Senate Budget Chair Sheldon Whitehouse has opened an investigation into whether high gasoline costs are the result of illegal industry price-fixing.
The Rhode Island Democrat’s probe of 18 different oil producers comes as a direct response to the Federal Trade Commission’s findings last month that Scott Sheffield — former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, now owned by Exxon Mobil — may have attempted to collude with OPEC countries and other oil companies to set crude prices as a means of boosting profits.
“In view of the findings against Sheffield, I seek to understand whether other oil producers operating in the United States may also have been coordinating with OPEC and OPEC+ representatives concerning oil production output, crude oil prices, and the relationship between the production and pricing of oil products,” Whitehouse wrote in nearly identical letters to the executives of the 18 companies, including Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
In those letters, he requested by July 12 “communications between and among the companies’ corporate and affiliate officers and members of the OPEC Secretariat,” and OPEC broadly, “concerning oil production output, crude oil prices, and the relationship between the production and pricing of oil products” from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present.
