The Hindu Business Line : Oily journey ‘from pump to pipeline’

Not a day passes without some story about oil or gas. And you may be excused for wondering why should be bear the brunt of Brent reports, or for indefinitely waiting at the kitchen tap for an invisible fuel to flow in through the city distribution system.

For a change, try ‘Oil on the Brain’ by Lisa Margonelli ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). A book that takes you from the petrol pumps to the oil fields, exploring ‘the culture of oil – the economies, destinies, and dreams shared by the people who live along the world’s pipelines’.

Along the way, you’d pick up nuggets of information. Such as that in California alone, the amount of petrol vapour wafting out of stations at the time of fuel-filling “totals 15,811 gallons a day – roughly the equivalent of two full tanker trucks”. That the gas stations can make more money selling water than gas. Or that the ‘break-away valve’ at the end of the hose ‘separates at twenty pounds of pressure’ so that if somebody drove off with the hose in the tank (as it happens twice a month!) it would be enough to replace the nozzle and the valve rather than the whole pump.

“Tanker trucks are the final and most visible part of an enormous octopus of pipelines, rail lines, barges, and tanker ships delivering gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products from the oil fields, to refineries, to gas stations,” describes the author. She talks to Dr Dave Verma, who has been studying benzene and truck drivers for more than two decades at McMaster University. “Driving a petrol truck is a higher risk than driving a vegetable truck because the tanker drivers have added exposure to the petroleum,” he concedes.

Join Lisa in her trip to the refinery, where she feels ‘like an ant in a maze designed for rats’, what with pipes everywhere. “Refineries are molecular butchers, dissembling crude oil and shaping it into smaller, usable components,” she explains graphically.

You’d also learn how crude arrives as ‘a stew of hydrocarbon chains’ and gets sorted by the refinery ‘by size and behaviour’ in fractioning towers. “The key ingredient is steam – a million pounds an hour, one-and-a-half gallons of water for every gallon of crude.”

The oily journey then moves on to a drilling rig, where the author realises that “the only real measure of a project’s worth is the oil or gas that gets found. Intentions, promotions, hopes, and personalities fade in front of the mighty drill bit.”

Bits are as expensive as a new compact car, she informs. “The bit consists of three cones tilted inward, each covered with medieval spikes… resembling the maw of a housefly magnified to the size of a football helmet.”

Lisa leads you also to SPR, the mysterious Strategic Petroleum Reserve – ‘a political football, a security issue, and a possible hazard in the oil markets’. According to some economists, the emergency stockpile’s existence is ‘inflating oil prices by 25 per cent’.

A chapter on NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) oil market lets you relish the slice of action on the floor. “For us, short term is the last three minutes,” says an analyst there. “None of us know. This whole market, nobody knows where it’s going. We might have opinions or experience, but all you can really expect is a mystery of faith.” Lisa finds the crude pit to be ‘an intoxicating mix of operatic drama and Super Bowl spectacle…’

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Oily journey ‘from pump to pipeline’