Energy, Oil Prices | 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....

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.

Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell Plc reported big jumps in first quarter earnings and beat forecasts, thanks to high oil prices and healthy refining margins.

Oil prices tumbled 3 percent Thursday, as economists warned that the recent surge in fuel prices will eventually hurt the fragile economic recovery....

The price of gas is going up so fast that even government reports can't keep up with it. A few days after the federal Energy Information Administration said in its weekly report that the average price of regular gas in the U.S. is $3.19 per gallon -- marking the highest average February price since the government started keeping track in 1990 -- the AAA fuel gauge report on Thursday put the national average at $3.22. The price rose three cents per gallon in a day.

Oil prices turned lower on Monday as reassurances from Saudi Arabia that extra supply needs had been met soothed market fears over the spread of protests to oil-producer Oman.

Stocks fell sharply and oil prices spiked to their highest level in two years on Tuesday as investors worried about the increasingly violent unrest in Libya.

BP lifted its estimate of the likely cost of its Gulf of Mexico oil spill by $7.7 billion to $39.9 billion on Tuesday, pushing its profits down sharply in spite of higher oil and gas prices.

The oil giant’s second-quarter income nearly doubled as oil prices and margins to process crude into fuel rebounded.