re: Chevron payments make up nearly 24% of Richmond general fund, CA city reveals accidentally

California doesn't actually need the production. And their refiners can't really export their product and compete.

In reality, the reduction of capacity is a natural end to refining and probably a precursor to what will become the national trend. No point in keeping old refining capacity online when it is no longer profitable and works against future earnings.

Downvoters, please explain how abandoning profitable income isn't an opening for lawsuits from investors. Reducing refining in Cali is a strategic calculation by refiners. Those looking from the outside to supply realize they are losing market flexibility as it takes weeks to react to a market demand spike. This is the new norm for the country supply. Demand spikes are not easily stopped.

Isnt richmond a pretty conservative part of CA?

My first job as a process engineer was at that refinery. Richmond is a ghetto shite hole. I took a 50% pay cut after 1 year to move back to the gulf coast.

Chevron won’t be spending another dollar in LA after the coastal lawsuit. I wouldn’t be surprised if they closed down their campus on the north shore. LA is just as bad as CA in that respect.

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Where does the crude come from? Alaska? Assuming it makes a lot of financial sense to have refineries in California or else they wouldn’t be there

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It used to come from California. It's a heavy high sulfur crude refinery. It did once get a good bit during Alaska's heyday. It could use crude from Canada via the export terminal in BC which is about the same as California crude oil.

Over 20 years ago, when a friend was working for Plant Reclamation a very major industrial demolition contractor, he performed a paid study on cost to decommission, demolish and remediate Chevron's flagship refinery in El Segundo. The reason for the study was that Chevron was tired of all the petty pissant lawsuits from local and state government. After this they backed off.

California has been screwing refining in CA for over 35 years. I was at Shell's Wilmington Refinery/Carson site to take it down 34 years ago. Shell had decided to expand its Singapore Refinery and import gasoline from there instead of deal with all the onerous and stupid regs by California. They did sell part to Unocal which had very old units and cheaper to buy the Wilmington site from Shell than build new. They had all recently been through a major in situ upgrade, plus brand new SCOT and Claus units for sulfur recovery. These part of Valero's refinery in Wilmington now and about to be closed.

PEMEX EVP of refining would have loved to have purchased the cat cracker of early 1980's vintage due he needed 3 like it for unleaded gasoline needs in Mexico City but PEMEX wouldn't fund it. Instead PEMEX bought half interest in Shell's Deer Park refinery and expanded the alkylation and coking production to get 50,000 BPD of unleaded gasoline base.

Another refinery was shutdown the same time as Shell, a smaller indie refiner. It had also been through a major upgrade with a new hydrocracker and coker units in the mid 1980's. It is now sitting in pieces in a yard in Houston after being 80+% refurbished to be re-erected in Romania, when finances by a German bank were cancelled.

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State of California, community and environmental groups. Same that are doing it now. Selling it doesn’t get them off the hook, due to Superfund

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They only have to clean the site if they leave, I doubt they leave the site.

Or they will weigh leaving the site costs versus running a terminal to prevent paying the costs.