INFO ON U.S. REFINERIES

I've read that we had about twice as many oil refineries in 1982 as we do now so I decided to look up the data. You can get it here and I've made a couple of graphs. The first one shows the total number of operable refineries in America and the number actually in use for the years 1982-2007. The gaps mean there was no data collected.


The second one shows how many barrels of oil the operable refineries could process and the actual number processed.

Acoording to Public Citizen, we've lost refining capacity because the majors decided to put the squeeze in the indpendents:

A congressional investigation uncovered internal memos written by the major oil companies operating in the U.S. discussing their successful strategies to maximize profits by forcing independent refineries out of business, resulting in tighter refinery capacity. From 1995-2002, 97% of the more than 920,000 barrels of oil per day of capacity that have been shut down were owned and operated by smaller, independent refiners. Were this capacity to be in operation today, refiners could use it to better meet today’s reformulated gasoline blend needs.

Profit margins for oil refiners have been at record highs. In 1999, for every gallon of gasoline refined from crude oil, U.S. oil refiners made a profit of 22.8 cents. By 2004, the profits jumped 80% to 40.8 cents per gallon of gasoline refined. Between 2001 and mid-2005, the combined profits for the biggest five refiners was $228 billion.