Refinery Outages and Gas

**Gawain of Orkeny** · 09-02-2005, 23:18

Gawain, Read what you just wrote and think about it for awhile. As I said before the price of OIL was not being limited by refining. You bought the Saudi line. If we shut off refining in the U.S. enough, oil prices worldwide will fall, because we are an net importer, and this would reduce our need for imports. Myth Busted.

Thats what you claim I say the opposite. So your saying if we shut off refining here the price of oil worldwide will go down? Have you lost your mind? How will that make us need less gas. It means we will have to import all our oil and refined products instead of a bit more than half as we currently do now driving worldwide prices through the roof. Hell according to this logic we should have shut them down a longtime ago. Myth busted.

**Red Harvest** · 09-03-2005, 00:11

Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny

Thats what you claim I say the opposite. So your saying if we shut off refining here the price of oil worldwide will go down? Have you lost your mind? How will that make us need less gas. It means we will have to import all our oil and refined products instead of a bit more than half as we currently do now driving worldwide prices through the roof. Hell according to this logic we should have shut them down a longtime ago. Myth busted.

Gawain, now I understand why you are having trouble with all this. If we shut down our refineries we will not be using nearly as much oil and gasoline because we would only be able to import some fraction. Locally, at home our prices would be astronomical. World prices would tumble because there would be global oversupply. We wouldn't benefit from it.

That would persist for some time until global demand caught up or we adjusted to importing gasoline (infrastructure changes for transport, etc.) It would persist longer since it would likely cause global recession. But the excess would be soaked up by the world eventually (on the scale of years) as demand grew.

You share a problem common to many other Americans: the inability to separate gasoline from oil in their minds. Yes, they are related, but they are not the same thing. The second prooblem you share with many others is that you cannot tell the difference between regional and global impacts/markets/driving forces.