Yesterday everyone and their brother was reporting that oil prices had managed to settle near $104.
First, how is that good news? It’s just not as bad as the news we were told to expect. So does that make oil “unexpectedly” near $104??
Reading all the news, you’d think this was either good or confusing news. The news is not confusing, it points to a dangerous issue in American infrastructure – we can’t refine gasoline and petroleum distillates as fast as they are needed. Thanks to Obama’s confused and ill-conceived energy policy, America’s production centers, commuters, manufacturers and transportation business may come to a screeching halt.
The American Petroleum Institute said late Tuesday that crude inventories rose 3.8 million barrels last week while analysts surveyed by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos., had forecast an increase of 2.3 million barrels. However, inventories of gasoline fell 3.7 million barrels and distillates fell 1.5 million barrels, the API said.
Gasoline and distillate inventories dropped while oil inventories rose. Gasoline and distillates come from refineries. You know, those giant job-producing, product-manufacturing hubs of capitalism that the left-wing extremists have been limiting for decades. What that means is that gas prices, to use Obama’s words, “..will necessarily skyrocket” regardless of the amount of available world oil. As our population and industry attempt to grow, a stagnating refining capacity will not be able to keep up. OPEC can pump until it’s blue in the face (not meant to be creepy), and it just won’t matter – we won’t be able to refine it into usable products. [1]
What? You thought oil production was the issue? Sure, production is one issue, but even once we get ANWR, North Dakota (Bakken region), offshore, shale oil and every other kind of drilling going in the United States, we won’t have any way to turn it into gasoline.
Iran has this problem today. While they are a net exporter of crude oil, they are a net importer of gasoline – Obama intends to turn the United States into a net importer of gasoline and his plan.. is working.
Why would our President, who said he wanted to fix the trade deficit, want to make us a net importer of gasoline? Remember the “necessarily skyrocket” comment? Yes, if ALL energy sources get too expensive for us to pay for, we will have to turn to government subsidized green “energy” or worse yet, the government directly. Either would be fine for our golfer-in-chief.
A predominant thought in the progressive, left-wing extremist, green energy movement is that gas prices need to escalate to levels close to those in Europe. In order to do that, we would have to import it – like Europe does. gas is cheaper in the United States because we don’t have to ship it in. We bring up or in the raw material, crude oil, and refine it here. When we start importing most of our gasoline, we will have to pay for the cost of the raw material and foreign refining costs. Of course the next problem would be the World’s capacity to refine the gasoline, diesel and distillates. If American refining capacity does not continue to grow with world demand, prices for the refined crude products will have to rise.
We need increased refining capacity along with more production of coal, natural gas, crude.. all of it. Oil is about to become only one part of our dependency problem, and this one dependency has been created by yours truly – Barack H. Obama.
Sources:
[1] – https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030800716.html
