Consumer Watchdog based in Santa Monica — says oil refineries are working hard to keep the state running on empty with planned outages — and other price surging tactics. "it's profitable for the oil refineries to keep us on low inventories and take refineries offline and they aren't importing the supplies we need to keep the prices stable." That's one of the reasons why California's average price for a gallon — is 75 cents more than the national average.
