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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (40794)	3/25/2005 3:03:18 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206222

The primary reason why certain parts of refineries burst into flame or explosion is excessive run-time between overhauls. Refinery engineers are most likely to stretch out the time between shut-down maintenance when gasoline prices and refinery margins are high - like they are now. Shut-down and re-build, which takes about 45 day, happens about every 18 months. If you stretch this out to 24 months, you effectively eliminate 15 days of lost production. The unit most likely to burst into flame in a Chevron refinery is the isomaxing unit, a proprietary catalytic cracking and reforming process. This giant processing tower combines oil and natural gas with catalysts at temperatures ranging from 600 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Over time, processes like these corrode the containment vessel which eventually lead to failure. The Isomaxer normally fails with fire erupting at defective welds. Rarely, larger failures occur - which is why the operators are located in underground bunkers. When refineries stretch out maintenance leading to containment failure, regulatory agencies levy fines for pollution emission and worse consequences if anyone is hurt. google.com The explosion at BP occurred in the isomerization unit, which is the same as Chevron's Isomax except, instead of recombining crude with natural gas, it apparently processed gasoline and hydrogen with a catalyst to raise the octane of the gasoline. While I don't know exactly what temperature their process uses, just imagine gasoline and hydrogen at something around 1,000 degrees. It will explode once a small breach in the containment vessel allows the contents to interact with air. Materials at this temperature are highly corrosive and a hole in the containment wall is inevitable. The isomerization unit controllers would have been in an underground bunker. Unfortunately there were outside contract workers overhauling nearby units. The contract workers were not close enough to affect the isomerization unit, but close enough to die when it blew up. When the refinery engineers push their luck by running the processor for too many weeks beyond the time when it is scheduled for rebuilding, this is very likely to happen. I'd place the odds at around 99% that this was the cause - it's almost routine. There's still a chance that this accident was caused by something else, but I very much doubt it. They may locate a "defective weld" but that weld likely held up for the normal 18 month life of the unit. It was running the unit too long that makes the "defective weld" fail. .