01-22-2013, 12:09 PM
I came here from Alaska. Yeah, Alaska produces oil. It was piped thousands of miles, then barged thousands of miles to the gulf coast,refined in the southern United States, turned into gasoline and other products we could use, and then barged back to Alaska so we could buy it "our" own oil byproducts. There is a refinery in Alaska but it produces AV fuel, and even those operations are getting mothballed because it takes a lot of energy to operate a refinery, and the cheapest energy to operate a refinery is natural gas. It was cheaper to barge the fuel back and forth a distance much further than the one way trip from the mainland to Hawaii than to refine it in Alaska. The natural gas in the continental USA is cheaper. To operate a refinery in Hawaii, you have to import the crude PLUS the fuel to refine it. It's cheaper to pay the fuel to import only the refined product versus importing everything and creating the refined product locally. It makes a LOT of sense to close the Hawaii refineries.
The United States sits on the largest discovered oil reserves in the world and love it or hate it, fracking is bringing that oil to the marketplace. Alaska slipped quietly from the 2nd largest oil producing state (behind Texas) to the third, and it will soon slip to 10th. The International Energy Agency (and others) predicts that within 7 years the USA will be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia and that by 2035 the USA will be one of the largest oil EXPORTING countries in the world.
Most people don't know that the USA exports coal. They also don't know that the several companies have filed for permits to start exporting liquified natural gas. The USA is already an energy exporting country.
Mitt Romney said that if we vote for him, we would be North American energy independent within 4 years. What he didn't say was that would also happen if he wasn't elected.
Some predict that the oil and gas fields coming online in the USA and Canada will send the price of oil down to the $30/barrel level. While I think its on the low side, one can't dismiss that the prices are going down.
These are the reasons why the refineries in Hawaii are closing. It will be a lot cheaper to refine cheap mainland drilled oil next to the gas fields to power the refineries than to import all that crap over here and do it.
The United States sits on the largest discovered oil reserves in the world and love it or hate it, fracking is bringing that oil to the marketplace. Alaska slipped quietly from the 2nd largest oil producing state (behind Texas) to the third, and it will soon slip to 10th. The International Energy Agency (and others) predicts that within 7 years the USA will be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia and that by 2035 the USA will be one of the largest oil EXPORTING countries in the world.
Most people don't know that the USA exports coal. They also don't know that the several companies have filed for permits to start exporting liquified natural gas. The USA is already an energy exporting country.
Mitt Romney said that if we vote for him, we would be North American energy independent within 4 years. What he didn't say was that would also happen if he wasn't elected.
Some predict that the oil and gas fields coming online in the USA and Canada will send the price of oil down to the $30/barrel level. While I think its on the low side, one can't dismiss that the prices are going down.
These are the reasons why the refineries in Hawaii are closing. It will be a lot cheaper to refine cheap mainland drilled oil next to the gas fields to power the refineries than to import all that crap over here and do it.