Released from Auto Purgatory

[kevin_standlee]

We got the Astro back yesterday.



American Auto Air & Repair in Reno called me at about 3:40 PM yesterday to tell me that the Astro was ready to be collected. As soon as we could, Lisa and I piled into the Rolling Stone and headed for Reno, with a deadline of their 5 PM closure. (They're not open on weekends.) Fortunately, we got there with about fifteen minutes to spare. Had we hit any significant slowdowns, it might have been a different story.

The problem with the air conditioning was the the line that feeds to the rear AC unit had sprung a leak. The additional problem was that when they replaced it, the line kinked and broke, causing the newly-recharged coolant to leak out again. They tried one more time and it failed the same way. GM doesn't make this model of auto AC anymore, so it's nearly impossible to get the part. The only thing they could do was cap off the lines to the rear AC unit. So we have AC in the front of the van but not the back. It's a good thing that we rarely carry passengers.

This morning, I took the the Astro to the car wash. It had been nearly a year since it was last washed, and the weeks it spent in the shop had been most unkind to it. After cleaning it up, I got it refueled. While it's more fuel-efficient than the RV, that doesn't mean it was cheap: $125 to refuel, and it did not quite top off even at that. However, unlike a bunch of brain-dead idiots, I don't think that the President of the USA sets gasoline prices. My ire is directed at profiteering oil companies.

Anyway, expect us to make quite a few trips to Reno over the next two weeks doing Westercon shopping.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The theory that the president sets gas prices (at least since Nixon, who created long gas lines with his price-freeze fatwa) is a new one on me. The causes are the loss of supply due to the Ukraine war and inflation due to a huge increase in the government's spending-to-income ratio.

The "profiteering oil companies" theory assumes that the oil companies were, for some reason, holding their prices below the optimal profit point for many years and suddenly decided to stop doing that. It lacks support in common sense or economics.

[delosharriman]

I don't blame the oil companies too hard. Not that I think they're poor misunderstood babies, but they're literally being told by the Administration, "produce (which means pump and refine) more now! but no more drilling permits, no more pipelines, and you should expect to be out of business in 5 to 10 years as part of our transition to renewable energy."

Now these are literally incompossible things. Increasing refinery output means major engineering works, which are likely to take two to five years from when you commit to them, and would normally be amortized over 20 years of operation. And as far as crude output? The Texas Railroad Commission took off the gags in 1972, and in most of the time since then, there has been relatively little idle pumping capacity in the country. If you don't have that (Saudi Arabia has, which is why the Administration, which came in talking tough about Jamal Khashoggi, is now making nice with Mohammed bin Salman), you have to drill more wells. From the time you get the permits for a well, it takes months to years to bring it into production, depending in part on whether you can hook into existing pipelines, or need to run new ones. A big chunk of the output over the past 15 years has been from hydro-fractured shale wells, which turn out to be very expensive and have very short producing lives, so that a shockingly large chunk of what was borrowed has been discharged in bankruptcy instead of being paid back — the market wants much higher prices before furnishing capital to drill any more of those. Interestingly, there was idle capacity for a while in the form of wells drilled but not fracked, precisely because of those bankruptcies, but the drillers which survived bought them up at pennies on the dollar, and have been gradually maintaining their output by using them up. The supply is pretty much gone now, and I rather suspect Russian Military Intelligence knows that.

Under those conditions, it's far from unreasonable (if not good citizenship) to take as much profit as you can right now.

Never mind that replacing motor fuel, and oil and gas heat, will require tripling US electricity output (kilowatt-hours, not kilowatts of nameplate capacity). Doing that with conventional power plants would be a severe strain on the industrial capacity of any nation. The US managed to sustain a doubling of electrical output every 10 years from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. (Also it would make very little sense to replace gas heat with gas-burning power stations!) Doing it with wind and solar is so much more difficult that I would feel justified in calling it technically infeasible, if not strictly impossible.

It's hard to imagine anyone competing with the previous Administration for sheer nincompoopery, but this one seems to be trying. That they seem to be mostly without malice is less of a comfort that one would have thought. That doesn't make them responsible for the price of fuel, though.