I guess I'll take a crack at the liquid barrels.
Actually, manufacturing industries can buy crude futures or gasoline futures, so they can hedge their cost structures. The gold people have been doing it for a long time; they sell all their production forward at a guaranteed price. You could lock in a margin, if you can lock in your selling price.
The problem is they get caught on the down side; they're just like the traders. At a company I worked for they used to try to hedge this. They just said, our shareholders are not looking to buy a gambling organization, they're looking to buy an oil company, and we're going to buy and sell oil on the commodity market and that's it.
Gambling is a different business, and I think most people would live and die via the current price.
But it's the same thing with your heating oil contracts. You can get natural gas contracts that will lock in a price. They were out selling them last fall, and I bet you the people who signed up then, when the prices were pretty strong, might not be happy right now. So it's a risk-reward business of trying to get the volatility out of the market or trying to anticipate it.