"There hasn’t been a refinery built in this country since the 1970s," Wirth said at Bernstein's Strategic Decisions Conference this week, when asked about the prospect of new capacity being added in the Gulf of Mexico. "I personally don’t believe there will be a new petroleum refinery ever built in this country again."
"Capacity is added by de-bottlenecking existing units by investing in existing refineries," he explained. "But what we’ve seen over the last two years are shutdowns. We’ve seen refineries closed. We’ve seen units come down. We’ve seen refineries being repurposed to become bio refineries. And we live in a world where the policy, the stated policy of the U.S. government is to reduce demand for the products that refiners produce."The Biden administration has sought to ease the rising prices by releasing a record 180 million barrels from the already-depleated Strategic Petroleum Reserve over six months starting in March, and by urging both foreign and domestic producers to increase output.
Wirth said that is just what the industry is doing. "We raised our Permian [Basin] production growth outlook to 15% this year," he said. "So the narrative you hear that the industry is not growing production is not true. We are growing production and our industry is growing production."