BP has great coffee

Bump

Didn't BP and Amoco just merge? What will happen in that case?

I wonder how recent this info is? BP merged with Amoco, so since the list says Amoco imports oil, but BP doesn't, just wondering which is true now?

I read in the paper just last week that this memo surfaces from time to time and is not true. All the companies get a portion of their fuel from the mid east

Last time I was at BP (last week), the pumps said "Now using Amoco gasoline" or something like that.

Oh dear, not this email again.

I suggest you do a search, this e-mail and information (with slight variation) has been posted on FR about a dozen times in the last month.

Basically, it's miseleading, and a gigantic waste of time.

Despite their "brand" local gas stations don't always buy their gas from their "brand"...there's a lot of trading back and forth among middlemen, etc., and you can never be sure where your gas comes from. The only difference among "brands" are some slight variations in additives, but the gas itself may have come from anywhere.

And oil is a "fungible" (look it up if you don't know what that means) commodity for the most part for refiners. As long as you use gas, even if somehow Americans used less Saudi gas, that would simply mean other parts of the world would use more Saudi gas and they'd still get their $$$.

I can't answer that. I am just passing on the idea, which in theory seemed like a good one. If someone wanted to check th DOE website and verify the info that would be great.

To check to see if gas was made from
imported oil.

1) remove gas cap

2) look in gas tank

3) too dark

4) light match

5) still too dark

6) put lit match in tank

7) too bright

Please pull this hoax email thread. May Ted Nugent's dog named George Carlin rest in peace.

Someone should combine these hoax emails.

Something like:
"Remember Ollie North testified [ fill in] Oil Co. behind terrorists suporting Post office charging for email to increase male staying power in free mortgages."

Oh dear, not this email again.

Well, I've stopped doing business with Nigerians who are trying to secrete $25,000,000 out of their country. From now on, I only deal with Americans who want to share their millions with me.

WHY ISN'T THIS IN BREAKING NEWS!!!!!???

This subject sounds dangerously like chain-mail spam.

However, to further the cause, I offer http://www.boycott-middle-east-oil.com. This site has month-by-month spreadsheets for each gasoline distributor detailing the imported oil.

MD

Good question. Everything else is.

I hate to burst your sarcasm bubble, but yes I know what "fungible" means.

This site has really gone downhill. It used to be someone could post something and even if it had been posted before or people didn't agree with the post everyone was civil to one another. Anymore it seems too many people are more interested in one upping others and being smart-sses, than maintaining that civil tone. That's sad.

Okay, I had to look it up.

Fungible n. Something that is exchangeable or substitutable.

Mr. Fox and I walk or ride our bicycles wherever and whenever possible. When we're commended for getting such good exercise we always reply that we're simply "sticking it to the Arabs." LOL!

In fact, once the oil goes into the stock tanks, you can't tell the nationality of it--the gravity is blended before refining. I've seen this at least 3 times.

Claim: Spurning gasoline from Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil will cut off the funding of terrorists.

Status: False.

Examples:

[Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Nothing is more frustrating to me than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends. It turns out that some oil companies import a lot of middle eastern oil and others do not import any. I thought it might be interesting for Americans to know which oil companies are the best to buy their gas from.
Here is the list:
Top 4 companies that import middle eastern oil (for the period 9/1/00 - 8/31/01). By the way, 86% of all middle eastern oil comes from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Shell 205,742,000 barrels of oil
Chevron/Texaco 144,332,000
Exxon/Mobil 130,082,000
Marathon 117,740,000

If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to about $18 billion. That's a lot of money.
Here are some large companies that do not import much Middle Eastern oil:
Citgo 0 barrels of oil
Sunoco 0
Conoco 0
Sinclair 0
Phillips 0
BP Amoco 62,231,000

All this information is available from the Department of Energy and can be easily documented. Refineries located in the U.S. are required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing. They report on a monthly basis.
Keep this list in your car; share it with friends. Stop paying for terrorism!

Origins: If it weren't for all the gross statistical errors and the naïve grasp of oil industry economics exhibited here, this piece might actually have some validity.

Although the message quoted above doesn't address where (outside of the Middle East) we import oil from, many people come away from reading it with the mistaken impression that most of the USA's crude oil is imported from the Middle East. It isn't. According to the most recent figures regarding crude oil imports, only 31% of the USA's imports came from Arab OPEC countries (Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) in January 2002. The top six countries (by percentage of total USA imports) supplying crude oil to the USA in January 2002 were:

Saudi Arabia:	16.9%
Mexico:	15.1%
Canada:	15.0%
Venezuela:	14.4%
Iraq:	11.4%
Nigeria:	5.9.%

(Henceforth, our definition of "Middle East" will encompass the five countries identified by the U.S. Department of Energy as "Arab OPEC" nations: Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. This definition does not include other oil-exporting countries identifed by the DoE as "Persian Gulf" exporters, such as Bahrain, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.)

