Art Bahrs wrote:

>     $3.44 for Diesel here in Portland... saw it again this morning!
> $2.44 for Regular Unleaded at same station.. basically $3 a gallon for
> diesel around here...
>

Diesel is taken from the same fraction of crude as home heating oil. 
Refineries, can increase the amount of gasoline produced by adjusting the 
catalytic conversion and distillation, but only at the expense of the amount 
of home heating/diesel that they produce.

I will be interesting to see what the cost of heating oil will be like this 
winter.

All of this is from memory of some chemical engineering courses I took back 
in the 70's, including one lecture given by an engineer from Shell on the 
"Simplex" algorithm which they use to determine the maximum profits that 
could be made for a set of given feeds producing various outputs. The 
algorithm came in handy when I switched from Chemical Engineering to 
computer programming in Flin Flon and inherited the maintenance of a Simplex 
program to maximize the profits from the smelter by selecting different ores 
from different mines as the feeds.

Bruce 

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