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So, EXXON makes 7cents /Gal of Gas. & US Govt makes 39cents/Gal....but their convoluted explanation of the ( “-7 “)will never be understood and EXxon will still be blamed.

tip to “big oil”, simplify your explanations - get rid of the “-7” on your graphs.

Reading can be fun as well as informative, as evidenced by the following quotation from the article:

"As the EIA figures show, however, refining doesn’t always produce a profit. In December, the data indicate that the U.S. market price for gasoline coming out of refineries was on average about 7 cents per gallon (-2 percent) below the refiners’ cost of crude oil alone, and before accounting for their costs of upgrading the crude into gasoline. In other words, refineries faced a market where domestic gasoline prices were very weak relative to global crude prices."

This is written about as straightforwardly as one might need to grasp the concept. They're saying that in December, 2011, at a time of relatively high crude prices, retail gasoline demand was weak, which limited the pricing power of refiners. Instead of the refining process adding value to the product, it was adding costs they could not recover from the retailers. At that time, it was costing them an average of 7 cents per gallon to refine crude oil into gasoline. The refiners were eating that increment of cost, not the retail customers. Hence, the cost associated with refining the gasoline, at least for the period they're talking about, was not being passed along to the consumer. But there are always costs associated with refining (wages, utilities, equipment, etc.), and those costs were paid by the refiner instead of being passed along as they would be normally.

That is why the graphic shows that the cost to you for refining crude into gasoline is shown as a negative. They paid the cost during the specified period, not you, the customer.

Gasoline refining hasn't been a very good business for the last few years. The good money has been found upstream (exploration/production) instead of downstream (refining/marketing.)

XOM's overall point is that for December, 2011, they paid 7 cents a gallon for you to have gasoline by eating the cost of refining. As opposed to the state and federal governments, which collect 39 cents per gallon for adding ZERO value to the process.