Gas Prices Still Going Up, Refineries Shutting Down

Boise Weekly ^ | March 18th | George Prentice

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Energy industry analysts say there's no relief in sight at the nation's gas pumps.

While prices jumped 6 percent in February, market experts said many of the nation's refineries have been idled or shut down permanently because their owners claimed they were losing money on them. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sunoco is expected to close another of its large refineries this July, "taking another 335,000 barrels per day in production capacity off the market."

[Chode]

the HOVENSA refinery on St.Croix just shut down...

[Balding_Eagle]

Will somebody please explain this to Bill O’Reilly?

LOL! Impossible, he's always talking.

[mdmathis6]

We haven’t got genetics robust enough to stand up to nuclear fall out if a panicky liberal cabal decided to use American nukes against the American population....this isn’t the 1860’s....

It might even fit with their depopulation agenda!

[thackney]

It doesn’t stop with Hovensa.

Valero to shutter Aruba refinery
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/03/19/valero-to-shutter-aruba-refinery/

The decline in US demand has impacts even outside our borders.

[thackney]

We are also a net exporter because refiners don’t want to keep dancing to the EPA’s boutique gasoline stupidity

That is not the reason for the export, as they are still supply that domestic market as well.

[Chode]

dominoes

[Terry Mross]

One of the workers at the BP refinery in Texas City told me that if BP can’t sell it, I think this year, they’re shutting it down.

[Terry Mross]

I couldn’t agree more. I have no idea what it would take to get “we the people” to go into action, but I don’t think obama staying the white house illegally would do it. He’s there illegally now and we haven’t done anything.

[Wuli]

For those who think high gasoline prices are an American problem, a problem that politicians should be doing something to “fix”, a problem that should be “fixed” by taking some kind of actions against American oil companies; the following points of interest are offered:

Today in China - still a low wage developing economy for most of its people, retail gasoline prices are $4.53 a gallon.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china-gas-20120320,0,670317.story

The vast majority of the worlds oil reserves are owned and controlled by state owned companies. The portion of the worlds oil reserves owned by United States oil companies is about 2 1/2 percent.

http://www.petrostrategies.org/Links/Worlds_Largest_Oil_and_Gas_Companies_Sites.htm

Big U.S oil companies earn the large sums they do NOT because they control so much oil in the world, but because they are trying to deliver oil and oil related products to the most oil-thirsty consumer market - the U.S.

U.S, oil companies own so little of the world’s oil reserves and the U.S. market is so thirsty for oil and it is such a large market that global demands and global events and global concerns about the oil supplies, not greedy U.S. oil companies, will perenially affect U.S. gasoline prices.

ExxonMobiles profits for 2011 amounted to a little over 12 cents on the dollar, in an industry that has some of the largest capital requirements in the world. They pay more in taxes than they keep in profits.

http://www.finanalys.com/?p=169

[thackney]

Part of the challenges for company like ExxonMobil is they buy more oil than they produce themselves. Their refining throughput is over twice their crude oil production.