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White House asks oil companies to postpone refinery maintenance – report
Forbes/AFX
The White House has asked US refiners to postpone all scheduled maintenance in order to keep up production levels after extensive disruption to the Gulf of Mexico energy industry production after Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Times reported.
It quoted an executive with a refinery in Houston as saying: ‘The message from the government is, ‘Run the refinery as high as you can and avoid all the non-priority maintenance in the next four or six weeks’.’ …
(7 September 2005)
Canada may defer refinery maintenance to help U.S
Jeffrey Jones, Reuters
CALGARY, Alberta – Canada’s oil companies are considering pushing back autumn maintenance at refineries to help alleviate U.S. gasoline shortages caused by Hurricane Katrina, an industry official said on Thursday.
However, there are no specific emergency provisions within the North American Free Trade Agreement under which more petroleum products or crude oil can be shipped to the United States, said Greg Stringham, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
“We’ll do whatever we can, as is humanly possible. If they can help identify what the needs are, we’ll try and meet them,” Stringham said. …
(1 September 2005)
BP kept unit running despite memo on eroded pipes
Anne Belli, Houston Chronicle
BP Texas City refinery managers in May knowingly kept running a unit with thinning and eroding pipes — which they considered a serious safety risk — just two months after a blast at another unit killed 15 people, according to an internal BP e-mail the Houston Chronicle obtained.
If pipes within a refinery become too thin and the erosion is severe, they can quickly fail and lead to fires and explosions. …
(9 September 2005)
Oil drilling 101: sharing the wealth
Heading Out, The Oil Drum
Well, it’s another well, or is this Saturday already?
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Well it’s another Saturday, and to make up for a few rather long posts this one should be relatively short as it moves us “techie-folk” toward a slightly different focus. For after all, here you are, sitting in the local “malt and cigar” shop, quietly bragging to your new and “very close” friends about how much money you’re making from buying into that oil well, and they would like to get in on the action.
And if you have a good well, then the obvious next move is to drill a second well and get your friends involved. But how do you do that, and more particularly how close should a really good friend get?
You might be familiar with some of the early photos of the oilwells when the first boom first began, and they were drilled almost on top of one another. There was an interesting ruling that came about at that time, and which has persisted since. It is called “The rule of capture” and essentially it says that whatever flows into your oilwell, regardless of where it came from, is yours. (`cos you “captured” it).So let’s say that you live in a nice neighborhood in downtown San Diego, for instance. And under your neighborhood someone discovers there is a rich pool of oil. Well if your next door neighbor is a fast mover, he might drill his well and suck all the oil out of your particular bit of that pool, before you can blink, and yup! It’s his (or hers).
So what do you do to counter this and get what’s yours before it is half-inched?
(10 September 2005)
One more in The Oil Drum’s series on the technology of oil. The original article includes a list of previous articles in the series.
Oil Spike Sends New England to Wood
Distant Events Stoke Homeowners’ Interest in Stoves for Winter Heat
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
LYNDEBOROUGH, N.H. — There are plenty of ways to tell that the market for firewood has taken off here. Wood-burning stoves are selling out in stores, the price of split wood has jumped past $200 a cord and would-be woodsmen are filling up classes on lumberjack skills.
But perhaps the best way to see what’s happening is to watch Maxine work.
Maxine is the nickname that logger Tom Chrisenton has given to the refrigerator-size, chain saw-swinging mechanical chopper that he uses to fell trees on his property here in southern New Hampshire.
(11 September 2005)
Magnetic energy? Perhaps
David Lazarus, SF Chronicle
The nation’s energy industry is struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Gas prices are soaring as a result of the catastrophic storm. America’s reliance on overseas oil increases every year.
And from his office in the North Bay city of Sebastopol, Mark Goldes envisions a day — perhaps not so far off — when none of this will be a problem. Goldes, 73, is chief executive of a small company called Magnetic Power Inc., which has spent years researching ways to, yes, generate power using magnets. Within a few months, he says, he might just have a breakthrough to report that could revolutionize where people get fuel.
“We’re not yet ready to talk about what’s happening in our lab because, honestly, we don’t know what’s happening,” Goldes told me. “All we know is that we’re seeing more energy output than input. We’re still having trouble making it repeatable, but we think that’s more an engineering problem than a scientific problem,” he said.
Does Goldes realize what’s he’s saying — that he’s perhaps discovered a clean, inexhaustible energy source? “That’s exactly what it appears to be,” he answered.
What Goldes believes he’s done is produce power from what physicists call zero-point energy. In simple terms, zero-point energy results from the infinitesimal motion of molecules even when seemingly at rest.
OK, let’s throw a whole bunch of caveats at this. First of all, I’ve spoken with physicists at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions, and not one said that what Goldes claims to have accomplished is doable.
Theoretically possible, they acknowledged. But not doable.
…My inclination is to suspect that cheap, limitless energy is probably a crock. Goldes might sincerely buy into this stuff, but there’s undoubtedly another explanation for what he claims to have achieved in his lab.
Then again, what if he’s right?
(7 September 2005)
The skepicism that Lazarus brings to the subject is welcome. -BA
