Thursday, January 15, 2015

Falling Oil Prices and ExxonMobil

I've been preaching for a while about how ExxonMobil is incorrectly blamed for any and all possible problems around the world that can be connected to our modern petroleum-consuming economies. While ExxonMobil may indeed be at fault for many of these accused problems either directly or indirectly, I again want to emphasize that they are a small fish in a large ocean.

Look at the recent price drop in petroleum around the world. ExxonMobil has nothing to do with this, and in fact, the low prices are hurting them. Revenues are dropping, investments are dropping and their stock price is dropping. Is anyone saying ExxonMobil is responsible for the low prices? Or si the blame being put on Saudi Arabia, whose National Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, has the largest reserves in the world, and who isn't cutting production?

People being people, ExxonMobil will again be vilified when prices do increase and their profits follow. No one will blame Saudi Aramco, and our profound, collective ignorance of the true dynamics of the petroleum industry will continue.



Previous Years

January 15, 2013 - Assault with a Deadly Hair Removal Gel


1 comment:

Ben Yancey said...

I wonder if Saudi Aramco is keeping production high as a way to provide indirect economic sanctions on other countries that support terrorist and on organizations that have control of some oil production capacity. If oil is not worth much then there is not a lot of money to be made off of it on back channel sales.