Refineries ran while 'offline,' pushing up gas prices, report says

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: King 5 News

Remember when gas prices went through the roof in May and October and that it was largely blamed on refinery outages?

New research expected to be released Thursday shows that refiners were actually still producing gasoline during that time, McClatchy Newspapers reports.

Oregon-based McCullough Research reportedly went through thousands of pages of environmental documents to find that refineries were still in operation even though the public was told there were outages and maintenance shutdowns.

The report said that emissions from at least two refineries in California show they were still in operation even though they were reportedly down for maintenance. It also found that gasoline inventories were growing in May even as West Coast gas prices rose substantially, and that the October price spike was 66 cents per gallon higher than it should have been based on historical patterns.


Read more: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Refineries-ran-while-offline-pushing-up-gas-prices-report-says-179482381.html

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The phrase price fixing comes to mind.

[louis-t]

1. Until someone is punished for doing this....

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin.

[sofa king]

3. Behold, I am your prophet!

Carved into stone on August 8, 2012,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014188090#post13

So now, the oil-Republicans are back to the Katrina strategy of claiming their refineries are down....

Expect to see more "accidents" like these in the next six weeks. Gasoline has to hit $5 a gallon for Romney to dig out of the landslide in which he is already waist deep.

But that won't work either, and if we can show they colluded and deliberately caused their refineries to fail, we'll have the power to run every last one of them down this time.

And what do you know? Hunting season is open, and BP is already in the bag.

[WCGreen]

4. Break up the Oil Trusts....

This is exactly what John D did back in the good old days of Survival of the Fittest capitalism.

[hedgehog]

14. Maybe the second time is the charm....

"On May 15, 1911, the US Supreme Court upheld the lower court judgment and declared the Standard Oil group to be an "unreasonable" monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. It ordered Standard to break up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors, the biggest two of the companies were Standard Oil of New Jersey (which became Exxon) and Standard Oil of New York (which became Mobil)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

[Hubert Flottz]

5. This is how the oil men who fund the GOP

pay for republican campaigns. With your money. It's called extortion.

[99th_Monkey]

7. +10 ~nt

[loudsue]

6. Gas companies trying, once again, to make Obama look like it's his fault in time for election

Assholes.

[Kingofalldems]

8. And some want us to cooperate and

name republicans to cabinet posts and such.

[FreeBC]

9. Can we try to blame this on Obama so that the mainstream press might cover it?

/sarcasm

[femrap]

10. Is Collusion

even against the law any more?? Every gas station in our town has the same price for gas. Come on. They were all $3.15 and then they all jumped to $3.45 in one day.

Put the f*ckers in jail.

[Squinch]

11. Did we ever doubt that was what they were doing?

Next there will be rolling blackouts. And crazy profits on derivatives somewhere.

[frylock]

12. fuck this shit. people need to be fined and/or imprisoned over this.

[dchill]

13. K & R.