Petroleum refinery

“ A pipeline under construction for the transport of petroleum products from the Burgas refinery to consuming centers at Stara Zagora and Plovdiv is to be completed sometime in 1973.
The refinery output has not been sufficient to cover all the country's requirements for petroleum products. Net imports of petroleum products in 1970, including gasoline, fuel oils, and lubricating oils, amounted to 2.5 million tons. Ninety percent of the imports originated in the Soviet Union. ”

“ Nature certainly spared no effort to bring petroleum into general notice ages before James Young manufactured paraffine-oil in Scotland or Samuel M. Kier fired-up his miniature refinery at Pittsburg. North and south, east and west the presence of the greasy staple was manifested positively and extensively. ”

“ The elder Ross was naively proud to have a “professor” visiting him, and to show him the well that was spudding in, and the one that was bailing, and the score that were drilling. They inspected the new refinery, something really special, that had been exploited in the newspapers as the latest miracle in petroleum engineering; incidentally it was a work of art, buildings of concrete and shining, newly-painted metal, set in a regular pleasure park. Oil wells are black and greasy, incurably so, but a refinery is different ”

“ When the wells cease spouting and it is not deemed advisable to bore deeper, pumping is employed. Generally the oil coming from the wells is conducted into large, carefully tamped excavations in the ground forming ponds or lakes. In these huge reservoirs the sand and heavier parts soon sink, making the bottom impervious. After the settling the petroleum is either pumped into large iron tanks or sent directly to the refinery by pipe-lines. ”

“ Affiant says the said Standard Oil Company owns and operates its refineries at Cleveland, Ohio, and its refinery at Bayonne, New Jersey; that it has no other refineries nor any interest in any other refineries, nor does the Standard Oil Company operate or control in the United States any other refineries of crude petroleum ”

“ It is true hundreds of inferior refineries have been dismantled, not because they were frozen out by a crushing monopoly, but because they lacked requisite facilities. The refineries in vogue when the Standard was organized could not stay in business a week, if resurrected and revived. A team of pack-mules might as well try to compete with the New York Central Railroad as these early refineries to meet the requirements of the petroleum-trade at its present stage of perfection. ”

“ The successful introduction of the internal combustion engine, however, completely changed the aspect of petroleum refining, and the desire became general, not to see how little motor spirit could be produced, but to perfect methods by which the yield of the benzene series of hydrocarbons should be as large as possible. Even to-day progress is still being recorded in this direction, and each American refiner is vying with his neighbour as to how far that output of gasoline, as it is there called, can be increased. ”

“ An explanation is necessary to understand why the railroads should unite: First, to carry oil received by them through pipe-lines that had combined to maintain a given rate for pipage twenty-two cents per barrel cheaper than on oil received from pipe-lines not so combining, and Second, to further weaken the refineries remaining in Western Pennsylvania by depriving them of their geographical advantage of proximity to the crude product, to the coal used as fuel, and to the exporting ports by free transportation of crude petroleum to the ring refineries in other states. ”

“ As may be imagined, the industry of petroleum refining has had to adapt itself to the altered conditions of to-day. For instance, prior to the advent of the internal combustion engine, which now is responsible for such a wide application of motor spirit, the demand for this, the lightest product of petroleum distillation, was non-existent. ”

“ It has been 30 years since a new refinery was built in our Nation, and lawsuits and red tape have made it extremely costly to expand or modify existing refineries. The result is that America now imports millions of barrels of fully refined gasoline from abroad. ”

“ The Standard Oil Trust offers to prove by various witnesses that the disastrous condition of the refining business, and the numerous failures of refiners prior to 1875, arose from imperfect methods of refining, want of co-operation among refiners, the prevalence of speculative methods in the purchase and sale of both crude and refined petroleum, sudden and great reductions in price of crude, and excessive rates of freight ”

“ They eliminated the jaded horses, oil-boats, wooden tankage, and slow freights, tedious methods, and questionable practices of handling petroleum, and substituted therefor the stem pump, the iron conduit, the steel tank storage, and systematic and businesslike methods which soon commanded the confidence and respect of all oil-producers. They extended their pipe-lines to practically every producing well and established a transportation system which serves the industry to-day as no other on earth is served. The advantages of the modern pipe-line to the oil-producer are obvious. ”

“ Owing to the enormous cost of handling coal, wood, and other crude fuel, and of removing the ash resulting from such fuel, it has been demonstrated in practice by the use of crude oil that the expense connected with the burning of brick can be reduced fully 60 per cent. This large saving is made by converting crude petroleum into gas and utilizing this fuel, either directly in the arches of the kiln or by converting the crude oil into gas in a gas producer, and drawing this fuel gas from the producer and burning the same as required in kilns of suitable construction. ”

“ This product, called a distillate, was treated with chemicals, washed with water, and run off into the tin-lined tank, where it was allowed to settle. Anybody who could get the apparatus could "make oil," and many men did—badly, of course, to begin with, and with an alarming proportion of waste and explosions and fires, but with experience they learned, and some of the great refineries of the country grew out of these rude beginnings.
Luckily not all the men who undertook the manufacturing of petroleum in these first days were inexperienced. ”

“ And it's also -- the price is also driven by the availability of infrastructure to deliver that supply, at a time when our capacity for utilization in this country under refineries is running at approximately 96 percent. Even if more supply were to come on the market from OPEC, until refinery capacity goes up, it's going to be harder to get that supply to markets, particularly in the tight summer months, particularly in regard to some of the local different -- difficulties that are created as a result of the 15 or so different recipes for reformulated gasoline across the country. ”

