Someone wrote: "Anybody who believes that environmental laws are responsible for the lack of new refineries probably has stock in oil companies or they are simply morons who probably believed all the lies by Enron about the sudden lack of generating capacity and other lies causing power shortages in California, which were blamed on environmental laws blocking new power lines and etc. It is utterly amazing at the number of complete idiots in the U.S. who either smoked too much dope or believe that everyone should be equally stupid and are doing their part to prove it."
I live 5 miles from the last refinery built in the US. The name of that refinery is Marathon-Ashland Oil Refinery in Garyville, LA. I do not work for them but do work for another major chemical company that also has several oil refineries. The area I live in has several other grain elevators, chemical plants and oil refineries that are lined up and down both sides of the Mississippi River.
In the last 10 years, several of theses facilities have shut down either due to market conditions (supply and demand), cost of raw materials, inability to expand to increase production or they moved their operations overseas to reduce cost. Did we (US workers), who demand benefits and higher wages cause them to move or was that a contributing factor?
Eight years ago the company I work for announce it was building a new state of the art facility with triple the production rate in China. The local staff was devastated because this meant that another 40 workers were going to lose their job. We fought back and the company decided to give us time to increase production by debottlenecking the unit. A unit that has been running at 120 percent above design capacity. A plan was laid out and permits applied for. The DEQ had public meetings to discuss the permits and we had over 800 people show up to protest against the expansion. The best part was only about 200 were local residents. Several environmental groups bus people to theses meetings from large urban areas paying them 25 dollars each to stand out front and protest. The DEQ denied the permits and the unit did not expand.
Luckily market needs for the product had dropped and the Chinese plant did not get built. The unit continued to run until last year when it was shutdown and the company decided to longer manufacture that chemical as the EPA is trying to ban its use in the US. The same type of protest and rigorous permitting process has made doing business in both the oil business and chemical business tough in the US. The last refinery built in the US, Marathon-Ashland Oil refinery recently went through a permit process and built a coker unit to squeeze more gasoline and other products out of a barrel of oil.
In the last 25 years, several chemical plants and oil refineries have shutdown. In my area several new plants have been attempted to be built but the permits to build were either denied by DEQ or local government due to public pressure or the companies took their business somewhere else (overseas). Refineries throughout the US are all running over 100 percent design capacity. Companies and DEQ have bowed down to public pressure to expand rather then build new. Environmental laws have hindered production due to limitation on equipment to prevent pollution. Good, yes but also bad.
What the US needs is more new refineries are new production units within current facilities. Most facilities cannot expand past a certain point due to environmental laws. Such laws a required green zones around facilities. Many companies have been forced to buy out the community around them at more then market price.
So the someone who wrote: "It is utterly amazing at the number of complete idiots in the U.S. who either smoked too much dope or believe that everyone should be equally stupid and are doing their part to prove it." Stay off the crack cocaine or get an education on what a barrel of oil produce. I will be looking for your reply by smoke signal since the computer you are using was built from chemicals made from a barrel of oil.
Sarge