July 24, 2012:

Safety at chemical plants and refineries has not improved despite scores of fatalities over the last decade and won’t until companies develop better systems for identifying red flags that point to potential disaster, panelists said at a hearing in Houston on Monday. The first day of a two-day hearing by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board focused on safety shortcomings that contributed to deadly incidents like the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers and injured scores. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill will be the main topic as the hearing continues Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown. Those incidents and others might have been prevented had companies paid closer attention to what the regulators called “leading indicators” – operational mishaps that may foreshadow serious safety hazards, regulators said.

Although panelists offered some praise for positive industry steps, they questioned the focus of safety recommendations crafted mainly by the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade organization and lobbying group. The institute’s standards for reporting, analyzing and acting on leading indicators probably would not have provided enough information to have prevented some recent disasters, said Bill Hoyle, a senior Chemical Safety Board investigator. For example, he said, eight chemical releases that preceded the Texas City incident were of insufficient size or duration to trigger disclosure under the existing standards, Hoyle said. “I think that’s a pretty important example,” Hoyle said. “Had those previous incidents been given serious attention – had they counted as process safety incidents and given the importance they should have got from that – we very well could have prevented the disaster that we had in 2005.”

21 companies involved

In Monday’s hearing and in previous reports, the safety board has stressed the need for process safety – systematic evaluation of the factors that lead to major accidents – in addition to personal safety that focuses on preventing injuries from such incidents as falls and dropped objects. Kelly Keim, the chief process safety engineer for Exxon Mobil Chemical, who served as vice chairman of the group that drafted the API standards, said that widespread adoption of the process safety monitoring guidelines has made a difference. A total of 21 companies, representing 91 percent of U.S. refining capacity, have reported 2011 figures on potential process safety indicators to API, Keim said.

But Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said that little substantive change has occurred to improve safety since the Texas City refinery explosion. “We were disappointed at the low level of learning that seemed to be happening in the industry,” Barab said of refineries after a recent OSHA emphasis on the industry. The chemical industry was no different, he said. “You’ll find the exact same hazards, the exact same violations, and pretty much the exact same lack of learning in that industry as well,” he said.

Few changes

In criticizing industry-supported standards they said don’t go far enough, Chemical Safety Board panelists referred to prescribed “obligations” in quotations marks because they are not legally binding. Certain chemical releases or gas leaks would be exempt from reporting because they would be too small, although they could be “potential indicators of more serious events,” said Manuel Gomez, the safety board’s director of recommendations. Although some investigators commended BP on safety monitoring improvements at its Texas City refinery, union representatives contended that little has changed at it or other plants. They argued that criminal penalties and steep fines for mistakes were the only way to force substantial safety improvements and prevent further deaths and injuries.

Katherine Rodriguez, of the United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, said the relatives of those who died in such incidents should play a role in any regulatory discussion. “Twenty-two men and women died at the BP Texas City refinery in a five-year span,” she said. “One of them was my father. I want you all to realize that what we are talking about over the next few days. They are not just numbers. They are men and women and we miss them every day.”

By Fuelfix

July 24, 2012:

NEW YORK - Bp Plc reduced crude run rates by up to 30 percent at its 337,000 refinery in Whiting, Indiana after a coker outage, traders said.  Chicago CBOB gasoline had rallied on Monday afternoon, up 5.00 cents a gallon to 17.50 cents under the August RBOB gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile exchange on refiner buying. The company did not immediately return calls for comment.

By Reuters

July 23, 2012:

PBF Energy will spend up to $60 million to build additional rail infrastructure at its 190,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Delaware City, Delaware, allowing the refinery to take advantage of increasing production of North American crude oil production, a source familiar with the situation said on Monday. The company will put its Clean Fuels project on the back burner in order to use its capital on shorter-term projects, said Michael Karlovich, a spokesman for PBF Energy. Originally, the company envisioned a three-year Clean Fuels project where it would spend $1 billion on a hydrocracking unit and hydrogen plant to increase distillate production from the refinery. Its sister refinery, across the Delaware River in Paulsboro, New Jersey would also benefit from the expansion.

Now, PBF is looking to internally generate working capital to invest in the Clean Fuels project. Spending less money on a shorter-term project to provide the plant with less expensive crude will help do that. Details of the rail expansion capacity are still being worked out. "The decision was reached last week," said Karlovich about the change of plans. "So we are still in the planning stages," he added. The refinery is flexible in being able to process heavier, traditionally less expensive crudes instead of only the normal East Coast refinery diet of imported light, sweet crudes. The additional rail infrastructure will allow the refinery access to both less expensive Canadian crudes as well as crude from the Bakken shale oil formation in North Dakota.

The refineries along the East Coast of the U.S. have faced high crude prices because historically they have run light, sweet crude imported from the North Sea and West Africa. The surging production from North Dakota's Bakken shale oil formation and other crudes have made it possible for refineries at risk for closure -- like Sunoco's 330,000 bpd Philadelphia refinery and the neighboring 185,000 bpd Trainer refinery -- to operate economically by replacing part of their expensive foreign crude slate with less expensive domestic crude, despite logistical challenges of moving crude oil by rail.

By Reuters

July 23, 2012:

SEATTLE (AP) — In 2009, Gov. Chris Gregoire declared that Washington would treat climate-changing gases as harmful pollutants that must be curbed. So environmental groups were surprised two years later when the Department of Ecology refused to use existing state rules to curb greenhouse gases from Puget Sound's five oil refineries. Refineries, after all, are Washington's second-largest non-vehicle source of emissions. Environmentalists sued the state and won. A federal judge this spring told Ecology it must hunt for ways to reduce refinery emissions. But Ecology, joined by the petroleum industry, has appealed the decision — and is rewriting the very rules the judge relied upon to reach her conclusion. "They're doing everything they can to avoid having to do this," said Becky Kelley, with the Washington Environmental Council, one of the groups that filed suit. "Until we sued them they weren't doing anything, and they've pretty much told us they're not intending to do anything. They don't want to do this job, and I don't get it. I think people should be angry. It's not right."

