There hasn’t been a new refinery built in the U.S. since 1976,
the result of extremely tight environmental restrictions, not-in-my-back-yard community opposition, and the high cost of new construction.
Used refineries currently sell for about 30 to 50 percent of the cost of building a new one, so it’s cheaper to buy an old refinery and upgrade it. Or squeeze a little more gasoline out of the refineries you already own.
Expansion of refining capacity is also made more difficult because oil refineries are a lot more complicated to build and operate than your average widget factory. For starters the raw material — crude oil — has many different properties, from thickness to sulfur content, so not all refineries can blend just any barrel of crude.
In addition to that, there are too many different formulations, dependent on the section of the US the products are consigned to and the individual states rules and compacts. Congress canfix that, but it will take some guts that are sorely lacking in this crew!
Just where are our statesmen?
Oh yes, over 8,000 now.
Greens Thwart Gasoline Production
"... The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, successfully pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block ConocoPhillips’ expansion of its Roxana, Ill., gasoline refinery, which processes heavy crude oil from Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The project would have expanded the volume of Canadian crude processed from 60,000 barrels per day to more than 500,000 barrels a day by 2015. After the Illinois EPA had approved the expansion, the green groups petitioned the federal EPA to block it, alleging ConocoPhillips wasn’t using the best available technology for reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
Apparently, the plant’s planned 95 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions and 25 percent reduction in nitrogen oxides wasn’t green enough..."