I was going to write about our apathy but I just could not be bothered why however are we paying this much?
Why is LPG going up in price yet we export it?
Why can I get 600 klm from my company car on $55 worth of LPG at zero import costs but we still import expensive oil?
LPG runs cleaner we have plenty we can stop importing and start to address our balance of trade why is the west not looking harder for other fuels?
While oil prices rise profits do too we get deeper in debt via balance of trade why no action?
Apathy plays a part other than my weak attempt at humor we just do not complain enough about the price of fuel and the theft of our tax dollars it takes.
If our tax was spent on roads and research into new fuels it may be worth while but it is mostly used in general funds
Road transport kills as drivers try to do extra journeys to pay for higher fuel prices the issues are never ending why pay so much?
We can fight inflation by just changing fuels to LPG while waiting for other answers.
Or are we chained to fuel company's interests? is that the reason we pay too much?

The 'experts' are now suggesting that people do not convert to LPG as the cost has risen to a point where it is becoming uneconomical to have your car converted.

Small cars don't have boots big enough for LPG tanks.

If everybody switched to LPG, the cost would go up as governments taxed it.

The only way to bring petrol prices down is to stop buying it. It's all in the hands of consumers. Unfortunately, people don't seem to want to leave their cars at home and use public transport.

More to the point, if everybody converted to LPG it would run out quicker than it's going to anyway. Even from a strictly commercial point of view it probably makes sense to keep as much of it in the ground as we can for now. The same argument applies to uranium of course, but that's a more complicated issue.

Personally, since I live in the bush I bought a brilliant 4 cylinder turbo-diesel 4WD new last year, with a mind that when it runs out of its 6-year extended warranty it could well be advantageous to be able to run on biodiesel. Some people are already making their own around here.

I'm friendly with the local proprietor where I buy most of my fuel - it's also the general store, but his fuel prices are extremely competitive when compared with the larger towns in our district (and indeed against the capital cities sometimes, although we're 300km inland from Brisbane). My mate said today, in response to a question from another customer concerning the 14c/L increase in ULP prices overnight in Sydney, that in his view it's just price gouging. He'll increase his price if he has to after his next delivery. We agreed that it's bizarre that, even after the recent Inquiry, that this sort of blatant rip-off is allowed to occur.

Interestingly, he raised the issue of political donations by energy companies. There I was thinking I was the only greenie businessman in town !

Anyway, fair question Belly - why do we cop it?

Stop whingeing. A litre of beer is still between 5 and 10 times the price of petrol and as for bottled water....... Oil is a remakably valuable non-renewable resource and we are fools for squandering it.

While I'm not happy about paying more for fuel, I think we vastly underestimate oils worth. Especially if we compare to equivalent human effort. A human can sustain about 75 watts continuously, yet my back of envelope calculations suggest about 4000w can be obtained from a litre of diesel. Roughly 50 man hours, or $1000 per litre(assuming $20/hr).
Obviously I'm not taking into account machinery costs, but a 300KW tractor is doing the work of 4000 men at a fuel rate of 70 litres per hour. About 2.5 cents/man hour. It's no wonder mechanisation revolutionised agriculture, tying up less folk on the land - allowing them to do important stuff like being lawyers, politicians and tax collectors.

Then take into account that the modern diesel engine harnesses less than a third of the potential energy of that fuel.

I do not think I am asking for much when requesting we stay in touch with reality in this debate.
Public transport? what crimson public transport? even in our city's it is as handy as two men short in a tug of war team but non existent in rural Australia.
LPG if we used it to power every internal combustion engine in this country would last for a century.
We export more than we use.
I think of it only as a stop gap, have true doubts we are not suffering to protect the oil industry, we can develop new fuels faster.
I would love to have my old Rocky 4x4 turbo charged back but the reality of country living killed it.
My company car is factory fitted LPG only one, one of 8 in our fleet in has done 354.000 never had the motor touched.
Our highest mileage is over 500.000 never been pulled down.
Small cars can have small LPG tanks, city cars do not need 600 klm capacity.
I drive for 6 hours non stop some days, must do so.
Put nothing less than 80.000 each year on that cars clock.
Country people waiting for a bus to take them to town , sometimes 120 or double that klm will wait forever.
Trucks transporting what we all need to live travel tracks no trains exist on and do 3.000 klm at least a week.
The answer is not to spend billions we do not have on trains it is cheaper fuel .less inflation, less tax theft, more true concern for those who do not live in coastal city's.
Shopping on Saturday? 120 klm no buses in sight
And I live in near coastal mainstream village not the real bush.

