Pansgold, you needn't tell me anything about the oil & gas industry as I have spent my work life there, 35 years of it to be exact. I'm the controller for an independent exploration and operating company.
You needn't tell me either about the price of a barrel or an MMBTU or the marketing cost of the product going from the wellhead to the plant or the refinery or the drilling and cost of exploratory wells or the taxes and fees paid or how the profit is derived or just about anything else about the industry.
Don't goad me about what I have to pay at the pump, just like everyone else does, and am sick of it too.
I can guarantee you that it's not the oil companies that created this mess, it was the government and their regulations and interventions of the industry.
And now you want to hand the industry over to them? That will probably work out just great. Just like Solendra, A123, Chevy and anything and everything else they decide to dabble in, you think? Those worked out just wonderful didn't they? Do you drive a Volt?
You have a right to be pissed off but, aim your piss at the right target please.
but it's the oil companies that are spending the money they are taking from consumers at the pump.
I also am no stranger to gas prices. I am old enough to remember gas wars and .17.9 cent per gallon gas. That was around 1962 when our family ran a Sinclair station. Then in 65 a Standard Oil station. In 1973 I ran an independent station for a company called Transport Oil Company and well remember the run up in pump prices from the Arab oil embargo.
I remember the outrage from customers at me every time I raised the pump price when I got a phone call from my supplier. “Your cost per gallon just went up a nickle for regular” about once a week. Gas lines 2 blocks long to my pumps.
I sold #1 and #2 fuel and was also a truck stop and #2 sold for around .22 per gallon and we offered a “ 2 cent trucker cash discount” after a 100 gallons.
Like now the refineries were taking the money as I watched my gallonage drop from 300,000 per month to 75,000 and I still made 3 to 5 cents per gallon no matter what the price from which I paid operation costs.
Eventually I could only stay open 3 days a week and had to limit gas gallonage per customer to 5 gallons per day. If I didn't, all my dairy product sales would go out of code date and get tossed.
The best thing I ever did was get the hell out of that gasoline business. You see, I might know a bit about the oil and gas business too.
Been there done that but on the retail end.