Plugging Up The Pipeline
Anyone who’s not sure why gasoline prices are so high has the opportunity to see a real-time reason being played out in public as an environmental group sues over the expansion of a refinery.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is asking a federal judge to stop construction of BP’s planned $3.8 billion expansion — not a new facility — of its Whiting refinery in northwest Indiana. The group claims BP needs a more restrictive air permit from the state because the refinery would discharge far more pollution than what it’s been approved for.
In addition to shutting down construction, the NRDC wants BP fined $32,500 a day for each day it has been under construction without the more restrictive permit.
There hasn’t been a new oil refinery built in the U.S. since 1976, in part because of actions like those of the NRDC. The environmental lobby, which went off the rails decades ago, has resisted almost every attempt to create more energy from fossil fuels.
One particularly telling example outside of Indiana can be found in Arizona. There, construction of a new refinery was held up for almost 10 years by environmental groups using regulations from the Clean Air Act as a hammer.
The environmentalists will point out that industry executives themselves have said that refinery margins in the past 10 to 15 years have not been high enough to justify new refineries and that there will be no need to build a new one at least through 2030.
But, we submit, that’s because the industry was forced to keep up with demand by, in a sense, doing more with less.
…It should be obvious that more capacity is needed, given that as domestic refinery capacity fell, U.S. gasoline consumption jumped 42%, from 2.4 billion barrels in 1981 to 3.4 billion barrels last year. To keep our economy humming and maintain our standard of living, we need more refineries.
It’s that simple.
The environmentalists don’t see it that way, though. Their gaze is to the rear, never ahead, except for their apocalyptic visions of the future: