Here is one more thing for those of us who live in the North Eastern U.S. to start worrying about - the refineries that make our gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc. are dropping like flies.

In today's economy, these refineries are simply losing so much money that their owners who are not major oil companies that make billions from oil production are having put them up for sale or close them down. In recent years we lost refineries in Westville, NJ, and Yorktown, Va. A large refinery in south eastern Pennsylvania was shut down in December as was one in New Jersey. A third large Philadelphia refinery is up for sale and will be closed in July if no buyer can be found.

Last week we learned that what once was one of the largest refineries in the world (500,000 barrels a day [b/d]), located in the U.S. Virgin Islands and which has been shipping about 200,000 b/d to the U.S.'s east coast will close next month. If you add up the rated capacities of refineries being closed you are looking at something approaching 1.5 million b/d, but as these refineries were not running at capacity or sending their entire product to the north eastern U.S., we are losing more on the order of 800,000 b/d of daily production. If this is not enough several European refineries, another source for gasoline in the U.S., have recently closed down or are up for sale.

Leaving out the 200,000 b/d of oil products that has been coming from the Virgin Islands, the three big Philadelphia area refineries were producing about 40 percent of the gasoline and 60 percent of the diesel being consumed in the northeast. Making up for a loss of this size is likely to take some doing. The EIA is already warning of higher prices in the area and the possibility of spot shortages as the logistics of keeping the northeast supplied with liquid fuels is becoming far more complicated.

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