Forgive my stupidity, but I am trying to understand a few things about the increased prices of gas....

Question 1- Do we buy our Oil already refined from foreign countries?, and if we do, do we pay a premium price for it?

Question 2- Do U.S. refineries refine oil for our use only?, or do we export some of it?, and if we do, what are the percentages?.

Question 3- Have their been any investigating into who are the major stock holders of U.S. refineries, and U.S. owned oil fields?

I guess what i'm getting at is, Foreign oil producers are telling us that they are producing enough oil to meet our demands, and the media is telling us that oil speculation is driving up the costs, along with the lack of refineries,
(are both of these things true?, or am I compareing apples and oranges?

SOMEONE TELL ME WHO IS MAKING ALL THE MONEY?

The answers are Yes, Yes, and Yes.

But the answer you really want is "the people with the capital, and that capital is oil in the ground, are the ones making all the money. Except for the US citizens who are giving their oil away to the oil companies really really cheaply so companies like Exxon and BP can make huge profits on it."

The US opened up ANWR, the North Seas nations opened up production there, Canada opened things up, and then they flooded the market with oil, driving the price of oil down below the cost of replacing the oil fields that are being depleted.

The result has been that the US oil fields, the North Sea oil fields, and many others are reaching their end of life in about a third the time that the early fields found in the US in Texas, Oklahoma, California, began to fall off in production.

The result is that only the oil owned by governments who reap all the profits have any real potential for increasing their production. But they have discovered that they can fetch well over $100 a barrel for their oil, so it makes absolutely no sense to increase oil production.

Think of it this was. Saudi Arabia is producing roughly 10 million barrels of oil a day at more than $100 a barrel. If they were to increase production by 5 million barrels a day, they would lose money. Today they get about a billion a day for their oil. But if they increased production by 5 million, the price of oil would probably fall to $40 a barrel. That means they would only get a profit of about half a billion dollars a day.

The same for Chavez, and Kadafi, and Iran, and so on.

Do you think that the House of Saud is a charity that is going to provide charity aid to US consumers who have no problem affording more than $125 dollar a barrel oil?

Ask yourself, what would you do if you were the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, Sudan, etc? Are you going to increase oil production so that the price of oil falls and you get less money even while selling more oil?

The answer should be as obvious as your going to your boss and telling him that you want to work fifty percent more hours each week, and to make that happen, you will take a 60% cut in pay so you work longer for less.

Dude, you are serious misguided.. ANWR is not open as you have implied... This month congress BLOCKED ANWR ,......

Newsmax.com - Senate Blocks ANWR Oil Exploration
Now he answered the OP with a YES, YES, YES, and he is only half right at best. I do not have all the facts and figures but rest assured Congress has NOT entirely opened up many billions of barrel of oil that could be sucked out in a heartbeat since we know it's already there. More exploration, having been blocked means only a tiny fraction of ANWR (if any at all) will be pumped out and it won't make any significant difference. Furthermore, this idea that states like mine(Oklahoma) have been tapped out is absolutely ridiculous!

I have mention many times before on OIL related topics the only expert I personally know, which is a geologist with over 40 years in the oil industry having lived in Alaska (surveyed ANWR and other potential Alaskan fields and part of government surveys not yet made public on oil reserves), lived in Texas and studied the gulf and the last 10 years before retirement here in Oklahoma, whom is my uncle...... he talks OIL reserves and I get confused but he is absolutely convinced that, we the public, are being lied to with fears of how little oil there actually is. As for Oklahoma, he claims we are floating on it with 1 exception. In his words there is no such thing as a DRY WELL in Oklahoma but what they call a dry well means that a well pit will take way too long to refill before it's worth it to draw the oil out and wait for the pit to refill..... He also claims that is the case in texas (the entire state)... So the oil may come slower but it's consistant and will essentially keep refilling to the point of being pooled enough to remove. The coast, he claims, has such a TINY amount of exploration it's hard to predict but from his vantage point it looks as if we are estimating (for the public knowledge) about 20-30% of what most likely is there. he's also quite upset we are letting other countries drill OUR OIL ON THE COASTS but we refuse to let our own oil companies drill it...


So, before you freak about an oil shortage just remember how many times your government has lied to you in the past. Also remember the entire world wants to drill our coastline! China is already drilling here but our own oil companies cannot!

Blame congress, not the president solo but the entire congress. Blame them for letting other countries take OUR OIL..........
Look up the coast of Florida for China Oil Drilling!

The Chinese oil rigs and workers are working under contract to the US oil companies with leases in US territory. That is because the US oil companies laid off all its oil engineers and drilling tech in the late 80s and 90s when the market was flooded with oil and the price was driven below the cost of merely maintaining wells in the US.

The mining schools in the US pretty much closed up shop because so few graduates would be able to find jobs in the US for US companies.

Unless you are referring to the Cuban territory, thinking that all the mineral wealth in the world belongs to the US.

