Episode 167: 2019 Philadelphia Refinery Explosion

Three, two, one, mark.

Okay, now there's a tone now.

Close enough.

There's always been a tone.

There's just two tones.

Ah, yes.

Pick it up, Broody.

Okay.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Oh, did you not like that?

I'm not a scar fan, right?

Yes, you are.

No, yes, you are.

Yes, yes, you are.

You know, what's very weird is my one-year-old daughter is a scar fan.

She's a okay, cheap sky.

She loves madness, but she's she loves the she loves just and she's to the point where she's starting to say

to herself when it plays, which is amazing.

Very good.

Yes, we're raising a good one.

I say we, like, I'm helping to parent Gareth Baby.

Of course you're helping to parent Lana.

You are across the Atlantic reaching out into my mind and soul and helping me parent.

That's what I'm doing.

Yes.

That's sweeter than we usually have on this podcast.

Yeah, usually it's death.

And nobody dies in this episode.

Well, we don't know that yet.

So funny.

We don't know that yet.

Yeah.

So

welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are...

Did I say he and him already?

I can't fucking think.

Yeah, whatever.

And we have a game.

We have a they're he and him.

And we have

not a guest, but not a guest.

Not a guest.

Temporary fourth mic.

Yes.

Until the situation improves, you are going to have to live with it.

Is this social security?

This is network rails full.

Yeah, fuck.

Yes.

Yeah, this is social security because there is no such thing anymore in the UK.

My name's Gath Dennis.

I'm a rail engineer, and my pronouns are

he and him.

Sorry, I thought about the fact that I was like, impressed to myself.

I was was like no i'm not a rail engineer anymore by profession but not by career thanks hendy anyway uh we're not going to talk about at all inclination yeah

yeah by personal interest yeah that's it it's a hobby of mine now

worse worse than unemployed demoted to podcast

but this is the thing right if if if the you know the right get this endless network of uh like think tanks and consultancies and stuff that mean that no one's ever really completely out of work and you never really see the back of yourself

We can influence the same thing.

We can do it.

I believe, believe, this is what they mean by dual power, right?

Yes.

Bi mode.

They have turned me into a bi mode.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah.

I'm no longer cancelled.

I cannot be cancelled.

I cannot be cancelled.

That's very true, right?

There's always more podcasts, you know?

If we, like, you know, God forbid, we have to fire you from this one for like, I don't know, you just instantly

build another station that we're fond of, then it's fine.

We just, we just shift you to Kill James Bond and from there to Trash Future and from there to come out to the mess.

Yeah, well, just we move the disruptive host around and don't worry about what we're doing on the back end here.

I love that analogy.

Again, day one.

Awesome.

I didn't love it.

What do you want me to fucking do, Nova?

Just like, introduct.

Here's your introductory package.

by the way do i have a metaphor for you about your job

oh

i love you all so much

love you too and this is why we're excited that you're you're joining us you know i'm so excited it's an honor it's an honor and i i hope the the hogs don't mind hi hi hogs I love each other.

That's how they'll do it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

What are they going to do?

Break out of the pen?

I don't think so.

I also don't think so.

What are they going to do?

Unsubscribe in an extremely easy process?

Remember, don't hit that subscribe button if you're already subscribed.

Yeah, because then you unsubscribe and that's not.

Unsubscribe.

That's bad.

You know what you can do?

You can hit the dislike button because that still counts as engagement.

YouTube counts.

Yeah, Joseph Google will.

Dislike and subscribe.

Yeah, exactly.

Joseph Google will come in and try and take your giant

logo back, which would be a disaster.

Yeah.

God.

Also, I'm still out of breath because I had to sprint across central Glasgow.

Yeah, you've been putting in some calisthenic efforts, getting your weight working.

I've been going on a number of dates, and then that has led to me traveling more and also having to do some urban hiking.

It's fine.

It's worth it.

More than worth it, actually, but it does mean that I am slightly fucked for work, which is what this is.

It's fine.

I mean, Roz, I assume, has been drinking.

I've been drinking.

Yeah, I know.

I feel great.

I did so many errands today.

Nice.

I feel very accomplished.

I don't know.

I'm in a good mood.

I'm ready to podcast.

At some point, I will need to eat dinner.

So I will mute myself when that time comes, or I won't mute myself and I'll just be a huge asshole.

I'm kidding.

I will mute myself.

I love a chores day.

My ADHD brain, it's the only day that I get lots of nice dopamine.

Put podcasts in my ears, do chores, feel happy about life.

It's nice.

You guys are doing chores?

I'm not getting shit done.

I do.

Yeah.

Well, so here's the thing, Nova.

So my wife, the lovely and talented and beautiful.

Oh, yeah.

I've spoken to her many times.

Yeah, she's wonderful.

She runs this house like the goddamn Navy, and I am an N Center.

I am

over budget.

Yeah, yeah.

My wife is just like, hey, like, you're off.

Go do these tasks.

And I'm like, but I wanted to sit and relax.

She's like, and she says, that's cool.

Go do your tasks.

I'm just like,

you get married and what you do is you install an objective tracker in your life.

Yeah, exactly.

Did you go to the, you know, did you get your hair cut?

Yes, I did.

Did you do this?

Yes, I did.

I just want to watch.

I don't know, not Pat McAfee on ESPN because I can't fucking stand that prick, but someone else on ESPN.

All right.

Should we do a podcast?

We should, yeah

you know what no i'm just gonna keep

friends chatting away thinking about chores

i want you to suffer roz

i don't know i gotta finish the podcast so i can do chores they probably won't do

podcast

okay

what you see on the screen in front of you is an oil refinery With a very large explosion occurring in the middle of it.

Oh, is that one?

Unrelatable, the lights in my house are flickering.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not joking, they are.

So, if I go down, just go without

them.

Mine were flickering earlier as well.

Oh, so spread it.

Okay, don't die.

Yeah, I've heard of like natural gas flaring, but I think this may be taking it a step too fast.

Yeah,

I was thinking, you know, I was convinced this was just RGB, but uh, now you say it's explosions and fire.

Then, okay, this puts a whole different slant on the situation.

God, you know what we should do?

We should do the Buncefield oil depot fire.

Put it on the list.

Put it on the list after the podcast.

Anyway,

yeah, this oil refinery is not supposed to look like this.

It's using a lot of oil is the thing.

Which you want to be like, you know, that's an output.

Right.

Well, actually, this was mostly propane and a few other

various,

nice, clean, odorless flame.

Yeah, low-weight

petroleum byproducts.

We'll get to that in a second.

You could grill over this thing with a big enough grill.

Yeah, you're actually not too far from the link.

You could if you just stream tailgating.

That's a good point.

Today we're going to talk about the 2019 Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery explosion.

Well, that is an energy solution.

Which

is a disaster that was very close to home.

I have to

make a self-disclosure here.

Are you going to deduct yourself?

No, but I will say that at one point, my father-in-law did work for Philadelphia Energy Solutions or Sunoka or whoever the fuck.

Was this while he was like an open Maoist?

That's my father.

My father-in-law is far less.

Sorry, Sean.

Okay, I missed that.

Sorry, sorry, Sean.

You're all right, I guess.

No one in this family is going to listen to it except Zach, and Zach likes me, so it's fine.

Hi, Zach.

This event was also known in the Twitterverse at the time as John Obel.

Are we going to have to explain John to these people?

We are going to have to explain John.

Who the fuck is a John?

John is a thing.

A catch-all noun for anything, person, place.

Oh, a metasyntactic variable.

Yes.

Like a doohickey, a watchmaker.

A thing of a jig.

I thought it was just when the German gets tired.

And then since the television show Chernobyl was popular at the time, of course, this became John Obel.

It wasn't a bad show, really.

I have seen it.

I liked it.

I enjoyed it.

I liked it.

It was a little bit like, oh, why don't we listen to the fucking scientists instead of the guys who, you know, ran a shoe factory, but, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

So I just want to say I drew a lot from the chemical safety board for this video, but also the Union of Concerned Scientists Report, Unrefined Ending, Lessons Learned from the Creation and Closure of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery.

It's a lot more heavy-going than the Union of Unconcerned Scientists report, which was like, eh, yeah.

Yeah, it's probably fine.

Union of Chilled Scientists.

Yeah.

I did not, unfortunately, get a chance to read Beyond Bankruptcy, the Outlook of Philadelphia's Neighborhood Refinery by Christina Simeon.

