New York Times article:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or the nation's oil refiners, Hurricane Katrina was a disaster long in the making.
Analysts and industry executives had for years feared the consequences of a storm ramming into the country's largest energy hub - a complex infrastructure that spans most of the coastline between Texas and Alabama, where nearly half of the nation's refineries are located. ... As a consequence, even though crude oil prices have fallen back to pre-Katrina levels, prices for gasoline, heating oil, diesel and jet fuel are expected to remain higher than they were before the storm for a much longer period of time. ...
Currently, four major refineries, owned by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Murphy Oil, are either flooded or without power, and are likely to be out of commission for several weeks, perhaps months. Together, these refine 880,000 barrels a day, or 5 percent of domestic capacity. "It's very significant," said Colm McDermott, an oil analyst at John S. Herold Inc. The loss is equal to 1 percent of the world's refining capacity. "It's a global market and that's certainly enough to have an impact on a global level." ...
Elsewhere in the world, some oil producers are planning to build new refineries. Saudi Arabia is one of them. "We cannot keep producing oil with no refineries," Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, told the industry newsletter Petroleum Argus a few months ago. "There is a limit."
While helpful, such moves abroad would mostly serve to shift the country's increasing reliance on foreign oil producers to a greater dependence on refiners abroad.
"We are going to be importing more products," Mr. Murphy of the American Petroleum Institute said. "That is a certainty if we don't expand our capacity. But the problem there is that you've changed one form of dependency for another."