Former Shell president is the man with a plan

During an appearance on CNBC early in the summer, John Hofmeister made a startling statement: “Oil isn’t a free market.”

Soon after he said it, the show cut to a commercial and someone handed Hofmeister, who was about to retire as president of Shell Oil Co., a piece of paper. It was a message from Shell’s headquarters in the Netherlands telling him he couldn’t say that. He crumpled up the note, went back on the air, and repeated his statement.


“The myth of the free market still resonates as if it’s a reality,” he told me recently over coffee and egg sandwiches at the Breakfast Klub. Oil markets, he said, are regulated at every step in the route from the well to the gas pump.

Customers can choose to buy their gasoline from a Shell or Exxon station, but Exxon Mobil and Shell are limited in choosing where they buy their oil. Most available crude comes from the OPEC cartel or other state-run oil companies. Until Americans understand how little control the U.S. and its corporations have over global energy supplies, we remain economically vulnerable, he said.

Hofmeister, who showed up wearing the official uniform of retirement