Why are there no new Oil Refineries built lately when price of Oil today is higher than it was 50 years ago?
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They add capacity over expanding more refineries. Also America just commissioned one like last year?
because a brand new refinery will cost tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars to build. with the trend towards renewables and EVs, there’s not much incentive to invest that much when there’s not a guarantee of recouping said investment.
Canada is still in construction(I believe) of a Bitumen refinery that will turn the Albertan Oil sands into Crude(IIRC).
Massive massive new construction as far as Oil refineries go as far as I’m aware. So, they are still making them, occasionally.
Source: Worked on it back in 2016, the North West Redwater Refinery, or NWR.
EPA regulations. Opening a new refinery under the current restrictions isn’t financially feasible even with current prices.
There is no financial incentive to open new refineries when limited supply drives up the cost per gallon anyway. So not only would opening a new refinery cost a buttload, it would drive down the per gallon profit.
Because fossil fuels are incompatible with our continued survival on this planet, and any new refinery would close before it can recover the cost of building it.
Why would a company invest billions of dollars in building something the government is telling them they are legislating out of existence and government policies will make it very difficult to build? Refineries run for many decades with most US refineries being more than 50 years old. Refineries make a very small amount of money each year and take a huge number of years to pay off the cost of building, maintaining, and operating the refinery. If they cannot get many decades out of a refinery, they are not going to build it.
Beyond what everyone else has said, gasoline is at an all-time (or near all-time) high in terms of profit margin. There’s not a lot of desire to lower the cost of your product at the expense of also lowering your margins.
It’s far easier to debottleneck existing refineries. Total crude capacity has increased since the timeframe you mentioned even though facility count has decreased.
For the same reason the price of an apple pie isn’t necessarily correlated to the price of apples.
The output of something can be very different from the inputs depending on the product because of all the additional skill time cost etc that go into making that output
Oil is just one ingredient
Why would you invest mini millions of dollars in a refinery that will take 10 years to build when the politicians say they will put them out of business in about that time? That’s not the only reason I’m sure but it does seem like a good reason to it invest in new refineries.
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