Edit: I have no idea why the story was posted twice.
Forget About Climate Change, America's Refineries Make Keystone XL A Bad Idea
When I filled up my hybrid’s gasoline tank last week, the pump price had jumped 30 cents from my last fill-up. I said to myself, “Hmmm…something’s going on.” Gasoline prices don’t just move up and down on a whim. So when I found out about the refinery woes going on across the country, I wasn’t surprised.
A devastating explosion destroyed much of Exxon Mobil’s Torrance refinery in California two weeks ago and severely cut into America’s ability to make gasoline. Residents for miles around had to cope with ash, gaseous fumes and really unhealthy air quality.
Add striking workers at nine other U.S. refineries to this explosive shutdown, and almost a fifth of America’s refinery output is in jeopardy because of continuing safety issues.
Petroleum refineries are the little-appreciated bottleneck in oil’s path from the well to the pump. Gasoline has to be refined from crude oil and the United States has no spare oil refinery capacity. Whenever one of our refineries goes down, gasoline prices spike.
Just like they did after the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 2012. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1999. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1989.
It’s become a major problem in the last 20 years and we are ignoring it.
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
In fact, refinery fires and explosions are so common that they hardly make the news. Just last month, a series of fires and outages in several eastern refineries stopped 20% of the refining capacity in the eastern half of the United States (Reuters).
After a small fire at BP’s largest U.S. refinery last August, Daniel Horowitz, the spokesman for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, said “operational incidents, including small fires, at refineries are reasonably common.” So common that, if they don’t involve fatalities or offsite damage, the Chemical Safety Board doesn’t even bother to investigate.
So I guess this is all OK?
The United Steel Workers Union doesn’t think so. The USW, representing more than 30,000 American oil workers at 65 refineries and over 230 oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities in the United States,started these strikes a month ago primarily because of poor safety conditions at these plants. It’s telling that these strikes are the first since 1980.
“The industry’s refusal to meaningfully address safety issues through good faith bargaining gave us no other option but to expand our work stoppage,” USW President Leo Gerard said.
Oil industry spokespersons were “extremely disappointed.” I bet.
I don’t understand why an industry that made over $100 billion in profits last year can’t spend less than one thousandth of that to ensure smooth and safe operations in something so critical to their own business, let alone America’s business.
The recent oil war between Saudi Arabia and the United States had given us the lowest gasoline prices in years. And that could have continued for a long time to the benefit of ordinary Americans and small businesses. Except for the industry’s short-sightedness with respect to safety.
The United States refines over 7 billion barrels of oil every year, half of it imported, and we turn that oil into 280 billion gallons of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a few other things.
The United States rose to power on the back of our immense refinery capacity in the 20th century. No one had anywhere near our capacity. No one else does even today.
It’s why Canada needs the Keystone XL Pipeline to get their tar sands crude oil to our refineries along the Gulf Coast. No one else can refine so much so cheaply so they can sell it overseas (OCI). And that makes Canada, and the refineries, much more money. But it doesn’t help the rest of us.
In fact, so much money can be made exporting, that the industry is pushing to raise the 1975 limits on exporting American crude oil overseas since much of our crude is sweet and easier for foreign refineries to process. Our refineries are adapted to process the really nasty stuff like tar sands oil from Canada and heavy oils from Venezuela.
But that action is stalled at the Department of Energy’s office. Secretary Moniz is unconvinced by the oil industry’s arguments given the broad economic and security implications.
To make matters worse, we aren’t building new refineries. So we have overworked our old ones. Their average age is 40 years, and some are almost 90. Only one new one has been built in this century. They are getting decrepit, and it takes serious maintenance and upgrades to keep them going – safely.
Still, the larger problem of refinery sustainability has yet to be addressed. What’s critical is that, while we closed half our refineries over that last two decades, the productivity of the remaining refineries has almost doubled. According to the Energy Information Administration, 301 refineries processed over 6 billion barrels of oil in 1982. In 2014, only 149 refineries processed almost the same amount of oil. In 2015, these refineries will top 8 billion barrels.
Americans consume 7.6 billion barrels of oil each year, so shutting down refineries, or diverting their product elsewhere, for whatever reason really hurts. Existing refineries have been running at or near full capacity since the mid-1990s. And more and more of their refined products are being shipped across the world because the profit is better.
Which begs the question: If we’re at full capacity, what other oil would be displaced by new Canadian crude delivered through the Keystone XL? And if tar sands oil is going elsewhere, does that mean we have to import even more expensive final product like gasoline, because we’d be refining less for ourselves? How much will that raise gasoline prices?