I just didn't have that much time.

But apparently, that was very prescient as to the events that unfolded.

Anyway,

so before we talk about this, we have to talk about the goddamn news.

Nuclear power is back.

Yeah, they're restarting Three Mile Island Unit One.

It's that great test that you love.

Oh, yeah.

For a Microsoft data AI center thing.

That's the worst fucking reason to do something that's a good idea I've ever fucking heard in my life.

Yeah, I would no longer critical support.

I withdraw my support for this.

I'm unhappy about this.

This is extremely not good news.

I'm unhappy about this.

It applies to a lot of stuff in Pennsylvania because I know that right fucking now.

So, I guess the idea is that Microsoft agreed to buy energy for

20 years in order to get a Unit 1 reactivated.

Unit 1 is the one that didn't melt down, if I recall correctly.

I know that he's working on this, actually.

Yep.

So,

and this is all just going into a data center, right?

Pretty much.

Or like several data.

Yeah, buddy.

Yeah, buddy.

This is what we're doing.

Big bet for Microsoft to make to be like, we are going to need like a large amount of energy.

GMI level, right?

So many entries in LinkedIn profiles are now going to be automated.

Sensational.

I'm so pleased about that.

And we're going to ruin GitHub even more.

You'll get nothing like it.

It's literally, it feels like what they're doing is that they're turning on the reactor and they're turning on the turbines and they're taking that electricity and converting it directly into entropy.

RIP Thomas Pynchon, you would have loved this news story.

Also, I think Thomas Pynchon's still alive.

Oh, you can still give an RIP.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Prospective RIP to Thomas Pynchon.

You're one of my favorite authors.

Have a nice night's sleep.

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.

is.

Yeah, okay.

So, yeah, I mean, I don't know.

It's pretty wild that

we do this all for just to run entropy machines.

That's like what crypto is.

That's what the metaverse was going to be.

AI definitely does it.

Yeah, all of this was going to be there to power your like robot legs in the metaverse.

Three, man.

Oh, what a time.

NFTs.

I don't want to get all like

a different podcast about this, but this.

This is essentially just virtue signaling for Microsoft, right?

This is Microsoft going, no, AI definitely is a thing.

Look, look, look, look, we're doing something real about this.

We're confident that AI is real.

But this is basically just virtue signaling to their increasingly unhappy investors, right?

This isn't actually material.

If you look at what Elon Musk is doing to

power Grok,

the answer is a fleet of mobile, like,

I think, methane generators.

Yeah, they're natural gas generators.

Yeah,

that are mobile precisely because if they stop being mobile, he has to to get a permit for them so they're just driving around

the guys just running around like a trailer with the methane generator on the back yeah you just have to have to move them around to prevent sort of like regulation like uh you know like a scud missile

so i i mean this is one of the better ways to waste energy i guess like yeah i mean at least it's not uh producing a whole shitload of co2 and also the reactor's already there which is the only reason they're restarting it is because the thing is completely intact You're going to produce spent fuel, but like it's not a huge amount.

I mean, it's, I guess the only thing more efficient than this would be like hooking it up to like renewables like solar or wind that are already built and doing nothing and being like, yeah, these are going to, you know, be wasted now.

I think it'd be better if this,

let's say, powered instead of an AI data center.

You can't do math.

And, you know, what else does AI do?

It tells you to put glue on pizza.

Yeah,

it generates pictures of shrimp Jesus, shrimp Jesus, writes a lot of college essays that have every academic I know tearing their hair out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ruin just destroys the internet and our ability to use uh internet searches.

Yep, yeah, I love that Google is just not completely fucked up.

Yeah, it's it's so cool that like that happens to you, like whether you like it or not.

You're just like, I want to Google something, perfectly ordinary act.

We've all been trained to do a bunch of times a day.

Um, and you're like, oh, by the way, you've just wasted like five gallons of water doing this.

You might as well start almond farming.

Why even bother fucking recycling or like, you know, like limiting your household use of water when like one company gets to decide, hey, we're just going to use like more of it than you anytime you do anything requiring our service.

It makes me so angry that I cannot switch it off.

It is genuinely like it's increasing everyone's carbon footprint and everyone's environmental footprint.

It's just, oh,

we're getting sidetracked here.

It makes me so unbelievably angry and I desperately hunting for what we're doing.

I'm sidetracked off this podcast.

Well, yeah, that's true.

I know.

Hello, that's how this all works.

What would be great is if they just restarted this because it's clean energy and it would drive electricity prices down.

That would have felt like a good thing.

Yeah, exactly.

You could power the whole city of Harrisburg with it.

Which is, you know, arguably worth more than anything done with AI.

I think so.

I think so.

There's some

gave the world

fucking Charles Bronson

from Harrisburg.

Yes.

And Gareth and I waited at a bus station there once.

We did.

And got very angry at Steve Greyhound.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Harrisburg is a, I don't know.

I like the senators.

That's all I can say about Harrisburg.

I try not to go.

Very nice historic center.

I'm from the shittier part of central Pennsylvania.

I'm looking at this now.

It's in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.

Dauphin, Dauphin.

Dauphin Cat.

Okay.

I'm not even going to get into this.

Well,

so good thing happening for extremely bad reasons.

Almost to the point where it might be a bad thing.

Yeah, it's sort of like tipped the scale over at this point.

It's not going to use it for anything else.

Exactly.

I mean, well, hopefully, you know, maybe Microsoft implodes and then they got another 20.

I don't know if they give it to us on the radar.

They give it to us.

Yes.

Well, I think it's more likely that AI implodes and then Microsoft has a bunch of energy it doesn't know what to do do with and it has to invent some contrived bullshit, even more contrived than AI.

Continue

buying energy for.

Step away from the lathe, though,

reverse nuclear reactor.

We're going to spin a turbine really fast.

Oh, boy.

Well,

you know,

news.

You know what this one was going to be.

Yeah, now now Israel is attacking Lebanon now more

than just blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies.

Now they're just blowing up people's apartments.

Indiscriminately, yes.

Oh, yeah.

A huge wave of airstrikes, which are almost certainly going to lead to a ground invasion and probable occupation of southern Lebanon, which history fans may remember

is a bad idea for everyone involved.

Haven't we already done this?

Yeah, literally.

And there's a bunch of like weepy Israeli movies about it, in fact.

But yeah,

I mean, all of the generals in the IDF now were like junior officers the last time they did this

and came up in this kind of like occupation of southern Lebanon.

So

Christ, I don't know.

Basically, like the whole thing is completely fucked because it's this full court press that like we are going to get our like, you know, our big regional war now while the going's good because we know the americans won't do anything to stop us so correct we're just gonna like do whatever we want to gaza like ostensibly now short of bulldozing it into the ocean but who knows all right they're gonna get that give it time give it time exactly and then we're also gonna uh like invade lebanon and push hezbollah back past the litany uh which

Best of luck.

I mean, they'll be able to do it, I think, but like not without a huge amount of bloodshed on like both for everyone involved and also like this kind of separating wound of occupation, which is exactly what happened the last time.

The cat is out of the bag, right?

So they've Israel or rather

the leadership of Israel, Netanyahu and his weird right-wing nutters that he's surrounded by, don't care about the fact they are actually destroying Israel.

Israel is a going concern and continues to be less and less likely to exist as they push this forwards because the the the the ultimate consequences of this are are unfathomable across the board for the region but they can do that but they don't care the the the little cabal who are currently running israel do not care because they know that they can do all this and as as as you've as you've said already the u.s will do nothing to stop them and they've they've seen that now they've done they're they cannot believe what they've been able to do in gaza without anyone stopping them and now they're like well okay cool let's just let's just work our way down our list uh lebanon's next uh right now i i i think I think there's a few things going on there in terms of like, I've said this before elsewhere, that it's partially the knowledge that like the US is going to like continue supplying weapons, continue supplying aid, and not have any enforceable red lines.

But it's also like, this might be our last chance to do this before Iran has nuclear weapons and can kind of credibly threaten us with them.

And we can do this without it turning into a nuclear exchange.

It will, I suspect, turn into a

sort of regional war, no matter what Biden says otherwise about it.

And I just.

Biden's probably saying.

Yeah, he doesn't know what the fuck's going on.

He doesn't know what room the toilets are in.

