Does anyone know if there was EVER a year the oil companies didn't make a profit?

Anyone? Facts? Did anyone during the hearings today ask this question??

That every year Bush has been in office they have made "RECORD" profits!

and I'd like to know what their definition of lean is.

My ol pal Vinnie da loan shark used to do that to clients who failed to repay in a timely fashion. He'd lean on 'em a little bit--usually with a lead pipe.

Back then they were called "whalers".

I seem to recall him demanding that the Saudi's RAISE the price of a barrel of oil.

When gas was 89 cents a gallon.

Once they figured out that they could just produce less and claim "environmental regulation" they were able to "move past that horrible era"

The most recent year would probably be 1998, when the price of oil plunged after the Asian financial crises and there was widespread panic in the industry. Here's an article from the British press with some additional linked articles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1998/12/05/cnoil05.html

Some corporate sites have a 10-year archive of financial reports:

BP turned profit in 1998, although weakly:

http://www.bp.com/downloadlisting.do?categoryId=9010688&contentId=7021119

Looks like Unocal took a small loss in 1996:

http://www.chevron.com/investors/archives/unocalirarchive/financialreports/

Not every company in the oil and gas sector is profitable. There are a ton of smaller companies that are still losing money. But not the large integrated producers.

In general, your suspicions seem to be borne out. Unlike industries like airlines and retail that frequently lose money when economic conditions turn down, major oil does not seem to have a pattern of posting financial losses.

and been put on the spot for all to see.

I never fully appreciated until I got into the industry myself, what a volatile business it could be.

DainBramaged, I don't have any cold hard facts or numbers, but I do remember in 1959 when my father, an accountant, came home from work one day and said that everyone except him had been laid off in the accounting dept that day, due to tough business conditions.

The first Arab oil embargo occurred around 1973, so oil prices rose and the oil industry was the place to be. Things began slowing down after a few years of heady prices, and when I hired on with one of the majors in 1982, I was low-man-on-the-totem-pole for about two years, before they began hiring again. Then in 1985 or 1986, my company offered its first-ever buy-out of employees, trying to pare down the work force as a way of shoring up the bottom line. It's economic Darwinism--businesses, like organisms, want to survive. I think we went through another round of layoffs around 1991.

So, you see just from my short experience how many ups-and-downs there have been. I do believe that the "return on capital employed" in the oil companies is around 12%, compared to around 18% for the pharmaceutical companies.

The oil industry is a risky business, where you may not begin seeing returns on your investment for 10 years or more. High oil prices spur exploration, BUT a very large factor in finding new oil lies in developing new technology to "see" where the oil may lie. Finding oil is an expensive, as well as risky, business.

Personally, I have always felt that gasoline should be taxed more highly, and those extra taxes should be used to create something like the original NASA, devoted solely to finding viable alternatives to fossil fuels. The first company that comes up with viable alternate fuel and/or viable alternate power mechanisms (for cars, planes, rockets, utilities) will be in the catbird's seat. I'd kinda like it to be an American company.

Oxygen? Water? Even if you don't drive, you depend on a host of things from your electric light to the food that arrives in the supermarket that exist because of oil. If a product is in universal demand, it's hard to see how regular market forces of competition can work, since people are going to buy their petroleum byproducts somewhere, whether from one competitor or the other.

Don't tell me they just sell barrels of crude and gasolene. They are also giant chemical manufACTURING COMPANIES.