Alaska oil production will be
severely curtailed as BP investigates pipeline problems.
In the world of Big Oil, this is cause for celebration. While supplies shouldn't be affected (the outage is 2.6 percent of American daily consumption and reserves are high), it'll give oil companies another excuse to jack up prices and continue on its record gouging of American consumers.
"The U.S. market is actually well-supplied; crude inventories are very high," he said. "So while this won't have any immediate impact on U.S. supplies, the market is in very high anxiety."
"High anxiety"? Call it "high opportunity" for more of this:
Oil giant Exxon Mobil has posted the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly-traded US firm.
Helped by high oil prices, the company earned $10.4bn (£5.6bn) in the second quarter of 2006 - a 36% increase on the same period of 2005.
Exxon, which is the world's biggest oil company, said its quarterly revenues rose by 12% to $99bn.