What if, instead of gas prices going up for everybody, oil companies simply made less money
— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan) March 8, 2022
Time for some math (updated because my original numbers were off and I had to fix my math):
ExxonMobil is the largest oil producer in the United States.
Last year they made $23 billion in profits.
They produced 38 billion gallons of gas.
$23B in profit for 38B gallons is about $0.60 per gallon profit.
I know that gasoline is not their only product so there are other, often much more profitable products (such as chemical feed stocks for plastic manufacturers) that also add into the oil industry’s profits.
Across the industry, and remember that I’m a chemical engineer who worked in an oil refinery, the profit margin on pump gas is roughly five cents per gallon.
I worked for a refinery that bought oil and owned no wells. The margin on that was $0.05 per gallon.
That’s what I did. We optimized and optimized to suck every fraction of a cent of profit out of our product. If we Gould gain a tenth of a penny per gallon, that was big money for us.
For oil companies that do oil extraction, their margins are wider because they are vertically integrated from crude to pump.
So let’s say this Blue Check got his wish and the oil industry agreed to cut their profit margin by 50%.
He would save between two and thirty cents per gallon depending on if he bought from an oil producer or stand alone refiner.
In his Prius with an 11 gallon tank, he’d save between $0.22 and $3 per tank.
But that wouldn’t allow him to make profound statements on Twitter.
To understand Blue Checks, you need to understand the Dunning-Kruger Effect and that these people are the sages who live high atop Mount Stupid.
Did you drop a decimal point somewhere? Using the numbers you mentioned, $23 billion profit on $5 billion gallons means $4 per gallon. That can’t be right.
I had gotten the bbl of one refining sector so I was off. I got better numbers.
Yeah, another overeducated moron who majored in ‘journalism’.
He’s stupid, doesn’t know he’s stupid, and will never accept that he’s stupid because all of his
educationindoctrination from the mid 80s onward has been to produce stupid people who can’t actually think, but only parrot the proggie propaganda they’ve had poured into their heads since they were children.“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
It is always amazing how people who never did anything somehow know how the world should work.
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Let’s see this idiot run a small business while paying his workers a minimum $15/hr. Or run a farm using strictly “organic” methods. Or keep their petroleum/mining industry profitable.
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I will bet every dollar in my wallet that as soon as Dave actually has to be in charge, all of his standards will disappear.
I remember reading some articles a while ago about George McGovern, who ran a B&B for a while after retiring from politics. He found out the hard way that money and business sense actually matters when you do that, and keeping a business alive is a lot harder than it looks when you’re merely an idiot politician.
McGovern also said that he hadn’t been aware that gov’t (rules & regs) were as intrusive as he found out they were.
McGovern lied a LOT.
whereas in my state the gas tax (not including other taxes/fees/surcharges) is .39/gal and is going to jump again in July big time because they’ve tied it to inflation.
Hence why the ‘bluecheck’ states are panicking and squawking about ‘tax relief’ on the taxes THEY created.
Elizabeth Warren said almost the exact same thing yesterday. And started legislation going for a “windfall profits tax” on the oil companies.
That ties into the other article about Harvard and brains (or not). Warren is proof positive that not only don’t you need a functioning brain to attend Harvard, you don’t need a functioning brain to be on the Harvard faculty.
Which is not to say that tag applies to all of them. One of my father’s classmates was on the Harvard faculty and earned a Nobel prize there. Then again, that was in physics, where the ability to think does show up as a prerequisite.
“I’m a chemical engineer who worked in an oil refinery”
Ok, sort of off base question, but maybe you’d know. Is “Top Tier” detergent gasoline for our vehicles really a thing? Or is it just a marketing scam and all gas is the same? I know Exxon/Mobil claims they have “Synergy” detergent blends, but I have my doubts that their gas is any different than the gas at a no name station.
Posting as a long time ago Hot Shot pickup driver in the oil patch, yes, there is a difference. Run any name brand for a few thousand miles, you have to change brands, so the new gas additives would clean out the former brand gas additives. Wife bought Canal gas (true brand name) in Louisiana once, almost didn’t make it home, took a while to clean that crap out.
“Journalist” & “moron” are pretty much synonymous these days.
You ain’t wrong.
Part of me wants to sit back and laugh at the oil companies who mostly donated to the DNC for the 2020 elections. You know what I mean? Too bad all that bribe, I mean political support money wasn’t spent on a pro-energy candidate.
But, yes, it sucks. And sadly we haven’t reached peak stupidity yet.