Quote:
Originally Posted by Esaias
I keep hearing about how there's little or no refinery expansion in the US.
News flash - I work in an industrial area. The following are building new refineries, all in the town where I work - ONEOK, Enterprise Products, Targa Resources, Exxon-Mobil, LoneStar. There are also a couple others whose names I am not sure of.
This is all in a town with a population of about 5000 people. Down the road there are about 4 or 5 other refineries which are expanding, building new processing units, expanding and upgrading existing ones, etc.
It's like people yammering about the Keystone Pipeline as if it was just on the drawing boards. Down here it's pretty much already completed and installed.
Also, there are numerous other pipeline expansions going on just as involved as Keystone.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Also, in regards to which countries are profiting off the oil business, yes it's true that ME countries have made it very favourable for petrochem countries (and others) to relocate or establish themselves there. Sort of like Halliburton moved their HQ to Dubai.
Does anybody think the average citizen in those countries really benfits from
such things?
As for ME oil and manufacturing countries, does anybody really believe the Carlyle Group, for example, has 'lost anything' to 'expanding Arab companies'?
The entire petrochem industry is run by a select few elites from various nations, America, Saudi, England, Holland, China, Russia, etc... and the vast majority of the disposable profits goes to the 'shareholders' of those consortiums, not the peoples of any particular country.
Also, US tax laws have driven overseas relocation of American business, for various reasons.
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I don't yammer. I
do expand refineries though. Lets look at what you are saying.
Enterprise Products is not a Refining company. They are building de-eth, de-prop, and de-C4 trains to process condensates recovered from natural gas wells. There are excess condensates in the natural gas that has to be removed before it can meet pipeline standards. Enterprise removes, separates, and sells them as ethane, propane, and butane. These are essentially waste products that are not for the fuel market, but for the petrochem market. Along with expanding their capacity to process them, they are also building a nice export terminal to export them as petrochem feedstock for overseas petrochem plants.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/10/02/e...port-terminal/
There are otherwise no major refinery expansions on the books in the US. What the Refineries ARE doing is building NHT units to comply with (new) Tier 3 standards for sulfur in gasoline. Please kindly note that an unintentional result of forcing refining companies to build these is that the refineries will see an overall drop in their blendstock octane reducing the amount of low-octane material that can be blended with the gasoline pool components and the overall amount of gasoline available to the market at fixed capacity. Conclusion: The price is expected to increase and less gasoline overall will be made. I wouldn't call that an expansion.
You say new refineries are being built. So name one: Size, location, and capacity. I say that there is not a single grass-roots refinery on the books EXCEPT for 2 being built by a foreign trading company, Trafigura. These will not process crude oil, they will process the same material that Enterprise processes and it will go directly to a shipping terminal for export.
The Saudis funded the Motiva expansion, it is now the largest US Refinery. Marathon doubled their size at Garyville a few years ago. That was 325,000 + 245,000 bpd capacity. That's 570,000 bpd. In the last 10 years, total added refining capacity was 633,000 bpd. That means that every other refinery on the books added a total of about 60000 bpd combined to their capacity. That's pretty pathetic.
For whatever reason, feedstocks that should be processed into finished commodities here in the US are getting shipped for processing overseas and billions are being poured into the Saudi eastern province and neighboring countries to produce commodities there. The issue was how terrible and backwards those countries are. The reality is that those countries are becoming preferred places to live, produce, and invest.