Introduction
This week’s column and the next will attempt to evaluate the pros and cons of small mini-oil refineries. This is being done with a view to appraising their effectiveness in the Guyana-specific economic landscape and not simply as an abstract theoretical evaluation.
To begin, if one considers that at the end of the 20th century, there were as many as 725 oil refineries operating worldwide (a number that is considerably reduced today (circa 650)). And further, since that time, a number of new oil refineries have been proposed (some have been operationalized, some denied, and some are still at the proposal stage seeking finance), then this would suggest that overall, probably a thousand or more feasibility studies on proposed oil refineries would have been completed worldwide, in recent decades. All this material would certainly have informed the