What Biden is saying he's saying, what Biden's people are saying he's saying, is that he is pushing the Israelis to come to a peace settlement, which they will not do.

They're not going to do it.

Yank the fucking A, dude.

God damn.

Yeah.

And as far as like saying, all right, good going, fuck ass.

You're on your own.

Good luck.

Fucking don't shit where you eat.

I don't fucking know.

Yeah.

As far as like destroying Israel goes, the Israeli economy...

Yeah.

Israel is a going concern and seems to be...

Seems to be kind of attempting to wind itself up.

Yeah,

not all Israelis, but certainly

the head of government just seems to not care about the long-term viability of the the Israeli state,

independent of what actually is happening on the ground.

They just don't seem to care.

Yeah.

Well, it's this weird combination, as with Trump in a lot of ways, right?

Of a guy or, you know, a bunch of other people, Berlusconi comes to mind,

like your central guy, Nenya, who is like...

absolutely cynical about this um and wants to stay out of prison right because like the second the war ends he will be out of power and then like all of the corruption investigation all land on him at once um but then you also have his various like also cynical, but cynical in a different way,

like,

like, headbangers, like Bengvir or whoever.

Oh, that fucking psychopath.

Jesus.

Yeah, I know.

I wish him more car crashes.

But

yeah, who, who, so, like,

hopefully fatal ones.

Don't bleep that.

Leave it in.

Yeah, who are fully on this like harnessed program of like Israel is sort of like ethnically and religiously like strong, will continue to be strong if it like purges its enemies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So

yeah, I mean, fucking hell is my answer to this.

Not good, not good.

Looks like they already got

men

sort of suited up and ready to go into Lebanon.

That's going to be pretty bad.

Pretty bad.

It's already pretty bad and it's going to get a lot worse.

Meanwhile, worth just putting a pin in the sand.

Absolute human misery and suffering just continuing to widen.

I know all of us know and care about that, but it's worth just reminding ourselves that the untold human suffering and misery

while these pricks machinate, like just absolute untold human misery and carnage

just continued to broaden and broaden across the region.

Absolutely horrifying.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, Netanyahu went on TV in English, which shows you what the audience is for it, saying that

the war isn't with Lebanon, it's with Hezbollah.

And it's like, I think

it dick shit.

Well, the war isn't against the Palestinians.

It's against Hamas.

I mean, that has exactly.

It shouldn't inspire any confidence in anyone.

It's like, even if this were about Hezbollah's ideology, which it isn't really, like, national sovereignty is still a thing, right?

Lebanon's still a country.

And apart from anything else, I think there's this idea, right, that if you, if you go like,

well, you know, we're only targeting,

you know, this movement within your country rather than the country as a whole, that's going to like, you know, sort of wave the magic wand over it in terms of international law.

I don't know why they bother.

I really don't, given that the arrest warrants are like, you know, imminent, but yeah.

Fun.

I just, I,

it, it's

part of the problem historically, right, is that

for every like sometimes assassination really works and does just destroy a dude's entire legacy, right?

And on the one hand, you get Shinzo Abe like that.

On the other hand, you also get Yitchuk Rabin like that.

And

yeah.

Well, what did we learn?

Absolutely nothing.

And it's going to get worse all the time.

Like, I,

who knows where this is.

There doesn't seem like there's an end state.

Like, there is no rational end state at this point.

It's just, it's just, what can we get away with next?

Escalate, escalate, escalate.

There's just, there's no, yeah, it's, it's, it's frightening.

Well, speaking of untold

human misery and carnage that there's no logical endpoint to, that was the goddamn news.

Sake.

Yeah.

There we go.

Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in northwest Pennsylvania.

It's like Seattle ever since.

It's the all.

Yeah.

This has widely been regarded as a bad move.

Have you done this joke with this light every time as well?

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm surprised it's not getting like copy burn.

You know, they get the copier burn as it kind of gets copied through each time, right?

Beautiful.

Okay, let's talk about petroleum.

No.

It's this great material.

It has very high energy density.

Say vegan.

Yeah, thousands of uses.

It's easy.

It's an animal-based product, kind of.

No, it's all natural and largely plant-based.

It's vegan.

It comes from the ground for free, right?

I don't know why everyone's so mad about this stuff

um and the thing is it's it's great for like obviously what we use it for as a fuel but it's also great as a like sequester of carbon yes carbon has sequestered the absolute fuck out of this thing oh yeah because it's all made of carbon this is like that's one of the best like dead tree carbon storage like mechanisms ever devised yeah people are wondering how much like you carbon sequest by doing the weird charring of it of a log and then putting some mud on top of it well imagine imagine that, but several million years ago and squished real small.

You cannot end it exactly, November.

It's the great carbon sink.

So the best thing to do with it is, of course,

to burn it.

Question mark.

Yeah, burn all of it as quickly as possible.

And after 1859, we really got on that.

So here's an early oil refinery.

Our oil refining industry first sets up shop in Pittsburgh.

There's a lot of small refiners.

Then this guy, John D.

Rockefeller, comes around.

He has an oil refinery.

I think the first one was in Pittsburgh, but he moves over to Cleveland because he got access to the Great Lakes there.

Sick of their basement toilet shit.

He's just like, fuck this.

This is true, yeah.

I'm going to go to the city by the land.

I bet all of the soil that you can see there under all that stuff is today completely clean and far.

Radiated.

Yeah.

John D.

Rockefeller builds up his standard oil monopoly in Cleveland.

You know, he's able to manipulate the oil market.

He has a lot of sweet deals with the railroads, all this kind of stuff.

Eventually, people get so mad at him that Congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act, and then about 20 years later, they use it.

Standard oil is broken up into several constituent companies.

Now, this eventually effectively reforms Zexon Mobile, but we don't talk about that.

No, of course not.

You can't use an Antitrust Act today.

you know?

Yeah, exactly.

You're going to break up Amazon.

When we talk about the facility we're going to talk about, there's two major players here in the history, Atlantic Petroleum and Gulf Oil.

I've heard of Gulf Oil.

Gulf Oil is the one with the cool logo, and they sponsored a bunch of motorsport stuff, the orange and blue one.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The GT4 delivery.

Yes.

Oh, sick.

So Atlantic was actually a pre-standard oil company.

It was founded as the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company in 1886 in Philadelphia, but later it fell under control of the Standard Oil Trust, right?

The Atlantic brand continued to be used for kerosene in southeast Pennsylvania, and when Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the company was born anew, right?

Atlantic was back.

This got the names out of storage of all the shit it had absorbed.

Oh, yeah.

And we're like, you know, you're these again.

People love Standard Original.

Atlantic held the rights to be standard oil of Pennsylvania, but they decided they like their brand better.

So, you know, Atlantic service stations pop up all over southeast Pennsylvania as the automobile takes hold of transportation.

Retail fuel sales far outstrip retail kerosene sales, right?

The refineries are getting bigger.

They're being reconfigured for this fabulous new chemical called gasoline.

It's not just for dry cleaning anymore.

You're not rolling up to this in your kind of like very strangely designed six-wheeled car being like filled up with kerosene.

Yeah.

The company prospers, you know, through both wars.

In 1966, it merges with Richfield Oil in California.

That creates Atlantic Richfield or Arco.

Arco is very successful.

It then buys and eats up Sinclair Oil and its famous dinosaur logo.

Then it becomes a national chain.

For antitrust reasons, its northeastern assets were sold off.

Those were rebranded back to Atlantic.

The brand kind of dump struggle.

Oh, my God.

It's like an overflow.

That part of the company struggled for a while, and Atlantic was sold off to Sunoco in 1988.

Our other contestant here is Gulf Oil, right?

No GT40 on this slide wave.

Fucking bother.

Question, Nova.

Gulf Oil was founded to exploit oil in Texas and was thus headquartered in Pittsburgh.

All right, yeah, all right.

Uh, it was largely financed by the Mellon family, better known for their banks.

The Mellon family.

Oh, these

motherfuckers.

The Mellon family is a bunch of far-right neocon and paleo-con freak shows.

Uh, I believe his name is Richard Mellon, who is one of the last single donors to Donald Trump.

Anybody killed JFK, huh?

Yeah,

Not him specifically, but like these are like Skifey.

Yeah.

Yeah, these are the fucking guys.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also founded Carnegie Mellon along with

Carnegies.

And also Melon Bank.

Yep.

That's all.

And the big fruit as well, of course.

