Fuel price drop job has cost jobs

Or an opportunistic time?
Doesn't look good for a corporate company to be laying off staff when prices are high and public perception is they are rolling in the money

Still so young but so synical hahaha

ok thanks I thought the price of crude was set world wide

my wife just told me her ex Brother in Law is up some where in Scotland on a rig he migrated from Adelaide to Aberdeen Scotland to work in a oil rig of the coast .


he might be one of the many to be put off she said it was funny how his kids came back to Australia speaking in a Scottish accent and they were all born in Adelaide .

The price of crude is set by the market.

When OPEC last met (recently) a lot of analysts expected them to address the sliding crude prices by reducing production levels. But that was simplistic, and some anticipated they would keep prod levels up (which they did) which in turn would force the price down further. On the one hand this reduced their revenue, BUT it put huge cost pressures on a lot of other producers with profitability closer to the line. While this was mainly aimed at the recent US production schemes than had been coming on line (and creating the supply/demand imbalance) it has also impacted heavily on North sea prod as well as on Russia, compounding their rouble problems.

Aussie prices are set on the Singapore price I believe

Tom, that's for peroleum products, not crude.

ok so if the crude is cheap does that not make the peroleum ie what we put into our cars

I had one guy in wagga try to tell me it was local truckers and tow truck drivers set the price no one out side this country sets prices he said
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when I asked his about Opec he just walked away and said i had no idea what i was talking about

Allein, the fall in crude prices on the world markets is the reason for the current low(ish) prices for petrol. (Diesel has been at a premium compared to ULP ever since we moved to low-sulphur standards for diesel).

Singapore entes the picture to the extent that we (still) seem to be importing petrol from there, so their cost has a bearing on our pump prices. Both or course have the crude price as their biggest influence.

Australian refineries supply around 63% of total Australian demand for petroleum products. The remaining 37% of fuel supplies is met by imports.
These imported (refined) petroleum products were sourced from over 20 countries, mainly from Asia.
The sources of the crude oil source we use, is the Middle East, West Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and NW Australia.

The cost of refining is a large part of our fuel cost - and Australia has some of the most expensive refining operations around.
So the oil companies are closing as many Australian refineries as possible, and sourcing refined petroleum fuels from overseas - from our Asian neighbours mostly.
This percentage of overseas-refined fuel will continue to increase in future.

The huge refinery in Singapore produces a large proportion of the imported petrol and diesel we use in Australia - about 20% of total fuel sales.
Singaporean petrol and diesel is refined specifically to meet our precise Australian fuel standards, and those standards are somewhat different to other nations. The petrol is refined to 91, 95, and 98 octane levels.

Sth Korea supplies about 2-3% of our imported refined fuels and Japanese refineries supply about 5-6% of our imported refined fuels.

The reason there has been an upsurge in "Brand X" fuel retailers, is because, if they can set up fuel storage here, they can buy shiploads of refined petrol and diesel directly from the likes of Singaporean, Korean and Japanese refineries, and import it direct, and avoid the local "big shots" (Caltex, BP, Shell, and Exxon Mobil) stranglehold on local fuel supplies.
These fuel retailers can also take advantage of drops in the oil price and shipping rates, to ship in a shipload of diesel and petrol at a good price.

We are looking at a serious oversupply in oil for the next 18 mths and no one producer wants to cut back on production first to reduce the oversupply.
The Saudis want to break American oil companies who have recently increased Americas gas and oil production by a huge amount. mostly via "fracking".
These U.S. companies will eventually be forced to cap their wells until prices improve.

The Saudis are sitting on US$750B in foreign reserves that they can sell off if needed, to balance their shortfall in oil income.
They don't really care about the oil price being down for 12 or 18 mths or more, they just want to once again, regain total control of the world oil market, and be able to set the price.

I personally suspect that the Saudis are also interested in shaking the speculators out of the oil market, and thereby leaving the oil market to find its own true level (oil pricing), without speculation.

The big world banks, big financiers, many huge global corporations, and a lot of big petroleum-using companies, such as airlines, have been speculating in oil futures, and this speculation has been making the oil price higher than it should have been.

There is going to be a lot of burnt bums, when these speculative positions in oil have to be unwound.
At least one big U.S. airline is looking at some serious financial losses due to oil price hedging.

Basically, if they bet on oil going up and it comes down instead (or vice-versa) they've burnt their fingers, just the same as a big losing bet at the casino.

Metallgesellschaft, a huge German company, lost US$2.2B back in 1993 by speculating in oil futures, and it broke the company.
Future commodity price speculation is as risky as going to the casino and betting with your whole pay cheque.

Metallgesellschaft oil futures debacle - 1993

Cheers, Ron.

same here in Broken Hill and both NRMA and RAA have criticized the local fuel stations who refuse to drop the price of fuel but the second a price hike it goes up with in days if not hours

In fact Yunta road house is now much cheaper and many locals retuning home from Adelaide fill up every thing including jerry cans to get the cheap fuel

What is the ACCC supposed to do here?

If one is $1.15 and the other $1.30, and price is your only consideration you won't need the ACCC to tell you which driveway to enter and fill up at, surely?

Cheers, Baz - The Landy

Maybe in this case not,, but if your paying top in other areas it's an issue when its dropping everywhere else. They've even commented about it several times. Closer to home there are 3 servos on each corner and there within . 03 cents of one another..

Fuel Pricing