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Chevron refinery fire expected to raise California gasoline prices

Paying the high prices for gasoline that we do in the San Francisco Bay Area is bound to warp the thought processes, but suggestions that Chevron would torch its own refinery seem farfetched, at least to most of us. :-) Personally, I draw the line at believing that Bay Area refineries likely schedule downtime for maintenance to drive up gasoline prices. :-) Funny how these things can occur in August, when a lot of people take vacations prior to the beginning of school….

According to SFgate.com:

Monday’s fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond is expected to send California’s already rising gas prices further upward, perhaps all the way to the $4-a-gallon mark within a week <emphasis mine>.

“That’s a foregone conclusion,” said Denton Cinquegrana, the west coast spots editor at Oil Price Information Service. “The reaction at the retail level is going to be pretty swift.”

How high the prices go will depend on how much time it takes Chevron to repair the damaged unit at the state’s third-largest refinery or for refiners elsewhere in the state to boost production to meet demand. Inventories in the state are already low, Cinquegrana said.

The average price for regular gasoline in California has already jumped 15 cents in the past month (you KNEW that it was getting too low, didn’t you? 😉 ) to $3.869/gallon according to data collected by AAA. Increased costs of crude oil and a widespread drought that is killing corn crops used in ethanol production are among the causes. (Personally, I never discount the “human factor,” :-) and anyone who still does not believe in Global Warming can pull your head from an anatomically incorrect place, at this point. :-) )

A significant outage at the damaged unit in Richmond threatens to erase the half-dollar drop in fuel prices between May and July.

How convenient!

“This is not an overnight thing,” Cinquegrana said. He cited a February fire at a similar-sized unit at a BP refinery in Washington. That facility didn’t return to full operation until late May.

Prices for regular fuel are at $3.93 in the San Francisco area, $3.86 in San Jose and $3.85 in Oakland, according to AAA.

Where I grew up in northeastern Ohio, fires were a common thing – not the wildfires that we experience in California, but the fires (and occasional explosions) that occur when someone does not pay a gambling debt or protection money owed to the mob.

There is a lot of inherent risk to operating a refinery, both to the operating company and to the people who live around the facility. For awhile, some of those people may breathe more easily while ALL of us pay more.

(Oh well… it just means that it’s time to switch from the 4-wheeled black Honda to the 2-wheeled black Honda for most trips! And it will help to cut down on the “greenhouse gases” at the same time… but probably not enough to cancel out all of the CO₂ released during the refinery fire. :-) )

-Bill at

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