Moving along, we find that nearly all of the statistics offered in the piece quoted above are erroneous or outdated:

By the way, 86% of all middle eastern oil comes from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Sorry, but no. According to the chart below, straight off the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) web site, only 56% of the oil exported from the Persian Gulf in 2001 came from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and that figure is probably even lower now that Iraq has cut its oil exports in protest of Israel's recent actions on the West Bank.

Here are some large companies that do not import much Middle Eastern oil:
Citgo 0 barrels of oil
Sunoco 0
Conoco 0
Sinclair 0
Phillips 0
BP Amoco 62,231,000

Wrong again. The DoE tracks oil imports by company each month, and although the raw data are a little hard to follow (fortunately, the DoE also provides an explanation of their symbols), for February 2002 the totals were as follows:

CITGO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the national oil company of Venezuela, so naturally most of its crude oil comes from there. However, in February 2002 CITGO also imported from Middle Eastern countries in the following quantities:

Iraq:	1,342,000 barrels
Kuwait:	437,000 barrels

Conoco imports primarily from Mexico, Venezuela, and Canada, and not from Middle Eastern countries. However, they are planning to merge with Phillips, which does import from Middle Eastern countries (see below).

BP imports from a variety of oil-producing countries, but in February 2002 BP North America also imported from Middle Eastern countries in the following quantities:

Iraq:	470,000 barrels
Kuwait:	415,000 barrels
Saudi Arabia:	2,123,000 barrels
Algeria:	3,853,000 barrels

Phillips also imports from a variety of oil-producing countries, but in February 2002 Phillips imported from Middle Eastern countries in the following quantities:

Iraq:	717,000 barrels
Saudi Arabia:	1,100,000 barrels

Sinclair imports from Canada, not the Middle East.
Sunoco imports primarily from Canada, Angola, and Nigeria, not Middle Eastern countries.

So, "doing the math" and multiplying these monthly figures by $30/barrel and projecting them over the course of a year, supporting only the companies listed above would still be putting $3.76 billion dollars per year in the coffers of Middle Eastern countries.

Statistics aside, the glaring fallacy here is the suggestion that we could possibly buy our gasoline only from these selected companies. This notion is like claiming that we could put the big grocery chains out of business if we all bought our food only from small mom & pop stores, but ignoring the fact that these small shops couldn't possibly come close to supplying all our grocery needs. The oil companies named above are relatively small (which is a large part of the reason why they don't necessarily import from the Middle East) and could not satisfy the demand that would be created if a significant portion of the USA's consumer base were to shun all the largest oil companies, unless they bought up the output of the companies we were supposed to be avoiding in the first place (or, alternatively, unless they raised their prices sky-high).

Moreover, the idea that oil companies sell gasoline only through their branded service stations -- and therefore if you don't buy gasoline from Shell-branded gas stations you're not sending money to Shell (or, by extension, the Middle East) -- is wrong. Oil companies sell their output through a variety of outlets other than their branded stations; as well, by the time crude oil gets from the ground into our gasoline tanks, there's no telling exactly where it came from. (A good deal of the crude oil purchased from Russia, for example, is oil from Iraqi fields sold through Russian middlemen.)

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted:

Economics Prof. Pat Welch of St. Louis University says any boycott of "bad guy" gasoline in favor of "good guy" brands would have some unintended (and unhappy) results.
Although foreign relations wax and wane, Welch says, the law of supply and demand is set in stone. "To meet the sudden demand," he says, "the good guys would have to buy gasoline wholesale from the bad guys, who are suddenly stuck with unwanted gasoline."
So motorists would end up buying Arab oil anyway -- and paying more for it, because they'd be buying it at fewer stations.
And yes, oil companies do buy and sell from one another. Mike Right of AAA Missouri says, "If a company has a station that can be served more economically by a competitor's refinery, they'll do it."
Right adds, "In some cases, gasoline retailers have no refinery at all. Some convenience-store chains sell a lot of gasoline -- and buy it all from somebody else's refinery."
St. Louis University's Welch says, "The e-mail presupposes that you know who the supplier is, and that's not always the case."

Finally, what this scheme proposes is merely a symbolic solution rather than a practical one, because even if the USA stopped importing oil from the Middle East, other countries will still purchase it. (Japan alone, for example, generally buys as much or more oil from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait than the USA does.)

Complex problems rarely lend themselves to simple, painless answers. Simply shifting where we buy gasoline isn't nearly as good a solution as the much tougher choice of sharply curtailing the amount of gasoline we buy.

Last updated: 23 April 2002

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