Fuel Companies You Should Avoid:

December 5, 2005

Before I was rudely interrupted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, I wrote an essay pushing for a boycott against Saudi Arabian owned petro companies that some papers may have printed ("Fight Bush's Friends: Boycott Saudi-imported oil"). Just prior to the storms, if you remember back in August, fuel prices went up to $2.61 per gallon (up from a previous week cost of $2.55 per gallon). The pre-Katrina price-hikes was already igniting anger among consumers, and websites were doing research as to what companies were primarily to blame for this. Around this time some began running a report called "A Crude Awakening (CA)," which warned against spending fuel dollars on the same people trying to blow us up, as well as gave a list as to which particular fuel stations to drive past.

Actually I received a flyer from a newspaper publisher friend of mine, Mr. Robert Booker of the Black Suburban Journal (Philly/Delaware) who told me that a female biker was distributing them around. I later checked the web as well as the US Department of Energy 2000 study and found the CA information to be pretty consistent. Before Katrina these were the Saudi-owned fuel companies to avoid, and their per-year average amount of barrels they bought here: Shell (Royal Dutch Shell)-205,742,000, Chevron/Texaco-144,332,000, Exxon/Mobile-130,082,000, Marathon/Speedway-117,740,000, and Amoco-621,231,000.

There are in fact oil companies that do not use middle eastern fuel oil. Before Katrina, prices were high with them for reasons other than Bush/Saudi price gouging. BP for example had a fire and an explosion at their Texas City TX refinery. For those of you who believe in good causes (as if not buying gas at the Saudi-owned pumps isn't a good enough cause), Citgo (based in Venezuela, and said to be run by President Hugo Chavez) gas prices are comparable to Saudi gas, but they deliver health care to the poor, and their economy is growing under Chavez. Some people propose boycotting all fuel stations, but just concentrating on the list of Saudi firms, if done effectively, would force a price-drop that would even lower the prices among the rest of the industry like Citgo, BP/Phillips, Hess, and ARCO.

Regarding the recent well-publicized report of oil companies that saw their profits rise through the roof during the 3rd quarter (July-Sept.), all of this wasn't due to the Gulf storms as the costs were already on the way up. Katrina was just the excuse used to go over the three dollar per gal. mark. The list of the companies that profited the most (as compiled by USA Today) during that period is top-heavy with the usual suspects. Exxon/Mobile-$9.9 billion, Shell-$9.0 billion, British Petroleum-$6.5 billion, Conoco/Phillips-$3.8 billion, and Chevron-$3.6 billion. But as we head into the cold season some states may become beneficiaries of lower heating oil prices from an unlikely source.

By December 12 Massachusetts stands to be the first state to experience a 60 to 80 cent per gallon reduction in heating oil by Citgo to low income homes. The same offer is open to other states as well, Chavez' first ran an ad in some of the major US newspapers including USA Today under the headline: "How Venezuela is Keeping the Home Fires Burning in Massachusetts." Chavez' ad describe this as "a simple act of generosity," but others like the Wall Street Journal beg to differ, they blame Joe Kennedy, and MA Rep Bill Delahunt for brokering the deal with a man considered a terrorist. One good turn I say.