What 99.5% of people fail to understand is that without getting certain
parts of the infrstructure back online, it won't matter how much crude
you release from the national reserves because the refining and
delivery system won't be online.

Right now you have just about 2.5 million barrels per day refining
completely shut down for one if not all three of the following reasons:

1: The plant itself is under water. If there is as little as 6" of
water in a lot of these plants, the units can't be run because many of
the pumps and their motors are in standing water.

2. They don't have any electricty....no power no operations

3. The natural gas piplines that provide the fuel to run the plants are
not operating....same outcome as #2.

One thing that has greatly helped is that the EPA had temporarily
dropped the rules on reformulated gas. Under the rules the gas that was
blended for the northeast coupldn't be piped anywhwere else because of
the smog rules. And so on and so on. What this means is that the
plants can run just a single blend of regular unleaded instead of the
60+ custom blends that the EPA mandated. This allows the plants to run
longer production runs and not have to limit the runs on how much of
one blend or another they need. Now they can run until all the storage
capacity is filled with the single blend and not get gonged by the EPA.
In the short term it's going to play some havok with the smog levels
in some locations, but that's better than having the entire country
screwed up by idiodic rules.

The worst thing people can do now is panic over the price and start
trying to hoard and store fuel. That causes an artificial shortage. One
station operator in Atlanta pointed out one customer to a news crew.
Said that he was in the station with a third vehicle and six more jerry
cans in less than an hour....just what we need.....

Once things shake out a little and the pipeline people and the plant
operations people get their basic power, water, fuel and feedstocks
back into some kind of operation, there won't as much of a problem.
Most of the drilling and production companies are already working to
get the rigs and production platforms back into action as fast as
possible.

BTW most places price their fuel based on what the next tanker drop is
expected to cost them and not what the current stock cost, and they
base that number on the daily spot market price.

Craig C.