Someone mind explaining to me exactly when House Speaker Hastert became the chief of one or more major oil companies?
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (Reuters) – With the oil industry poised to report fat quarterly profits reports this week, the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives urged oil companies on Tuesday to expand refineries and help “ease the pain” of high gasoline prices for consumers.
In what some analysts described as a sea-change in strategy, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other senior Republicans said the oil industry must invest more money in refineries to crank out more gasoline and distillate fuels such as heating oil.
“Increasing capacity and improving refineries will do much to boost supplies so that consumers do not feel such a big pinch,” Hastert said in prepared remarks obtained by Reuters. Hastert and other Republicans, including House Energy Committee Chairman Joe Barton, were scheduled to hold a news conference at 1:30 p.m.
…
“We expect oil companies to do their part to help ease the pain American families are feeling from high energy prices,” Hastert said. His remarks stopped short of calling for legislation.
One analyst calls this a “threat,” and surely it is. There are many reasons oil companies don’t build new refineries, but chief among them are economic — that is, the cost is very high for a complex refinery and traditionally refining margins and returns on capital are very low. In a very uncertain market in which no one can be sure where the price will be next year or three years from now (unlike, say, the Qatar LNG projects, which sell natgas to Asian customers under very long, 10-20 year, contracts). Building a complex refinery is not a 90-day operation, it takes time (years), resources and capital that the OWNERS and hired managers of that capital have decided can be put to better uses.
And when, exactly, did affordable gasoline become an “entitlement” or a right of citizenship (or residency)? Or is this — along with bombing oil-producing countries — what Dick Cheney meant when he said the American “way of life” was non-negotiable?
1:07 pm on October 25, 2005
