The problem with it is that the business is a pure commodity business that is highly capital intensive with huge risk if you fuck something up. It has prolonged stretches where it loses money or just breaks even and then once a decade the sun shines on the dog's ass. No American company is willing to commit to material capital expenditure and Aramco owns the biggest refinery in the US.
The entire fucking modern economy is derived from the distillation tower in these giant refineries. None of these chucklefuck politicians understand that. The refinery heats crude up and it breaks into different fuels depending on the length of hydrocarbons. The process creates propane, butane, regular gas, jet fuel, diesel fuel, heavy oils that ships use and shit that becomes asphalt and roofing tar. Even if you could electrify the entire passenger fleet overnight, it's gonna be a helluva long time before any substitute for jet fuel or that heavy oil they use to carry your undies across the Pacific from China comes around.
A lot of the problem with interpreting the refining data is that there's no clear cut method for determining what's included in capacity. There's a lot of capacity out there right now not being considered because it got shut down during the germ and hasn't been restarted yet. That capacity can go online quickly relative to new construction, and it will once price and demand cross each other.
It's the same thing with steel. During covid tons of mills and service centers shut down due to demand and the price when ballistic. The AMM for HRCQ coils shot up to record levels over a dollar almost instantly, and now that covid shutdown plants have slowly started to come back online the AMM has gradually slid back to $.57 as of this morning. The gradual slide is because (like gasoline/diesel), most of the steel milling capacity is owned by 3 giants. They know the market isn't sustainable, but they're going to get as much margin out of it as they can for as long as they can. The result is that steel is way down from where it was during the germ hangover, but it's going to be more expensive than it was prior for a fairly long time. The same thing will happen with gas/diesel.
There's a "new normal" being established, which is common for every commodity at varying points across history for varying reasons. It's going to change the economy, but it's not going to tank it.
What people need to be watching more than fuel is agriculture. The stuff going on across the pond is going to do some seriously funky shit to our economy for a long time. Luckily the US is waaaaay agriculturally secure and will be for as long as anyone here will be alive (even with climate change), but the rest of the world is going to be in serious trouble with the Russo-Ukraine issues and that
will affect our economy more than fuel. For whatever one thinks of it's downfalls, capitalism has driven HUGE advances in ag technology and efficiencies, and we are going to be very, very thankful for that in the next 5 years. People can cry all they want about the US being the new major oil power, but being the agricultural leviathan we are is much more important to our stability.
