Our nonprofit Consumer Watchdog has asked California's U.S. attorneys to investigate.
Are California oil refiners manipulating gasoline supplies through shutdowns to drive pump prices and profits higher? Or, as some industry apologists say, are oil companies just in the right place at the right time?
Since the beginning of February, California's 14 oil refineries have suffered 10 serious slowdowns or shutdowns, many due to questionable causes or timing.
The timing of these overlapping outages raises questions about their true necessity, and about whether some refinery capacity may have been taken offline in order to drive up prices and profits for oil refiners at a time when some of their crude operations have been yielding lower profits.
Experts have publicly and privately stated that they have never seen so many refineries down for planned and unplanned maintenance at this time of the year.
Consumer Watchdog's letter documents the pattern of suspicious outages using information from industry sources, print media and trade publications, and from the Oil Price Information Service.
According our watchdog group's analysis, Californians paid $2.4 billion more for their gasoline than drivers nationally paid between February and April, based on the gap in pump prices. Southern California gas now costs $1.30 more than the nationwide average -- the widest gap ever http://goo.gl/Ie6OTO
