And where is this added cost coming from? I suspect the Gov't is "there to help", once again. A company exists to create a profit, and if it cannot create a profit - it will cease to exist. Because these refineries are not closing down for "maintenance" - you cannot say that this is a huge big-oil plan to jack the price of gasoline up. When a plant permanently closes it's doors we lose capacity, we lose the ability to regain that capacity, we lose jobs and the price of gas goes up higher - increasing the cost of doing business - and causing further job erosion.
And, IMHO, we can largely thank the Environmentalists for this, as a huge amount of the cost of running these plants, is meeting goals arbitrarily set forth by a party without any financial interest in the success of these companies.
From the rise in crude oil used to make the gasoline.
This isn;t a mystery. Refineries are factories, taking raw material and manufacturing finished product.
The raw material, they use, oil, has shot up in price lately. That is where their costs go up. Refineries don’t make more money when oil gets more expensive, they end up with tremendous price pressures, because if they raise the price of gasoline, demand drops.
So, when oil gets expensive, they will shut down the most inefficient production lines for gasoline, since producing more gasoline won’t make them more money.