SRefinery closures have occurred every year over the past two decades.  Since 1988, we have lost over 1.6 million barrels per day of capacity, which is about 10 percent of today’s capacity.  Several factors are driving this situation:
		–The refineries that have closed are smaller and have less favorable economics than other refineries in their market area.
		–Even though refinery utilization has improved since the 1980’s, refinery margin improvements have been modest.
		–In recent years, some smaller, less-economic refineries that faced additional investments for environmental reasons in order to stay in business found closing preferable because they predicted that they could not stay competitive in the long term.
	SWhile the rate of closures as measured by average capacity shut down per year has slowed, EIA expects to see closures continue in the future.