Yeah.

He is.

He's dead now, but I'm going to dig him up and piss on his grave.

He died on July.

He died a day after his 82nd birthday.

So I hope his last 24 hours were not a happy celebration, but instead miserable writhing and twitching right before he saw the good Lord and was sent straight to hell.

Fucking asshole.

So.

Yeah, buddy, I'm here.

I'm just

gonna have a list of melons.

And on this list of melons is Cordelia Scafe May with an incredible one-line biography, famous recluse and funder of multiple anti-immigration organizations.

Also, birth control and family planning.

So, who's to say?

I feel like if you're a famous recluse, you're not doing being a recluse.

Again, Thomas Pynchon.

Yeah,

she hanged herself, Rivertz, hanged for people.

And she said that America was being invaded on all fronts by immigrants who breathe like hamsters.

So, so long, you dead bitch.

You deserved it.

Jesus Christ.

I mean, some of the worst people.

Gulf Oil invested heavily in pipelines, allowing him to extract petroleum from as far afield as Oklahoma and ship it very cheaply and very quickly to its Port Arthur, Texas refinery.

Port Arthur is right near the Louisiana border on the Gulf Coast.

Excuse me, I was just thinking this is like Manchuria, right?

Like the Russian far east.

They couldn't build a pipeline that far.

Gulf was known for

consistency and quality and its distinctive, these nice small neoclassical service stations hmm i mean if we're gonna like set the world on fire nice building to do it it's a nice little one this one just got moved to somewhere in fairmount park i think in order to make way for a big condo tower um oh i yeah i don't i gotta stick my uh flag in the sand and say i don't like that i i don't know i don't i find it find it icky uh look at our twee service station burn the planet it is quite kitchen kitchen yeah

well i don't think they knew they were burning well they did did know they were burning the planet, but they thought it was a much slower time process.

Yeah,

this is still the days when we thought smoking cigarettes was good for you.

This is true.

All they knew since the 50s that cigarettes are bad for you.

Shut up.

I know.

Gulf Oil leads in technology.

It was the first to install a catalytic cracker in 1951.

We'll talk about that in the next slide.

It's called a catalytic white person, Ross.

You demonetize.

Great.

Fantastic.

They also lead on influence.

They have significant political contributions that lead to significant influence in Colombia, Venezuela, Kuwait.

Kuwait.

Excuse me.

Why don't you say Kuwait?

Kuwait.

Kuwait.

Kuwait.

Kuwait.

Kuwit.

Sounds like a little bird.

And even horror of horrors, Canada.

Oh, God.

God.

Gulf Oil eventually winds up with a massive portfolio of oil and energy-related businesses from nuclear power to basic research to private militias to protect wells in Angola.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a really evil corporation.

I mean, not that there's a good one kicking around, but like...

No, it's like stinky evil.

Yeah, yeah.

Private militias.

That's always

a term, a noun that always fills with confidence that a company is good.

Yeah, it's a right cooker death squad.

This is so infuriating.

Alexa played jungle work.

All of this stuff is expensive.

As a result, Gulf Oil's portfolio underperforms significantly, and it falls victim to corporate raiders in the 1980s who break up the business, and the refining side is sold to Chevron.

That whole corporate raiding thing was really funny in the sense that you just had these bloated, extremely vulnerable, extremely evil corporations that are like, yeah, we make paperclips with a paperclip making company.

We have done 50 coups to prevent anyone from developing an alternative to paperclips.

We have like a ton of bodies on us.

And then just getting like effortlessly defeated in like boardroom judo by like one guy who has like read the SEC raw.

Yeah, weird critical support.

Strange critical support to the corporators, to like the...

The sort of

old Carl Icon and like, yeah, Warren Buffett.

I mean, exactly.

The only company that survived that was like 3M.

Yeah.

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.

Barbara.

They just take the door shut, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

I can't get in.

They put a post-it over it.

Super glue, everything.

You come and take it.

It's just two cross bottles of super glue.

Kind of had 3M in mind when I was thinking about the like, you know, assassination attempts to prevent someone developing an alternative to the post-it.

They made a.

We can't let them develop a better paperclip.

All right.

So those are our two corporate players here in the early days of this refinery, but now we have to talk about the refinery and the process, which means it's time for some diagrams.

Learning.

That's a Department of Defense looking.

Jesus Francis Mixes.

Oh, golly.

Okay, how do you refine oil?

What does that even mean?

You do all of this shit to it.

Yeah, you do all of this shit to it, yeah.

You put your hands down to the bottom and you get the chunky stuff.

And if you just scoop your hands in the top, you get all the little light stuff.

Yes.

You do a bunch of really interesting chemistry with it involving like fractional distillation or whatever the fuck.

Yes.

I don't like the black tape

one in the middle here.

I don't like that.

That's not very nice.

You take a jar of crude oil and you do what you do to make whiskey to it, kind of, for a bit.

And then you do a bunch of other shit.

Sort of.

with less fire than with whiskey yes

cowards no well as we're gonna learn sometimes more fire

broadly speaking refining oil you take crude oil and you make it into more useful oils crude oil is made of by made by natural processes and is therefore full of stuff you don't want yeah it's just sequestering whatever you know yeah like it also varies a lot in molecular composition but we want oil products with consistent properties right

this is all about the molecules.

Hydrocarbons.

They're just molecules made primarily of hydrogens and carbons.

This guy right here is an octane.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

And like the properties of these hydrocarbons vary based on length.

You can select for these.

Oh, yeah.

This is not the good octane.

The good octane is iso-octane, which is pictured in a later slide.

This is the bad octane, which actually does not increase the octane rating of your fuel um yeah so these things so this this like big long molecule thing because it's big and long well this one's kind of big and long uh you get lots of intermolecular forces which makes it stickier and changes its performance its behaviors and how it how it like you know how quickly it burns and stuff whereas the smaller ones like methane which is just one uh has uh less intermolecular forces because the molecules are smaller and so that's why it's a gas versus being a liquid or whatever and it has different sorts of properties so that that's kind of why these you know the forces the longer your molecules stick, the more it sticks to other molecules near it.

It's kind of like, I don't know, like stickle bricks.

Yes.

And that's why you remember

that.

Deep cut for the 90s kids, like me and Nova.

That also applies to like different grades of crude oil.

Like you can have a very, very heavy crude oil with a lot of long chain molecules.

It looks like this poop bottle.

Or you can have something much lighter.

So yeah, generally speaking, when you strike oil, the product that comes out of the well is a big mishmash of about a million different molecules, plus impurities and whatnot.

So, there's general categories here.

You can have heavy and light crude oil, and you can have sweet and sour crude oil.

Yep.

Yeah, and those are not euphemisms.

Like, you can don't do this, but you can't taste it.

You can do it.

Yeah, sweet crude oil tastes.

You can go to the oil well on your property and take a sample and taste it.

Yeah, you will die, but like you cannot advise enough.

Please don't do it.

Do you taste a lot of it?

Yeah, all right.

Do not do the one scene from the movie Three Kings to yourself.

You will get a variety of interesting flavored cancers if you do that.

Do not do that.

Yeah.

But yeah, heavy crude, full of big hydrocarbons.

It's very viscous.

It may even need to be heated to flow at all.

Your Mazut type shit.

Exactly.

Light crude is primarily full of the smaller hydrocarbons.

It flows pretty readily.

It may come out of the ground on its own.

That's a classic gusher you'll see in old Western films due to pressure from the soil forcing it out of the well on its own.

Sweet crude oil has very few impurities.

It's mostly just straight hydrocarbons.

It's especially low in sulfur.

Sour crude oil has many impurities, which again is especially including sulfur.

Yeah, these phrases do originate from tasting it.

Incidentally,

the name petroleum comes from your kind of

like the oil that flows out of the ground on its own and just collects like from rocks and stuff.

Rock oil, petro, oleum, petroleum.

Thanks, November.

Some things you learn.

You do the Cambridge Latin course and it makes you like this for the rest of your life.

So to get from crude oil to wonderful petroleum products that improve our lives,

you need to go through many different processes right and there are different process units that perform these processes and not every oil refinery has every process unit they might be designed for specific feedstocks uh well you might have a very like full service refinery that can take any kind of oil you can throw at it you might also have one that let's say can only take light oil so you know there's a lot of uh stuff that you know let's say down here it doesn't have or

you know, like, because you build it, you know, within reasonable transport of your oil field.

