Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer’s records.
These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an “invisible hurricane,” have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country’s 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analysts.
There have been blazes at refineries in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and California, some of them caused by lightning strikes. Plants have suffered power losses that disrupted operations; a midsize refinery in Kansas was flooded by torrential rains last month...
...Every refinery would like to run as much crude as possible but they simply can’t,” said David Greely, senior energy economist at Goldman Sachs, who in a recent report compared the drop in domestic refining with an “invisible hurricane.” “These are more complex systems. There are more chances for things to go wrong. And when things go wrong, they tend to back up the system.”
Meanwhile, refiners have been scrambling to meet a raft of environmental regulations, phase out toxic additives, add ethanol to the fuel mix and introduce new ultralow sulfur standards for gasoline and diesel. Industry insiders attribute much of the fragility of refining operations to the difficulty of making these cleaner fuels...
...This year’s problems have raised alarms about the safety of refining operations, especially after a deadly accident at a BP refinery in Texas two years ago that killed 15 workers. The federal Chemical Safety Board issued a highly critical report blaming a broken safety culture at BP. But the board’s chairwoman, Carolyn W. Merritt, who has spoken out about safety problems at refineries, said there was a pattern in many other refinery incidents that the board had investigated...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/business/22refine.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sloginIn addition, many environmentalists have been critical of the fossil fuel industry's inability to build a permanent repository for dangerous fossil fuel waste.
Such waste is widely distributed and can be detected almost everywhere on the planet.
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