Oil is the world’s foremost commodity. Nations fight wars to control it; economies wax and wane based on its price. But oil is also useless without a process to transform it into the stuff everyone needs: gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and petrochemicals. Over the last couple of years, the refining industry became a chokepoint, pushing the cost of turning crude into fuels to an all-time high, in turn inflating gasoline and diesel prices. The “refinery wall” was the buzzword. Now, the bottleneck is easing.
What changed? The world is building new refineries and expanding older ones at a speed unseen in nearly two generations. It may sound counterintuitive given efforts to ease the climate emergency, but oil demand continues to grow and, to accommodate that, oil companies are again investing billions of dollars in new refineries.
