Invisible Hurricanes

What kind of fuckery is this?

I went to the airport yesterday, as I am often wont to do on beautiful, clear, cool, Saturday afternoon in July and found that the price of 100LL avgas (aviation grade 100 octane low-lead gasoline) has risen to $5.00 per gallon.

This morning I was greeted by this in the New York Times.

Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer’s records.

These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an “invisible hurricane,” have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country’s 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analyst

There’s a very good diary up at dKos today which discusses these oh-so-convenient disasters which seem to have befallen the oil industry.

It’s the plot of a thousand old TV shows: wife discovers that the husband is worth more dead than alive. Scratch one husband. There’s a business version, too, where some unscrupulous store owner takes a torch to his own place.

Of course, the guys hauled in by Columbo or Mannix were just generated by the imagination of some screenwriter. In real life, it’s hard to think that a business could profit from a disaster — could actually pull in more bucks when their own facilities were wrecked. And a situation where the bigger the disaster, the bigger the dollars that rolled in, is too ridiculous even for TV. Though that would make you feel a little differently about the hurricane season, eh?

Thing, is, there’s this odd little situation with the oil industry. A couple of years ago, Katrina delivered what looked like a devastating bunch of lemons to their Gulf Coast facilities, but the optimists in the petro biz turned it into record-setting lemonade. Far from being hurt by the storm that drowned an American city and turned thousands into nomads, the oil companies racked up their best quarters ever.

Of course the reason for those record profits was a restricted supply of oil that just barely kept up with demand, allowing companies to raise their prices over, and over, and over. So it’s a good thing that last year the hurricane season was quiet. Some of the big political concerns overseas have died down, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to bomb Iran for at least another week. So with no disasters in the past year, the market should be much better. Only it’s not.

Maybe I’ll go get a glider rating.