Why can't the US Government start or buy its own Oil Company?

That's a brilliant idea, as long as the US doesn't nationalize the whole industry, or continue to subsidize the Government owned one. I actually had this idea. If there is so much profit, let the government get some seed money, like 100 million, start up a business, and if it is successful by reducing profits and prices, it will sell more and more and will not need more money from the government. If there are no excess profits, it will buy and save at the same rate and maybe go out of business.

Of course the trolls will shout 'socialism' as if that is explanation enough, but with this criteria I think it would be fine.

The government doesn't drill because it has no expertise in the business. What it ought to do instead is lease the land to private companies who do have expertise, let them drill, and take part of the gains. Hmmm... I'm not sure who told you we have enough to last 191.25 years, but that's probably overblown. We consume about 20 million barrels per day. Even with liquified coal and liquified shale, we aren't lasting that long.

Governments are good at managing public goods, like Jails, Schools, and Military. Oil is a private good. Governments do not manage those so well. If we did nationalize a oil company and sold to the US at below cost, we would deplete those resource quickly.

The private sector is not building more refineries because it is not profitable for them to do even if you remove all the environment regulations that apply and you gave a tax break.

Because any business run by the US government will lose money and need taxpayer subsidies to survive.

Look at the example of Amtrak.

The fact of the matter is that the government cannot compete against private companies that generally are more innovative and react better to changing situations.

One reason is the same one that prohibits tax exempt churches from starting businesses that compete with businesses owned by taxpayers. If you own a business and its income is taxable, and a business down the street that is not required to pay taxes is in competition with you, your competitor has an unfair advantage and can probably price its products below your prices. So you go out of business.

Most of the world’s largest oil companies are state-owned or are owned by companies that are state-controlled. What most of those companies have in common is large domestic oil reserves. We don’t have that. We hold only about 6% of the world’s proven oil reserves but consume 25% of the world’s oil production. And we import more than 60% of the oil and refined oil products we consume.

It’s bad enough when Exxon raises its prices in France. Can you imagine how bad it would be if U.S. Oil raised its prices in France?

Assume U.S. Oil took over the production of all U.S. oil and sold 50% of it at cost to American users. That would account for about 20% of what we now use. It wouldn’t make sense to sell the other half to the rest of the world at market prices and then buy it back plus three times more from foreign suppliers. It would make more sense to keep it all here at or near market prices. If we supplied 20% of our “free” oil it would cause uproar in the WTO because it would be seen as a government subsidy to our exporters. That would cause our trading “partners” to seek remedies in the form of tariffs and possibly quotas. It would be a mess.

The government doesn’t belong in the oil industry, particularly when we are facing an almost certain shortage of oil in the foreseeable future. We need to devote our resources to alternative sources of energy, and there seems to be only one source that can begin to solve our petroleum problem: Hydrogen. If we could start from scratch and create an atomic bomb in about five years in the 1940s, it should be possible to create hydrogen-based fuels with the science we have today in a few years. We have already made a start. We use approximately 400 million gallons of gasoline every day. There is no combination of biofuels and solar, wind and wave power than can make more than a small dent in that amount of consumption. We have coal liquefaction technology, but it is expensive and there are concerns about heavy metals that the production process emits. We also have good nuclear technology, but we have no repository in which to store the wastes. Hydrogen is clean.

We need to stop dreaming about easy solutions like ethanol and “next generation” biofuels; we also need to stop thinking that if Brazil could achieve energy independence based on ethanol, we can do the same. Brazil’s population is heavily concentrated and its roads are poor. And Brazil has not stopped using oil. It just uses relatively little: about 4.5 barrels per capita per year. We use about 27 barrels per capita per year and our population is more than 50% larger than Brazil’s. So, on a comparable basis, each American consumes almost 10 times as much petroleum-based energy as each Brazilian does. Only hydrogen holds any real promise of replacing enough oil to make a real difference in our petroleum problem. Each gallon of sea water contains 300 times as much potential energy as a gallon of gasoline does. We need to find a way to get to it.

Have you not seen what happens when the US government runs things? Also, that can't work until we actually drill up enough oil to sell. Otherwise we're still stuck with the international pricing of oil.

We do have our own reservior. SPR. We've been pumping ttanker loads of oil into it for decades now.

Have our own oil company? My God don't you believe in capitalism??? the oil companies are doing a wonderfully efficient job of managing our oil supplies and refining capacity.

And we're paying them millions every year in tax credits to show our appreciation.

Great idea. Let's put Maxine Waters in charge of this nationalized company. Things will surely go smoothly.

Because Bush had a bill last month for drilling and making new refinery and Congress say NO/

Do you understand the concept of "natural resource"? Do you believe that it is our oil under their sand? Do you think that if we drill the oil will come?