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No US president has been reelected with gasoline prices above $4 a gallon, and the price at the pump is almost $4.70 this summer. It’s the single biggest economic threat to Joe Biden’s presidency.

Biden’s first response was urging OPEC to raise global oil supplies, with some success. He tried to shame US shale drillers, too, for failing to put rigs back to work, with less success. Then administration officials began to confront an arguably bigger and longer-term obstacle to reining in the fuel prices that have sent inflation to the highest level in decades: America’s refining complex is in decline.

During the pandemic, plants that distill crude into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel shut down around the world, and construction of new ones was postponed. The closures were especially acute in the US, where old facilities suffered irreparable damage from breakdowns and hurricanes while others were converted to produce renewable diesel.

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In June, as prices at the pump shot past $5 a gallon, Biden officials met with top executives from the nation’s largest fuel-making companies. The comments they made, industry insiders say, displayed a woeful—perhaps willful—misunderstanding of the refining business. In one Zoom-based session with a refining executive, White House officials soberly suggested that, with profit margins so large, oil companies should be able to recoup the costs of a new refinery in a year.

Biden economic adviser Heather Boushey rejected assertions that the president’s approach has been naive in a July 7 interview with Bloomberg Television, saying Biden was using every tool at his disposal to address gasoline prices. But to longtimers in US refining, the idea that companies would invest billions of dollars in a new refinery based on a few months of high profits was almost laughable.

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The US hasn’t built a full-scale refinery since 1977. Designing and constructing the labyrinth of pipelines, tanks, and distillation columns would easily cost $10 billion and take as long as a decade.

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My personal view is there will never be another new refinery built” in the US, Wirth said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in June. “You’re looking at committing capital 10 years out, that will need decades to offer a return for shareholders, in a policy environment where governments around the world are saying, ‘We don’t want these products.’?”

For a look at how challenging it will be for Biden to solve the refining shortage, consider this: He once tried to help save a refinery—and failed.

That refinery, in Philadelphia, not far from Biden’s hometown, used to account for almost a third of the refining capacity in the US Northeast.

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Supporters of the refinery implored then-Vice President Biden to help save it from closure, but their efforts proved futile. It eventually succumbed to a series of breakdowns and explosions and is now being dismantled.

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Refining additions in Asia and the Middle East may ease global shortages, but they also stand to increase US dependence on foreign supplies at a time of supply chain uncertainty.

For now, Biden’s options for quickly bringing down gasoline prices are limited.

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The above account of what the President and his administration said to “convince” executives of refiners to open up exposure to billions and billions is laughable and a clear sign that this administration knows zilch about the industry they first demonized during campaign season but now are begging to help pull their incompetent asses out of $4+ gasoline purely to try to save their skins with voters.