OIL

Reader concerned about gas, oil prices

Drill baby drill? Energy independence? Heard the news that the United States exported more petroleum product in 2011 than it imported? Since we have insufficient refinery capacity, limiting product output, thus raising prices at the pump, we need more refineries right? Seems Brazil lacks refineries also, so we export refined product to them.

Should we allow Canada to build a short-cut pipeline (a Keystone pipeline already exists) beneath our dwindling aquifers, across our heartland, our breadbasket, to enlist our "scarce" refinery capacity, in hurricane-prone Port Arthur, so they can export their product offshore?

Anybody pay any attention to the broken Exxon Mobil pipeline last July that resulted in an oil spill fouling the Yellowstone River in Montana? Or, in July 2010, the pipeline breach that contaminated the Michigan creek with tar sand crude from a Canadian company, the resultant oil spill entering the Kalamazoo River, which luckily was contained before reaching Lake Michigan?

Petroleum is a finite resource, why do we use our own scarce refining capacity to export our own domestic product offshore while we pay the price at the pump? Why should we, most especially in haste, allow Canada a quicker route to foreign markets even though it's already been admitted that it won't lower our own gasoline prices?

As for doubling the price since January 2009, from 2005 prices varied between approximately $2 and $3 plus. Early in 2008 it spiked, peaking above $4 in summer and dropping dramatically to a 2004 level, below $2 by year's end from which obvious anomaly it began a generally gradual rise back into the previous $3 plus range.

Gasoline prices cannot be controlled domestically. It's a competitive, expanding world market affected, not just by OPEC, but everything from refinery capacity and market speculation to weather and war.

Darlene Meyer

Ephrata