“ In 1916, many plants shifted from coal to fuel oil, because of the inability of the railroads to deliver coal. We have developed an oil-burning navy and are rapidly developing an oil-burning merchant marine. Ships and factory furnaces are competing with the internal-combustion engines of millions of automobiles and the hungry lamps of the countryside for the diminishing reserves of petroleum. Already the supply of crude petroleum is hard pressed by the demand for fuel oil. Already approximately one-half of the original petroleum supply of the United States is gone. ”

“ Sixty miles of pipes connect these piers and refineries with the wells. The most notable feature of all these steamers is, that they are worked entirely with oil-fuel. Newcastle coal will soon cease to find a market on the Black Sea or the Mediterranean—it may even be driven out of the Red Sea, as the use of petroleum refuse in engines becomes better understood. Already it is the only fuel in use on the Caspian, either in the mercantile marine, in the Russian gunboat flotilla, or on the railways. ”

“ Oils are also artificially produced from the so-called waste-products of the gas-works, but in some parts of the world the process of their manufacture has gone on naturally, and a yearly increasing quantity is being utilised. In England oil has been pumped up from the carboniferous strata of Coalbrook Dale, whilst in Sussex it has been found in smaller quantities, where, in all probability, it has had its origin in the lignitic beds of the Wealden strata. Immense quantities are used for fuel by the Russian steamers on the Caspian Sea, the Baku petroleum wells being a most valuable possession. ”

“ The ease with which oil fuel is handled is remarkable, for vessels of the largest size—that is, those using oil instead of coal for power purposes—could replenish their stores within a few hours at any oil port. In the transport of petroleum by the modern tankers, the taking on board of a full cargo is accomplished in about a single day, thanks to the most improved means of pumping oil from the shore tanks through flexible pipes. ”

“ It has approximately 735 tank cars, operates about 470 miles of pipe line, including adequate facilities for the transportation of crude oil from the fields to its refinery, and has about 256 wholesale and 263 retail gasoline stations in Oklahoma and other states which are supplied from its refinery. At the refinery it has gastight steel storage tanks with a total capacity of about 645,000 barrels. ”

“ They are these: that the refining of oil as a business has been of late and is now overdone; that the capacity for refining petroleum in this country exceeds the production in the ratio of three barrels to one; that the railroads have reduced freights to the lowest extreme, and were even losing money; that refiners, in spite of all their efforts, could not earn their running expenses; that the special interests of Cleveland as a refining point were in danger of being lost ”

“ And in no sphere of commercial and industrial activity has greater progress been made during the past few decades than in regard to the multiplication in the uses of the products of petroleum. The avenues for advantageous consumption are constantly increasing, and this to such an extent that the production of crude petroleum—enormous though this is—has been outstripped by the demands for the refined product. ”

“ It is, in fact, impossible to over-estimate the importance of this up-to-date system of oil transportation in the United States as it exists to-day. To show the impossibility of conducting the present-day American petroleum industry without the use of pipe-lines, let me give a few facts. The large oil-tank cars, which are not unusual sights on our railways, hold, at the maximum, about 25 tons of oil. Excluding California altogether from these illustrations, the half-a-million barrels of oil which are transported daily in the States by pipe-lines would fill over 2,500 tank cars. ”

“ It has added untold millions to the wealth of the country and conferred incalculable benefits upon humanity. To-day refined petroleum lights more dwellings in America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia than all other agencies combined. ”

“ And even if the supply of petroleum were far less limited than the experts estimate it to be, even if there were enough of it to last for many decades to come, the fact that it is practically the one lubricant of the industrial world makes it a social crime to burn it as a substitute for coal. Without it, every railroad wheel would run hot and stop; the great turbines in our ships and modern power plants move on bearings that are smothered in petroleum oil. ”

“ Taking first the methods of oil transportation by land, in no other oil-producing country do we find such an elaborate system for dealing with enormous quantities of petroleum as in America, for it is safe to say that at least 500,000 barrels of crude oil have to be dealt with daily at the present time. ”

“ As in the United States, a considerable part of the actual production of petroleum in Russia is distributed among a large number of individually weak companies, dominated, through the control of pipe-line or refining facilities, by one or another of the principal groups. ”

“ The Russian oil-fields have an output of, approximately, 10,000,000 tons annually, or, roughly, 15 per cent. of the world’s total production of crude oil. Since the time when the petroleum industry was placed upon a commercial footing, the Russian fields have produced 230,000,000 tons of petroleum. ”

“ Many years ago, fuel oil made its serious début, but at that time the supply of the product was very uncertain, and, consequently, progress in passing from the old to the new form of power-raising was slow. To-day, however, matters have materially changed. The crude oil output has been immeasurably increased, and many fields whose production of crude oil is essentially suited for fuel purposes have been opened up. ”

“ He can suffer heavily his own mistakes, learn from them, cor-rect them. He can fight opposition, bear all—so long as the work is his. There were refiners in 1875 who loved their business in this way. Why one should love an oil refinery the outsider may not see; but to the man who had begun with one still and had seen it grow by his own energy and intelligence to ten, who now sold 500 barrels a day where he once sold five, the refinery was the dearest spot on earth save his home. ”

“ The enormous wastage of a world's war, resulting in a cry for more production, a new level of high prices for crude, rumors of an alarming shortage of supply, the success of independent producers, large and small—all these, and other reasons, too, caused many people hitherto uninterested to turn their serious attention to petroleum. ”