A Refinery’s Fever Pitch
On a sweltering morning here in the Bay Area late last month, employees at Valero Energy Corp.’s refinery geared up for another tough day of making gasoline.
Inside the hulking complex, cold water cascaded over mustard-colored tanks in a makeshift effort to bolster the cooling system. At their morning meeting, managers discussed a pump outage the previous day that nearly triggered a major shutdown, and employees gave progress reports on repair projects. One noted that there was a nettlesome beehive that could make it difficult to access a nearby safety valve in an emergency.
Keeping a refinery running all day, every day, demands attention to such details. But in the oil refining business, the most meticulous supervision can’t prevent production glitches, especially in California, where the state’s 13 gasoline-producing refineries are straining to make enough cleaner-burning fuel to satisfy drivers and appease clean-air regulators.
The Benicia refinery -- at 36 years old the youngest in California -- has suffered at least five serious breakdowns since January, limiting production and several times tipping the region’s brittle supply-and-demand balance.
Benicia hasn’t been alone: There has been an unusually high number of so-called production-reducing refinery failures this year, twice the historical average cited in a recent California Energy Commission report.
Just last month, problems at California refineries owned by Valero, Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Tesoro Petroleum Corp. cut statewide gasoline output by more than 8%, which experts say caused the average pump price for regular unleaded gasoline in California to jump more than 9 cents a gallon in one week. On Wednesday, a steam boiler explosion at ConocoPhillips’ Carson refinery caused no injuries but paralyzed the plant, one of California’s largest, and caused an immediate jump in wholesale gasoline prices.
The Benicia refinery has had more than its share of outages this year. “It’s not a track record that anybody would be proud of,” said Bill Buckalew, Valero’s general manager at Benicia. At the same time, he said, “there’s a misunderstanding about how really complicated these things are. Everything in those pipes is highly flammable, and a lot of it is at high temperature and high pressure. There are thousands of pieces of equipment, and all of them have a finite lifetime and need maintenance.”
When all the parts are running well, Buckalew and his Benicia crews make 10% of California’s gasoline, or about 4.2 million gallons a day. Every year, Benicia and the state’s other major refineries, located near the ports around Los Angeles and San Francisco, produce 16.2 billion gallons of fuel for consumption by motorists in California, Arizona and Nevada.
That’s not enough to meet demand, though, so imports fill the shortfall. But it takes as long as two weeks for delivery of shipments from overseas. And with oil companies keeping only small reserves for emergencies, they can’t immediately make up for an unexpected drop in production.
“The California refineries run pretty much at capacity, especially in the summer months, so if you lose one you know that you’re short of supply,” said Joanne Shore, a senior analyst at the federal Energy Information Administration, an arm of the Energy Department. “That means that prices are going to keep going up until some more supplies can get there.”
That point was underscored during the June uptick, as well as in March, when a combination of events pushed up the price for regular gasoline to a record statewide average of $2.145 a gallon. Unanticipated refinery outages were part of the problem, according to regulators.
Such price hikes have led some to cast refineries as villains, not that they’ve ever been popular. Outside the oil industry, people tend to look on refineries with disdain -- or worse. Despite improvements in safety and pollution control in recent decades, refineries are still viewed as ugly, dangerous beasts that can belch noxious pollutants when they misfire. They are often clustered along coastlines and sometimes sit near neighborhoods.
Critics of the industry agree that, given their complexity and harsh environment, refineries are bound to break down occasionally. But they say it’s a different story when the glitches happen in bunches.
“When you see a system that is riddled with outages just at a time when people use it most, like the summer drive time, it reminds me of the California electricity crisis,” said Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica. “It’s very similar to how all of the electric plants went off-line once the price of electricity went up.”
During the 2000-01 energy meltdown, power plant owners were accused of intentionally squelching electricity production with timely outages to drive up profits on the remaining supply, which they could then sell at inflated prices.
Oil industry experts say refineries do sometimes reduce output when they are losing money and demand is weak, but in supply-tight California, they say plants have every incentive to keep up production. Unlike power generators, refineries have contracts that require them to deliver fuel to a network of customers, from retail gas stations to wholesalers that in turn supply businesses and government agencies. When a refinery falters, the company has to summon supplies from sister plants or buy fuel from a competitor at inflated spot-market prices to honor its commitments.
“The only way to make money is to stay running,” said Rick Albis, an operator at ConocoPhillips’ 84-year-old refinery in Wilmington, one of the few California plants that hasn’t reported a major breakdown this year. “Once a unit goes down, then there’s a shortage, and your competitor makes all the money.”
The Benicia refinery, which Valero bought from ExxonMobil Corp. in May 2000, is a collection of complicated -- and huge -- machines, tanks, pipes and towers of different heights and sizes. Except for some olive-green towers and tanks, the whole thing is painted mustard yellow.
Inside the refinery’s cave-like passageways, workers in fire-proof jumpers wear earplugs to soften the roar of big machines in action, a loud hum accented by the whir of turbine engines and the steady whoosh of fluids and gases coursing through pipes that zig and zag everywhere. The air is hot and laced with the greasy-musty smell common to heavy industry.
Benicia’s crew of 29 workers tends to thousands of pumps, compressors, valves, seals and other components crucial to the operation. The making of gasoline begins by running raw crude oil through a distillation tower, a tall cooker that uses heat to separate the basic liquid and vapor components of oil according to weight and boiling point.
The workhorse is a tall, bullet-shaped unit known as the fluid catalytic cracker, or FCC, which mixes a powdery catalyst with heavier gas oil fluids -- at 1,300 degrees and low pressure -- to “crack” larger hydrocarbon molecules and create gasoline and gasoline ingredients. Its support system includes furnaces, heat exchangers and other machines.
It was the FCC that Benicia managers shut down for 16 days in June, cutting the plant’s gasoline production by 2.3 million gallons a day. A bearing problem caused a pump seal to fail, and a chemical spilled and caught fire, according to Valero. No one was injured in the 45-minute blaze, but the 40-foot flames fried overhead instrumentation cables and crippled the FCC.
Valero’s Buckalew described that particular problem with the FCC as a “killer” for the company.
“People have this idea that we cut production just because we want to affect supply and demand,” he said. “But you can sacrifice a lot of your profits for the year in a few weeks.”
