The oil and gas business is growing increasingly difficult, putting pressure where retailers, refiners, marketers, jobbers and consumers will feel it most.

And while many point to the growing pocketbooks of the nations' largest oil companies, those companies still complain that the markets and speculation are in fact what's driving up the price of a barrel of oil and, ultimately, a gallon of gas.

On Wednesday, Exxon Mobile announced it would divest its company-owned stations to jobbers, following on the heels of BPand Shell.

"It's just another sign of the times,"said Mike Rud, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association. "These guys don't want these retail outlets because they're not profitable."

The proposed Consumer-First Energy Act, which was defeated in the Senate this week, was a bill intended to curb rising prices by several means, including windfall taxes, speculation regulation and granting the U.S. attorney general the right to sue theOrganization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Opponents said the additional measures would only cause higher prices.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., is among a growing group of lawmakers in Washington who would like to regulate speculation in the markets, a move Rud and his association firmly support.

The legislation's wording says it would "significantly increase" the deposit oil traders must have on hand; the NYMEX, a commodities futures exchange, has already increased the required deposit six times since the beginning of the year, although the percent is still in single digits.

Speculators only need to front less than 10 percent of the money for the purchase, Dorgan said; he is working to draft legislation to make that purchase much more difficult, raising the margin to possibly 25 percent, or "substantially increase" it.

"We've had testimony saying there is probably 20 to 30 percent of inflation in oil and gas because of pure speculation,"Dorgan said. Raising margin requirements, he said, could make moving market paper more difficult for noncommercial traders, or traders who don't intend to take physical possession of the commodity they're trading.

"The current run-up in oil and gas prices is not justified by the fundamentals of supply and demand,"Dorgan said. "I think it's a dramatic amount of speculation."

There have been many bipartisan comments on the affects of speculation on prices.

Rud said if the problem isn't addressed soon, reports show that 20 percent of the retailers currently in the business are going to drop from the landscape by January 2009.

"We're in the economic fight of our lives right now,"he said.

(Reach reporter Crystal R. Reid at 250-8261 or at crystal.reid@bismarcktribune.com.)