Originally Posted by
sailingfun
The refinery has lost money almost every quarter since we have owned it. It does no good to save 7 cents a gallon on jet fuel and lose 15 cents a gallon on the other products. There is a reason not a single other airline has followed our example. Between the purchase cost, upgrade costs and ongoing losses were down about a billion dollars.
That does not even get into potential long term environmental obligations.
Why did we lose 15 cents per gallon? Because of the hedges?
We would have been hedged anyway, regardless of the refinery.
Yet we still saved that 7 cents and will continue to do so.
And the refinery should lose money. Always and forever. We didn't buy it to "make a profit". By definition any penny of "profit" that it could ever make would come out of the other pocket. Its "profit" or "loss" means absolutely nothing. The only thing that matters is the overall effect to the bottom line. You can't count hedges against it; that's ridiculous.
We have lower refining costs and more control of the supply of a bottlenecked high markup portion of the process. That's exactly what it was designed to do.
As for "long term environmental obligations" maybe you know something no one else does, but for now I'll assume they knew what they were getting into until proven otherwise.