For the stock savvy.. Check this out.. wow..

Thats profit for 1 quarter for the third largest.. can only imagine what Exxon will announce. Its pretty staggering that with all the perceived shortages, this kind of profit is being realized.

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/conocophillips-1q-profit-up-17-pct-on/n20080424094609990039

yeah......it sucks!

"Although we delivered solid financial results during the first quarter, unplanned downtime negatively impacted our performance," Jim Mulva, ConocoPhillips' chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

In plain language - "we reamed the public and made obscene profits by closing our refineries to create a shortage of gasoline and drive up prices even further."

There is NO gas shortage.

JG!

"Daily production in the most-recent quarter averaged 1.79 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, down from 2.02 million barrels a year ago."

Not saying there is a shortage, because there isn't - I'm saying they reduce supply to justify charging more. Basically, they have us coming and going.

Further reason to nationalize or at least regulate the energy cartels.

Look who is in the White House and oil is at 120.00 barrel .I think every oil well in Texas is pumping today and Bush and his buddies are lining their pockets.

Puppets are on strings dude!

George and Dick are laughing all the way to the bank.

You know how to buy stocks don't you ?

Yep... its payday boys.

$27 per gallon when HE took office and $120 now? Not saying it's HIS fault, but maybe HE hasn't helped the situation.

I'm sure a war with Iran would help. Probably won't help you or me but will cetainly help those with defense contracts. Capitalism at it's finest (most corrupt)!

High prices are only going to hurt not help, I can not go back to farming with horses ,I need fuel to stay in business and I need cheap fuel ! What needs to happen is , people need to stop buying huge suv's and start driving smaller cars and start looking at ways to conserve . high oil prices also mean high fertilizers cost which means higher food costs but what the heck we can just import more food from other countries they have low cost fertilizer ( Human Poop ) Then we will all die from e-coli, Problem solved

It's the "Born on third, but thinks he hit a triple" mentality.

Hankster, show me where we are preventing the building of new refineries.

"The price of crude is factored by demand...period"

It's factored by supply which is manipulated by the likes of OPEC.

The low value of the US $ is the biggest factor in today’s oil prices. Don't forget that during G W's reign our dollar has lost nearly 32 % of it's value on the world market based on GDP per capita. In the mean time inflation has gone up over 25%. Oil is traded in US $ so the price has to rise as our dollar falls. It would seem more stable if oil was traded in Euros but it would still have gone up in US dollars. Oil is a commodity that is traded on the open market and its' price is driven by demand. Use less and the demand goes down and prices go down. Unfortunately we are not the only ones using oil and demand on the world market is not going to go down. Until we either find a cheaper alternative or oil prices rise to the point that currently more expensive alternatives will be cheaper than oil, prices will continue to rise.

On a side note if we had spent half the amount on research and development of alternative fuels as we have on the war in Iraq we wouldn't need to buy oil from OPEC by now.

That's true! Amazing but true!

World oil production is up over last year as is demand.

http://www.worldoil.com/INFOCENTER/STATISTICS_DETAIL.ASP?STATFILE=_WORLDOILPRODUCTION

That might need some explaining.. because its B.S - 6% is close to the margin your local Kwiki mart gets for selling you a gallon of gas. They report a whole bunch more than 6% increase in profit every single quarter, let alone annually. The "sales are so huge" because the price is so high.. not because they are selling that much more oil.. your just paying more for it. Sure, China etc is using oil now, but not enough to keep the graphs of cost vs profit vs usage.

The cost of harvesting oil has not increased. The cost to refine oil has not increased. The only things thats increased is the amount you pay for gas and the profits.. which are insane.

On the up side, I was always a guy who really didn't think about paying for the gas on a fishing trip, we just kinda always worked it out. Now days we are worse than 8 women trying to split up a lunch tab.. the calculators come out.