Obama considers his energy disasters to be “significant progress.”
Mitt Romney’s new energy memo says:
Today the Obama Administration released a one-year progress report on its “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future.” This blueprint, which calls for higher taxes, higher spending, and more regulation and subsidies, has produced the results we would expect:
— Fewer leases and permits, and declining oil production, on federal lands
— Off-shore production in decline, with drilling equipment leaving for other parts of the world
— Gas prices skyrocketing and costing the average family thousands of dollars
— Power plants shutting down and threatening the reliability of the electric grid
— Electric vehicle sales missing targets by a factor of ten, leading to mass layoffsOr, as the Obama Administration describes it, “significant progress”…
WTI is no longer the relevent benchmark crude that it once was. The Keystone XL portion from Cushing to the Gulf Coast was supposed to have alleviated this, but….
Neither. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, especially with the human equation as the non-confounding factor.
The WTI crack spread this morning is $32, versus $13 for Brent, a spread of $19, which curiously enough is the current spread between WTI and Brent crude oil prices.
The weekly WTI spot crude oil price in the first week of March, 2008 was $103, and the average Midwest gasoline retail price was $3.15.
The weekly WTI spot crude oil price in the first week of March, 2012 was $108, and the average Midwest gasoline retail price was $3.82.
So, an increase of 12¢ per gallon of WTI crude, from 3/08 to 3/12, corresponded to an increase of 67¢ per gallon of gasoline.
Note that from the first week of March, 2008 to the first week of March, 2012, the price of Brent increased from $102 to $125, an increase of 55¢ per gallon of crude.
So, are product prices in the Midwest (check out those crack spreads) more closely following WTI or Brent crude oil prices?