You may be wondering why are we experiencing a gasoline shortage when oil production is peaking in North Dakota...

The shortage isn't with oil the bottleneck is in the refining process.

This graph shows you what's going on...

We have three pipelines that bring gasoline into the state.

All three of them dead end in North Dakota. President of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, Ron Ness, says being at the end of the pipeline means we get the left overs and now there's not much left over to get.

Ness says North Dakota is producing 120 thousand barrels of oil a day.

The Mandan Refinery refines about 60 thousand of those barrels. That means half of our North Dakota oil has to go to refineries elsewhere.

(Ron Ness / ND Petroleum Council) "The oil from Bowman County goes to Denver, that oil does not get back up here. Oil in Northern half is piped to chicago, minneapolis. Some works it's way back into North Dakota." Ness blames the gasoline shortage on how refineries are being regulated.

(Ness) "You can produce more product out of refinery if you don't have to meet those high standard regulations. What congress should be looking at is ways to maximize capacity yet maintain environmental quality. Yet we've gone above and beyond what traditionally is required is reasonable."

Ness says the problem can only be solved by increasing the refining capacity.

The last new refinery in the nation was built in 1976.

Ness says investors in Arizona have been trying for ten years to build a new refinery.

A BP refinery in Indiana is also meeting resistance with an expansion that would double it's size.

And there's a proposal to create a refinery in Sioux Falls. Ness says all these would help the supply in our region. watch the video | save this article / add to your favorites list