Petroleum Industry

Infos Llégales

Membership made up of petroleum industry-related operators, suppliers, technology providers, and organizations with a material interest in the development of oil and natural gas electronic business standards.

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With so many people blaming oil companies for high gasoline prices, the natural constituency inclined to resist popular-but-counterproductive policies is small. It won't deliver many votes in November, so we can't discount the possibility of something foolish being enacted.

Right now my top candidate for a plausible-but-dumb response to the current situation is a new windfall profits tax. Before taking a step like that, it's important to consider just what aeon gas would mean.

First, you'd only be taxing 12 of the 15 companies. Even in their best years, independent refiners don't achieve above 5% earnings on their revenues.

Secondly, you'd be hitting US independent producers much harder than larger international companies like Marathon, which scored barely above 5% in 2005. The average margin of the six large independent producers on this list was a whopping 35%.

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ENERGY OUTLOOK

To put the impact of the SUV trend into perspective, we've added approximately 100 million net vehicles since 1975, and 65% of the increase is in light trucks and SUVs. On a massive scale, consumers have chosen trucks over cars, negating the original justification for holding trucks to a lower mileage standard.

But now the argument of economic necessity has shifted from protecting trucks and commercial truck buyers to cutting oil imports, and SUVs will have to adjust. All that remains is the much tougher challenge of shifting the preferences of consumers away from the big, heavy vehicles they've selected in overwhelming numbers since the mid-1980s, when the last energy crisis ended.

We now face a series of major problems relating to the generation, transmission and consumption of energy, all of which are essential to business, the way we live and the development aspirations of humankind.

The power generation industry faces major challenges in meeting this growing demand, not least because of inhibitors such as regulation and legislation; inadequate investment returns and unhelpful economic incentives; and of course the supply of natural resources.

EIA - Short-Term Energy Outlook