This is a SNAFU of titanic proportions. But why aren’t new refineries being built in the United States?
First, they’re expensive – several billion dollars to build, and small profit margins lead to a decades-long payoff period – who wants to invest in something like that?
Second, there are a lot of environmental requirements on where and how they can be built, and it takes years to permit them.
Third, nobody wants one anywhere near them.
If you’re a for-profit company, it just does not pay to build them. But it pays to overwork the ones we have. They’re essential to the world’s economy. And they make more money if you ship the product overseas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, we had a surplus of refining capacity, so the industry decided to shut half of them down. Some members of Congress suspected that these closings were calculated to increase oil company profits, but the notoriously low return on refinery operations was probably sufficient disincentive.
Had they known tars sands and unconventional fossil fuels would become so easy to extract, they might have kept a few more open.
This is not a good situation for us to be in. Perhaps this is one of those times where government has to step up and help.
But to do what?
Follow Jim on https://twitter.com/JimConca and see his and Dr. Wright’s book at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419675885/sr=1-10/qid=1195953013/
Forget About Climate Change, America's Refineries Make Keystone XL A Bad Idea
When I filled up my hybrid’s gasoline tank last week, the pump price had jumped 30 cents from my last fill-up. I said to myself, “Hmmm…something’s going on.” Gasoline prices don’t just move up and down on a whim. So when I found out about the refinery woes going on across the country, I wasn’t surprised.
A devastating explosion destroyed much of Exxon Mobil’s Torrance refinery in California two weeks ago and severely cut into America’s ability to make gasoline. Residents for miles around had to cope with ash, gaseous fumes and really unhealthy air quality.
Add striking workers at nine other U.S. refineries to this explosive shutdown, and almost a fifth of America’s refinery output is in jeopardy because of continuing safety issues.
Petroleum refineries are the little-appreciated bottleneck in oil’s path from the well to the pump. Gasoline has to be refined from crude oil and the United States has no spare oil refinery capacity. Whenever one of our refineries goes down, gasoline prices spike.
Just like they did after the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 2012. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1999. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1989.
It’s become a major problem in the last 20 years and we are ignoring it.
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
In fact, refinery fires and explosions are so common that they hardly make the news. Just last month, a series of fires and outages in several eastern refineries stopped 20% of the refining capacity in the eastern half of the United States (Reuters).
After a small fire at BP’s largest U.S. refinery last August, Daniel Horowitz, the spokesman for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, said “operational incidents, including small fires, at refineries are reasonably common.” So common that, if they don’t involve fatalities or offsite damage, the Chemical Safety Board doesn’t even bother to investigate.
So I guess this is all OK?
The United Steel Workers Union doesn’t think so. The USW, representing more than 30,000 American oil workers at 65 refineries and over 230 oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities in the United States,started these strikes a month ago primarily because of poor safety conditions at these plants. It’s telling that these strikes are the first since 1980.
“The industry’s refusal to meaningfully address safety issues through good faith bargaining gave us no other option but to expand our work stoppage,” USW President Leo Gerard said.
Oil industry spokespersons were “extremely disappointed.” I bet.
I don’t understand why an industry that made over $100 billion in profits last year can’t spend less than one thousandth of that to ensure smooth and safe operations in something so critical to their own business, let alone America’s business.
The recent oil war between Saudi Arabia and the United States had given us the lowest gasoline prices in years. And that could have continued for a long time to the benefit of ordinary Americans and small businesses. Except for the industry’s short-sightedness with respect to safety.
The United States refines over 7 billion barrels of oil every year, half of it imported, and we turn that oil into 280 billion gallons of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a few other things.
The United States rose to power on the back of our immense refinery capacity in the 20th century. No one had anywhere near our capacity. No one else does even today.
It’s why Canada needs the Keystone XL Pipeline to get their tar sands crude oil to our refineries along the Gulf Coast. No one else can refine so much so cheaply so they can sell it overseas (OCI). And that makes Canada, and the refineries, much more money. But it doesn’t help the rest of us.
In fact, so much money can be made exporting, that the industry is pushing to raise the 1975 limits on exporting American crude oil overseas since much of our crude is sweet and easier for foreign refineries to process. Our refineries are adapted to process the really nasty stuff like tar sands oil from Canada and heavy oils from Venezuela.
But that action is stalled at the Department of Energy’s office. Secretary Moniz is unconvinced by the oil industry’s arguments given the broad economic and security implications.