So,

and you know what kind of oil you're getting out of that.

So, unless you have multiple oil fields giving you different kinds of oil, you build it to the thing that they're.

And even if land is cheap, these facilities, you know, they're sprawling facilities.

Every new thing you plug in is a huge amount of complicated machinery that you have to have, someone has to design.

They have to build the thing, they have to maintain it.

There are parts you need for it.

expensive.

It's a lot of power.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you want to minimize how much of those these, you want to minimize the extra bits you stick on.

Yeah, lots of heat, lots of maintenance.

So if you're like, let's say you're only taking in light crude oil,

I don't need, let's say, a delayed coker here.

I don't need

to do that.

Yeah, please.

What else do I not need?

I don't need necessarily

crap.

I had this written down.

I thought I had this written down as an example.

You don't need some of these things.

You don't need some of these things.

We're only going to talk about a few specific processes.

The anime treating at the top there?

Don't know what that does.

Oh, yeah.

You got an anime treating.

You know, you've got your...

We got some funny names later.

Don't worry.

Yeah.

I'm just enjoying a Hydro Treasure, to be honest.

Pleasing to me.

So you've got what we're going to talk about here very briefly is the atmospheric distillation column.

We're going to talk about the fluid catalytic cracker, and then we're going to talk about the very important alkylation unit.

Of course, the alkylation unit.

Yep.

Yes.

Of course.

What do we do without the alkylation unit?

What would we do without the alkylation unit?

I mean, genuinely, though.

But also, I think we should speak a little bit about these different grades of oil and how we use them in the United States,

specifically after the oil export ban was lifted.

This is where we post like a random farmer in the U.S.

discovers the largest resilience

or something

again.

So, the United States, you know, as every Democratic president

will tell you, oh, we export more oil than we import now.

But we still import a hell of a lot of oil.

And those numbers are pretty close together.

So, you know,

it's an interesting economic situation.

You know, in the United States, we have a lot of access to this very good, high-quality, light, sweet crude oil.

It's in Texas.

It's in the Backen Formation in the upper west.

You know, you can frack it in Pennsylvania to a certain extent.

You know, and this is

very easy.

It's in your backyard.

Just go out and start digging.

Yeah, exactly.

This is very easy to process.

Despite this, a lot of United States refineries are actually set up to process heavy sour crude oil, which has to be imported from like Venezuela and, you know, Saudi Arabia,

Mexico, even Russia.

You know,

they fully couldn't, even when the sanctions were coming in, cut off Russian oil completely because it just wouldn't.

You crash everybody's economy.

Forgive me,

this does sound silly, though.

Why are you?

Capitalism was the most efficient distribution of resources, et cetera, et cetera.

Oh, it is.

You're the moron.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

You know, why don't we just use our own oil and avoid a bunch of geopolitics?

You know, we've had for the past 50 years, you know, for the...

Trade policy is fascinating.

And we had an export ban, right?

The answer is, of course, the United States, we have a lot of industrial capacity and technical know-how to build build these humongous, technically advanced refineries that can take the most garbage feedstock in the world and turn it into high-grade petroleum products.

Getting you a sort of like kerosene out of like a rock I found.

Yeah, exactly.

So as such,

either, you know, you just didn't really drill for oil too much in the United States.

There was still some domestic production, but it wasn't like it was still more expensive than importing the oil.

So, you know, and there was no export market.

Now we export it, of course.

You know, we can export that expensive light, sweet crude oil to countries with less advanced refining industries.

And then we can import the cheap, heavy, sour oil that, you know, we would have,

and we get more oil for it.

The high flu.

Sorry, go on.

Go on, no one.

It's just good business sense in a very evil way.

Yeah, you have the good product, you export it, and you take in the bad bad product that you can use because you have the really good oil refineries.

This is now universal.

There are still like imports of light, sweet crude oil.

I don't think we have much sour crude in the United States at all.

Someone's going to correct me if I'm wrong, going to have to correct me if I'm wrong here because

I had to learn all of this.

Top shit, you might have to import from us,

right?

Isn't North Sea oil mostly sour crude?

North Sea is Sprint crude oil.

No, it is not sweet.

Not even close.

Okay.

I'm just

the podcast that checks Wikipedia in real time.

No, that's another fun one.

We'll get to later is, of course, there's two light sweet prices, and this was relevant for a while.

There's the West Texas Intermediary, and then there's the Brett

oil.

Brent crude, yeah.

Which I've heard of, yeah.

Which Brent is just everything that's not in the United States.

So this is also why it's, you know, it's expensive to be an underdeveloped country.

You know, oil runs a whole lot of stuff.

If you have a primitive refining sector, you're paying more you're paying more for expensive oil.

Or if you're especially poor, like I don't know, you're Haiti, you actually have to import refined products, which is a total ripoff, right?

You know, shipping finished petroleum products is expensive and it's dangerous and you can't use a giant supertanker for it.

But this is one of the reasons gas is so cheap in the United States, other than low taxes.

We export the oil and we use that money to import more oil than we would have otherwise had.

That's thinking with the brain head.

I love capitalism.

I love our planet and the way that our society functions.

It's fab.

It's wonderful.

As a result of this beautiful idea, now a bunch of poor countries have oil, but also have it at larcenous rates.

Yes.

So let's get to the process units.

This is the heart of the refinery.

This is the distillation column.

So you pump your crude oil into the furnace, right?

And then, you know, you pump it, you pump the heated crude oil into the bottom, or actually, in this case, into the middle of the distillation column.

I think, yeah, actually, it does go in the middle.

Fractional distillation.

The different stuff in it is going to have different temperatures at which it

separates out.

Exactly.

So each section of the distillation column is at a different temperature and it has various pans where whatever condenses there collects and then it gets piped out.

This is weirdly, this is one thing I sort of know about and that it's the only bit of like my fuck the only bit of my like GCSE chemistry I ever remember still.

Yeah, I did it.

I remember being taught fractional distillation.

Yeah, yeah, fractional distillation, the good stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's this entire trade.

Heavy molecule goes down.

Light molecule goes up.

In fact, I think they fully taught this with this example.

So I've like labeled this diagram before.

But

most of these products here, they need more processing, right?

You can see here, okay, up here at the top, you got naphthas.

Those can be made into gasoline.

I think also some plastic

constituent products.

You know, you got your kerosenes, you got your gas oils, you got lubricants, fuel oils, asphalt.

So getting less and less reactive as we go down.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stuff at the bottom of any process unit

is just called the bottoms, right?

So, and that that that that's going to that's going to be uh uh the basis of a crude joke later.

Don't worry.

I was going to say, none of us responded there.

It was very disappointing.

There's a yeah, I listen, I've

spent too much of today doing that shit in real life to respond to jokes about it.

Sorry.

Problem with the distillation column is it only produces the hydrocarbons you already have.

Very heavy crude is going to produce a lot of tar and fuel oil and not much gasoline.

And a light crude oil is going to produce a lot of gasoline and kerosene and not much tar.

Generally speaking, the lighter products have always been more desirable, higher grade, and result in higher price fuels, right?

So if I am the owner of you know a heavy crude well, I need a way to convert those heavy oils into lighter ones,

which leads us to our next process unit: the fluid catalytic,

the fluid catalytic cracker.

Bunch of pipes, yes, that is one factor which is constant in the oil refinery, pipes galore.

Yeah, if you're selling pipes, liquids in, yes,

in an oil boom, sell pipes

in an oil oil boom, learn to weld.

Yes, yes.

So cracking is the process of taking a few heavy hydrocarbon molecules and turning them into lots of light hydrocarbon molecules.

The old way to do so was lots of heat and lots of pressure, but thermal cracking was overtaken by cheaper and safer fluid catalytic cracking in the 1950s.

Yeah, remember those long hydrocarbon changes going in there and snapping those apart?

Snap them in half, yeah.

So in this case, you know, the example I'm using is taking gas oils directly.

It can take other heavier feedstock through vacuum distillation that I don't want to talk about.

I don't understand that.

This is not an important process to thoroughly understand here.

But yeah, you're cracking these hydrocarbons in half and then in quarters and so on and so forth.

Then you have a problem that you get a lot of the product you want, but then some of the molecules got too cracked.

Oh, we've all been there.

Yeah.

Now we gotta, now we gotta join them back up together.

Yeah.

