Tuesday 20 August 2019

Nobody move or the refineries get hurt!

From the BBC:

The future of the UK's fuel refineries could be threatened by a no-deal Brexit, according to an internal local authority document seen by the BBC.

Under current government plans for no deal, they face a "danger to viability" from cheaper imports, while exports to the EU are set to be hit with tariffs.

Concern is widespread in an industry deemed crucial for both economic and national security...


National security??

From oil well to your car is a long, delicate thread, trailing halfway across the world, through all manner of political, religious, commercial, practical and technological eyes-of-needles (if that's what threads go through).

Our dependence on oil itself is a threat to national security, if we can skip a step and buy the end product cheaper from abroad, let's do it.

6 comments:

Dinero said...

A lot of this type of convoluted reasoning is Keynesion economics.

You are saying if it gets the job done then it is good.

You are saying If it is cheaper it is good.

Keynesion economics says if it reduces the amount of people employed it is bad.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, aye

Andrew S. Mooney said...

"Concern is widespread in an industry deemed crucial for both economic and national security..."

Theoretically, yes, in the form of the idea that the UK government will not hesitate to wreck it in the name of how wrong you were to vote for Brexit.

Jim Ratcliffe, at Ineos, was only able to stop the jobbie jabbers in Edinburgh from shutting the liquid natural gas terminal that Ineos operates at Grangemouth, by pointing out that if they did so, the UK would be the only industrialised nation upon Earth to imagine that it can be run without any means to manufacture plastics. Of any kind.

No-one, apparently unless threatened by the company that this was the end result, was interested in this matter in any way because Edinburgh wanted to signal it's virtue by having nothing to do with this filthy, imported American shale gas.

Also, the UK's biggest source of oil and gas imports is arguably Norway, which has nothing to do with the EU either.

Hence, business as usual, and if anything mysteriously does happen to this working arrangement, it is not unreasonable to assume it IS deliberate.

Mark Wadsworth said...

ASM, excellent points. Agreed.

Striebs said...

Wasn't Jim Ratcliffe talking about importing liquified ethane rather than methane ?

Any idea whether the ethane was extracted from wet gas to leave only ethane at gas processing works between the well head and main gas network or during the liquefaction process at the liquefaction terminal ?

The Westminster Parliament also seem to have forgotten bringing in teams of U.S. drillers during WWII to pioneer the East Midland oil patch and it's contribution to national security or that without the coal industry , the masses would have perished in WWI and WWII .

Those Yanks drilled and completed a well in a week whereas it took British drillers over a month .

The volunteer Yanks who had the option to up and leave had to fight small minded British bureaucracy which wanted them on war time rations instead of the 5,000 calories a day required to do the job .

Mark Wadsworth said...

Str, no idea on the first question.