| It's needed, and the envirogoobers will fight it tooth and nail. |
Louisiana is among three U.S. states interested in being the site of a joint venture refinery with Kuwait amid concern about a shortage of capacity to process crude into gasoline and other fuels, Kuwait's oil minister said. Kuwait, the Middle East's fourth-largest oil producer, is seeking a ``mid-sized'' U.S. partner like Marathon Oil Corp. to build a refinery in the U.S. with as much as 400,000 barrels a day of output, Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al-Sabah said in an interview last night. Texas and New Mexico may also be interested, Sheikh Ahmad, 42, said. ``We are very keen to build a refinery in the U.S., but environmental restrictions and other regulations make it difficult,'' Sheikh Ahmad said in Kuwait City, where he's hosting OPEC's sixth ministerial meeting this year. A lack of construction in the U.S. and Europe during the last 30 years has left refineries with little margin for error and susceptible to breakdowns. Worldwide, refineries ran at 95 percent of capacity last year, up from 80 percent in 1984, according to the International Monetary Fund. Expanding a U.S. refinery may cost as much as $10,000 per barrel of capacity, according to Dan Robinson, president of Placid Refining Co., operator of a refinery in Port Allen, Louisiana. That means that Kuwait's refinery project may cost as much as $4 billion. Strict environmental rules and the high cost of investment have kept oil companies based in the U.S. and Europe from building refineries near their biggest markets.
Kuwait was in talks in September with the Bush administration to build a refinery in the U.S., seeking to construct the nation's first new plant in three decades as gasoline and diesel prices surged to records. The Persian Gulf emirate was seeking White House assistance in gaining the necessary permits, Sheikh Ahmad said in a Sept. 18 interview in Vienna. Kuwait is hosting OPEC's sixth ministerial meeting which starts today.