🚀 go-pugleaf

Don Homuth wrote:

> There is no lack of refining Capacity in this nation.

http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/business/17309229.htm

WASHINGTON - With gasoline prices averaging $3.22 for a gallon of 
regular nationwide over the Memorial Day weekend, traditional economic 
logic might suggest that this would be a good time to invest in new U.S. 
oil refineries and increase the supply of gasoline.

Yet no new refinery has been built in the United States in three 
decades, only one is in the works and oil companies are scaling back 
planned investments in new, expanded or modernized U.S. refineries 
rather than increasing them.

Overseas, however -- where it's generally cheaper, faster and easier to 
build oil refineries -- a boom in construction is under way to meet the 
growing demand for gasoline in the United States and in big developing 
countries such as China and India. That means that Americans 
increasingly will be filling their tanks with imported gasoline.

``We are outsourcing refining,'' said Severin Borenstein, an economist 
and energy expert at the University of California in Berkeley. ``I think 
that this is primarily because of community resistance... people don't 
want to live by refineries, but they still want the gasoline.''


Congress passed legislation in 2005 to streamline the permitting 
process, hoping to encourage new investment in U.S. refineries. 
President Bush offered military bases to house them. Yet only one new 
U.S. refinery is planned, in Arizona, and it's been in the works for a 
decade.

``There are just a vast number of barriers for a start-up oil refinery 
in the United States,'' said Ian Calkins, a spokesman for the Arizona 
Clean Fuels Yuma project, which has faced environmental and community 
hurdles and now a lawsuit over former American Indian tribal lands.