Looking for All-American Gasoline? Good Luck!

Living in the heart of oil and gas country, you would expect that our five refineries in Oklahoma only refine oil produced in the United States. That is not the case as it is much more complicated based on the type of crude a refinery is able to use in their refining process. If the EPA was not so stringent, we would have more refineries either upgraded or new that could refine more types of crude.

If you are one of the people attempting to boycott particular stations, you are hurting the American worker:

Oil Rig workers on or offshore to bring in the well
Vendors supplying the rigs on and offshore
Manufacturing employees of companies that provide various items used in drilling and anything associated with oil production
Vendors supplying the storage facilities for the crude
Truck drivers of oil tankers who deliver the oil to the refinery
Refinery workers
Truck drivers of oil tankers to the gas stations
Owner and employees of the gas station
Vendors to the gas stations

That is just a small sample of workers who would be hurt by a gasoline boycott of a particular brand. That doesn't even include the restaurants who make the money off the oil workers.

This is also a sample of how the moratorium in the Gulf by the Obama and his Administration is hurting collateral industries with their boneheaded move knowing they were going to be hurting employment along the Gulf Coast but Obama doesn't seem to care as long as he and his family can take luxury vacations and he can golf.

When people urge boycotts, most don't stop to think who they are hurting in the process. In the oil industry, the crude from many areas of the world is used in US refineries and it would be virtually impossible to separate which crude went into the manufacture of a particular brand. All you have to do is look at the trucks that come into our gas stations and realize the trucks all come from the same refinery in a town south of us. Who knows where the crude came from? Very seldom do you see a tanker truck with a particular brand on them delivering gasoline in our area.

Another aspect of a boycott not taken into consideration are the various products that come from crude oil that we use in every day life.  When you stop to think about it, oil production is key to so much of what we use and makes us wonder why new and upgraded refineries are being blocked by the EPA and while Obama and his Administration are not pushing for more domestic oil production? 

Boycotting your local gas station makes 'zero' sense.

Looking for All-American Gasoline?
There May Not Be Any In Your Neighborhood

It now looks as if the Gulf Coast oil spill, brought to you in part by BP and the government’s Minerals Management Service, will not cause the northern hemisphere to close down. Yet, memories of BP’s former CEO, Tony Hayward, continue to stoke a national aversion to “foreign oil” and a boycott of the nation’s 10,000 BP stations (almost none of which are owned by BP). Boycotters determined to put mom-and-pop BP stations out of business have joined with the petro-jingoists who have prodded us for what seems an eternity to not buy oil produced in the Middle East.

Can using a “Buy American” bumper sticker as a Band-Aid for our oil deficit do much to help Americans wean themselves from overseas hydrocarbons? Is it even possible to “buy American?”

Think of Joe and Josephine Citizen, out there wondering what they can do, short of putting their Honda through the crusher and buying bicycles, to help free our great nation from the yoke of foreign oil. They could wear clever T-shirts to demonstrations at the home offices of oil companies, of course, but they might profit more if they leaned their placards against the wall for now, and turned off their bullhorns, while we see if there are ways to avoid purchasing oil pumped from lands beyond the seas.

Consider that the United States, with four percent of the world’s population, consumes a disproportionate slice of the world’s oil-production pie chart. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that we import almost 10 million barrels of crude oil per day of the 74 million the world produces (up from 21 million in 1960). We use 10 million barrels of our own oil, making our consumption roughly 26 percent of all crude oil pumped out of the earth.

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We buy about half of our 10 million imported barrels from four countries. They are: Canada (1.86 million barrels), Mexico (1.17), Saudi Arabia (1.08), and Venezuela (1.07). The rest comes from eleven other countries.

It is apparent, then, that we buy 3.32 million barrels of crude each day from countries that either want to repossess California, have a habit of funding Middle Eastern terrorist groups, or are led by an egomaniac who hates everything about the U.S. except Sean Penn. We could lose Canada if a bad call by a U.S. referee should cost one of its hockey teams the Stanley Cup.

Think for a minute about the companies that refine all this crude oil. The U.S. had 300 oil refineries in 1982, and today we have 148. Operating at about 90 percent of capacity, the Department of Energy says that existing refineries can produce some 631,000 barrels of petroleum products a day.

How many barrels of our daily 20 million are refined into gasoline? Each 42-gallon barrel delivers 18.56 gallons of gasoline. Put another way, gasoline makes up 45 percent of a barrel’s yield, so our daily ration produces 9.0 million barrels of gasoline. We can refine only .63 million barrels and are thus dependent on outsiders. Worse, we are likely to remain so.


The Internet teems with lists of companies that allegedly buy or do not buy oil from the Middle East. These lists are often incomplete or inaccurate. ARCO, for example, will appear on the list of non-Middle-East purchasers, but ARCO is owned by Venezuela. For my money, Hugo Chavez sucks just as loudly as the terror-supporting states.

All of the companies lumped under the Big Oil banner (Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and Total) are multinationals to a greater or lesser degree. This makes it difficult to pinpoint an All-American company or even one that buys no Middle East or Venezuelan oil. Oil, remember, is a commodity. And no one cares where a commodity comes from if the price is right.

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