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Gasoline Price Gouging

I’ve never seen gas prices as high as they’ve been this week. According to Reuters and the Lundberg Survey, an oil research group, these sky-high gas prices are due to the Northeast power outage.

Bah! This is nothing but price gouging. You can’t tell me that just because power was out for 12 hours around New York that the entire U.S. gas supply took a huge hit. The article vaguely mentions some refineries being offline. Doesn’t New Jersey (which never lost power) have more refineries than New York? Come on, Manhattan has no room for refineries. You can’t tell me that this was the problem.

This is nothing but simple price gouging, taking advantage to raise prices before Labor Day. Sure, Arizona has a pipeline problem, but that’s refined gas on the way to retail stations and it affects only the Phoenix area. There’s no reason that should be affecting the rest of us.

Man, oil companies are scum.

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  1. The oil companies will use any excuse to raise prices, no matter how tenuous it might me. Calling them “scum” is a compliment.

  2. Oil companies looking to make a profit. How, how un-communist of them…

  3. Having done quite a bit of consulting work in that region & industry, I can tell you that most of the refineries are alone the Delaware River in south Jersey. Most oil tankers could never get further north than the Ben Franklin Bridge anyway. Many other refineries are in Marcus Hook, PA and along the state of Delaware’s eastern boundary. None of these areas were directly hit by the power outage.

  4. Nothing like a virtual monopoly (plus a little under-the-table price fixing) to boost your bottom line. File it under “unfettered greed”.

    Electric prices are regulated; natural gas prices are regulated; why are oil prices regulated, too? It’s just as much an essential commodity as the other two.

  5. Oil price casts pall over global recovery hopes:

    The lack of Iraqi oil may have pushed it higher still, but the real reasons for the longevity of high oil prices are not in the Middle East but in Louisiana and China. In that southern US state and in neighbouring Texas lie huge salt-lined caverns that house America’s strategic petroleum reserves. After 11 September 2001, President Bush said he wanted to increase the oil in the reserve from 600 million barrels to 700 million barrels by the end of 2005.

    This huge cache of black gold would serve as emergency stocks should any unfriendly country choose to halt exports, or should there be a repeat of Venezuela’s political turmoil, which hoisted oil prices above $35 in December.

    Then President Bush stopped adding to the reserve to alleviate pressure on the oil price. In May, he turned the taps back on again and the US administration has been paying top dollars – of more than $30 a barrel – for 11 million barrels of oil. Democratic senator Carl Levin accused the Bush administration of foisting high oil prices on the world.

    Bush is either a moron or he’s lining the pockets of his oil buddies.

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