Snopes says:
Origins: The two most important basic facts about this misguided scheme for lowering gas prices are:
• It was written several years ago, when the world oil market was considerably different than it is today.
• It wasn't accurate even at the time it was written, containing many gross statistical errors and exhibiting a severely flawed grasp of oil industry economics.
Although the message quoted above doesn't address where (outside of the Middle East) we import oil from, many people come away from reading it with the mistaken impression that most of the USA's crude oil is imported from the Middle East. It isn't. According to some recent figures regarding crude oil imports, in December 2007 only 23% of the USA's crude oil imports came from countries classified by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as Persian Gulf exporters (i.e., Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain). The top six countries (by percentage of total USA imports) supplying crude oil to the USA in December 2007 were:
Canada: 18.0%
Saudi Arabia: 17.0%
Venezuela: 12.7%
Mexico: 12.6%
Nigeria: 12.3%
Angola: 4.5%
Moving along, we find that nearly all of the statistics offered in the piece quoted above are erroneous or outdated:
Top 4 companies that import middle eastern oil
Shell 205,742,000 barrels of oil
Chevron/Texaco 144,332,000
Exxon/Mobil 130,082,000
Marathon 117,740,000
This information is quite outdated. In 2007, the top four companies importing oil from the Persian Gulf were as follows (figures given in barrels):
Motiva Enterprises: 160,876,000
Exxon/Mobil: 155,181,000
Valero: 153,519,000
Marathon: 64,134,000
Here are some large companies that do not import much Middle Eastern oil:
Citgo 0 barrels of oil
Sunoco 0
Conoco 0
Sinclair 0
Phillips 0
Some of these numbers were inaccurate to begin with, and consolidation in the oil industry has since wiped out some of the true zero figures as non-importing companies merged with (or were acquired by) importing companies. According to the DoE, in 2007 the above-listed companies imported oil from Persian Gulf countries in the following quantities (figures given in barrels):
Citgo: 949,000
Sunoco: 0
ConocoPhillips: 22,992,000
Sinclair: 0
BP North America: 34,099,000
So, "doing the math" and multiplying these figures by a price of $100/barrel, we calculate that supporting only the oil companies listed above would still be putting $5.8 billion dollars per year into the coffers of Persian Gulf countries.
Statistics aside, the glaring fallacy here is the suggestion that we could possibly buy all our gasoline only from a few select oil companies. This notion is like claiming
that we could put the big grocery chains out of business if we all bought our food only from small mom & pop stores, but ignoring the fact that these small shops couldn't possibly come close to supplying all our grocery needs. Some of the oil companies named above are relatively small (which is a large part of the reason why they don't necessarily import from the Middle East) and could not satisfy the demand that would be created if a significant portion of the USA's consumer base were to shun all the largest oil companies — unless they bought up the output of the companies we were supposed to be avoiding in the first place (or, alternatively, unless they raised their prices sky-high).
Moreover, the idea that oil companies sell gasoline only through their branded service stations, and therefore if you don't buy gasoline from Shell-branded gas stations you're not sending money to Shell (or, by extension, the Middle East), is wrong. Oil companies sell their output through a variety of outlets other than their branded stations (and in countries other than the U.S.); as well, by the time crude oil gets from the ground into our gasoline tanks, there's no practical way for consumers to know exactly where it came from. (A good deal of the crude oil purchased from Russia, for example, was oil from Iraqi fields sold through Russian middlemen.)
As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted:
Economics Prof. Pat Welch of St. Louis University says any boycott of "bad guy" gasoline in favor of "good guy" brands would have some unintended (and unhappy) results.
Although foreign relations wax and wane, Welch says, the law of supply and demand is set in stone. "To meet the sudden demand," he says, "the good guys would have to buy gasoline wholesale from the bad guys, who are suddenly stuck with unwanted gasoline."
So motorists would end up buying Arab oil anyway — and paying more for it, because they'd be buying it at fewer stations.
And yes, oil companies do buy and sell from one another. Mike Right of AAA Missouri says, "If a company has a station that can be served more economically by a competitor's refinery, they'll do it."
Right adds, "In some cases, gasoline retailers have no refinery at all. Some convenience-store chains sell a lot of gasoline — and buy it all from somebody else's refinery."
St. Louis University's Welch says, "The e-mail presupposes that you know who the supplier is, and that's not always the case."
Finally, what this scheme proposes is merely a symbolic solution rather than a practical one, because even if the USA stopped importing oil from the Middle East, other countries will still purchase it. (Japan alone, for example, generally buys as much or more oil from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait than the USA does.)
Complex problems rarely lend themselves to simple, painless answers. Simply shifting where we buy gasoline isn't nearly as good a solution as the much tougher choice of sharply curtailing the amount of gasoline we buy.