Woodchucker writes:
Oil sands are refined here and the product sold to – eyup the US. What isn’t refined is shipped in various levels of refinement. Costs to build new refineries at current Environmental standards are too much of a hit on the profit margins. Better to export to an old grandfathered refinery ( out of Country even better ), plus the by products become someone else’s “asset”.
Unless Woodchucker is speaking of Canada about which I have no information, it is just not true that oil refineries are a net loss.
Here is the sleazy, slimy lying game that the dirty oil companies and their oily backers in the Republican Party play:
The oil companies and their Republican whores are always yelling that environmentalists are keeping us from building new oil refineries. Every time there is a spike in gas prices, these scums all start screaming and yelling that we need to get rid of all the regulations on oil refineries so it will be profitable to build new refineries.
Here is the truth. The regulations are no problem at all for building new refineries. They have built new ones in recent years and most of the older ones meet current emissions standards. Oil refineries make money. They are a good investment. The reason oil companies have built so many oil refineries is because they make a lot of money off the refined oil from these refineries which they then market all over the world.
The truth is that the oil companies could build new refineries any time they want to, but they have chosen not to build any new ones for quite some time now. The reason that they have deliberately chosen not to build new refineries is because the oil companies want a permanent refinery shortage. With a permanent refinery shortage, there are frequent bottlenecks in supply that cause prices to be artificially high. So they maintain as few refineries as possible in order to keep prices as high as possible. If they built more refineries, they would still make money, just not as much.
But they hate those regulations that they have to go by because it costs a lot of money to install new anti-pollution equipment. So in order to try to get rid of these regulations, they lie and say that the regulations are what is causing your gas prices to be so high and if it weren’t for those evil environmentalists, your gas would be a lot cheaper.
The corporate media generally goes along with those disgusting charade. For many years, I thought that environmental regulations kept us from building new plants. There are only a few scattered voices in the media who actually tell the truth about the oil industry. The rest of the media are bought off corrupted whores are 100% in bed with the oil companies.