To make matters worse, we aren’t building new refineries. So we have overworked our old ones. Their average age is 40 years, and some are almost 90. Only one new one has been built in this century. They are getting decrepit, and it takes serious maintenance and upgrades to keep them going – safely.
Still, the larger problem of refinery sustainability has yet to be addressed. What’s critical is that, while we closed half our refineries over that last two decades, the productivity of the remaining refineries has almost doubled. According to the Energy Information Administration, 301 refineries processed over 6 billion barrels of oil in 1982. In 2014, only 149 refineries processed almost the same amount of oil. In 2015, these refineries will top 8 billion barrels.
Americans consume 7.6 billion barrels of oil each year, so shutting down refineries, or diverting their product elsewhere, for whatever reason really hurts. Existing refineries have been running at or near full capacity since the mid-1990s. And more and more of their refined products are being shipped across the world because the profit is better.
Which begs the question: If we’re at full capacity, what other oil would be displaced by new Canadian crude delivered through the Keystone XL? And if tar sands oil is going elsewhere, does that mean we have to import even more expensive final product like gasoline, because we’d be refining less for ourselves? How much will that raise gasoline prices?
This is a SNAFU of titanic proportions. But why aren’t new refineries being built in the United States?
First, they’re expensive – several billion dollars to build, and small profit margins lead to a decades-long payoff period – who wants to invest in something like that?
Second, there are a lot of environmental requirements on where and how they can be built, and it takes years to permit them.
Third, nobody wants one anywhere near them.
If you’re a for-profit company, it just does not pay to build them. But it pays to overwork the ones we have. They’re essential to the world’s economy. And they make more money if you ship the product overseas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, we had a surplus of refining capacity, so the industry decided to shut half of them down. Some members of Congress suspected that these closings were calculated to increase oil company profits, but the notoriously low return on refinery operations was probably sufficient disincentive.
Had they known tars sands and unconventional fossil fuels would become so easy to extract, they might have kept a few more open.
This is not a good situation for us to be in. Perhaps this is one of those times where government has to step up and help.
But to do what?
Follow Jim on https://twitter.com/JimConca and see his and Dr. Wright’s book at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419675885/sr=1-10/qid=1195953013/
Forget About Climate Change, America's Refineries Make Keystone XL A Bad Idea
When I filled up my hybrid’s gasoline tank last week, the pump price had jumped 30 cents from my last fill-up. I said to myself, “Hmmm…something’s going on.” Gasoline prices don’t just move up and down on a whim. So when I found out about the refinery woes going on across the country, I wasn’t surprised.
A devastating explosion destroyed much of Exxon Mobil’s Torrance refinery in California two weeks ago and severely cut into America’s ability to make gasoline. Residents for miles around had to cope with ash, gaseous fumes and really unhealthy air quality.
Add striking workers at nine other U.S. refineries to this explosive shutdown, and almost a fifth of America’s refinery output is in jeopardy because of continuing safety issues.
Petroleum refineries are the little-appreciated bottleneck in oil’s path from the well to the pump. Gasoline has to be refined from crude oil and the United States has no spare oil refinery capacity. Whenever one of our refineries goes down, gasoline prices spike.
Just like they did after the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 2012. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1999. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1989.
It’s become a major problem in the last 20 years and we are ignoring it.
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
In fact, refinery fires and explosions are so common that they hardly make the news. Just last month, a series of fires and outages in several eastern refineries stopped 20% of the refining capacity in the eastern half of the United States (Reuters).
After a small fire at BP’s largest U.S. refinery last August, Daniel Horowitz, the spokesman for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, said “operational incidents, including small fires, at refineries are reasonably common.” So common that, if they don’t involve fatalities or offsite damage, the Chemical Safety Board doesn’t even bother to investigate.
So I guess this is all OK?
The United Steel Workers Union doesn’t think so. The USW, representing more than 30,000 American oil workers at 65 refineries and over 230 oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities in the United States,started these strikes a month ago primarily because of poor safety conditions at these plants. It’s telling that these strikes are the first since 1980.
“The industry’s refusal to meaningfully address safety issues through good faith bargaining gave us no other option but to expand our work stoppage,” USW President Leo Gerard said.
Oil industry spokespersons were “extremely disappointed.” I bet.
I don’t understand why an industry that made over $100 billion in profits last year can’t spend less than one thousandth of that to ensure smooth and safe operations in something so critical to their own business, let alone America’s business.
