Environment-friendly and accountant-friendly may be converging at the consumer end of the production chain - where resource savings often bring ‘green’ in line with ‘lean’, and create a selling point that enables more to be charged for less. Further up, fierce trade-offs are still in evidence. BP’s plans to upgrade and expand an oil refinery in Indiana have been halted by pollution discharge targets which it says are unattainable with present technology. But environmentalists are angry that the oil company has been given permission to increase its toxic effluents into Lake Michigan, even though it says it will not make use of the higher limits. As a result of such stand-offs, US refineries will continue to be caught between environmentally-driven demands for cleaner output and cost-driven pressure to use dirtier crude inputs; and the US consumers will remain at risk of supplies running short when the driving season peaks.

BP’s American unit says its first priority is to develop new technologies enabling it to process heavier crude without exploiting its permission for higher discharges, which include a 35% rise in the heavy metal residues it can release into the lake, from its Whiting site on the outskirts of Chicago. But if it cannot do so within the project’s financial parameters – and president Robert Malone says they are “not aware of any technology” that would allow them to do so – then the plan is likely to be cancelled. Already suffering from the health and safety deficiencies exposed by a refinery explosion in Texas City in March 2005, BP is unwilling to risk any more controversies over impact on public or environmental health. With elections approaching, politicians in Chicago and the neighbouring state of Illinois are demanding that industry not only throw nothing more into the Great Lakes, but also clean them up after past discharges.

The US has raised its oil consumption by 45% since 1976 without building a single new refinery, and leading distributors to warn of a critical capacity shortage. But environmental pressure has also forced a reformulation of gasoline, slowing the expansion of output from existing facilities. Ironically, this means the shortage is plugged by hauling in refined fuel over longer distances – saving on the local pollution that would occur around new refineries at the cost of greater global pollution from additional tanker transport over land and sea.