Refinery capacity expansion vs. grassroots capacity

摘要

The rapid growth of the world economy is increasing the demand of energy day by day. It ispredicted that in just 25 years, the world energy demand will be increased by 50%, and it isbroadly considered that in a rather long period of time in the future, oil and natural gas will stillbe the main body of the primary energy. Facing the oil price continuously high, figures inpetroleum industry generally state that oil and gas resources are sufficient, but the problem ishow to rationally transport petroleum and petroleum products to the terminal consumers, i.e.this relies not on the availability of the resources, but on their deliverability. A lot ofauthoritative persons and petroleum experts state that one of the reasons causing high oilprice is the limited oil refining capacity. The infrastructures of petroleum industry have madegreat changes. A big surplus in world oil refining capacity in the period of 1980s to 1990s hasgone for ever. This limited oil refining capacity results in no room for manoeuvre in petroleumproduct supply and it is hard to deal with the challenges of increasing demand, which hasbecome a bottleneck in the supply chain of petroleum products. The urgent problem to besolved at present is to expand the oil refining infrastructures, increase oil refining capacity,improve the efficiency of oil refining industry through scientific research and technologicaldevelopment, fully utilize crude oil resources, make efforts to develop and produceenvironment-friendly and clean petroleum products and make contributions to environmentprotection and social sustainable development.