Record oil profits

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Originally Posted By: javacontour
I don't think he is very accurate. The federal tax on fuel is $0.184/gallon on gas and $0.244/gallon on diesel. So the federal government makes roughly 2x as much as the oil company on refined motor fuels.


But a company doesn't report gross revenue as profit. So if the goverment has road maintenance costs how is it making all that as profit? You can't count refining, production and delivery cost in one instance and disregard roadway costs in the other and call that honest. We can play with figures all day but oil sells for over $3 gal before any tax or refining. Someone is making a lot of money at that price. It doesn't really matter where you make the money if you are both produing oil and refining. The consumer is paying either way.
 
Originally Posted By: jmac
Originally Posted By: LTVibe

OPEC's Windfall Revenues

Quote:
The forecast of earnings of $1.034-trillion this year represents a hefty 32.5-per-cent increase from the nearly $780-million that OPEC earned last year. Even in real terms, adjusted by inflation, OPEC earnings would also hit a record this year and nearly double the earnings level set in 1980 during the second oil crisis.




I really hate it when reporters do not understand the relationship between million, billion, and trillion - and no one in the general public even notices. One of the figures in the article is wrong, and if it was the first number, there would not even be a story.



First articles' mistake: "...the nearly $780-million that OPEC earned last year."

The Oil & Gas Journal got it right: "EIA said OPEC last year earned $778 billion in net oil export revenues..."
 
Originally Posted By: LTVibe
The Oil & Gas Journal got it right: "EIA said OPEC last year earned $778 billion in net oil export revenues..."


The key word there is "revenues". Not nearly the same as "profits".

The Globe & Mail article had the right headline: "OPEC eyes record revenues above $1-trillion."

But then the reporter got it wrong in the very first paragraph: "The earnings of the members of the cartel, from Saudi Arabia to Iran, are set to break above the $1-trillion (U.S.) mark this year for the first time..."

What kind of blithering idiot would hire such a numbskull to write for the leading Canadian newspaper?
 
Originally Posted By: Tornado Red
What kind of blithering idiot would hire such a numbskull to write for the leading Canadian newspaper?

The Globe & Mail article originally appeared in the UK's Financial Times by Javier Blas, who regularly writes for FT.

But it is strange that someone at the G&M didn't notice the mistake.
 
Originally Posted By: Tornado Red


What kind of blithering idiot would hire such a numbskull to write for the leading Canadian newspaper?


There is an amazing number of such errors in all forms of journalism these days.
 
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