Free Republic

In a stunning real-life example of why it is important that Americans retain their Second Amendment right to bear arms, a shooter at a Texas church on Sunday was fatally shot within seconds after he pulled a gun and shot two congregants during a service. The gunman — identified Monday as 43-year-old Keith Thomas Kinnunen, according to KXAS-TV — entered the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, near Forth Worth, and opened fire. Fortunately, he was quickly stopped by armed security, preventing any further deaths or injuries. Several other churchgoers also drew their weapons — a fact...

ATLANTA (AP) — Armed with a handheld video camera, a Georgia university student drove with a friend in April 2005 to Washington, D.C., and captured scenes of the Capitol, the Pentagon and other locations. Investigators say Syed Haris Ahmed, now 24, wasn't a tourist but a wannabe terrorist who wanted to send the videos of potential terror targets to an overseas contact. He was attending the Georgia Institute of Technology at the time. The charges, along with an allegation that Ahmed went to Pakistan and tried to join a terrorism group a few months later, are central to a federal...

The ethanol wars between King Corn and the oil and gas industry continue, with the corn faction finding a new champion this month in the person of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois). It shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s teaming up with Senators Ernst and Grassley since Illinois is the third largest ethanol producer in the country. The fight is still going on over the EPA granting waivers to smaller refineries from the ethanol blending requirements in the Renewable Fuel Standard, but Duckworth is raising the stakes. She’s asking the EPA’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not Trump’s EPA...

Refiners in the United States are stocking up on heavy crude, pushing prices higher, as the Trump administration prepares to slam more punitive measures on Caracas after the inauguration of Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela for a second term after elections considered illegitimate by Washington. Reuters reports that officials from the presidential administration met with oil industry executives to discuss the measures on the table, including the suspension ofrefined product exports to Venezuela or Venezuelan crude oil imports into the United States. Gulf Coast refiners have a limited choice of supplier when it comes to heavy crude. Besides local...

In case you’re growing tired of waking up every morning and checking social media or reading the Washington Post and hearing about how awful everything is these days, how about some good news? The U.S. Energy Information Administration has finished compiling all of the production numbers for last year and determined that America was the global leader in production of both petroleum and natural gas. And in terms of who else was in the hunt, it wasn’t even close.

For much of last year, the two crude oil benchmarks traced one another pretty closely, with Brent often trading at a relatively minor $1 to $3 per barrel premium to its American counterpart. But the spread between the two blew out after Hurricane Harvey, an event that took several million barrels per day of refining capacity offline for a few weeks. Crude oil piled up into storage, and the glut pushed the WTI benchmark down relative to Brent. The refineries along the Gulf Coast returned to operations within a relatively short period of time, but the effects of the disaster...

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Nate highlighted the exposure to life and property all along the Gulf Coast. Of the critical national assets that took a hit, the crux of the U.S. refining industry suffered dramatically. As a result of Harvey alone, twenty refineries in the 300 miles between Corpus Christi and Beaumont were forced to shut down or dramatically reduce rates. The spot price of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) promptly increased by 10%, while that for gasoline and jet fuel increased by 25%. All three prices remain about 10% higher than before the hurricanes, in part due to regulatory constraints...

If you are near a gas station in metro Milwaukee, you might want to stop and fill up. Right now. As oil prices have hit their lowest price in 6 years this week, gasoline prices in Milwaukee are soaring. Wholesale gasoline prices are now higher than retail prices in the upper Midwest and that means prices at the pump will jump in coming days. "It's going to be very ugly," said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at gasbuddy.com. The wholesale price of gasoline has risen 90 cents since Monday. As of Wednesday morning, the wholesale price was higher than retail,...

Union leaders called strikes on Sunday at nine U.S. refineries in a bid to pressure oil companies to agree to a new national contract covering workers at 63 plants. The walkouts, the first held in support of a nationwide pact since 1980, target plants that together account for more than 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity. The discord comes as plunging crude prices force oil companies to slash spending. Royal Dutch Shell, the lead industry negotiator, indicated talks had broken down. ... Shell activated a strike contingency plan at its sprawling joint venture refinery in Deer Park, Texas, to keep...

