Noted and thank you.
If you might indulge me with another answer; do you have any idea about how quickly that situation could be fixed?
...that is a question with a lot of layers, and a lot of separate issues.
First, a new refinery coming on line, from the word go, is a 10 year process if things go WELL. Even the Corp of Engineers would be hard pressed to make a civie scale refinery boom that makes a noticable impact on gas prices in much shorter a time, because you cannot rush building a refinery if you want it to last. Small, single still refineries near small towns might be a stop-gap you could toss up in like 3 years, just for gas/diesel, but that requires very sweet, very clean oil, and delivering that oil to said refineries is a challenge in and of itself.
Second, it requires that require accepting the Alaska state government is a barely functional mess at every level and it's more purple than red these days.
The military bases are the most functional parts of the state, outside the airports and major seaports like Seward or Dutch Harbor. Anchorage is like a smaller Detroit with an airbase and with too shallow a bay to make large ships safe to bring in, Juneau is played out gold mining town that wouldn't be more than a fishing village if it was not the state capital, which makes the state have to put what amounts to a second capital building in Anchorage itself anyway. Anchorage is the only place I've ever seen people passed out on the street, might have seen a guy get strangled while we drove past an intersection, and had a police chase a fugitive/carjacker through the edge of part of a family members property at 2 am one time.
The main seasonal employment/tourist season also usually ends mid-late August and doesn't start again to late May, so for a lot of the year people simply don't have guaranteed employment, and they have to live off what they make in the summer season unless they want to work the winter ocean fisheries. And Deadliest Catch actually tones down how dangerous it is out there for nearly any fishing season.
And all of those issues have their own layers.
It'd actually be easier to set up more industrial alcohol production and just put a larger amount of denatured alcohol into the gasoline supply, than make more refineries. Less NIMBY-ism too, because people don't really have a problem with what amounts to a rubbing alcohol plant nearby, so long as it is OSHA/EPA complaint, and it's rather easy to denature alcohol without poisoning the enviroment. Won't do much for shit that needs diesel, marine diesel, or for the plastics precursor supply line.
