Drilling advances

Increasing fuel price in the US and other countries has been the hot button topic for the last several months. Emotions have been inflamed by continued reports of folks having to forego driving to buy food, pay utility bills and purchase prescription medications. Everyone has an opinion, with most of them being negative toward “Big Oil,” even though the crude price increase has been experienced by all oil companies, big, small and national. Interestingly, through all the investigations and grilling of Big Oil executives, there has been no evidence of collusion, price fixing or price gouging. The phenomenon has been caused by a perceived supply gap (surprise!). High prices caused a demand drop and a subsequent crude oil price drop (another surprise). Perhaps this free market stuff really works! Fueling the controversy (no pun intended) is that retail prices increase faster along with rising crude prices than they fall with declining crude price.