Big Oil Spends $ on Shareholders, not Exploration

clipped from www.courant.com The five biggest international oil companies plowed about 55 percent of the cash they made from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year, up from 30 percent in 2000 and just 1 percent in 1993, according to Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. The percentage they spend to find new deposits of fossil fuels has remained flat for years, in the mid-single digits. In the first three months of this year, Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest publicly traded oil company, shelled out $8.8 billion on stock buybacks alone, compared with $5.5 billion on exploration and other capital projects. ConocoPhillips has already told investors that its stock buybacks for April to June of this year will come to about $2.5 billion — nine times what it spent on exploration. "If you're not spending your money finding and developing new oil, then there's no new oil," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University

If the price of oil is really a supply-and-demand problem, as the Bush admin. asserts, then Big Oil isn't doing much to increase the supply.