The one thing we all know about the oil industry is that it’s awash with money. Except that if you look at the refining business in the UK, it’s not.
Refineries in the UK work on a margin of around 1.65 pence per litre. (Compare that with the £1.40 you pay at the pump). Taking out operating costs, energy, salaries etc, that comes down to a net figure of 0.6p/litre. New costs imposed by UK legislation take out around 0.1p. And the industry is now facing new EU legislation, including the Emissions Trading Scheme Phase III, the Industrial Emissions Directive, and the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD). That last by itself will cost 1p/l. Taking all the regulatory costs together, that will see the industry making a loss of around 0.75p/l.
Can’t they just put the prices up? No they can’t. It is becoming cheaper to import refined oil products from other countriess than to refine under EU rules in the UK. They tell me that India has some excellent, very large, modern, state-of-the-art refineries, which deliver lower costs without the burden of EU rules. No one looking to invest in refining capacity will do it in the EU, faced with massive regulatory uncertainty and massive regulatory costs. And we’ve already seen one major UK refinery, Petroplus’s Coryton, close with the loss of 850 jobs.
Yet again, we see EU regulation driving business, jobs and investment out of the EU altogether, and usually to jurisdictions with lower environmental standards. So our “Green” policies undermine European economies while actually increasing CO2 emissions. It’s sheer lunacy.
The FQD is a particular problem, not only for its cost but for its distorting effect on the market. The first objective was to ban imports of Canadian oil sand products (which in any case go mostly to the USA, not Europe). But they’ve made a real dog’s breakfast of it. In effect, they’ve rated oil from all sources for “Green-ness”. And they’ve ignored the market impact. This will limit EU refineries to a fraction of the global market — and will therefore drive up prices in that sector, creating a unique penalty for EU refiners — and for EU businesses and motorists. It’s a spectacular own goal.
Sometimes I despair over the folly of the EU. And I am more than ever convinced that we should be Better Off Out.
In the Alice in Wonderland where Guy Verhofstadt lives with his chums, all this makes perfect sense.
Which is why, I agree, we must get out fast.
But how?
what annoys me most about our fuel is the amount the Government gets from it , they don’t have to do any research to find oil , they don’t drill for oil , as far as I can see they don’t do any thing apart from taking a larger slice of the cake than any body else , you would think with a large population like ours with more people buying fuel it would be cheap , and yet Australia with a population a 3rd of ours its far cheaper ,
Wouldn’t it be nice to be ruled by people who actively encouraged and supported our industries instead of trying to destroy then. Alas, it seems that at both the EU and national levels government these days is not merely incompetent, it’s insane!
I think that we have to look beyond the incompetence and stupidity displayed by the EU. Nobody of average intelligence would hobble their industries with pointless rules and regulations the way they do.
The agenda of those pulling the strings is to de industrialise Europe – just as they attempted when, in the seventies, the big scare was ‘global cooling’ leading to another ice age.
What was the answer back then? To shut down ‘polluting’ industries that were causing the cooling!
The people who have insinuated themselves into powerful positions have an anti-industry agenda and will not be happy until they’ve destroyed our manufacturing base.
No wonder they’re furious at the thought of the UK leaving the EU, it’s not just the money that they’ll lose, it’s also the power to regulate. They hate us and they would hate us even more if we left the EU and became, as we undoubtedly would, a much more successful nation without being shackled to the greedy, anti-democratic troughers of the EU.
Here another reason why we should do anything but continue burning dirty tarsands and fracked gas: Climate Change. Roger Helmer is denying that manmade emissions would cause any significant global warming. He is also dismissing the the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior.
The U.S. National Academy of Science have produced a series of videos providing a basic overview of climate science, it’s is called “Climate Change: Lines of Evidence”. The whole series in one video here: