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Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2009
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Country of Origin Labeling for Oil
September 9, 2009
When you walk through your favorite grocery store’s produce section,
you’ll see “country of origin” labels on the fruits and vegetables.
Tomatoes from Mexico. Grapes from Chile. Oranges from South Africa.
Such labeling is required by the 2002 federal farm bill.
Why not “country of origin” labeling for petroleum products? Suppose
you could pull up to the pump and check to see where your fuel money is
going?
The ethanol lobby thinks country-of-origin labeling for petroleum is a
dandy idea. What a great way to give ethanol a leg up in the market, by
sticking labels on gas pumps telling drivers that their hard-earned
money is enriching regimes that wish our country ill.
Come now, would you rather give your money to a hard-working American
farmer or to a glowering despot like Hugo Chavez, he of the red shirt,
or Vladimir Putin, he of no shirt?
Trouble is, however, that the oil companies pooh-poohing the idea are
right. Because of the way that the oil industry works, it would be next
to impossible to slap an accurate label on the pump that says, for
example, “Made in Nigeria.”
The reality is that the hydrocarbon molecules coursing into your tank
at each fill-up come from hither and yon. First, refineries accept oil
from both domestic and foreign sources, and those sources may vary day
by day. Second, gasoline from different refineries is typically mixed
together as the fuel sloshes through pipelines on its way to bulk
terminals, where it is loaded into tanker trucks for delivery to retail
stations.
Country-of-origin labeling for each fuel batch wouldn’t work. What
would work, however, would be labels that give consumers a general idea
of where oil in the U.S. market comes from, broken down by country,
and, importantly, where the big reserves are so they know where it’s
likely to come from in the future if we continue with business as usual.
It would be relatively easy to display that information in simple pie
graphs that could be stuck on pumps. The graphs would show in living
color the global trouble spots and dysfunctional regimes with which the
U.S. is likely to be entangled if we continue running on the hamster
wheel of oil dependence.
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