As a test of wills between OPEC nations and U.S. shale drillers fuels a global oil market slump, a brewing battle between Canadian and Saudi Arabia heavy crudes for America's Gulf Coast refinery market threatens to drive prices even lower. While the stand-off between the oil cartel and U.S. producers of light, sweet shale oil has captured the limelight in recent months, the clash over heavier grades - playing out in the shadowy, opaque physical market - may put even more pressure on global prices that have halved since mid-2014. Two factors will come into play over the next few...

The decision to allow two Texas companies to export condensates looks like a win for Eagle Ford Shale crude producers at the expense of refiners and companies planning to build processing plants along the Gulf coast. Today's selloff in refiners reflected concern that the groups will lose some of their competitive edge if condensate exports become common: Valero Energy (VLO), the largest U.S. refiner, dropped 8.3%, PBF tumbled 10.72%, PSX fell 4.2%, and HFC slid 6.7%. Oppenheimer notes that Pioneer Natural Resources PXD, DVN, MRO, COP and MUR produce the most Eagle Ford condensate, and could benefit if U.S. condensate...

Valero Energy Corp., the largest US independent refiner-marketer, plans to invest $730 million in upgrading two of its Texas refineries to process increased volumes of light crude sourced from the Eagle Ford shale. The company will spend $390 million at its 160,000-b/d Houston refinery and $340 million at its 325,000-b/d Corpus Christi, Tex., refinery to add crude topping units designed to boost crude oil processing capacities at each of the plants, Valero spokesman Bill Day told OGJ. While the addition of these units will not add to the refineries’ overall output capacities, they will allow the plants to reduce their...

U.S. refining capacity increased since 2000 as capacity additions outpaced the loss of capacity from three major refinery closures. Yet the number of refineries and companies both declined over the same period, as the concentration of refining capacity among the top five companies increased from 38% in 2000 to 44% in 2013. Ownership of U.S. refinery capacity changed substantially in recent years, notwithstanding relatively slow changes in refinery capacity and the number of companies involved in the refining sector. An examination of company-level information and transactional data since 2000 shows both consolidation and dispersion. Almost 40% of large refiners (i.e.,...

This matters because for refineries to stuff ballooning amounts of ethanol into a static gas pool, they must blend it at levels of more than 10%. Since the nation's auto makers have declared they will void the warranties of cars using gas with more than 10% ethanol, refineries face lawsuits. Most have instead turned to buying federal renewable "credits" to make up for the ethanol they don't blend. As demand for these credits skyrockets, so has the price—jumping from a few pennies a gallon last year to close to $1 a gallon today. Oil refiner Valero has said the credits...

VANITY POST: I have been trying recently to compile any articles of Arabs within the United States or Europe taking pictures of Nuclear Plants, Chemical Plants, large buildings.

An EPA-funded environmental group has been disseminating misleading data about refineries to make them appear to be more dangerous than they actually are in order to invite federal intervention, according to a report to be released early this week. The Environmental Protection Agency has been bankrolling a project by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a state-based environmental group, called the Refinery Efficiency Initiative which has been presenting misleading information to the media and to regulators, according to a report by the Pelican Institute, a Louisiana-based think tank. “[The Louisiana Bucket Brigade] refinery transparency initiative bankrolled with taxpayer money has flooded the...

America’s petroleum refiners manufacture safe, proven and reliable high-quality fuels and other products in an environmentally responsible manner to keep America moving, our economy growing, our citizens employed and our nation secure. But refiners are being squeezed by costly government overregulation, foreign competition, high oil prices and reduced fuel demand. A recent report by the Department of Energy found the compounded burden of federal regulations was a significant factor in the closing of 66 oil refineries in the United States in the past 20 years, wiping out thousands of jobs. Two money-losing refineries in the Philadelphia area are threatened with...

Energy industry analysts say there's no relief in sight at the nation's gas pumps. While prices jumped 6 percent in February, market experts said many of the nation's refineries have been idled or shut down permanently because their owners claimed they were losing money on them. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sunoco is expected to close another of its large refineries this July, "taking another 335,000 barrels per day in production capacity off the market."

As the nation's light switch and gas pump, Texas releases far more greenhouse gases into the air than any other state, according to federal data released Wednesday. Texas' coal-fired power plants and oil refineries generated 294 million tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in 2010, more than the next two states - Pennsylvania and Florida - combined, the data shows. The Environmental Protection Agency released the data by industrial facility for the first time as part of a broader effort to reduce emissions linked to global warming. The agency collected data from more than 6,700 industrial facilities that...

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