By the way, when you next talk to your oil engineer buddy, ask him where he thinks the next super giant like Ghawar will be found, and when will it be found. After more than half a century of production, Ghawar has peaked and is in decline, so its time for a new one of similar size to be found to replace it.

Mulp, First off you said ANWR was open which was wrong as I showed in a report and as recently as this month congress voted it down. Secondly, what frustrated my uncle (geologist you referred to as buddy) is the prevention of drilling more test wells, especially along the coast.

Also, when I mentioned China I was referring to slant drilling off the coast to cuba into american owned mineral rights. However yuo are right that our own congress is allowing other countries to drill our coasts which is absolutely insane!

Back to another of the OP's questions about whom owns the oil fields. That answer is basically everyone that owns mineral rights where oil is located. Some is in national parks (federal land) and some oil companies have bought mineral rights so they own large chunks of it themselves. I have mineral rights (a real small fraction of a percent like so many other people), however my grandmother owns 100% of mineral rights over a square mile of land. We keep hoping a company comes in wanting to drill..........

Tile ,good luck getting an oil company to drill.My cousins had chevron drilling their ranch in Montana.(the temporary wealth was fleeting) then they pulled
out when the market was flooded.This was in the 1980's .they never returned
but the oil is still there.Mineral rights are great if you can afford to drill
yourself.

Too late at night. I meant the North Slope and Prudoe Bay, which I recall being opened up in the 70s, and I must admit, I thought were basically the same until I started researching the oil fields in Alaska. The North Slope, to my surprise, has been producing oil for a century, and in 1928 was reserved for the Navy to fuel ships switching from coal to oil. In the 1970s, the North Slope was moved to the BLM and in 1980, the BLM was directed to lease it for oil exploration. Then the discoveries at Prudoe Bay were made, and so, Reagan-Bush did nothing with the North Slope. Then, Clinton, when the price of oil was in the toilet, got the plan for leasing it done. But when Bush took office, rather than going straight to lease sales, he changed it, which resulted in law suits, which stalled things. So the first leases didn't get done quickly, with the first sales in 2004 and 2006.

One of the comments I found interesting is that the environmentalists gave up on protecting this region, focusing on protecting ANWR. So, the BLM has been directed at leasing out the North Slope, but the oil companies and the Republicans don't bother with pushing forward on that region, but instead put all their effort into opening up ANWR. Not that they have fully developed Prudoe Bay, with Exxon sitting on Thomson Point leases, which are right next to ANWR, for three decades without doing anything.

And they have had leases in the lower 48 that they sat on and eventually abandoned. Of course, those old leases come up indirectly with claims of "an oil field as large as Ghawar but the environmentalists won't let us drill there." Look under the covers and you find that those 100 billion barrel oil fields can only deliver 5-10B and then very expensively, because the geology requires lots of drilling to get to the oil, unlike Ghawar where a dozen wells can drain the the entire 100 billion barrels. (They are using several hundred wells, with most injecting water, to push the oil to the extraction wells, so they can get 150+ billion barrels out of the field.)

So, bottom line is that for three decades and more, millions of acres of prime oil/gas US citizen owned territory has been directed by Congress to be leased to be explored for oil, but the oil companies focus on the unexplored area of ANWR, blaming environmentalists for denying the oil companies any place to drill for and produce oil. I figure that if Republicans had given them ANWR, they would have ignored that too, and instead demanded the right to drill in the most popular national parks, like the Grand Canyon, and then blame "environmentalists for denying them access to the oil place with oil in the US, and thus causing them to fail to add to their reserves. Of course, the would justify their high profits on the risk of drilling for oil, as if they were actually going to take a risk and drill for oil.

But perhaps what motivates the calls to drill in all these new places is the desperate hope that the can find and lease cheaply an oil field like Ghawar. If they explore ANWR, and as likely, fail to find the Ghawar that can deliver a million barrels a day from a single well for 50 years without any injection wells or any technology newer than 1940, then they will abandon ANWR and demand to drill someplace else, no matter how unlikely the potential for finding anything. Sort of a "if we keep searching, we will find Saddam's WMDs" mindset.

In short, environmentalists created this situation and they are profiteering from it.

__________________
The United States of Indentured Servants

you nailed it.But is it indeed in the oil companies best interest not to increase supply.Unfortunately many of the stockholders are everyday people who are undecided about whats best for them or best for the country.

Well, the House of Saud, those damn wacko tree hugging environmentalists, just want to protect the environment so they won't let US oil companies take the oil for $5 a barrel.

And the Iranians, those damn wacko tree huggers, just want to protect the environment so they won't let US oil companies take the oil for $5 a barrel.

And those Iraqi environmentalist just want to protect the environment so they won't let US oil companies take the oil for $5 a barrel.

In fact, all those around the Persian Gulf with more than half the world's oil, are just damn environmentalist who want to conserve their oil so the can sell it years down the road for $100 or $200 or $300 a barrel instead of letting US oil companies get it for $5 or even $10 a barrel.

If you are going to blame anyone, blame the tree hugging Arab environmentalists that have imposed a carbon tax of more than $100 a barrel.