"Fuel Prices Why Do we cop it?"

I think they put fricken ritalin or something in the water, Belly. The apathy drives me insane. 'Down the road' there's a servo selling unleaded for a buck 38, but in the next town (10 mins) the servo is selling unleaded (FROM THE SAME TRUCK) for a buck 28....go figure.

I have a solution for 'encouraging' Caltex, BP, and Shell to reassess their current lack of humanity....and basic soul selling money grabbing highway robbery, unfortunately the feds would frown on it and lassooing fundi suicide bombing fruitloops and pointing them in 'that particular direction' would be a logistical pain in the ginger.

“Small cars can have small LPG tanks, city cars do not need 600 klm capacity.”

Do they make small tanks? I don’t think so.

Small cars are not necessarily ‘city cars’. My 1.5 litre Mitsubishi Lancer is the only car I own and it does some long trips.

The car has a 60 litre tank, and that takes me over 600kms without a fill up. Given the poorer litres/100kms of LPG, I would be nuts to convert, even if there was a tank small enough for the boot.

No matter what our cars run on in the future, we can bet that it will continue to cost us big time, thanks to greedy producers and double taxing governments.

The biggest rip off of the present time is the hybrid car, selling for close to $40k and producing an overall economy comparable with a small petrol engine for less than half the price.

With all of the argy bargy going on behind the scenes with governments and oil producers, all we can do is plod along with what we have. It's highly unlikely that most of us will see any practical, cost-effective options to fossil fuel in our lifetimes.

Stop whingeing. Woolworths put the price of chocolate up by 32c a few months ago, overnight, and no-one complained. They are also charging 75cents more for the same loaf of bread than their nearest competitor and no-one is complaing about price gouging and people are still buying heir inflated bread. As I said beer is as much as 10 times the price of petrol and no-one is complaing about price gouging.

Our petrol is CHEAP; it costs billions to find it, pump it, transport it and deliver it to your petrol tank. Just because Oz has been too stupid to develop proper public transport in its cities where live about 80% of the population, doesn't mean that public transport in the cities won't work. If you live in the city, stop using your car to commute to work and lobby for proper public transport. If we all did this, then we could help reduce the demand for hydrocarbon energy and lessen our CO2 footprint, and the price of petrol might even fall so that those in the bush may be able to pay less for their essential fuel.

Henry learn the difference between private competition and a cartel. also, you don't seem to understand the place of oil in the economy.

Come on Henry you can do better than that er can't you?
Our country does not run on chocolate, we do not need it every day and count with me, how many loaves of bread do we eat daily?
My Falcon has that idiot spare wheel, the fuel tank takes up the room it cost near half to run.
It adds little to the balance of payments to fill it.
That supermarket chain charges 69.9 it was 12 cents cheaper just months ago.
Country town up the road? 79.9! just a bit more? 82.6!
We see some who fill once a week, some once a day, but it costs us in everything we buy the too high price of fuel.
Transport costs get us every time in every item we buy.
Why do we cop it? we just do not understand the real costs are much more than the fuel in our tank.
And our apathy or let some one else fix it lets politicians fill that tax bucket with our dollars and claim it is good management.
We each subsidies oil because to find another fuel would destroy that industry.

Belly & others;
Consider this information which is easily confirmed.

All oil companies except Total have produced less product each year
that the previous year for the last few years.
They have increased their expenditure on search and discovery.
They have not found very much oil considering the enormous expenditure
involved in search and development.

I have no axe to grind for the oil companies but these are the facts
and we are in for a lot more of the same.

It is no coincidence that Sydney and Melbourne public transport is now
bursting at the seams. There are now millions per year extra public
transport journies. In country areas it is still probably cheaper
to have private transport rather than public transport.

