Right now I believe EB over JTS, who is clearly pulling numbers out of you-nowhere. Get off your backside and come up with some real numbers rather than just impugn EB... The internet's full of good stuff, get your girlfriend to help you out.

Back around '99 oil was $9 a barrel out of Alaska and some pundits were predicting this would go on for years. This doesn not mean the oil companies were making a profit at those rates. In order to maintain infrastructure, market share, and payrolls they had to keep goin'. And nobody gave a tinker's cuss about it, so from the point of view of the oil companies, why should they care about the bleating at the pumps as gen X'ers fill up their Rav4s for that solo ride to the espresso bar?

Meanwhile, one of the things that happens when oil is down, which it has been recently, is that a lot of support/ remedial work does not get done at the major industrial sites required for the movement and refining of the crude. BP's site down in Texas was so poorly maintained they had a major disaster and killed 15 on-site workers and injured 500.

Refineries are notoriously tight because they don't own the oil, they buy it, process it, and market the products. They are run with skinny margins.

There is a lot of catch-up and environmentally mandated work that's been going on now that some sectors of the oil bidness are flush. They are notoriously tight with a dollar and this work wouldn't get done without the recent surge in price.

Meanwhile, the high prices in the States are getting several important things done at once:

1) Making Americans familiar with what Europeans have been going through for years.
2) Encouraging some seldom seen restraint on the part of the gas burning public.
3) Shifting economic investment to alternative fuels/ energy development.
4) Giving us a vital warning as to what's ahead. There is still a huge amount of petrochemical reserve in the world, but it's a finite resource, and this is a warning (actually so far it is a minor warning).
5) Exxon needs to have some of the ready at hand to finally pay out Alaskans for their losses during the Exxon Valdez spill.

Oh, and while Exxon was reaping in the billions, General Motors was
losing them, on account of pretty horrible management choices over what to develop and produce, and a lot of arm waving about efficiency and the hydrogen economy which they've been doing to assure us they are ready for the future. I got a look at the BMW museum in Munich back in the 80's and they were talking about efficiency and recycling even then.

So this price hike is highly valuable for separating the BS from the fax.