Eric Bolling appeared on Fox News today to express outrage about a recently approved Export-Import Bank loan for a refinery upgrade project in Colombia. Bolling stated: “This is absolutely crazy and no one, no one in the administration was going to tell us about it. I happened to be digging through the Export-Import Bank loan documents and found it.”

Actually, the Export-Import Bank put out a press release about the loan on April 7, which is a weird way of keeping something secret.

The Ex-Im Bank doesn't use taxpayer dollars, and the point of the loan is to “support the purchases of equipment and services from over 150 large and small U.S. engineering/design, equipment supply, contracting and process license firms.” So why is Bolling upset? Well, he sees this as another opportunity to attack Obama's energy policies, despite the fact that Obama does not control the decisions of the Export-Import bank, an independent agency.

From the segment:

MARTHA MACCALLUM (host): We always talk about how we have no refining capacity here in the United States really and no new things being built, so why are we sending nearly $3 billion to Colombia to do the same thing?

BOLLING: Yeah, it's outrageous. You know, we talked about this Export-Import Bank of the United States giving a $2 billion loan to Brazil for drilling. How about this one? $2.8 billion, part of a $5 billion refinery upgrade to Cartagena, Colombia. I'm not really sure what the policy is here. It feels like the policy of the Obama administration is drill there, refine there, but pay here. We see pump prices $3.83 a gallon on US pumps.

That, in addition to refining capacity in the U.S. still - we have built not one single brand new refinery in the U.S. on US soil in nearly 35 years. So what we should be doing is we should be allowing - making it easier for people, for companies to drill our own oil here and then go ahead and refine it here so that our gasoline prices can come down. This is absolutely crazy and no one, no one in the administration was going to tell us about it. I happened to be digging through the Export-Import Bank loan documents and found it.

Somehow, MacCallum and Bolling seem to conclude that if the Export-Import Bank is supporting a refinery project in Colombia, that means we're not refining oil here in the United States. But that's simply not the case.

According to the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, 95 percent of the fuel used in the United States is refined here. A spokesman for the association also stated that “While no large refinery has been built in the United States since 1976, the decade prior to the recent recession saw expansions at existing refineries at a rate that created additional capacity that was equivalent to building one new major refinery every year.”

This is not the first time the bank has offered assistance to a refinery abroad. In May 2007, the Export-Import Bank announced loan guarantee for an oil refinery in India. I'm going to guess that Fox News did not respond with a segment attacking Bush.