Redstate

Posted at 5:02pm on Jun. 12, 2008 ExxonMobil to Exit Gasoline Retailing

By Vladimir

Well, it looks like you're going to have to redirect your ire over retail gasoline prices. (This means you, too, Congress.) As it turns out, most of the retail gasoline is sold by independent jobbers marketing under a major name, and by convenience stores and truck stops. The majors are really not a presence in gasoline retailing.

Exxon getting out of retail gas business

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Posted at 10:09am on May 16, 2008 ExxonMobil CEO Says We're Using Less Gasoline

By Vladimir

Maybe we've found that key point on the supply/demand graph -- the point at which consumers make economic judgments on the use of gasoline, and actually curtail its use (rather than just idly b*tching about it).

Sure, gasoline costs more than consumers are accustomed to paying at the pump, but our mass behavior sheds light on the actual value of the product, based on its utility [which is its rather unique ability to put the Family Truckster down the road 15-20 miles]. It also points up the validity of the drum yr humble correspondent has been banging in these pages for 3-1/2 years, which is that during the period 1984-2004, petroleum was in an oversupply situation, and thus very cheap. And we all got hooked.

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Posted at 12:04am on Mar. 3, 2008 Ben Stein in NYT: Exxon Mobil needs a hug

By Vladimir

In a response to Mr. Barack Obama's demagogic attack on Big Oil, Ben Stein strikes a couple of chords that may sound eerily reminiscent of your humble correspondent:

Mr. Obama is clearly an intelligent man. So it may not be too early to start a small process of education about Exxon Mobil and other oil companies and why attacking them is not smart. First, Exxon Mobil, like all the other gigantic integrated energy companies in this country, is owned not by a cabal of reactionary businessmen holding clandestine meetings in a lodge in the Texas scrublands (as Oliver Stone so brilliantly illustrated in “Nixon”).

Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.

When Exxon Mobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne in Texas. It goes into the pension and retirement accounts of ordinary citizens. When Exxon pays a dividend, that money goes to pay for the mortgages and oxygen tanks and in-home care of lots of elderly Americans.

So, Mr. Obama, which union pension plans — and which blue-collar workers who benefit from them — will be among the first you would like to deprive of the income that flows from Exxon’s rich dividends?

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Posted at 12:04pm on Feb. 17, 2008 Exxon Mobil Bites a Big One

By Vladimir

Exxon Has Off Year Discovering New Oil
(Feb. 16 Wall Street Journal, p.2; link requires subscription)

None of this is good for the consumer, or for our economy. A less profitable Exxon ultimately means higher gasoline prices. And if you look at the reasons behind their apparent lack of success in 2007, it doesn't bode well, either. Before the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, the "Seven Sisters" (American firms Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, and Gulf, plus British Petroleum and Anglo-Dutch Shell) pretty well called the shots in the worldwide oil market. Now, 70 to 80% of worldwide reserves are in the hands of national oil companies, many of those controlled by regimes which are hostile to American interests.

The world's biggest publicly traded oil company by market capitalization said Friday that it replaced just 76% of the oil and gas it produced last year, using a reserves-accounting method favored by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Using a different accounting method that Exxon says is more representative of its business, the company said it replaced 101% of its production last year.

Either way, Exxon was less successful in 2007 than in prior years in finding new fossil fuel. Exxon said its 101% reserve-replacement number in 2007 was the company's lowest in 14 years.

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