LPG will have to be used more in Australia, but it should be produced
from natural gas not oil as is done in some refineries.
I have seen conflicting figures for Australian oil production.
The ABARE web site says Australian oil production went up in the last
year but other figures say our production is decreasing by 8 % per year.
It is possible both figures are correct. It is just a matter of the
time scale used.
No matter what we will be importing 99% of our oil in about 7 years
if we keep burning it at the present rate.

If I needed a long range driving car I would look at the small European diesels.
I believe they get remarkable milage.
Then you could run them on vegetable oil.
Did you see the story in the UK where the supermarkets ran out of
vegetable oil on their shelves because it was cheaper than diesel at the pump ?

What it all means is that you are going to pay a lot more and you had better be grateful.
It is still better than walking.

As I said, stop whingeing, and be grateful that you have been able to waste an extremely valuable chemical resource in doing so little so cheaply for so long. Get rid of your old Falcon. Buy a $245 motor that you can strap on your push-bike (now advertised in Just Bikes, the motorcycle magazine), buy a push-bike from your local tip-shop for about $10, strap on the motor, and use that for commuting. Tell your kids that like I used to they can cycle the 5km to their school, or catch a bus. It will get them off their fat little bottoms and get them fit. And tell your politicians to build cycleways, not freeways, and that they should make damn sure that public transport works.That's for the townies who read this column.

If you are in the bush and you definitely need an appropriate petrol/diesel vehicle, tell the townies to get off their butts and stop wasting petrol in commuting to work over the same old route every day; public transport is their way to go. Or bicycle, motorised or not.

Your whingeing will make no difference to the price of petrol. We are hitting peak oil, and that's that.

The reason that gas has gone up in price is because oil has gone
up in price. The price of the two is linked, its all energy.

The thing is, the easy oil has been discovered and largely used,
especially with China, India and other developing countries, using
more all the time.

There is still oil and gas to be discovered, but costs are huge.
I fool around a bit with oil shares so am aware of some of the costs.

As they go deeper and more offshore, costs rise further. Those
rigs can cost half a million a day to rent. One hole they drilled
recently, 25$ million to drill it, it was dry. That is fairly
common these days and those costs have to be recouped somewhere,
or nobody will bother drilling.

Yes, we now have technology to drill, where we never drilled
before, but its hugely expensive and complicated. That is all
reflected at the petrol station.

Henry you remind me why I find some conservationists not worth listening to.
Yes we are short of oil, maybe we are past peak oil, we do not know for sure.
Let our suburban brothers tell me what they are going to eat if country Australia can not afford fuel.
Dream on about bikes if you want but it is silly to think like that.
Why must we use petrol if we have something else Henry?
Now as oil price rises profits do too 10% of $110 a barrel is more than 10% of last years prices.
Tax too is the same thing, reduce tax's say the few conservationists who think this country is its city's and we will only use more.
They will only tax us more on something else say others.
Fuel prices impact on every thing we buy and the very lives of country people.
No trips to town unless youu must for some.
Apathy is evident here right here in this thread easter comes and fuel will spike to see holiday makers pay even more coastal country towns will drop for a few eeks any discounts in place and apathy wins.
We are not looking for new fuels as fast as we can.
LPG for a while is cheaper and could fill a gap ,but in time it will be taxed more too.

Belly, I am far from a conservationist. I have made a living for a long life and in many countries in a profession conservationists and greenies see as causing rape and pillage across the globe. Simply get used to the fact that they ain't making oil no more and what is left will be increasingly hard and correspondingly expensive to find. We can use vegie oil; we have oil shales; we have coal; we can turn food into ethanol (which is why the price of bread is rising and maybe the good old third world will have to suffer a little more starvation on our behalf). We can easily keep that old Falcon of yours trundling along at ever-increasing expense to you and we can keep on adding CO2 to the atmosphere in doing so. BUT Australia has 80% of its population in towns, 60% of whom trundle back and forwards to work on the same old road, every day, in the same old car, one to a car, causing all sorts of problems and demanding we waste our taxes on freeways when we need the money for hospitals and schools. Now that is silly, and it is wasteful and it adds to the cost of fuel. The OPEC cartel will not drop the price of oil because they know it's a once-used resource and they need the revenue to do things for the poor in Venezuela, squander on wives and fornication in Saudi Arabia, and perhaps build an infrastructure that means that when oil runs out they have something other than sand to live on. Personally, I LOVE my car.But I'd like to see us move to a hydrogen economy and save oil for ball-bearings and fertiliser and recyclable plastics. So stop BELLYaching and re-assess your transport needs.

