Since this went from a simple gas price report to a political smear thread, I'll just add some fuel to the fire.

Everyone wants to complain about gas prices and yeah it hurts, it hurts everyone who owns a car, but when you read about these megabillion dollar reports oil companies are making, you need to look a little deeper and see what their profit margin is. The profit margin will tell you what big oil is really making and the fact is they only make somewhere between 6 and 9 percent depending on whose report you research. The reason the profit margin is so little is because a new refinery hasn't been built in this country in 30 years, the current refineries are antiquated and are costing more to keep them within code and functional than it would cost to build new ones. Thanks to environmentalists and screaming left liberals who believe Al Gore's line of crap, our usable sources of oil in the US are off limits and Bush has tried to pass legislation to drill in ANWR and the Gulf, only to be stopped right at the start.

If you want to get mad about who is making money, take a look at credit card companies and banks making 32-35% profit each year and will bankrupt the country faster than big oil,,,,,, Don't get me wrong, I don't think Bush is some phenom President, but to put this entirely on his shoulders isn't 100% correct either.

 

When the profit margins are in the "billions" when talking about dollars instead of percentages is what gets people so fired up. Percentages can be misleading when talking about profits. If someone is making %50 profits, but the dollar amount only adds up to 100s or just 1000s of dollars, is quite different from companies making small profit percentages but making "billions" in dollar profits. Who usually comes out better...One who sells cheaper products but in very large volumes, or the other person selling the same product but at higher prices and lower volumes. Percentages of profit are very different, but the person who sold 100s of things vs the guy who sold only a few, the smaller profit percentage and the larger volumes of sell tends to greatly overtake the Larger Percentage profiters with little sales.

But yes, it's funny how these fuel topics can get so off topic. But to add to the actual topic at hand, right now prices are $2.99 diesel and $2.85 for gas.

 

Enough politics. Let's try math.

In ten years, a gallon of gas went from $1 to $3. An increase of $2.00 per gallon

A barrel of oil went from $15/barrel to $65/barrel. About $1.25 per gallon. Tha's your price increase, high oil prices. Not Al Gore he had nothing to do with it.

Oil used to cost 30 cents a gallon. Add in 30 cents of road tax, 20 cents for the retailer and move it around, ten cents in refinery costs, and you had gas in the neighbourhood of 90 cents a gallon and life was good.


The reason we pay $3/gallon for gas now, is because we have a commodities market trading oil at $63 barrel.

But ask Exxon to provide some receipts they are actually buying oil at $63/barrel. They're not.

The Government of Alberta gets about $10 in royalties and fees for a barrel of their best oil. Even if it costs another $10/barrel to get the oil out of the ground and bring it to market, that's still only $20. Exxon is selling the oil to us for $63. Exxon says we have to pay the price oil trades at on the commodities exchange and the traders in New York all seem to think that oil should sell for 3x what it costs to produce.


Want to bring down gas prices, investigate the commodities exchange. Find out who is bidding up the price of oil and with whose money.

The summer delivery contracts for oil are already trading at $75/barrel so gas is sure to go up. All the gas we're gonna use this summer, somebody already owns it.

Somebody is buying up all these futures contracts, sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in oil and waiting for the price to go up. Who has that kind of money?

You were right about the banks, they're crooked as all hell. But you don't think they're in bed with the oil companies and taking us all for a ride, come on.

 

thats the thing that kills us on the part of buying it at what its traded at.

every little thing that happens in this world, whether its a threat from a middle eastern state, to a terrorist attack, to a natural disaster, oil goes up. in this decade alone under one administartion, this country has stepped back about 5 decades in credibility, and we as consumers have seen astronomical rises in everything we see and touch.

 

The royalty... companies are paying on oil in Alberta is a measly 1% on the dollar. ($0.01)

 

Trudeau offered you 75 cents on the dollar for that oil.

 

But limited the market and production.

 

You've heard of Citgo?

 

dont buy citgo, hugo chavez gets kick backs from citgo being venezuelen affiliated.

chavez would like nothing more than see this country crumble. venezuala and iran have 82 treaties between them, one of which is if one country is at war, then the other one will be as well.

 

What are you going to do about it? You're not gonna get any oil from Iraq or Iran. Chavez can sell his oil to India and China.