Fred the Red Shirt wrote:
On Sep 14, 11:38 am, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
...

That's nice as far as it goes - I even sort of agree with you - but
there is a huge pragmatic elephant in the room. The oil companies have
been so vilified by the left, the enviros, the press, the populists,
and so on that they are constantly under PR and even regulatory
assault. For example, Katrina took out key refining resources. The oil
companies knew this was problem long ago, but had apparently given up
building additional capacity because pretty much no one wanted a
refinery built in their back yard. ...

You seem to suggest in increasing the supply of refined products
will reduce the cost when in fact the supply aready meets or exceeds
the demand and MOST of the cost in the refined products is in
the raw material itself.

Excess refining capacity is excess cost that does not contribute
to the generation of additional revenue unless the company captures
more of the market. A company with more refineries could not
do that because the petroleum contracts in place do not allow
them to buy more petroleum. But even if one oil company did
expand its production and capture more the market, then some
other would lose part of its share and decrease its product.

Production will NEVER significantly exceed demand for any
significant period of time.

...
P.S. I want to be the first in line to picket the offices of Earth First,
Green Peace, and the Sierra Club when these idiots finally figure
out that their push to hybrid created an enormous environmental
cleanup problem: The clean disposal of billions of lead-acid batteries
that can no longer be recycled. I'd like to wish the whole bunch
of those people the insanity that comes with ingestion of too much
lead, but ... how would we be able to tell the difference from their
mentality today?
...

Hybrids do no use lead-acid batteries.

Don't let that stop you from picketing.

--

FF

Let the industry shut down one of the refineries for maintenance and see
what happens. Look at Texas right now. The industry down there is almost
completely off line due to IKE. Prices are going through the roof.
Supply almost exactly equals demand with little for storage.

DN