Henry in that south American country petrol is 14 cents USA a gallon! and it is smuggled into the next country to be sold for twice that.
My intent was not to denie oil is running out.
But to ask why are we paying so much.
Yes OPEC try to control both supply and price.
But tax has a higher impact on what we pay than barrel prices.
IF today some one invented a brand new fuel, say it was water, and it worked better than petrol.
First would the western world let us use it? the overnight impact on oil would nearly bankrupt millions.
Say they said ok use it soon it would be taxed as much as oil.
yes we need new fuels yes oil will not last forever but do you truly think we can maintain our standard of living while peddling 20 million push bikes?
And let reality shine for a while ,surely you understand not every car is only used to commute?
Australia's tourist industry's would be dead without private transport.

Belly,
We are paying for the desperate search for more oil.
The oil companies know that their business as it is now has no long
term future. That is why they are engaging in takeovers and share
buybacks.
If anything we should increase the tax, but only if the extra was put
into public transport, railways etc.

An increased tax would enforce conservation of our supply.
Australia is in deep doo doo with our small production and large demand.
When it hits the fan we will be like "Please sir can I have some more ?

It has already pushed our trade balance into the red and with our
production depleting fast and the import price going up it can only
get one hell of a lot worse.
We should start a change to LPG but that will cost really big money
to change the whole fleet. It should only be done if we stop export
of natural gas and do not make LPG from oil.
That done we will have a considerable time to move to a new fuel
regime which will have to be done at some period in the future.

Belly-thanks this time for not calling me a greenie. I appreciate that our transport needs are not solely to do with commuting. This was made clear in an earlier post. What I am saying is that those of us in the cities who do practice single-person commuting by car over the same path every day should, out of regard for everyone else, cease this wasteful practice and useful alternative transport. This will begin to reduce our fuel/CO2 bill and the costs of maintaining and building expensive roads. We need to assess also our city planning and end the endless Australian sprawl that sees the cost of infrastructue balloon beyond sense. One reason we have water problems is perhaps that the stuff is stuck in pipes over huge areas, waiting uselessly to do something.

As for people in the bush (and I don't rate lifestylers-by-choice on 5-acre blocks in this category), then maybe we may have to look at some other answer to their problems in respect of rising fuel and other costs. But if we can free-up cash by changing our wasteful way of living in cities, maybe that will help it become easier to help people in the bush. Though this suggestion might get me accused of being a Latte Socialist in these happy columns.

* but do you truly think we can maintain our standard of living while peddling 20 million push bikes?*

Actually Belly, yes we could. It would perhaps just about solve the
obesity problem for starters. As a kid I cycled everywhere. Now they
drive them everywhere, when cycles worked fine and were a healthy
activity.

In the US, they are so lazy, alot of them don't even bother to make
a cup of coffee, they drive to their local Starbucks drive through.
I think that all this will change and will be a healthy change.

We really have become a fat slob society and a bit of exercise will
do us some good, if we are honest.

Yabby Bazz and Henry as a young bloke I too walked, even now I park at least 500 meters away from my stop.
The return trip makes another klm walked ,but lets be fair dinkum it can not be the answer for rural Australians.
No 5 acre farmer I live close to the coast in a small village, but I have lived in the true out back.
All your ideas have merit, I offer to take locals shopping or do it for them , mostly those who take the offer up are users but it should be in every country town but the subject is why do we pay so much?
I put LPG forward as a fill in , we do you know plan to export massive amounts.
Just 10 years ago we paid so much less, if we just took brand new cars on to LPG only we could save billions in imports.
Looking for more oil is not an answer unless we found as much as we already used we would take less than 30 years to be in trouble again.
If we use more LPG we cut the need for oil we can do both and still look for new fuels electric can be a city answer or part of it but country needs fuel maybe bio diesel is part of the answer.
It must be close to true Australians pay more in tax than oil company's profits from oil.

I guess there are two parts to this discussion-one, that OPEC is a cartel and the oil companies are in the game of maximising profits at everyone's expense. The answer to that is perhaps to socialise oil globally, but that then spins off into all sorts of problems and gets me called a Latte or Chardonnay Socialist.