The state maintains the judge made a mistake, and Washington never intended to regulate greenhouse gases at refineries. Instead it wants the federal government to lead. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is already working on national emissions rules for refineries, but those rules would only be triggered when facilities seek to upgrade. Emissions rules for refinery facilities that want to continue as-is remain several years away — provided there aren't extended delays. The dispute over which emissions to reduce, and how, highlights the complex factors that help set or dash priorities when attempting to respond to climate change. The state's top clean-air expert said Ecology shares environmentalists' overall emissions-reductions goals. But because the state's refineries get their power from relatively clean sources, he said, there are few easy improvements to be made. He also said the state had been working on the rule change long before environmentalists sued.

"The major concern for me is the huge administrative and analytical costs involved," said Stu Clark, head of Ecology's clean-air program. "If we're going to spend our energy doing something about climate change, let's focus on something that does make a difference — where we know we've got significant gains that can be leveraged. "If the political winds said I could do anything I wanted to address climate change, refineries wouldn't be anywhere near the top priority." The reason: The five Puget Sound refineries combined account for nearly 6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year, second among stationary sources only to TransAlta's coal-fired power plant in Centralia, which accounts for nearly 10 million metric tons. But that pales in comparison to emissions from motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes and boats, which combined account for more than 45 million metric tons. That's nearly half of the state's total emissions, which are about 101 million metric tons.

"I get that the environmental community is very frustrated by the lack of action nationally and ... really wants something to happen," Clark said. "But to me, this is just a complete alteration of the structure of the federal Clean Air Act." Activists from the Washington Environmental Council and the Sierra Club remain furious with the state over its approach, especially given the enthusiasm with which Gregoire went about, in 2009, negotiating with TransAlta's owners and helping find a way to get the power plant to stop burning coal by 2025. More importantly, said Janette Brimmer, an attorney with Earthjustice, much of the federal EPA's approach to greenhouse gases and other pollutants has come in response to pressure from states that first threaten to tackle issues on their own. Ecology's position removes that leverage. "How many times over how many decades and for how many pollutants have we heard the argument that 'the Feds are on it?' " said Brimmer, who won the environmentalists' lawsuit in federal court. "That's a lame excuse, and it makes no sense at all. These rules have been in play forever, and there have been countless delays. We are years from seeing results on the ground."

Brimmer and Kelly met privately last week with EPA officials in Seattle and asked them to deny the state Department of Ecology's request to change its rules. But the EPA, while not yet committing either way, is inclined to side with Ecology, arguing that following the judge's decision could lead to a kind of chaos. "To just address it locally (the refinery issue) would be meaningless, and no matter what you did, you would set up all this structure that's not suited for this type of problem," said Rick Albright, head of EPA's air, waste and radiation program for the Northwest region. The EPA requires states to have plans to deal with six of the most dangerous air contaminants — such as lead or sulfur dioxide. If a state or region doesn't keep those pollutants in line in accordance with strict federal limits, the federal government will force states to take drastic steps to clean the air.

While the EPA, too, has officially declared greenhouse gases to be dangerous, it hasn't included them on this list of pollutants covered under EPA's national ambient air quality standards. But U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman ruled in December that the way Washington's administrative code is written, greenhouse gases do fall on the state list of contaminants that have to be kept in line. That means the state is obligated to demand major sources, such as refineries, apply "reasonably available control technology" to improve emissions. She gave Washington 26 months to comply. The state and regional clean-air authorities say they are taking steps toward that effort even as they appeal. Nationwide, the country's 150 refineries are among the largest sources of greenhouse gases. The bulk of that carbon-dioxide pollution is from the combustion of petroleum, which is part of the fuel-making process. But refineries also require gobs of energy, much of it (outside Washington) from dirty fuel sources, such as coal-fired power plants.

Cleaning up refineries requires a complicated mix of using cleaner-burning fuels, making systemwide internal efficiencies and switching to cleaner electricity sources. Clark, at Ecology, said that since Washington's plants get power from relatively clean electrical sources, such as hydropower and natural gas — and absent new technologies to sequester carbon from combustion — the only clear way to improve emissions is through efficiencies. And engineers with clean-air agencies "who know more about the internal workings of refineries feel that our refineries are already some of the more efficient in the country," Clark said.

Environmentalists disagree.

"Nobody knows how clean and efficient our refineries are because they (the state) haven't really gone through the process to look," Brimmer said. "They're just saying, 'Trust us, we kind of know,' but that could be true for everything. That's why we have to have clean-air laws." While California is already moving to set emissions ceilings on refineries as part of a statewide cap-and-trade effort to curb greenhouse gases across all industries, Clark said the best approach is to let EPA take the lead nationally.

By Chem Info

July 23, 2012

Valero Energy Corp said all units at its 125,000 barrel-per-day Meraux, Louisiana, refinery were shut following a fire early Sunday.  "A full damage assessment is still under way at the Meraux refinery," company spokesman Bill Day said on Monday. The units will remain down while repairs are made to the crude unit and related utilities, Day said. A leaking exchanger at the refinery caught on fire at about 1:30 a.m. local time (0630 GMT) on Sunday, a report filed with the U.S. National Response Center showed. "It is believed that it was leaking crude oil," the report said. The fire was extinguished on Sunday with no injuries. The refinery can process medium sour crude oil and produces premium products.

By NewsDaily