You know, in a lot of refineries, this is just a waste product, or you send it off with other gases from the distillation column for separate processing.

But

you can just flare this off.

You can just burn this shit.

Obviously, you could do that.

It's a thing.

Some refineries do.

But what if I want more gasoline?

No, I mean, who wouldn't?

So we got to go to the alkylation unit.

This is where the things get a little complicated.

Now, this point.

Those are beautiful tanks, by the way.

They're very nice.

Yeah, very, very pretty.

Full of the worst chemicals you can imagine.

Oh, yeah.

Incredible.

Like, this is like a.

Looks like I can only interpret this through the lens of, like, this would, if this were a 3D model, this would be a really well-constructed model.

Oh, yeah.

There's a very nice BIM model on this.

Yeah, this is the shit that turns the guy into sludge at the end of Robot Cop, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hold that thought.

So we have these lighter gases from the fluid catalytic cracker unit.

They're propene and butane, right?

Oh, en, note, en.

Okay, yeah, that means there's a double bond in there somewhere.

Yes.

I remember my

organic chemistry.

Oh, yeah.

I want to snap one of those bonds so I can get butane so I can light my lighter, you know?

Yes.

We also have isobutane that comes from another part of the plant, which is i think uh the hydro cracker or something i i don't know what that one does uh we've we've talked about too many processes iso it's iso because it's not one line it splits right that's why it's so it's butane is four but the iso bit is because it's oh man i'm having a bit of i'm tripping back actually this i'm remembering dr atkinson and doctor and and my my my flat back to the time when i very vigorously flirted with my male chemistry teacher and he did not let it happen.

He stopped it right there and then in the lesson in a very firm way.

Not physically, that would have been exciting.

But no, just like, stop.

And I was like, oh, okay, I'll stop flirting with my chemistry teacher.

We appreciate a safeguarding chemistry.

Yeah, absolutely.

He nipped that in the bud and I

stopped doing that.

I probably still have that chemistry book somewhere upstairs with my handwritten notes in it for no good reason.

One of those things that I've yet to set on for Seth Roo because there's no point keeping it.

I actually never took organic chemistry.

Everything I've done for this podcast, I've had to learn on the fly.

I sort of want to learn.

Like, this is the thing.

One of the benefits of the podcast is I get to go back to uni, which is what I'm doing now.

And like, part of me wants, like, for as long as we're doing this, just keep doing that and just end up with like fucking 50 bachelor's degrees in whatever I feel like for that given like three or four years.

It was kind of fun.

I love it.

Genuinely.

Like, and I discover every time I learn something, how much more I don't know.

And I'm like, oh, that's perfect.

I can fill this in, you know, I can, I can sort of like,

because

I've learned like one or two things.

I'm like, I don't know shit about, in this case, organic chemistry.

And I'm like, well, it's interesting.

Lots of people moaned about organic chemistry as being the bit of chemistry they didn't like or they found annoying.

I was the opposite.

I hate inorganic chemistry because

there are no rules and none of it makes any bloody sense.

Whereas I always enjoyed organic chemistry because there were nice rules and you got to play with the little plastic balls and make models of of these increasingly fun, complicated looking molecules.

I always enjoyed that.

Shout out to

organic chemistry heads.

I actually also, like the limited amount of organic chemistry I got in chemistry too, I thought was pretty fun.

Then you look at the people who do either of these things for a living, right?

Like professional, either organic chemists or inorganic chemists.

And it's like, what do you do for work?

Oh, like some of the most evil shit imaginable.

You get into petroleum engineering.

yeah.

I just want to look at it and say, ha ha, look how long the molecule is.

So, anyway, using these two chemicals plus an acid, right, the isobutene and

the, ah, crap.

I lost my place here.

The isobutane, the butene, and the

propene.

The propene, yes.

Plus an acid, we can create alkylates, right?

Which are very high-octane hydrocarbons.

Like iso-octane here is the standard for 100-octane.

2-2-4 trimethylpentane.

Oh, nice.

That sounds like some shit that I don't want on me or around me.

It's, you know, I mean,

people have survived getting splashed with racing fuel.

Yes, survive is

one of the

burns so clean that you are on fire invisibly.

Oh, yeah.

So we can blend these hydrocarbons into our final product and produce premium gasoline from our horrible heavy sour crude oil.

Hmm.

So a fairly common process, which is pictured here, uses sulfuric acid, right?

It's really funny that part of the reason why you blend these into your gasoline is to reduce

NOC, which previously you would use lead for.

Yes.

This whole thing stops you from getting lead poisoning.

Gives you a bunch of of other different poisons, but like, you know.

Yeah, no lead poisoning because you have good gasoline.

So yeah, fairly common process, which is pictured here, uses sulfuric acid in the alkylation unit, right?

It's not particularly efficient.

It consumes a lot of sulfuric acid, you know, enough that you need a dedicated sulfuric acid process on site to supply it.

Oh, my gosh.

It also requires...

It requires refrigeration.

And so this seems very inconvenient to produce a whole shitload of sulfuric acid constantly.

What if there was a more efficient way?

What if there was a better way?

Let's talk about hydrofluoric acid.

Don't get this on you.

Yes.

Or

yeah, just don't.

Just don't.

Don't get this mixed up with the cortisol.

Like, this is no.

Don't do that.

This is not a mouthwash.

This is critical.

So, hydrofluoric acid is not to be confused with hydro or hydrofluoric acid is not to be confused with hydrochloric acid.

Yeah, that one's fine.

You need to mouthwash with that.

No problem.

Pretty much, yeah.

It's in your stomach.

It's supposed to be.

Yeah.

This one has a fluorine instead of a chlorine.

So this stuff is really nasty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

So my local and Zencaster crashed on me.

Zencaster is showing finished.

It crashed at 48 minutes in.

How far in are we?

We We are one hour or two.

Okay, so I've lost 14 minutes of audio.

Okay, well, I mean,

you were muted for most of that.

No, I was talking.

I was making jokes, but it's fine.

Let's just go.

I don't have time to redo it, so.

Okay, well,

we simply eat the lack of leave.

Yeah, and

we keep the local recordings and send those to dev.

All right.

Yeah, okay.

Yep.

We need more Leo in the second half then.

That's the only way.

I can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, what we need to do is we need to restart the Zencaster.

And

one second.

We're back.

I believe we're back.

We've never been so back.

Okay.

Are we?

Yeah, we're back.

We're back.

We're going to get rid of my face.

Goodbye.

Lovely.

Then we will need to re-sync the audio.

Yes.

Are we

keeping our locals running as they were?

Yeah, please.

Yeah.

That will save so much of a headache.

Thank you, Devin.

Hi, Devin.

All right.

Three, two, one, mark.

Right.

All right.

Let's get back into it.

Hydrofluoric acid burns.

Hydrofluoric.

Yes.

Okay.

Hydrofluoric acid.

Not to be confused with hydrochloric acid.

This one's got a fluorine instead of a chlorine on it.

Don't fuck around with a fluorine.

I swear to God.

If it's got the phoneme floor in there and it's not in your toothpaste, go nowhere near it.

Yeah.

so this stuff is really nasty it's extremely corrosive to the point where normal acid handling protocols don't work very well oh um it'll eat glass meat burns sand oh dear

um it reacts vigorously with most metals

uh it boils at room temperature and becomes a very nasty gas called hydrogen fluoride

it's also extremely fond of flesh and bone oh i mean aren't we all but but uh you know

HF burns are very nasty.

The first thing it does is it takes out your nerves so you don't feel anything, so you don't seek treatment for hours afterwards until problems start.

Oh, I was going to say, because that one doesn't sound too bad at the start.

Everyone likes having their nerves taken out.

HF readily penetrates your skin and your flesh and goes right to work, dissolving your bones.

Oh, no, no.

Yeah.

Don't worry, it also fucks up your flesh as well.

Oh, okay.

Comforting.

And distributes pretty widely because once it gets into your blood, it will react with the calcium in it.

It's a bad time.

Yeah.

Yeah, it'll go on your circulatory system.

It's also distributed enough around the body, causes horrible damage everywhere.

It also happily penetrates latex gloves.

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

This is not the worst chemical out there, but it's probably one of the worst ones commonly used in industry and in industrial quantities.

Yeah, all the others are also

fluoride.

These get all their own in trains, right?

No.

No, okay.

You don't transport,

well, generally, you just don't transport hydrofluoric acid.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, it doesn't move.