The other issue here is how are we in Australia going to cope under the present system, wherein the price of oil will continue to rise, which will in turn increas the price of food and rents and house construction whilst wages are being forced to saty low, in comparison, thus increasing crime and social disruption. Which is certainly on the horizon. I put my money on oil reaching $200 per barrel and $3 per litre at the pump by Christmas . How then do we reduce our dependence on hydro-carbon fuel, whilst ensuring that people who really do depend on it for their living can still afford to keep using it till an alternative e.g. hydrogen comes on stream?

A lot rests on how we can re-engineer urban life, which constitutes about 80% of Australa. To me, the answers are obvious, as per prior posts.

Well all, what is happening is that our higher prices make it worth while
to develop the harder to get and more expensive oil, which in turn will
slow the depletion and keep us on the plateau a bit longer.
This will hopefully enable more cars to be converted to gas.
However someone calculated that the car fleet turns over in 20 years.
That is too long and the time and money to convert all of them to gas
will probably be unaffordable as the governments funds will be also
depleting by that time as will the populations available funds.

It really is a race against time. Governments are not prepared to tell
it like it is and tell the people what they face.
If they did they would be asked why they have waited so long ?
No doubt you have like me, when explaining to someone what peak oil
will mean to them, get a look of not disbelief but incomprehension.
Well politicians have been like that for a long time and anyway it
was after the next election, so don't scare the horses.

Rationing will be virtually certain when the import bill goes higher
with no sign of an end. It will be the only way we can stretch it out
for long enough to change to an entirely different mode of living.

mean

Come if every new car coming of the factory floor in Australia was LPG from now on, if governments left tax at present rates.
If it took 20 years to turn over the country's fleet we would see 20% less imported oil in 4 years.
But in the first year once savings became known we may see 40% in those 4 years.
We can afford to drop tax's on the cars at every tax point if it meant we are addressing balance of payments and using a better fuel while still searching for another.

You are right of course Belly, it would be a significant step forward,
but it would require the politicians to admit that the problem is that
urgent.
If government could be convinced that it is an urgent problem then it
is my belief that the following steps should be taken;

All new cars to be LPG fitted.
All LPG made from natural gas.
Petrol and diesel rationing introduced.
Export of natural gas prohibited.
Electric cars be developed and produced with tax advantages.

The above will have significant trade difficulties with China and
Japan but this is no more than oil exporting countries are doing to
maintain their internal usage.

Ultimately all transport will be electrical and in the long term
everything we do will have to move in that direction.

There is little hope in getting politicians to agree to any of the
suggestions I have made at least until shortages develop and we
find that Australia cannot obtain the required supply of oil.
Drivers in petrol queues get very angry.

Bazz your points are good but turn the fight another way, we both know governments do not act so we should.
Why cop it?
If , oh yes it has been said before, we bought our petrol from one service station brand name, for a month.
That one only, the cheapest, how long would it take to start a price war?
The international price of oil would not come down but locked pumps on Tuesday would end.
And if a peoples movement against fuel prices was born?
If 5% of us, all it would take, went out on the streets demanding no tax on LPG for 5 years.
No state rego fees for LPG cars for 5 years we could start using less imported petrol.

Belly,
I think your suggestion of a directed buying campaign won't
work because the price power is at the refineries which supply all brands.

I see that ASPO Australia has good coverage in Melbourne papers about
the need to take action in Sydney. The NSW government spokesman is still
unaware of developments in the ethanol field as they are boasting about their campaign to promote ethanol.

http://news.theage.com.au/sydney-must-prepare-now-for-peak-oil/20080317-1zwt.html

It is extraordinary that they are so out of touch.
The best we could hope from our governments is that they might build
the motorways to be suitable for conversion to railways, light or heavy.
I am afraid politicians just lack the ability of comprehension and
to be able to visualise a possible future.

Bazz I think you need to re read my post I was not saying boycott would work only that it would keep them honest in that respect it would work.
I have kept an eye on the NSW legislation mandating ethanol use, it is a progressive move.
Ripping up freeways to build rail? no never it will not be called for.
When we do run truly short of petroleum products a new fuel will come to life like a miracle trust me.
Why do we cop it? easier to complain than act.