I am reading in Hydrocarbon Processing that Sunoco oil company is exiting the refining business. They contracted Suisse Securities consultants and decided to shift from manufacturing to logistics. In the last thirty years no new refineries were built in America. Europe too has a refining overcapacity. I have invested in BAZAN the Haifa Refinery and they are embarked in a vast modernization process. They are not going to pay dividends in the next 5 years, if ever.
The same magazine writes about the energy situation in Europe. All the investments in biofuels in Europe have been written off, locally grown and refined fuels cannot compete with hydrocarbons. The countries cannot go on subsidizing biofuel production. The low cost producers like Brasil cannot compete because ethanol is a low energy density fuel and transportation costs are prohibitive. A Finn refiner sells biofuel from Indonesian coconut oil, but it is trying to get out of the business because eco-terrorists dressed as orangutans are threatening it (to save the rain forest).
Europe has also tried to close nuclear reactors and generate electricity by wind farms and solar cells. When subsidies were discontinued, they were largely abandoned. Happily, the Russians are still pumping natural gas.
People loves to point out improductive investments in China. But what Europe has done to itself with the ecology movement is suicidal. China invests its savings, while Europe took out loans to develope alternative energy and they have to be paid back. Europe has enormous debts and no GNP growth. China has no debts and is growing 10% p.a. meaning that in only seven years from now, circa 2018, it will have an economy equal to Europe and America together.
6 comments:
Projecting straight line trends rarely works. In any case China has 2 or 3x the combined population of the US and EU so even if GDP were equal, per capita GDP would not be. But China was always among the richest nations on earth until the Industrial Revolution.
K
7 years is not so far away.
Do you want to write about your trip? I'll post it here if you allow.
7 years is not so far away.
Do you want to write about your trip? I'll post it here if you allow.
Thank you for the offer, but I really don't have that much to say - my son was returning from Seattle with his car and belongings and I flew out to help him drive back. We tried to do the trip fairly quickly - 4 days, about 1200 km per day - so mostly what we did was drive on the big interstate highways from morning to night, with only a couple of stops along the way. We really didn't get to see much other than what you can see from the highway at 100km/ hr (cattle - a lot of cattle, mostly Black Angus beef cattle). One imagines that there were never any Jews in such places but in fact the Jews were often among the 1st to arrive and set up businesses. In one place in Wyoming, there was a plaque indicating that the town formed (in the late 19th century) around a saloon owned by one Jake Kaufman. I googled him and in case there was any doubt, he was known by the knickname "Jew Jake". This was before the age of PC.
My daughter this summer took a much more leisurely trip over much of the same territory, touring most of the major Western national parks with their famous landmark geysers and rock formations, hiking up mountains, camping in a tent, etc. She considered it to be among the best experiences of her young life. She travelled with a Lithuanian family - an exchange student in her school and her parents. My first reaction was that the Lithuanians would be anti-Semites but the truth is that Lithuania has been Judenrein for over 60 years so these people had probably never seen a Jew and they were actually lovely people (or at least they were careful to keep their anti-Semitism well disguised). My daughter got along famously with them precisely because they were NOT her parents.
If things work out, we may go and visit them this summer and drive into Poland and Ukraine to see my parents' home towns, KZ lagers, etc. That should be an interesting trip.
K
This BTW is a local story here in Philly. Sunoco has been here since the dawn of the petroleum age. The Pews (the owning family) ended up putting most of its fortune in the Pew Charitable Trusts, which were originally conservative but now supports fashionable environmental and other liberal causes. The decline of the West as mirrored in one family.
K
I blame the Pews.
Anon.
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