It stays where it is.

Yeah, you got to make it on site.

But they also said that about vinyl chloride.

Oh, boy.

They do definitely move that around in trains.

Yeah.

Okay.

I like the little picture of the molecule here, which looks like kind of the aftermath of one of my kind of lazy attempts to make a new planet in the universe sandbox.

So in the alkylation unit, hydrofluoric acid can be used in place of sulfuric acid.

It produces less byproducts.

It lasts longer.

You can use a lot less hydrogen fluoride than sulfuric acid.

And it can produce high octane alkylates from a wider variety of feedstocks.

The downside is you have to overengineer the hell out of the alkylation unit to ensure it doesn't eat itself.

Now, this is by and large a solved problem.

Yeah, and you just have engineers, chemical engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers who just, you know, you just pay them a bit more money and they design you a fancier thing that doesn't

turn into mush and then spread the HS.

Just gotta do the maintenance on it.

I'm still,

I had to track down

the

John Clark in this book Ignition about

chlorine trifluoride,

one of the

many terrible, terrible chemicals you get in rocket engineering.

Oh God, yeah.

Oh dear.

Yeah.

Extremely toxic, hypergolic with every known fuel, so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured.

Also hypergolic with cloth, wood, test engineers, asbestos, sand

and water with which it reacts explosively.

Oh, it's a good job there's not lots of weakening atmosphere.

Yeah, it can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals, steel, copper, aluminium, etc., because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride, which protects the bulk of the metal.

If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, the operator is confronted with the problem of a metal fluorine fire.

For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

It's a a good idea i like that a lot

now so the girard point refinery was relatively unique in the united states we've talked a lot about importing sour crude oil for use as feedstock this was a very large refinery set up exclusively for light sweet crude oil

um a whole lot of the process units for heavy sour oil were just never installed uh most notably the one that really makes the economics work right now which is a delayed coker most too delayed too delayed Yeah, exactly.

Never show up.

This meant that in the latter half of the 20th century, it began to have sort of questionable economics.

Okay.

So this is a combination of two earlier refineries, the Atlantic Refining Company's Point Breeze Refinery and Gulf Oil's Girard Point Refinery.

So, hold on.

There's okay, the Platte Bridge is here.

So, actually, I think this may only be a picture of the Girard Point side, and then Point Breeze is over there.

Anyway,

so it just

spans the river.

Yeah, exactly.

So Atlantic had interests in the oldest oil fields in Pennsylvania.

Thus, it located its major refinery in close proximity to both the oil and to population centers.

Great.

Oh, good.

I mean, safety wasn't invented yet.

Yes.

Well, people had to walk to work, you know?

I mean,

Gulf located a refinery here because it was near population centers.

And by the 20th century or the early 20th century,

big oil tankers were finally practical.

Obviously, not that big, but they're not like merchant sailing ships filled with barrels of crude oil.

Sure.

Right?

Both these sites have had a lot of history and a lot of legacy infrastructure.

They've been refining oil on this site consistently since 1874.

Jesus.

And the site has not been without its fair share of accidents in that time.

Right.

Okay.

One I thought was worth mentioning would be the 1975 fire, just because it may tie into a certain other podcast.

I didn't have too much time to go into detail on this.

Big, beautiful golf sign, though.

Oh, yeah.

Right on this big, beautiful Art Deco building that just got demolished.

Yeah.

Don't have time to go into a lot of detail on this.

This could almost be its own episode, but a tank exploded from being overfilmed.

The fire was almost contained.

Another tank exploded right as the firefighters were containing that fire.

Fire Commissioner Joseph Rizzo watched eight of his men consumed by flames right in front of his eyes.

Oh, dear.

Jesus.

And then Mayor Frank Rizzo broke his leg.

Good.

Should have broke the rest of him.

What?

The fire commissioner's leg.

No, no, no.

Joseph Rizzo was traumatized.

Frank Rizzo was on the scene, also there, just because he was Frank Rizzo.

And And then when one of the tanks exploded, his security guard ran away and tripped over the mayor, breaking the mayor's leg.

A bad day to be a Rizzo.

Yeah.

And the podcast is called No Gods, No Mayors.

Go to no GodsNomares.com.

So this was an 11-alarm fire.

It was the worst fire the refinery had until there was a 9-alarm flyer a week later.

It was not a week.

It was more like a year.

Anyway, eventually.

This facility has worked 364 days without a lost time accident.

Don't ask about 364.

It's time to cause one.

Now, Sunoco, we remember, took over Atlantic Refining in 1988.

In 1994, they take over the GoFoil half, which was then owned by Chevron.

Correct.

They could really fucking do a logo back in the day.

Especially if you killed NASCAR, which they don't pick.

The little swoosh on the end there.

I guess it's a serif or serif i've never been sure how you pronounce that but uh yeah it's sort of a serif it's not semi-serif

um sunoco then does as so many vertically integrated oil businesses did and starts to exit the production side of the business they idle the marcus hook refinery um they demolish their eagle point refinery in webst west stepford township new jersey and sunoco sells half of the combined point breeze girard point refinery to the carlisle group in 2012.

It's like investment, guys.

Yes, exactly.

They subsequently focus entirely on retail sales of fuel.

So, you know, guess who makes the official fuel of NASCAR?

Not Sunoco?

Not Sunoco.

They just sell it.

It's all brands now.

It's just brands.

It's brands all the way down.

The Carlisle Group

subsequently scratches up some funds to keep this antique refinery going under the moniker Philadelphia Energy Solutions or PES.

See, this is a shit logo.

Why it's a shit logo is because it's so low effort because it's so clearly just like spin this thing out, call it something, fucking, I don't know, Philadelphia Energy Solutions.

Yeah, sure.

Essentially, the success of this project required a few conditions, one of which was privatizing the Philadelphia gas works, the subsequent construction of a large diameter natural gas pipeline from the refinery to the fracking fields, and the conversion of the facility to take more natural gas as a feedstock.

Uh, there would also be just a little bit of direct public subsidy.

Always

when we say a little bit,

how much are we talking here?

Um,

uh, how many zeros?

Several, probably, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was about to say about seven.

Um,

now, the thing is, almost none of this pans out.

Oh, Despite Mayor Michael Nutter's best efforts to sell the gas works, it's still in public hands to this.

Mayor Nutter.

Yeah.

Second name alert.

Mayor Watt?

Nutter.

Mayor Nutter.

We're not making that up.

I met him once.

He is kind of a goofy guy.

He's a goofy dude.

So, obviously, this refinery is sort of on shaky grounds.

What happens next?

Good things, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Back in crude oil came to the rescue.

Some random farmer discovers the largest deposit of the resource.

So PES winds up benefiting from so-called shut-in oil, right?

Oil that's being produced but can't easily be transported due to the lack of pipeline capacity.

That meant that a lot of the sweet crude oil was sitting in North Dakota with no way to be processed and no way to be transported.

Yep.

Shout out to the DAPL protesters.

They were right.

So this resulted in the one crude oil exchange, the West Texas Intermediate, trading at a discount compared to Brent crude oil everywhere else.

This was compounded by the fact that while the back-end formation was being exploited, the U.S.

still had a blanket export ban on domestic crude oil so pes was in an ideal spot to exploit this it had pretty good rail access it had ready supplies of cheap sweet crude oil all all they had to do was take in a dozen or so mile-long back and crude oil trains that went right through this

right next to chicken yeah yeah right next to children's hospital of uh pennsylvania right here

oh god

yeah if you're if you're a sick kid you can look out on this like crude oil train and feel better Yeah, there's like a dozen of them a day.

Thankfully, there are no previous episodes of this podcast that talk about the consequences of running these sorts of trains through bill-up areas.

Don't worry about it.

Completely safe.

I think they did derail one in the South Philly rail yard once.

It did not explode, but it did derail.

So it looked for a while like, all right, we've carved out this insane niche that shouldn't exist.

And the refinery's future was, was

secure.

And then

two things happened.

Things always be happening.

So two things happened that ruined this brief run.

Number one is there was a big downturn in oil prices in 2014, during which time OPEC refused to cut production.

That lowered the Brent price and therefore the discount that PES was counting on to stay competitive.

Then in 2015, The oil export ban was lifted.

Now your West Texas Intermediate Oil was an international market, which also meant there was basically no discount on it anymore.

