EIA just published its annual World Crude Oil Distillation Capacity tabulation which gives a country by country breakdown of distillation capacity as of January 1, 2006. Distillation capacity jumped up 2.8% in the last year, to 85,127 thousand barrels a day, the highest increase since 1978 and the first time it exceeded 1.0% since 2000. Demand for oil for the first three quarters of 2005 (latest figures available) was up 1.16% over last year, so refinery capacity is up well ahead of demand. This should help eliminate the refinery bottleneck that has existed during the past year, as long as they can get enough crude.
The United States did not show any increase in distallation capacity during 2005, so our imports of refined products are going to increase. China showed the largest increase with 1,596 thousand barrels per day, followed by Saudi Arabia (350) the United Arab Emirates (267), Poland (117) and Germany (105) for a net total of 2,332 barrels per calender day to 84,500. Several countries had a loss of capacity, so note that the total is total net capacity.
The total world crude oil production (including lease condensate) is running about 73,500 thousand barrels per day or about 86% of distillation capacity. This is still a very high percentage on a worldwide basis, it would be OK for an individual country.
These number do not represent total liquids output capacity, natural gas liquids alone are about 7,500 thousand barrels per day, so be careful if you try to compare these numbers to other numbers.
Technorati tags: oil, refineries, energy, technology
Do you guys believe the peak oil theory of not building refining capacity. Peak oilers seems to believe that the reason why the US has not built a refinery for a few decades is because world was gonna hit peak oil. Here are some peak oil sites I found
www.peakoil.net
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
www.theviewfromthepeak.com
www.oildrum.com
Posted by: Anonymous | March 16, 2006 at 08:09 PM