I don't feel like I can make much justice for those aspects but here's my two cents: Selling oil on the free market disproportionately benefits those that own the means to process and resell it further. Or rather, those that ultimately coordinate global oil logistics. The global fossil fuel market doesn't exactly seem like a "free" market. There are few players and they are powerful.
What is the basis for this comparison? Compare the profit margins of a gas station (tiny) versus the profit margin of a company that needs to purchase fuel to operate a factory (could be anything). Or for that matter a company that needs products produced at one of those factories (the rest of us). The benefit is widespread and it's not at all obvious who benefits most, commodity or not.
Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.
The 'first order' issue is earlier in the process, it's that 'House of Saud' keeps most of the surplus for their family and furthermore use it to do some suppressive things.
The fossil fuel market it is very open, and market oriented. It has obvious geostrategic artifacts (notably the petrodollar, some politicians refusal to build pipelines, military support of interventions, OPEC), but it's generally open season. Nobody controls the flow of spice melange.
> Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.
Singapore might disagree. But what do they know?
For example, 'gold' imported by ill-gotten means from some far off land actually provides 0 value in terms of material value creation. Of course 'oil' does, but remember the 'House of Saud' is kept in power by the US not with the promise of US access to 'cheap oil', rather, with the promise it will be sold at full value, on the open market - just not in some kind of strategic/complicated/backwater setup with the then Soviet Union or China. The US didn't 'go in and take all the oil', which they definitely had the power to do.
This exemplifies, in perhaps a crude, ham-fisted realpolitik manner the 'enforcement of trust' in systems I alluded to in my original comment: it's actually the US (and ultimately everyone's) interest to uphold fairly basic commercial and humanitarian standards in the long run.
And to be fair, these problems are to some extent a function of capitalism, because only 'very large' systems have the opportunity to plan on the generational scale, ergo, there's effectively no commercial enterprise for which the implementation of such standards really matters, that's generally the purview of governments.