Oil | featured news

With gasoline prices hovering at $4 a gallon nationally, many Americans are making tough choices: scaling back summer vacations, driving less or ditching the car altogether. Some seniors are choosing a tank of gas over their prescriptions....

A GOP bid to expand and hasten offshore oil drilling in the face of $4-a-gallon gasoline prices suffered an overwhelming defeat in the Senate on Wednesday, four days after President Barack Obama directed his administration to ramp up U.S. oil production....

The Senate blocked a bill Tuesday that would repeal about $2 billion a year in tax breaks for the five biggest oil companies, a Democratic response to $4-a-gallon gasoline that might fare better when Congress and the White House negotiate a deal later this year to increase the government's ability to borrow.

Rex Tillerson, the boss of ExxonMobil admitted last week that the price of oil–based purely on supply and demand- should be in the $60 to $70 a barrel range. The reason it’s above $100 a barrel, Tillerson explained, is due to the oil majors using futures contracts to lock in current high prices, and speculation that is engineered by the high-frequency trading of quantitative hedge funds.

Oil prices tumbled nearly 5 percent on Wednesday, as easing supply concerns sent gasoline into a tailspin that briefly forced trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange to stop.

With high gas prices and federal deficits in the political spotlight, senior Democrats believe that Senate Republicans will support an idea they otherwise might not like.

The average gas price in the United States has hit the $4 mark, just 11 cents shy of the all-time high, according to a survey published Sunday.

Oil prices plummeted by almost 9 percent on Thursday as traders worried that American drivers were beginning to balk at the price of gasoline.

So now President Barack Obama has decided to go after the oil speculators. He wants to “root out any cases of fraud or manipulation.” He’s directed the Justice Department to set up a task force. Yessir, he’s determined to get to the bottom of this.

Chevron says first-quarter earnings rose 36 percent. The company received higher prices for the oil it produced, and also made more money from refining oil.