Originally Posted By: grampi
The big oil cheerleaders will never stop defending the industry...they all believe it's this squeaky clean, completely moral and legal enterprise that never does anything wrong, and never purposely does anything to pad their profits...I just don't get what they get out of the deal by always defending the actions of the industry...it must be some kind of a deal the industry has with their shareholders to give out bonuses to defenders...
Remember one thing: We in California are paying about $1/gal more than national average, because we use special formula that only refineries in CA produce it, this special formula costs about 15-120 cents more a gallon, state tax is higher too also gas stations cost is higher too.
Even we are paying higher price but we still think that with all the hard works the US oil companies doing very good job making the drivers have gas to go anywhere we like at reasonable price.
The oil companies on average were/are earning about 10-15% profit compares with much higher profit from other industries, such as pharmaceutical, finance, high tech(such as Apple) ... Sometimes they lost big money in exploration and came up empty hand. Shell lost $5 BILLION in Alaska few year ago.
Quote:
After investing an estimated $5 billion in recent years into oil exploration in the offshore Alaskan Arctic, Shell announced Thursday that it will abandon any renewed drilling effort this year.
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/30/...illing-20140130
If you look at the cost of finding, extracting and transporting crude oil you will see that their profits are reasonable.
If you look at the price of a gallon of milk and a gallon of gas, you should see that gas is cheap. Looking at the black crude oil and finished gallon of gas you should be amazed that they can refining it so cheap, looking at a gallon of milk from a cow and a gallon of milk you buy in super market do you see the big difference ?
Summary: I am very thankful for being able to buy gas whenever I need it at reasonable price, my only wish is we use similar formula as the rest of the country so that we don't have to rely on only few refineries in California.