Interesting, though: The Snopes page doesn't really contradict what the email claims. (It does cast some doubt on the ability for the published statistics to accurately reflect where all the oil originally originates from.)
But mostly it just tries to debunk the whole notion of a boycott. So according to Snopes this isn't an urban legend, just not a very good idea.
Snopes does like to interject their opinions sometimes, and they don't do a good job of identifying them as such. Sometimes you have to read their pages carefully.
Here are their arguments against the boycott:
- The political naïveté that asserts "Middle Eastern" equals "terrorist," and that by purchasing gasoline refined from Middle Eastern crude oil you are "sending your money to people who are trying to kill you." Not everyone from the Middle East is a terrorist, nor does every terrorist hail from the Middle East. Moreover, groups such as the
Al-Qaeda have built up financial investments and portfolios so complex and diverse over the years that they can operate quite effectively without receiving direct revenues from oil exports.
- The notion that because a refinery purchases crude oil from a non-Middle Eastern country, they're not buying Middle Eastern oil. A good deal of the crude oil purchased from Russia, for example, is oil from Iraqi fields sold through Russian middlemen, but it still shows up in the refineries' books as having been imported from Russia.
- The implication that most of the oil exported to the U.S. comes from the Middle East. According to the Energy Information Administration (as reported by The New York Times), the biggest exporters of oil to the USA in 2000 were (in millions of barrels per day):
Canada: 1.69
Saudi Arabia: 1.57
Venezuela: 1.52
Mexico: 1.36
Nigeria: 0.89
Iraq: 0.61
- The shaky grasp of supply and demand evidenced by the proffered scheme. Oil refineries generally operate at close to full capacity; if everyone in the USA stopped buying gasoline from Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil, and instead purchased their gas only from Citgo, Sunoco, Conoco, Sinclair, Phillips, or BP Amoco-supplied service stations, the companies in the latter group wouldn't be able to come close to satisfying the sudden increase in demand for gasoline, because their refinery capacity is limited. Their supplies would run out, and prices would skyrocket. And even if they could somehow come up with extra refinery capacity necessary to fulfill the increased demand, they'd almost certainly have to turn to Middle Eastern exporters for the additional crude they'd need to supply those refineries.
- After crude oil has been pumped out of the ground, put in tankers, shipped around the world, refined into gasoline, and delivered to service stations, that gasoline can't necessarily be traced back to its point of origin. Nor do oil companies sell only gasoline to their own branded stations
-- that a consumer buys gasoline at a non-Shell service station is no guarantee that the gasoline didn't come from Shell, or that it wasn't refined from Middle Eastern crude.
I love snopes, they are one of the truly useful sites on the internet for information.