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June 23, 2005
The Source of the Problem ...
Is your gas tank full on Saudi oil?
Nobody knows. And the root of the problem is the Department of Energy, which hasn't had an energy policy since Bill Clinton left office. If they required oil refineries to account for the country of origin of their refined petroleum products (even the DOE knows the country of origin of the crude they import), you could know whether you were buying Saudi gas or American.
This handy DOE website explains why you can't be sure where your money's going when you buy a tank of gas.
Their first reason why you can't be sure your gas comes from is that nobody's sure where your gas comes from. That's just the way it is. All the more reason to demand country-of-origin labeling on your gasoline and a DOE with the guts to see it through.
Their other two reasons are just as simplistic. It's complicated, they say. There's a lot refineries, they say. There's a lot of oil, they say. Somedays they refine oil from Saudi Arabia. Somedays they refine oil from Canada. Nobody knows.
But nobody knows because nobody's checking, and nobody's checking because nobody bothered to ask.
Take Chevron, which in April 2005 imported oil from Mexico, Trinidad, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, among others, into various U.S. ports to be refined and sold.
The DOE records tell us this much, but no more.
We don’t know what happened to that oil after refining. Was it retailed at Chevron gas stations? Or was it sold off to the generic mom-and-pop gas stations that make up a third of all gas stations in the U.S. and retailed as generic-label gasoline?
The DOE doesn’t know either.
The DOE shouldn’t. It’s not up to the government to monitor every financial transaction Chevron makes. It’s up to Chevron. And you can be sure Chevron does. Do they know what happened to the shipments of Saudi crude oil they pulled into El Segundo, California last April? You bet. After they refined it, they sold it, or moved it, or stored it. And whatever they did, they made a paper trail.
But Chevron hasn’t told you. It should. And it would, if the DOE required country-of-origin labels on your gas. Some gas money supports our troops, some gas money supports the terrorists shooting them. Is it too much to ask which is which?
Posted by James Fichter at June 23, 2005 04:43 AM