The recent oil war between Saudi Arabia and the United States had given us the lowest gasoline prices in years. And that could have continued for a long time to the benefit of ordinary Americans and small businesses. Except for the industry’s short-sightedness with respect to safety.
The United States refines over 7 billion barrels of oil every year, half of it imported, and we turn that oil into 280 billion gallons of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a few other things.
The United States rose to power on the back of our immense refinery capacity in the 20th century. No one had anywhere near our capacity. No one else does even today.
It’s why Canada needs the Keystone XL Pipeline to get their tar sands crude oil to our refineries along the Gulf Coast. No one else can refine so much so cheaply so they can sell it overseas (OCI). And that makes Canada, and the refineries, much more money. But it doesn’t help the rest of us.
In fact, so much money can be made exporting, that the industry is pushing to raise the 1975 limits on exporting American crude oil overseas since much of our crude is sweet and easier for foreign refineries to process. Our refineries are adapted to process the really nasty stuff like tar sands oil from Canada and heavy oils from Venezuela.
But that action is stalled at the Department of Energy’s office. Secretary Moniz is unconvinced by the oil industry’s arguments given the broad economic and security implications.
To make matters worse, we aren’t building new refineries. So we have overworked our old ones. Their average age is 40 years, and some are almost 90. Only one new one has been built in this century. They are getting decrepit, and it takes serious maintenance and upgrades to keep them going – safely.
Still, the larger problem of refinery sustainability has yet to be addressed. What’s critical is that, while we closed half our refineries over that last two decades, the productivity of the remaining refineries has almost doubled. According to the Energy Information Administration, 301 refineries processed over 6 billion barrels of oil in 1982. In 2014, only 149 refineries processed almost the same amount of oil. In 2015, these refineries will top 8 billion barrels.
Americans consume 7.6 billion barrels of oil each year, so shutting down refineries, or diverting their product elsewhere, for whatever reason really hurts. Existing refineries have been running at or near full capacity since the mid-1990s. And more and more of their refined products are being shipped across the world because the profit is better.
Which begs the question: If we’re at full capacity, what other oil would be displaced by new Canadian crude delivered through the Keystone XL? And if tar sands oil is going elsewhere, does that mean we have to import even more expensive final product like gasoline, because we’d be refining less for ourselves? How much will that raise gasoline prices?
This is a SNAFU of titanic proportions. But why aren’t new refineries being built in the United States?
First, they’re expensive – several billion dollars to build, and small profit margins lead to a decades-long payoff period – who wants to invest in something like that?
Second, there are a lot of environmental requirements on where and how they can be built, and it takes years to permit them.
Third, nobody wants one anywhere near them.
If you’re a for-profit company, it just does not pay to build them. But it pays to overwork the ones we have. They’re essential to the world’s economy. And they make more money if you ship the product overseas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, we had a surplus of refining capacity, so the industry decided to shut half of them down. Some members of Congress suspected that these closings were calculated to increase oil company profits, but the notoriously low return on refinery operations was probably sufficient disincentive.
Had they known tars sands and unconventional fossil fuels would become so easy to extract, they might have kept a few more open.
This is not a good situation for us to be in. Perhaps this is one of those times where government has to step up and help.
But to do what?
Follow Jim on https://twitter.com/JimConca and see his and Dr. Wright’s book at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419675885/sr=1-10/qid=1195953013/
Forget About Climate Change, America's Refineries Make Keystone XL A Bad Idea
When I filled up my hybrid’s gasoline tank last week, the pump price had jumped 30 cents from my last fill-up. I said to myself, “Hmmm…something’s going on.” Gasoline prices don’t just move up and down on a whim. So when I found out about the refinery woes going on across the country, I wasn’t surprised.
A devastating explosion destroyed much of Exxon Mobil’s Torrance refinery in California two weeks ago and severely cut into America’s ability to make gasoline. Residents for miles around had to cope with ash, gaseous fumes and really unhealthy air quality.
Add striking workers at nine other U.S. refineries to this explosive shutdown, and almost a fifth of America’s refinery output is in jeopardy because of continuing safety issues.
Petroleum refineries are the little-appreciated bottleneck in oil’s path from the well to the pump. Gasoline has to be refined from crude oil and the United States has no spare oil refinery capacity. Whenever one of our refineries goes down, gasoline prices spike.
Just like they did after the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 2012. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1999. And the Chevron Richmond Refinery fire in 1989.
It’s become a major problem in the last 20 years and we are ignoring it.
