I am not sold on that math being accurate. The oil company sells the oil to the refinery. Their profit has nothing to do with the end product. Their profit is tied to their expenses and the price of oil at the time of the sale.
Here is a blurb from a Conoco news release.
All told, ConocoPhillips earned $17.09 per barrel of oil in the second quarter, up from $9.38 in the year-ago period.
Both numbers are much higher than your 4.20 figure. I think it gets even more complex when the company pumps, buys and refines the oil. So I don’t think you can take a number from the price of refined oil and calculate what they make per barrel of oil. I know they can’t sell it internally to their own refinery for less than market rates. So right there is a built in profit.
They may only make 10c a gallon of the refined gasoline but I would be willing to bet every barrel of oil they produce themselves reaps large profit.
Are you confusing refinery margins with profits? Also, second quarter has not happened yet, are you talking about a previous year?
From comment # 18 above the hotlink shows the composite cost of feeder stock to be approximately 100 bucks per barrel delivered to the refinery, in 2011.
If the profit margins are higher on one end product, the refiner will crack to preferentially generate more of it than for the very low profit margin of gasoline, (commonly 3 to 4 cents per gallon).
Thus, the earnings per barrel cannot be directly applied to the earnings for gasoline. After the money is earned, then expenses must be deducted to arrive at the actual profit for each product generated from a barrel of feeder stock.
However, for the sake of this discussion let us assume that ALL of the earnings are the same as the profits, and that 1/3 of the feeder stock is converted to gasoline.
Then $17.09 X 1/3 = $ 5.6961 divided by 42 = $0.13562 earnings per gallon for the second quarter, and $9.38 X 1/3 = $ 3.1263 divided by 42 = $ 0.0744 per gallon for last year’s second quarter.
For a two year average of $0.013562 + $ 0.074437 = $ 0.210058 = $ 0 .105029, or 10 1/2 cents per gallon earnings.
On a $100 per barrel purchase of crude oil feeder stock the refiner and downstream entities generate earnings of 17.09 and 9.38 % respectively, for the two quarters, and 13.235 % per year average for the average of the same two quarters.
In return for purchasing the lowest cost refined products in the World, the consumer of these refined products is enabled to move goods, services and people to every corner of the World, plus use plastics, make surgical tubing, generate heat, electricity, fertilizer, and of course jet fuel so Green Peace can send their people to protest drilling of Oil wells off of the coast of any Nation with a coast line.
BTW, what return do you get from the Federal Income Taxes that you send in to Sheriff of Nottingham, Timmy Gee, each April 15 th? My guess is that it is less than 9.38 %. Last I checked, Social Security paid 1.2 % per year, well not counting your share of the National Debt, of course.
Yes, indeed! One can ALWAYS count on the US Federal Government to deliver the greatest loss at the maximum pain level for the longest period of time.