Oil company executives will be on the hot seat Wednesday at a House subcommittee hearing as U.S. consumers across the country allege gasoline price gouging at the pump, where drivers last month paid record-high prices per gallon for the fuel.
That’s of little comfort for U.S. drivers who paid an average of $4.353 a gallon for gasoline on March 11, the highest price on record, according to GasBuddy data.Also see: Diesel’s cost climb could hit consumers harder than record gasoline prices In what could give rise to calls in the U.S. and in Europe for profit-windfall levies or the like connected to the rising energy prices, Exxon said in a filing late Monday that its first-quarter profits could top $9 billion, compared with $8.8 billion in the fourth quarter.
Other major energy companies have not yet provided first-quarter updates, which are somewhat unusual in the tightly scripted world of integrated giants. Prices for fuel generally “lag on increases and decreases” in the oil price by anywhere from two to four days before starting to move in the direction of a major oil-price change, saif De Haan, and there is some “truth to the ‘rocket’ and ‘feather’ prices,” given that prices can “rocket” up and then slowly decline.
But that doesn’t translate into big profits from gasoline sales for oil companies. In a recent report, Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives at the National Association of Convenience Stores, or NACS, said that only around 39% of the country’s 145,000 fueling outlets carry branded fuel from one of the five major oil companies, and only about 0.1% of U.S. fueling outlets are actually owned by a major oil company.