(NaturalNews) If you're in California, you're paying sky-high prices for gasoline this week. At some stations, prices are over $5 a gallon. But you might not be aware of why you're paying this price. The answer may be more than a little disturbing: California's energy infrastructure is so fragile that a power outage at a single gasoline refinery caused state-wide prices to skyrocket.
Yep, an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance was knocked offline several days ago by a local power outage. This, in turn, caused a sudden spike in gasoline prices state-wide. This whole fiasco may have been set off by something like a single electrical transformer failing somewhere along the electrical supply chain.
Our energy infrastructure is more fragile than you think
What this really reveals is just how close to collapse California's energy infrastructure really is. And it's worse than you think, by the way: California can't import gasoline from neighboring states because its fuel refining requirements are so stringent due to air quality control concerns.
As Nancy Rivera Brooks, the LA Times editor, explained in a recent interview:
Because we have such a clean-burning recipe for gasoline here, very few refineries make it outside California, and there aren't pipelines that bring it into California from those refineries that can make it. When something goes wrong, you're stuck with what you've got in your tank.
I bet most Californians had no idea the gasoline supply across their entire state depends on a couple of high-voltage wires feeding a single refinery in Torrance. That's how amazingly fragile California's energy infrastructure really is. There are no pipelines from other states! When California's refineries go out, they're out!
And given how California is steeped in the culture of driving for hours each day, a loss of gasoline supply is the equivalent of an economic collapse. Without gasoline, in other words, California's economy grinds to a halt almost immediately. For starters, nobody can get to work!
A reminder to prepare for worse things yet to come...
More at link http://www.naturalnews.com/037454_gas_prices_California_collapse.html
