On 2008-04-10, Jay Honeck wrote:
Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT. Of course you
wouldn't build a refinery in a populated area.

Where are you going to get the workers?

Refineries need infrastructure. If you want to build a refinery on
vacant land it will be an inordinately expensive proposition: you need
to build suitable roads, pipelines, houses for the workers to live -
you've got to get the materials in to build the refinery.

If you look at where the refineries are at the moment, there are good
reasons for why they are where they are, because they need to be close
enough for certain resources: engineers to run the plant, workers to do
the day to day operation, safety and security (fire crews, police). You
have to get the raw materials in and the refined product out. These go
in and out in colossal quantities, so refineries are often in a place
where you can get large ships into and out of. Since you have all those
workers now running the plant, the workers themselves need all the other
infrastructure to support their lives: shops, entertainment, and all the
other typical things you find in a city. If you want to build that in
the middle of nowhere, you're also going to have to build a city to go
with it and also find workers (many who need to be highly educated and
skilled) who are prepared to work in a new city, in the middle of
nowhere. Presumably, given your political leanings, you don't want this
to be the only class of people who are likely to want to do this -
immigrants from poor countries off your southern border.

Additionally, building the new city that must go with the refinery is
going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than simply extending an
existing refinery, or building one where the people already live that
doesn't turn the air green.

We don't have refineries that run as unattended automatons. A refinery
needs very close supervision because it's basically a giant bomb.

--
From the sunny Isle of Man.
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