gas prices article

An interesting article in Car and Driver while we were at Urgent Care yesterday. What? We were at Urgent Care?? Oh yeah - more about that later. For now, here's an excerpt:

"Then there’s the demonization of the big oil companies. Some simpletons actually think that the increase in the price of gasoline over the past few years goes directly into the oil company coffers. The fact is that the big American oil companies own relatively little oil in the ground. They have to buy crude oil on the open market in order to have something that they can refine into gasoline, diesel oil, jet fuel, and all of the other oil products. A barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons and currently costs about $130. That means the raw material costs $3.10 a gallon. For finding the oil, getting it out of the ground, transporting it to a refinery, turning it into gasoline, and distributing that gasoline, ExxonMobil cleared about 58 cents per gallon in 2007, based on the figures in its annual report. Of that 58 cents, Exxon paid about 25 cents in federal income tax. The feds also collected 18.4 cents of excise tax per gallon. Meanwhile, here in Ann Arbor, the state of Michigan collects 19.875 cents per gallon of “excise and environmental” taxes, along with 24 cents of sales tax (at $4.00 per gallon). So ExxonMobil nets 33 cents per gallon, while our federal and state governments take 87 cents per gallon.

Still, that’s an excellent profit, but so what? ExxonMobil is an American company, owned largely by American shareholders, employing tens of thousands of American white-collar and blue-collar workers at high wages. We need more companies like it to leverage our superior technical expertise and maintain our high living standard."