Exxon Sets Highest U.S. Profit Ever

Exxon Mobil announced the biggest quarterly profit of any corporation in U.S. history, breaking its own previous record with $11.68 billion in earnings during the second quarter. The company’s revenue surged 40 percent, to $138.07 billion for the quarter. If it were a country, the company would have the 18th-largest economy in the world. The engine behind those results was Exxon Mobil’s oil and gas production. Exxon Mobil produces about 2.4 million barrels a day of oil and natural gas liquids worldwide. It sold that output for an average of $119.28 a barrel, more than $50 a barrel higher than the price a year earlier, essentially riding the wave of world oil prices that has boosted prices at the pumps.

Profit from oil and gas production accounted for the overwhelming majority of the company’s earnings, which rose 14 percent compared with the second quarter of 2007. And high crude prices outweighed an 8 percent slide in Exxon Mobil’s worldwide output of oil and natural gas as well as a steep drop in net income from the company’s other businesses — oil refining, fuel marketing and chemical manufacturing, which all rely on oil and natural gas as raw materials.

The outsized profits at Exxon Mobil and other big oil companies reporting earnings this week sparked a barrage of criticism from lawmakers, consumer groups and environmental organizations, who called for measures to either rein in tax breaks for big oil firms or prod the companies to invest more in oil exploration and the development of alternative energy. Friends of the Earth called for an end to $33 billion in tax breaks and other “handouts” that it said the industry would receive over the next five years.

Much of the criticism focused on the fact that Exxon Mobil’s spending to buy back shares of its own stock exceeded that for capital projects, such as oil and gas exploration. The company devoted a record $7 billion to capital in the second quarter, a 38 percent increase, while it spent $8 billion on share purchases.

“Perhaps the only thing more outrageous than Exxon Mobil making record profits while Americans are paying record prices at the pump is the fact that Senator McCain has proposed giving them an additional $1.2 billion tax break,” Obama said. “Instead of an energy policy that reads like an oil company wish list, it’s time to create a new American energy economy by investing in alternative energy, creating millions of new jobs, increasing fuel-efficiency standards and ending the tyranny of oil once and for all.”

The McCain camp called Obama’s criticism a “hypocritical political attack” because he voted in 2005 for an energy bill backed by President Bush but opposed by McCain, the Associated Press said.

– from www.washingtonpost.com

Please dont make them rich by paying our money and polluting the planet.
Please go for electric vehicles and public transport.