ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1962 there were refineries on stream in seventy countries and there were projects under construction, or at the definitive planning stage in another twenty-four countries. Six years earlier in 1956 refineries were operating in only fifty-seven countries, 1 and in 1950 in only forty-one countries, about the same number as in 1939. The rapid proliferation of countries with refinery capacity has arisen as a result of the changing relative importance of the several factors that help to determine the places at which an oil company locates its manufacturing processes and any consideration of the pattern of refining is an integral part of the larger study of these factors.
