My TITLAL Weblog

There are friends of mine who would say shame on me after they read my take on this subject. Their reason would be because my job for the past 35 years was related to the oil & gas industry, either directly or indirectly, and I made a respectable living doing so. (However, I was never in any position to see any confidential or private information supporting my below observations while in any of these jobs.) 

There is no question a lot of people have a good job with the oil & gas industry. But that does not justify us quietly sitting by and allowing big oil to take advantage of the public with their outrageous charges for their products and their continuous weekly price increase’s. And one thing is for sure. They really don’t need to be spending any of their hard-earned profits on a Public Relations department. In general, the news media is doing a fine job for them in great fashion. Now-a-days the news media just automatically announces the daily justification; a little tropical depression within a thousand miles of the Gulf of Mexico, Turkey & Northern Iraq throwing rocks at each other, a refinery somewhere has shut down for a couple of days for maintenance, etc. How proud the oil company’s must be of their unpaid public relations department. And, as usual, no one is seriously challenging any of this.   

My protest on this subject is nothing new. There is hardly a week that goes by that some source is not talking about the oil companies’ ungodly profits and greed. And both Democrats & Republicans have “hauled” big oil into their hearings to “blast” them. Couldn’t you just see the fear in big oil eyes when that happens? They are just sitting there smirking behind their solemn face. They know that Congress is not really going to do anything because big oil has too many of them in their pocket already and getting more every day. Heck, half of them couldn’t even get elected without big oil contributions in one form or another. This “show” by Congress is just that; a front to make us gullible citizens “feel good” that our elected leaders is trying to protect us from the “Enemy’s at the Gate”. And if our government can’t do anything about them no one can, so big oil has absolutely nothing to be concerned about. You might think competition would hold them in check, but when it comes down to this matter do you really believe for one minute there is a real “competitiveness” between big oil companies?  

Big oil no longer tries to justify these continuously increasing record profits. Not record incomes, but record profits! Basically, I think they have run out of excuses. And they know they don’t need to do that anymore anyway. As I pointed out above, they know there is no one that can do anything about it. On the rare occasion they make references to justification, they always fall back on the old “cost of finding new reserves so we can become independent” excuse. But I challenge you to go back, say for the past 20 years, and look at the overall known oil reserves then as compared to today. What you will find is individual big oil company’s reserves has increased but not primarily as a result of discovering new reserves. Remember the surcharges oil companies have been allowed to charge over the past 30 years for oil imports? Was that used to buy up their competition and/or merge? Chevron bought up Gulf Oil then merged with Texaco; Exxon merged with Mobil; ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell. You could argue that “reserves” have increased. But the fact is there have been no “eureka” new reserves found. Royal Dutch Shell was “forced” to fire an executive a few years ago because he had deliberately over stated their reserves. First, you have to wonder why he would do that and, second, who really believes that he did that without the blessing of top management. The bottom line is that increased reserves worth mentioning have come about through mergers and acquisitions, period. And, of course, they always have one of their old reliable standby defenses for not finding new reserves; all those “liberal tree huggers” are preventing big oil from going into areas where unlimited reserves are certain to be.  

Beware of the biased defender on this subject! They will tell you that I am crazy or something and the experts is just a bunch of left wing liberals.  

Below are just a few of the hundreds of sites you could go to for reports on this subject.  

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8646744/ 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/28/business/shell.php 

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8H8DJD03&show_article=1 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/25/AR2005102501655.html 

http://www.npnweb.com/daily/news_print.asp?a=564423