Good Time To Own a Refinery!

We could be making USD$2.5 every day with the Petrotrin refinery if Keith Rowley did not shut it down.

Far from being a loss maker, Petrotrin would have been making us foreign exchange, even if we had to import oil.

bp reports that refinery margins — the difference between the price of refined petroleum products and the price of crude — have risen this year up to US$35 per barrel.

Petrotrin used to import 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day to refine. Given the type of products it produced, we would have made US$2.5 million per day, or almost US$1bn for the year.

Petrotrin would have made even more on the 40,000 barrels of crude oil per day that we owned and refined.

This is yet another reason why there was no good reason to raise fuel prices.

The PNM’s argument that the importation of oil was a problem for the Petrotrin refinery was always false. Some of the largest refineries in the world — for example in Singapore — depend ENTIRELY on imported crude. The PNM relied on the country’s mis-education in order to make its foolish argument.

Indeed, none of the official studies and reports on Petrotrin EVER recommended that Petrotrin be shut down. Rowley closed down Petrotrin and covered up the fake oil corruption for his friend.

There certainly was no proper consideration for the closure of Petrotrin and there is no accountability for the outcome.