US largest refinery may need a year for repairs

[herm]

The sour crude CDU is severely damaged

Erwin Seba - REUTERS - June 25, 2012

It uses 600,000 barrels of oil and produces 6 million gallons of gasoline every day, just in time for the 4th of July. --Ed.

In the end, all it took was a small chemical spill -- perhaps less than a barrelful -- to bring down the newest, mightiest oil refinery in the United States.

Three weeks ago, while workers repaired a minor leak at the Port Arthur, Texas plant owned by Motiva Enterprises, a few gallons a day of so-called "caustic" was inadvertently seeping into the newly built Crude Distillation Unit (CDU), the 30-story-high network of interconnected cylinders and latticed pipelines at the heart of the refining process.

While harmless when mixed with crude, the undiluted caustic vaporized into an invisible but devastating agent of corrosion as the chamber heated up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370 Celsius); the chemical gas raced through key units, fouled huge heaters and corroded thousands of feet of stainless steel pipe.

Now, just weeks after they commissioned the biggest U.S. refinery project in a decade, two of the world's biggest oil titans -- Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, which own Motiva -- are rushing to repair the potentially billion-dollar glitch that has added an embarrassing and costly coda to a landmark $10 billion expansion.

After a five-year effort to double the plant's capacity, making it the largest in the country, they must now reassemble many of the same people and parts for a blitzkrieg fix that may exceed the original $300 million cost of the unit: corrosion experts are flying in from across the world; hundreds of workers are being hired; bespoke 30-inch (75-cm) stainless steel pipelines and 30-story cranes may need to be obtained quickly, according to sources involved in the repairs.

... [Read More]

[Carcus]

The whole thing sounds squirrelly.

[phoebeisis]

If I was a conspiracy "person"
I would be certain this was a setup to raise gasoline prices.
Gasoline has been plummeting in price-and small difference in supply make HUGE differences in the price we pay.
We use how much gasoline-maybe 200,000,000 gallons per day(pure guess)
add 20 cents to the price- $40,000,000 per day-25 days $1 billion.

Yeah it was just a screw up- but what a screw up!!
I will bet we IMMEDIATELY-TODAY- notice a price spike!!

[ALS]

Well Gasoline futures initially jumped three cents and have dropped down to 2.6 cents in the last thirty minutes. I figure we will continue to see it drop back as the day proceeds on.

[50 mpg by 2012]

Apparently OPEC (and others) need a market for sour crude.

Their sweet crude must not be able to meet total demand even at higher prices.

I think there is another smaller refinery of this type scheduled to come on line 3Q12.

[thunderstruck]

Hopefully with more competent engineering. Wouldn't take much, obviously, to sabotage one. Who needs to crash a plane into a refinery? Al Quaeda could get more bang for their buck with some strategically placed Drano.

[WriConsult]

WHOOOPS! Another refinery accident. How convenient. And at a refinery co-owned by Shell and Aramco? Interesting.

An incident at the Northwest's largest refinery caused our prices to be highly elevated for most of the spring. No pattern here folks, move along.

All this is reminding me of the 2001 Western power crisis, for which we northwesterners are still paying in the form of 15-year power contracts that locked in that year, thanks to an unusual number of power plants being offline due to problems or just plain "maintenance". Now this year there has been an unusual number of refinery problems. I'll be watching closely for signs of history repeating itself. First time is tragedy, remember.

[herm]

hmm.. maybe the Chinese are to blame, so they can get their hands on the Canadian and Venezuelan tar..

[ALS]

Well gasoline futures are up 8 cents for the day.

[phoebeisis]

"Hopefully with more competent engineering. Wouldn't take much, obviously, to sabotage one."
RIGHT!
Hard to believe something like this wasn't forseen.
What did they do-outsource the engineering of this plant??
The BP disaster was simple to understand- it was a cheapout-didn't want to "admit" the cement job was ineffective-if they did it was going to cost time=$$
Didn't keep the blowout preventer properly maintained-once and time=$$
And money in BPs case was millions per day- real money even by oil "bidness" standards.
This refinery however- probably was an extra $1,000,000 to correctly engineer it-one time cost-nothing to the oil "bidness"

Yeah there is a cheapout-or outsourcing- at the bottom of this
Maybe a scam- but more likely just a plain old short sighted(quarterly report) cheapout-
CHEAPOUT!