Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Refining Information = Disinformation

The right wing mantra about refineries is a farce, of course, like most of their pronouncements. As I have pointed out previously, Shell for one has bought up refineries and shut them down.

In April 2007, a little information leaked out. I found it in an excellent comment at Watching the Watchers, that stated; That added production from new leases on the OCS would bring short term relief from high gas prices is a claim that McCain explicitly made just last week, saying that opening up drilling in the OCS "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis."

The part about "short term" gas price relief is patently ridiculous as many commentators have pointed out.


The information about refineries was taken from CNN, and follows.

"Everyone is quick to say "look at these refiners, they're driving up the price,'" said Phil Flynn Flynn, senior market analyst at Alaron Trading in Chicago. "But if I wanted to build a refinery tomorrow, I couldn't do it."

And then there's the public's newfound concern over global warming and its supposed commitment to do something about it. President Bush himself has called for a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use over the next 10 years.

"What refining executive in their right fiscal mind would say, gee, we need to add refining capacity right now," said Drevna at the refiners' association.

While refinery capacity may not be growing as fast as demand, it is growing.

For example, Drevna noted that expansion projects at the nation's existing refineries have had the effect of adding the equivalent of a brand new refinery every year. That increase came despite mandates for cleaner gasoline and diesel fuel, which take longer to make.

And the future looks even brighter.

"There is a tremendous amount of expansion," said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, speaking of projects at existing facilities. "We will have a solid increase in North American refining capacity, but not for another two years."

Kloza said much of the expansion would come along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Midwest, an ideal spot to process heavy crude from Canada's emerging oil sand deposits.

The only place that might not see more capacity is the West Coast, said Kloza, where there is little refinery expansion planned, leaving the region more dependent on expensive imports.
Energy companies prominent in Fortune 500

Overseas expansion is moving even more quickly, with $300 billion slated for refining projects over the next 20 years in places like India, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.

"I think there'll be a concern that the world added too much capacity and refining will go in the dumpster again," said Kloza.

Much of the international capacity will feed surging demand in the developed world. But some will also supply the United States and Europe.

"Partly what's going on here is part of a broader trend in manufacturing, and that is the movement of it offshore," said AAA's Sundstrom. "With it go environmental issues, tax structure, legal liabilities."


The misrepresentations the right wing keeps persistently using have the purpose of undermining the public interest, and their use of it is with full knowledge that it is wrong.

The selling of our lands to oil companies has not one good reason except that the administration depends on oil revenues for their livelihood.

I do believe that if the war criminals invested in solar energy, they would be trying to put it out to make their assets more valuable.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Heya Ruth, check out The Petro-Manipulaters in the NY Times:

Anyone who lived on the West Coast during the phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 cannot help thinking of Texas and two of its worst products — Enron and a politician not named George Bush — as gas creeps up toward $5 a gallon this summer.
What happened during the great energy heist at the start of the new century was like an extended bad dream, part “Twilight Zone” and part “Chinatown,” the extraordinary 1974 film about water manipulation and long-buried secrets.
The price of energy spiked — tenfold, a hundredfold — despite low demand. Californians became the most efficient users of power in the nation, and still suffered through dozens of rolling blackouts. None of it added up.
And into the worst energy crisis since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 came Vice President Dick Cheney, blasting conservation as a sissy virtue and saying the nation needed to build a new power plant every week for the next 20 years.
The administration’s neglect was breathtaking, a harbinger of what was to come when a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, would do to Louisiana what a man-made disaster had done to California. We now know, of course, that the problem eight years ago was caused by manipulation by Enron and other speculators who gamed a faulty system, sticking it to Grandma Millie while laughing at how easy it was to rob 40 million people.
Now consider the present dilemma: oil doubling over the last year, gas at $4.50 a gallon in places and the oversized influence of speculators in a market where few used to tread. Big investors are free to run up oil futures contracts thanks in part to former Senator Phil Gramm. He is the Texas Republican who co-sponsored the so-called Enron loophole in 2000 at the behest of what was later found to be one of the nation’s biggest criminal enterprises.
Enron may be gone, but its legacy lingers in the work done by politicians who did its bidding. And Gramm, who once told corporate contributors, “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that’s ready money,” is now the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain.
Gramm’s role in helping to unleash energy speculators has been well-documented in recent months, and Senator Barack Obama has made an issue of it. Both Obama and McCain have called for closing the loophole. But just how big a role that kind of global gambling plays in the overheated commodities market is only now coming to light.

5:50 AM  
Blogger Ruth said...

Thanks for the article, WoWo, it's amazing that the public just swallows the same line again. We have to keep reminding everyone who's listening, these crooks are interested in your pocketbook, not your well-being. And that especially includes your security. It's winger lies.

6:51 AM  

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