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Last week the industry's critics got some powerful new ammunition. Fifteen of the nation's largest oil companies released first-quarter profit figures, and they showed an acceleration of the winter-long earnings surge. Included in the group were six of the so-called Seven Sisters,* the richest and most powerful oil companies in the world, which, more so than their smaller competitors, have huge investments in all four aspects of the business: drilling, transporting, refining and marketing.
Profits are shooting up because tight supplies worldwide have allowed oil companies to raise their prices just as the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has raised its own. Companies with big business overseas had certain advantages. Earnings in markets like West Germany, which has no price controls on petroleum products, climbed especially sharply. Also, the recent strengthening dollar against foreign currencies improved the overseas balance sheets of the companies.
Both Shell Oil, the Houston-based affiliate of Europe's Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Standard Oil of Indiana, one of the nation's largest retailers, are heavily dependent on business in the U.S., where prices are federally controlled. They had large increases that only seemed puny when compared with the others, which enjoyed gains that ranged from impressive to downright startling: SoCal's ARRIS earnings rose 43% over the past year, Gulfs profits increased 61%, and Texaco's were up 81%. Marathon Oil had a rise of 108%, while Amerada Hess jumped 279%. Standard Oil of Ohio, holder of a large and profitable stake on Alaska's North Slope, increased 303%; Continental Oil, which owns Consolidation Coal and suffered a slide in income during last I year's coal strike, posted a stunning recovery of 343%.
The biggest oil multinational of them all, Exxon Corp. (1978 sales: $60.3 billion), reported a gain of 37.4%, to $955 million, by far the most impressive three-month earnings period in the company's history. Recalling the rough treatment that the press gave top management in the winter of 1974, when Exxon announced similarly enormous profit gains during the Arab oil embargo, the company avoided a press conference; instead, it announced the earnings by faceless press release. Chairman Clifton Garvin and President Howard Kauffmann even managed to be out of town on vacations, leaving any explaining to be handled by a monotoned vice president.
The embarrassment of riches comes when oilmen are battling to keep as much as possible of the increased profit that will begin flowing to the industry at the end of the month, when Jimmy Carter starts phasing out domestic crude oil price controls. As a result of controls, the average price of crude in the U.S. is $9.45 per bbl., vs. the world level of $14.55; removing the ceiling will increase oil company revenues by perhaps as much as $ 13 billion over the next 28 months.
As the debate over decontrol and Carter's call for a windfall profits tax intensifies, the President has been amplifying charges made more than a year ago that the industry is plotting "the biggest rip-off in history." Now, Carter is actually