| | | ym I listened to about 2/3's of it. Bout all I could handle.
I doubt this person has spent a working day of her life inside a refinery. First couple years of my career my co commissioned a very large refinery upgrade, which included a 100,000 Bpd cat cracker. So this upgrade was to allow the refinery to process heavy awa sour crudes. My job related to mechanical equipment .... steam turbines, compressors, pumps, motors, generators, fans, expanders etc.
Not a process engineer, but from experience and osmosis know a bit about processes and why they do all the things they do in that regard.
- Afa I know US refining capacity is largest in the world.
- Many a large US refinery of today has the ability to process all different kinds of crude; sweet, sour, light, heavy, etc. Did not used to be the case, many in the old days could only handle the lighter and sweet stuff. But remember during the peak oil days of the 80's the US only produced between 5 and 6 million BPD at the bottom, rest was imported. So if you wanted to stay in the refining biz you had to invest to handle various crude types, and many did. Most of those that did not went out of business.
- A multi faceted refinery can live without heavy crude, but they like to process it, because it is denser and has more btu's per barrel. So the volume output is higher than if they process only light crude, which improves economies of scale.
- And since the 80's EPA regs have probably had a lot to do with things as well, products sold today have to be fairly 'clean', sulfur content being a big one. We had a small but decent sized refinery near here, owned by the Koch bros, it shutdown, they chose not to upgrade. They used to make diesel on the slope, no longer. The EPA gave them a long extension, but in the end they also chose to close up shop. Now all diesel used on the slope is trucked up out of Fbanks. I don't know probably 5 tankers a day or so.
I think I understand why you are asking. Venez crude output has been going downhill for years, that seems to be what happens when the commies/socialists gain control. Yet our refineries been getting by just fine. It is not like the lack of heavy Venez crude suddenly popped up.
My first co invested heavily in Venez, I mentored a Venez engineer for several months as part of a training program. Nice, sharp guy. That co lost everything they invested when Maduro and pals nationalized it all. Was billions.
Not sure how or why CVX has stuck it out in Venez, but they have. Can't mean much on the profit end for them.
Going to be interesting to see how all this moves forward. If they want to get Venez oil industry back on track going to take billions and more billions. And it will be a long process. I don't see how this will happen without some US boots on the ground, for protection of assets awa personnel. Too many have been burned, some more than once.
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