The Refinery Oligopoly

Here’s James Surowiecki on oil refineries in the latest New Yorker:

In a normal marketplace, of course, high prices and profits would drive companies to expand, in an attempt to capture more of the market, or else new players would emerge, hoping to outmaneuver a risk-averse establishment. But the refining industry isn’t a normal marketplace. For one thing, refineries are huge investments—a new one costs at least two billion dollars—and they take a long time to open. This means that although refiners might make more money by opening new facilities and thus serving more customers, they’d rather take the sure money than gamble. It also means it’s hard for new competitors to raise enough capital to enter the market at all.
What’s more, over the past fifteen years refiners have been buying each other up, creating an industry that’s highly consolidated. In 1993, the five biggest refiners in the U.S. controlled thirty-five per cent of the market. By 2004, they controlled fifty-six per cent. And refining is primarily a regional business. The government allows different states to use different formulations of gasoline—some formulations burn cleaner than others—and in some urban areas a federal requirement determines what formula can be used, depending on the quality of their air. That makes it hard to ship gas across state lines, and shrinks the number of refiners that provide a particular blend of gas, giving each refiner more power. As a result, in many areas the refinery business is more like an oligopoly than like a competitive market. In 2002, a Senate report identified “tight oligopolies” operating in twenty-eight states; in California in 2003, ninety-five per cent of the refining market was in the hands of just seven companies.

Posted by on June 5th, 2006 at 12:13 pm


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