Is Sen. Rand Paul's claim that oil companies earn only 7 cents per gallon of gas factual?

Not unless you discount the profit that, for example, one of my holdings, Exxon, gets from crude. It is the lowest but Exxon produces crude for 12.39 per barrel and sells it often to itself for over 100.

Furthermore since it uses a LIFO flow for accounting, as all oil companies do, it calculates its profit based on the replacement cost of the oil or 100 dollars per barrel. Not the cost of actually producing the crude. Basically they get to use the spot market price of crude to determine their costs instead of their actual costs. Showing zero profit on the sale of the crude on its books.

Retailers of fuel earn about 2 cents per gallon profit.

Refiners earn about 8-14% profit on a gallon of fuel.

Oil companies themselves do not directly make profits off fuel unless they also are a refiner and/or retailer. They make a profit off oil prices and the difference between the cost to get the oil to market and the market price..

On oil they make a profit off about 9 different products that are distilled from crude. This doesn't even count the natural gas that is found along with oil exploration.

If an oil company also owns its own refinery and its own fuel retail chain, it is not factual that they are only making 7 cents per gallon.

maybe if you are making false claims based only on the profit the oil company themselves make by selling oil to the refiner, can you come up with such nonsense. But that would mean leaving out the other 10 products acquired while exploring for oil that are taxed far less than fuel and far more profitable.

So I guess if you exclude the profit on all the other products they make out of oil, then yes maybe that is true. But why are we talking about how much oil companies make per gallon of fuel when we should be discussing oil companies and barrels of oil or refiners and gallons of fuel.

On the oil they refine to gasoline yes around 7 cents per gallon would be accurate. On the oil they drill from the ground, and since for the most part it is the same company absolutely not they've paid on average (or at least exxon) about $20 a barrel.

Rand Paul isn't lieing. He said 7 cents per dollar on gasoline fraction, which means it does not include Vaseline, Diesel, Kerosene, Petroleum Ether, and other stuff. No one can give an accurate view on how much anyone makes from a gallon of crude. Even the oil companies aren't sure. The most valuable fraction is Gasoline though. There are accounting tricks to hide profit so they won't pay as much on taxes. I do not disagree with suspending the tax breaks , but not end it. Oil profits are cyclic and we need to stabilize production when profits are down. But things are not as simple. CHina and Mexico subsidize their gasoline companies,

The illegals, the lower class, the lazy, the worthless, and the "I'm entitled to it" masses that suck BILLIONS of tax dollars (that 45 cent thing) from the welfare system when they could be out there working for a living. If the oil co's only get 9 and Uncle Sam gets 45, then where is the other 300 gong?

On profit alone Corporate management owns only 1.5 percent of the U.S. oil and natural gas industry.

The rest is owned by tens of millions of Americans through retirement accounts (14 percent) and pension funds (26 percent). Mutual funds or other firms account for 29.5 percent ownership and individual investors own 23 percent of oil stock holdings.

You'll notice on some gas pumps there's a sticker saying something like .81 of every dollar is tax, doesn't leave much for the actual production of the fuel.

Exxon/Mobil's most recent quarter reported earnings of $0.02/gal. Contrast that with state and federal governments taking between $0.40 to $0.65/gal. That is astonishing to me.