Now that God has sent another righteous hurricane to wipe out all those faggots and communists in Houston, Texas, we can all relax. For a moment I was a little worried that all that faggot communism would start spreading like an evil cancer, and I would soon be forced to have egalitarian butt-sex with another man, but no longer. Now I can worry about OTHER scary things.

For example, U.S. refining capacity. Most oil refining is done just-in-time and physically proximal to market. This is because gas laws differ all over the place, and it simply makes sense to produce gasoline of a certain kind where it's going to be used. It also makes sense not to have 50% spare capacity just sitting around unused all the time - why waste all that money running factories when you don't have to?

Let's consult our friends at the EIA. According to them, U.S. refining capacity utilization runs at about 90%. That is, we refine about 15 Mbd of crude, and we're capable of refining just under 17 Mbd. That's peachy! Good thing nothing bad is about to happen.

Also, you'll be delighted to read this:

As with most aspects of the U.S. oil industry, the Gulf Coast is by far the leader in refinery capacity, with more than twice the crude oil distillation capacity as any other United States region. (The difference is even greater for downstream processing capacity, because the Gulf Coast has the highest concentration of sophisticated facilities in the world.) As discussed in the section on Trade, the Gulf Coast is the nation's leading supplier in refined products as in crude oil. It ships refined product to both the East Coast (supplying more than half of that region's needs for light products like gasoline, heating oil, diesel, and jet fuel) and to the Midwest (supplying more than 20 percent of the region's light product consumption.)

Fuck, yeah! Say, you don't think this could have anything to do with the several recent airline bankruptcies, do you?

Let's do some quick, bad math: U.S. gasoline stocks usually run at about 90 million barrels. Consumption is 9 million barrels a day. Let's say that the Gulf Coast has 45% of the refining capacity in the U.S., which normally fills 9 Mbd of gasoline. This means that if the Gulf Coast refining is knocked out for 22 days as a result of Hurricane Rita, U.S. gasoline stocks will be totally depleted.

This is obviously hyperbolic, of course, since we can actually import gas, and consumption is probably going to drop like a stone over the next month. But $5 for a gallon of gas doesn't seem that hyperbolic at all.