Oil Prices

Last year's oil price run-up made it a good time to be an oil company chief executive with a fistful of stock options, and Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum Corp. made the most of it, cashing in $184.4 million worth. Filings show the largest sales took place April 28 at $87.15 a share. At the time, oil prices were on their way to a July peak and Occidental's shares were headed toward a May 20 closing-price high for the year of $97.85. Irani's options exercise dwarfed his pay of $30.4 million last year as calculated by the Associated Press.

Retail gasoline broke all of the usual seasonal patterns in 2007, and the last week was no exception, Energy Department figures showed Monday as pump prices rose nationally and in California at a time of year when prices are normally on the decline. The year that motorists will be only too happy to see in their rearview mirrors ended with the national average at $3.053 for a gallon of self-serve regular, up 7.

If we can read Wednesday's market news as a sign, 2008 could be a challenging year for the economy. In the new year's first hours of trading, the price of oil hit a record $100 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Number-crunchers on Wall Street have an- ticipated this psychological milestone for some time. Oil prices have been rising since 2004, jumping almost 60% in 2007 to hit a then-record of $99.29 on Nov. 21.

The price of oil fell Thursday as traders took profits from a record rally that had pushed it two days in a row to $100 a barrel, a level that raised a red flag over global economic growth. U.S. crude settled down 44 cents at $99.18 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after hitting a peak of $100.09 earlier in the day. The surge above $100 came after the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that crude stocks in the world's biggest energy user fell 4.

Crude oil fell sharply on the New York futures market Monday, down $2.82 to $95.09 a barrel, on concerns that a cooling U.S. economy would curb demand. But retail gasoline prices were still playing catch-up and climbed higher over the last week in California and the U.S., the Energy Department said. The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline in California rose 3 cents to $3.

President Bush and Saudi leaders tangled Tuesday over the price of oil, with the president reminding this wealthy desert kingdom that U.S. purchases could fall if the American economy slips and with a Saudi official refusing to commit his country to greater production to reduce costs at the pump. Bush said the price of oil, driven up by growing demand in the United States but an even greater increase in China and India, had become "painful for our consumers."

The middlemen who buy and sell fuel on the wholesale market have seen Los Angeles gasoline prices plunge more than 50 cents in the last two weeks. Too bad drivers aren't seeing the full benefit at the pump. On Friday, the most recent trading day, the wholesale gasoline price in Los Angeles hovered around $2.17 a gallon -- a figure roughly equal to a retail price of $2.77 a gallon after taxes and other costs were included.

Record oil prices pushed Occidental Petroleum Corp. to record profit for the fourth quarter and all of 2007, the Westwood company said Tuesday. Occidental earned $1.5 billion, or $1.74 a share, during the fourth quarter of 2007, up from $930 million, or $1.09, during the same three months in 2006. That was well above the $1.69 that had been predicted by analysts polled by Thomson Financial. Net income for the year climbed 29% to $5.4 billion, or $6.44 a share, from $4.2 billion, or $4.

Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Ibrahim Naimi believes that crude prices are unlikely to fall below $60 a barrel because of rising costs to develop tar sands and alternative fuels. Producing oil from the alternatives costs about $60 to $70 a barrel "and, therefore, a line has been drawn below which the price cannot fall," Naimi said in an interview published Saturday in PetroStrategies, a Paris-based newsletter. Naimi and other ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet this week in Vienna to set quotas as winter heating demand fades and the U.S. economy slows.

The gravity-defying price of oil shot through another barrier Monday by briefly touching $103.95 a barrel in New York trading, the highest cost ever for black gold even after adjusting for inflation. Before Monday, the April 1980 price of $38 was the pinnacle, fueled by dramatic Mideast events including the failed rescue of American hostages in Iran. Adjusted for inflation, that $38 is now more than $103.