Cotc For This Week

Lynne Kiesling

This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is at The Frozen North. I’ve been a bad citizen this summer, what with work and house and all, and have not been contributing and advertising as much as I should be.

Not surprisingly, I particularly liked Tim Worstall’s post on oil prices. Tim also gives a nice plug for KP in the comments there — thanks! One of the commenters asks about the role of domestic refinery capacity. Big role, and it’s a mess. The last refinery built in the U.S. was built in Louisiana in 1976. Since then, refiners have had to work within their existing footprints to squeeze more capactiy out of existing assets. Thankfully, technology has enabled that to happen, but we now routinely run at about 98% capacity in a lot of refineries for more of the year than they were engineered to run.