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
A refinery is necessary to turn crude oil into the things we use – gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and a host of other products. The problem is, America’s refineries are old and at full capacity. Source: NREL
In fact, refinery fires and explosions are so common that they hardly make the news. Just last month, a series of fires and outages in several eastern refineries stopped 20% of the refining capacity in the eastern half of the United States (Reuters).
After a small fire at BP’s largest U.S. refinery last August, Daniel Horowitz, the spokesman for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, said “operational incidents, including small fires, at refineries are reasonably common.” So common that, if they don’t involve fatalities or offsite damage, the Chemical Safety Board doesn’t even bother to investigate.
So I guess this is all OK?
The United Steel Workers Union doesn’t think so. The USW, representing more than 30,000 American oil workers at 65 refineries and over 230 oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities in the United States,started these strikes a month ago primarily because of poor safety conditions at these plants. It’s telling that these strikes are the first since 1980.
“The industry’s refusal to meaningfully address safety issues through good faith bargaining gave us no other option but to expand our work stoppage,” USW President Leo Gerard said.
Oil industry spokespersons were “extremely disappointed.” I bet.
I don’t understand why an industry that made over $100 billion in profits last year can’t spend less than one thousandth of that to ensure smooth and safe operations in something so critical to their own business, let alone America’s business.
The recent oil war between Saudi Arabia and the United States had given us the lowest gasoline prices in years. And that could have continued for a long time to the benefit of ordinary Americans and small businesses. Except for the industry’s short-sightedness with respect to safety.
The United States refines over 7 billion barrels of oil every year, half of it imported, and we turn that oil into 280 billion gallons of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a few other things.
The United States rose to power on the back of our immense refinery capacity in the 20th century. No one had anywhere near our capacity. No one else does even today.
It’s why Canada needs the Keystone XL Pipeline to get their tar sands crude oil to our refineries along the Gulf Coast. No one else can refine so much so cheaply so they can sell it overseas (OCI). And that makes Canada, and the refineries, much more money. But it doesn’t help the rest of us.
In fact, so much money can be made exporting, that the industry is pushing to raise the 1975 limits on exporting American crude oil overseas since much of our crude is sweet and easier for foreign refineries to process. Our refineries are adapted to process the really nasty stuff like tar sands oil from Canada and heavy oils from Venezuela.
But that action is stalled at the Department of Energy’s office. Secretary Moniz is unconvinced by the oil industry’s arguments given the broad economic and security implications.
To make matters worse, we aren’t building new refineries. So we have overworked our old ones. Their average age is 40 years, and some are almost 90. Only one new one has been built in this century. They are getting decrepit, and it takes serious maintenance and upgrades to keep them going – safely.
Still, the larger problem of refinery sustainability has yet to be addressed. What’s critical is that, while we closed half our refineries over that last two decades, the productivity of the remaining refineries has almost doubled. According to the Energy Information Administration, 301 refineries processed over 6 billion barrels of oil in 1982. In 2014, only 149 refineries processed almost the same amount of oil. In 2015, these refineries will top 8 billion barrels.
Americans consume 7.6 billion barrels of oil each year, so shutting down refineries, or diverting their product elsewhere, for whatever reason really hurts. Existing refineries have been running at or near full capacity since the mid-1990s. And more and more of their refined products are being shipped across the world because the profit is better.
Which begs the question: If we’re at full capacity, what other oil would be displaced by new Canadian crude delivered through the Keystone XL? And if tar sands oil is going elsewhere, does that mean we have to import even more expensive final product like gasoline, because we’d be refining less for ourselves? How much will that raise gasoline prices?
This is a SNAFU of titanic proportions. But why aren’t new refineries being built in the United States?
First, they’re expensive – several billion dollars to build, and small profit margins lead to a decades-long payoff period – who wants to invest in something like that?
Second, there are a lot of environmental requirements on where and how they can be built, and it takes years to permit them.
Third, nobody wants one anywhere near them.
If you’re a for-profit company, it just does not pay to build them. But it pays to overwork the ones we have. They’re essential to the world’s economy. And they make more money if you ship the product overseas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, we had a surplus of refining capacity, so the industry decided to shut half of them down. Some members of Congress suspected that these closings were calculated to increase oil company profits, but the notoriously low return on refinery operations was probably sufficient disincentive.
Had they known tars sands and unconventional fossil fuels would become so easy to extract, they might have kept a few more open.
This is not a good situation for us to be in. Perhaps this is one of those times where government has to step up and help.
But to do what?
Follow Jim on https://twitter.com/JimConca and see his and Dr. Wright’s book at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419675885/sr=1-10/qid=1195953013/
