQ

[Solly Mack]

1. I've got a suggestion

(retrograde)

They know what it means...

[unhappycamper]

2. At 1.2 million barrels of oil a month, they should be concerned.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=13024

[forintegrity]

3. Poor, poor Pentagon.

No sympathy from me.

I'm hurtin', too, but I can't just go and ask for millions more!

How 'bout releasing some of our reserves to helpp EVERYBODY?

There's a thought!

YES! I AM BITTER and proud of it!

[UpInArms]

4. isn't it just lovely how we get to pay more for oil for the Dimson's

wars and this is why oil costs more?

[fed-up]

5. and all those "brilliant minds" can't figure out if we END the WAR we won't need the oil? nt

[mallard]

13. Re: 'brilliant minds'

Yeah, would somebody in the office that's worried please get the message up to the desk upstairs that's made the price so high now to begin with (?) because they don't always read this far into the morning paper.

Could save big bucks - no computers required, either.

[Nihil]

6. Two things to say on this:

#1


#2
> "for every dollar increase in the cost of fuel, we end up
> increasing by 130 million dollars in terms of operational costs."

Well stop bombing the shit out of civilians in faraway countries then.

You have the problem? You also have the solution.

[Sherman A1]

7. Well, then

They can pull a couple of those Carrier Battle Groups over to the curb and get some more efficient engines in those aircraft and other vehicle. Maybe we could have a M1a2 Abrams Hybrid getting 60 mpg in the city and 55 on the highway. Or better yet we could simply cut the Pentagon budget by 50% and bring the troops home.

[mortismo]

8. Hmm. Peak Oil was May 2006. This reminds me of a war

scenario I read about back in the 1970's, in which it was shown that a middle-east war would use far more oil and resources than could ever be recovered even in a total military victory.

The estimate was that it would use 50 years worth of the regions' oil supplies just to fight the war.

Granted, that was a cold war scenario against the Soviet Union, however.

Anyway, if you want to know about global oil production, just ask the big oil companies for charts on google. We peaked two years ago for the first time in history and have been declining since.

[dipsydoodle]

9. I have to assume they're having a laugh

Part of the increased cost is due to the diminished value of the US$ and , as far as I'm aware , they just keep the money printing press rolling anyway. So - the actual cost is paper. The world will only become real for them when oil gets re-priced in Euros.

[Algorem]

10. cut pentagon's budget by 90%,then they won't have to spend so much

[Robbien]

11. Pentagon isn't worried. They have money coming out of their ears.

If they were really worried they would start negotiating gas contracts instead of just automatically paying premium prices when buying gas from Cheney's no-bid buddies.

[Gman]

12. Why don't they just take some of the crude Halliburton's been stealing

and bring it back here?

[Arctic Dave]

14. The price of crude keeps going up but

the oil companies don't do enough to develop the fields they already have. http://www.adn.com/oil/story/384213.html This was in todays Anchorage Daily News. It shows a field that Exxon has had the lease on since 1977 but has never developed. What the map doesn't show is the other field (Liberty) that BP keeps dragging their heels on. The Badami field in the picture is another BP field they keep defering the work to improve the oil output, as a matter of fact they put in to warm storage, again, at $117.00 a barrel. These guys could up production if they wanted to, but why should they, when they make so much money with the prices they have now. Yes the oil companies are scamming us.

[NickB79]

15. The fields they have left are relatively tiny and won't make a dent in oil prices

The link you posted to, for example, states that the field they want to develop holds "several hundred million barrels of oil". Now, that may sound like a lot to you, but the global economy uses over 80 MILLION barrels per DAY. That field is less than a week's worth of global demand.

There is nothing left but the crumbs, I'm afraid.

[Arctic Dave]

16. This is just an example of what I was talking about.

There are several other fields in Alaska that have been drilled and capped until it fits the oil companies agenda not the consumers. How do I know this? I work in the oilfield that is in the article.

[NickB79]

17. Find any fields with over a billion barrels of recoverable oil?

Because the world burns 80 MILLION barrels a day. The US has approximately 2.5% of the world's oil reserves, while consuming 21 million barrels a day. A few million here and there, even a few hundred million here or there, are still crumbs. The capped fields you mentioned, unless they are massive, will not make a dent in oil prices.