Newsflash – Americans spend a lot on gasoline. In fact, over the lifetime of an average vehicle, you spend around $22,000 on gasoline. That might be as much as you spent on the vehicle in the first place. So where does all this money end up?

We looked at this question in a new report entitled appropriately enough, Where Your Gas Money Goes. This is a particularly timely report given that several major oil companies recently released their earnings for the last quarter of 2012, and their profits soared to new heights. It is also not breaking news that oil companies reap huge benefits from the status quo and invest in obstructing progress toward oil-saving, climate-friendly solutions.

Oil companies have been trying to improve their public image by arguing that these record-breaking earnings benefit the millions of Americans who own stock in oil companies – so go ahead – fill up your gas tank and help out your fellow citizen’s retirement portfolio. But this rhetoric begs the question: Does your oil use benefityou?

In our new report, we calculated how much money an average consumer spends on gas, where that moneyreallygoes, and what a consumer can expect in return. It turns out that regardless of how many shares you may own in oil companies, your oil use fails to benefit your bottom line. In fact,the ‘average’ ExxonMobil shareholder getsfar less than a pennyback in additional dividends from their annual gas expenditures. Even ExxonMobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson, who owns 1.7 million shares of ExxonMobil stock worth almost $150 million, would only get 34 cents back per year from spending money on gas purchased exclusively at Exxon stations.