"If the U.S. petroleum industry doesn't reduce its refining capacity, it will never see any substantial increase" in refinery profits, said a Chevron Corporation document in November 1995.
ConocoPhillips on Thursday became the latest energy giant to seek to break itself up, announcing that it will spin off its refining business to shareholders as a separate publicly traded company.
Iran is already working hard to build up its refining capacity because it currently imports a large amount of gasoline.
The problem: Chevron doesn't produce enough oil to meet its refining needs, which means it has to buy some oil on the open market.
[C2.] A WARNING FROM SHELL Royal Dutch Shell said that third-quarter net profit rose 16percentt, but it said that numbers looked better than the reality because the underlying performance of its refining operations was weaker than it appeared.
It also allows Shell to strengthen both its refining capacity and its retail sales network.
Shares in the company fell by 4% after it recorded almost $2bn£1.25bnbn) in losses from its refining division for the last quarter of 2009 which were much higher than expected.
But the price spike that followed was so big that Marathon made twice as much from its refining operations in the third quarter of 2005 as it had a year earlier.
It was during this phase-out that Mitsubishi moved its refining operation to Malaysia, where old tin mines had left behind thousands of tons of semiprocessed slag that was rich in rare earth ore.
The company shut down its refining units in those countries earlier in January after it ran out of money to buy crude oil.
Marathon Petroleum itself was the product of Marathon Oil spinning off its refining and marketing operations, creating one of the nation's largest independent refiners.
