WorldNetDaily: Oil analysts foresee record-high prices

The article is unusually disjointed for WorldNetDaily. The bottom lines:

• Several oil rigs were severely damaged or even sunk. They won't be replaced soon.
• Multiple refineries in Texas and Louisiana remain shut down. (Details later.)
• Crude oil is actually declining in price, prompting OPEC to cut its output in October.
• And once again we hear from those who insist that oil is a product under continuous production deep within the earth's mantle, brought to drilling range by sheer momentum from the earth's rotation--also known as "centrifugal force."

All right, let's try to make sense of this, shall we?

First, whether crude oil would go up or down would depend on two things: how fast could anyone pump it out of the ground, and how fast could refiners take it to turn it into something else. Right now, with twenty percent of our refining capacity shut down, and likely to stay shut down for awhile, refiners can't refine the crude as fast as it gets pumped out, even with so many Gulf of Mexico rigs sunk or otherwise knocked out. Result: prices are falling. That situation is temporary.

More to the point, the spot prices of refined products are continuing to rise. Gasoline, both premium and regular, went up six cents a gallon in one day of trading yesterday (Tuesday, September 27). The reason is the same reason, ironically, that oil prices are falling: twenty percent, give or take one, of our refineries are shut down. Nor are they likely to come back online any time soon. Those who haven't sustained severe damage that will take weeks to repair, don't have electricity--because they never bothered to build independent, back-up power plants with a supply of fuel to fire them until the refinery stream came back online. So in addition to this country not having built a new refinery in thirty years (thanks a lot, NIMBY screamers!), the refiners made themselves dependent on energy from an outside source. Doh! The juice sometimes blacks out, and that's what's happened to you now!

And then come the proponents of the "abiotic theory" of oil production, who say that even though oil is a continuously generated commodity (though they never explain the nature of the original sources of carbon and hydrogen), the prices of crude oil and gasoline will continue to rise, hurricanes or no. Such monumental inconsistency should make them ashamed of themselves.

Nevertheless, I would have to agree: the era of cheap gasoline is over. Something's got to give. We can and should build new refineries as a stop-gap, but we also need to use whatever techniques are scientifically feasible to achieve energy independence.