While we are waiting for the report to come out this morning, here is a graph for you. If you add the sum of the finished products together, that is, unleaded, jet fuel, distillates, residual fuel oil, and propane, and then compare it to the inputs, here is what you get....
As you can see, there was a crossover event, in 2004, and since that time, there have actually been more refinery outputs than there have been inputs. Normally this would violate the law of conservation of matter except that we know that since that time, and especially since all of the pricing stuff in 2007, there have been non-crude-oil additions to the system, including ethanol and also probably more importantly GTL and other non-crude oil inputs that have increased the overall capacity of the system to produce finished products...
There are a couple of ramifications to this, including the most obvious one, which is that we don't need all of that refinery capacity anymore to produce the equivalent amount of finished products, and the situation is probably even worse than the weekly refinery utilization suggests, since the processes for the incremental 10% or so of products are quite different.
Anyway, our friend the plant manager of the refinery is probably thinking about this a lot this morning as he sits with his feet on the desk waiting for the morning staff meeting....
