Friday, March 7, 2008
The rising price of oil hit a record of $105 per barrel this week as students continue to empty their wallets at the pump.
According to kansasgasprices.com, the average gas price in Lawrence is $3.05 per gallon.
Matt Kadel, Independence senior, said it cost him more than $40 to fill up the tank in his Chevy Malibu at the Conoco on 23rd Street.
Alex Straus, Topeka senior, pumps gas at Kwik Shop, 845 Mississippi St, Lawrence, before going to work on Thursday evening. "I'm a deliver driver, so I really hurt," Straus said about gas prices. "It cuts down my wage."
“I feel like for me to do the things I want to do I’m going to need gas so I’ll have to buy it at any price one way or another,” Kadel said. “I would probably stop buying it once it reached about $10 per gallon, but I mean how else would I get around?”
Travis Humphries, Dallas freshman, said he’d also have to continue buying gas regardless of the cost.
“I try not to drive around as much because of the price, but I need to get around to the places I need to be so I don’t really have a choice,” he said. “When you’re using your own money, it definitely isn’t fun.”
The increasing worldwide consumption of oil and the decreasing value of the dollar are the two main causes behind the rising price of oil, said Timothy Carr, co-director of the KU Energy Research Center.
“As long as places like China and India keep growing, they’re going to continue to need more oil,” Carr said. “We’re now in a period of strong worldwide demand.”
The only thing that could stop the growing rate of demand is a worldwide recession, he said.
The last time the price of oil pushed the United States into a recession was in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but an Asian banking crisis halted the economic development of many developing countries, Carr said, which dropped the price of oil significantly in the early ‘90s.
The price of oil was at one of its cheapest points in January 1999 when it cost less than $9 per barrel, according to eia.doe.gov, a government Web site that tracks international energy statistics.
The growing demand for oil in developing countries in the last 10 years has brought the price back up to more than $100 per barrel.
The only way to supply the growing demand is by discovering more oil deposits, Carr said.
“There’s plenty of oil and natural gas,” Carr said. “We just have to find them.”
Two large oil deposits have recently been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alberta, a province in Canada.
The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it would approve Keystone Pipeline’s request to build a 3,400-kilometer pipeline from Alberta to Kansas, Illinois and Oklahoma.
According to Keystone Pipeline’s Web site, transcanada.com/keystone, the company expects to finish the pipeline by 2010, but Carr said he thought it could take a little longer.
Carr said the pipeline could help bring down the price of oil but that would largely depend on uncontrollable factors such as how far the value of the dollar drops and the possibility of a conflict between Venezuela and Colombia, where Carr said the U.S. received a lot of its oil.
Les Blevins, a retired mechanic in Lawrence, said he thought drilling for more oil was only a short-term solution.
Blevins is currently developing technology that he said would be able to convert biodegradable material — debris, sewage sludge, agricultural waste and even our municipal garbage — into electric power and biofuel.
“The facts are that there’s already an intensive search for new oil deposits and it’s gotten incredibly expensive,” Blevins said. “Oil is a finite resource and it’s getting harder and harder to find it.”
He said he considered an alternative energy to be the only long-term solution to the current oil crisis.
“I think we’re coming to the end of cheap oil and that’s evident in the current price, which is sure to keep going up as time goes on,” he said.
He said his patented technology, which he planned to introduce to the city commission later this month, would cut our dependence on oil considerably.
— Edited by Jessica Sain-Baird
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