So, the whole thing was simple.

All of a sudden,

they were paying a lot of money to import, to bring all this oil down on so many goddamn trains a day.

A genuine, it was constant.

A dozen

mile-long trains a day.

A day.

This is like me when I fuck up in workers and resources.

This is like how many trains you have to run in Transport Fever 2 because the the game basically makes you run an entire railway like a metro system

yeah

interesting how we both went to the video game that we play about this and no one has mentioned city skylines too

oh yeah well oh

now there's an episode anyway no no there's not it's not it's fine

yeah it was um it the the state i believe uh paid for them to build a new crude oil terminal.

It was like called a rapid unloading terminal so they could get these mile-long crude oil trains

like um

like turned around in a few hours

so yeah these these uh they they they moved a lot of oil in by train and all of a sudden it didn't work anymore

oh stonks to stinks stinks not stonks not stonks pes couldn't afford to ship in the oil by rail they go back to using ships, right?

A brand new state-funded unloading facility was written off.

This was sort of spun at the time as addressing the city's concerns about having all that crude oil run through Center City.

It was not about that.

It was about economics.

Yeah, like they cared about Center City.

Yeah, exactly.

Ultimately, PES can only struggle on for a few more years.

The entire company enters bankruptcy in 2018.

Ultimately, the outlook here is very bleak.

This is a large, old-fashioned refinery with high labor costs and a limited range of expensive feedstocks.

Upgrading the facility was out of the question at this point, so they turned to President Donald J.

Trump.

Oh, Jesus.

And asked them, and asked for relief from complying with the renewable fuel standard, which is the one that makes you put ethanol in the gasoline because corn ethanol is sustainable, I guess.

Okay,

your Great Plains farmer's bribe.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this was designed back in 2005 to accelerate the development of advanced biofuels, and I'm sure we'll get one of them one of these days.

In fact, this in a way had an echo to the last episode we recorded, actually.

Around about this time, everyone was convinced that biofuels were the future and they were going to save everyone's ass.

I remember that.

Any second now.

There's also this sort of inscrutable financialized credit system, which during the bankruptcy, the Trump administration allowed PES to bend the rules on, and that raised them about $350 million.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I couldn't do it.

Yes.

So they got their waiver.

They got the money, but that wasn't enough to fix the finances.

They make it through Chapter 11 bankruptcy by the skin of their teeth.

They needed major investments to keep the plant competitive.

And a miracle was needed for that money to be found, right?

It's like the bit in a, like a, you know, a Disney movie or whatever.

We need like $350 million to save the community center.

Yeah,

we're going to start a bank sale to save the neighborhood.

Putting on a show, yeah.

Music rolls and just 50,000 people are dead of HF exposure.

This is from the Union of Concerned Scientists report.

PES also expected major turnarounds coming due in order to continue operating, and these would require investments in equipment renewals.

The sulfuric alkylation unit in 2018.

Low sulfur gasoline would need new equipment in 2019.

They would need a sulfur plant in 2019 and 2020.

They would need a distillate desulfurizer in 2020.

You need dirt with this fucking sulfur, man.

Like, fucking

fucking it.

They need a hydrofluoric alkylation turnaround in 2020.

They need the

turnaround here is doing really heavy maintenance, right?

Gerard Point Fluid Catalytic Cracker 2019.

Reformer in 2020.

I don't know what an OOD says, but they need that.

Yeah.

Butane isomerization unit.

You got to isomerize your butane.

Yeah.

All this stuff would be incredibly fucking expensive to do.

Just a standard ass Amazon Prime order list right there.

I'm pretty sure you got to go to Alibaba for this.

They're just like, yeah, we need you to build us a new oil refinery.

Essentially, yeah, you were looking at renewing all this equipment.

It was also unclear if PES was actually in compliance with existing environmental standards on gasoline.

Like they give a shit.

So the company's finances were clearly still on the rocks when in January 2019, they

scrapped a major maintenance turnaround, right?

Where the plant would actually have to be shut down for a very long time.

So, whether this would have caught the problem we're about to see is anyone's guess, but they were at this point deferring maintenance.

Oh, that was a recipe for success.

That is John Opal.

Yeah, good God.

Okay,

here's another annoying diagram from the CSP.

So, in the red here, this is the actual alkylation unit, right?

But we also have to talk about the things that happen afterwards.

Shot of pipes.

Yes.

Not all of the product is fully processed in the alkylation unit.

So we have some additional processes to return usable product back to the alkylation unit.

That's the depropanizer, right?

And the propane stripper.

The two sides of Hank Hill's nightmares.

Oh, yeah.

At 3:34 a.m., an operator in the refinery's main control room starts the process of reconfiguring the alkylation unit so that the propane stripper bottoms

down here at the bottom.

That's the products that come out at the bottom.

Yeah, likely place of them to be.

Exactly.

They flowed to a treatment unit for storage instead of being recycled back into...

the alkylation unit, right?

Yeah.

This is to remove excess propane from the unit because the propane just sort of accumulated over time.

The operator also slowly increased the feed into the propane stripper from 73 barrels per hour to 80 barrels per hour.

Pumping 80 barrels per hour into the propane stripper.

Gosh.

Yeah.

Jesus.

And presumably like commanding all of this with the finest like industrial technology of the 1950s.

Yes.

Jesus.

Well, probably about 1973.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Which I believe is when this unit was installed.

You're like your sort of anti-woke 1970s

propane stripper control unit.

Yeah.

So 73, so all of this is like slightly, like, slightly charbroiled from the 1975 fire.

Good question.

I think this is on the...

Yeah, this would be on the Gulf Oil side.

So yeah.

It's got lots of like white, like hand white marks apparently, isn't it?

And saying we try the

lots of cocks.

Yeah, that's it just drawn in the soot on the side of the uh tanks.

Nice.

So at just after 4 a.m an elbow between the depropan the depropanizer accumulator

we're getting doctor who shit now okay yeah yeah and the propane stripper ruptured oh it all comes back to pipes once again it does

it's all it's it's all bad welding at the end of the day.

This is dangerous because, A, propane is flammable.

No.

I've heard of this.

B, at this part of the process, the propane is contaminated with more than trace amounts of hydrofluoric acid.

Oh, fucksticks.

Something like 2.5%.

Anything above 0% is bad.

That's.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say that's 2.5% more hydrofluoric acid than I ever want involved in anything around that.

Correct.

Yes.

So, okay.

Down here we have

okay.

One thing I have to say about this diagram is that for some reason North is down.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we have down here

here here is the alkylation unit as a whole.

There is a control room for the local operators that's attached to the old control room.

The new control room was blast proof.

Oh, good.

Yeah, exactly.

And you have two field operators inside the blast control room.

One of them is outside.

Ooh.

No.

No.

All three of them heard a bang and a roaring noise.

Oh, you never want to hear a bang and a roaring noise.

In an oil refinery?

I suspect not.

No.

The one who was outside went back into the control room

through the old control room.

Saw to his horror a large cloud of ground-hugging vapor.

Oh, no.

Yeah, the juice was loose.

This is when I pull my oil refinery employee service weapon that is only used for like myself instantly.

You have to bleep that as well.

So go for that cyanide tablet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you.

They should issue you those in these situations, I feel.

It's not a situation you want to be in.

No.

So at this point, alarms start blaring in the control room.

There's various low-flow warnings, acid detectors, all kinds of thing.

The field controllers are overwhelmed instantly.

One of them inside the control room.

Oh, one of them opens the door from inside the control room, sees the vapor cloud had now enveloped the whole building, and he shut it again.

What do y'all see to do, right?

Like, just

doing the kind of like looking through the window in the door, like a teacher asking if they can borrow a kid from a class.

The other decides to take a look as well.

He opens the door, he sees the vapor cloud, which immediately ignites,

flinging him back into the control room and slamming the door shut.

Yeah, either you close the door or the door will be closed for you.

Wait, the door closed.

Oh, because there's an out.

Okay, that makes sense.

It's an outwards opening door.

I don't know why I was visualizing a door opening inwards for some reason, but no, okay, that makes sense.

Outwards opening door slammed shut.

Last resistance.

Yes.

Yeah.

He was shaken, but not injured.

So that was just a comedy experience.

Just like ragdold

across a control room.

Source engine.

Ragged old enemy.

Covered in soot.

Oh, Nico.

The first flash had rapidly consumed most, but not all of the propane.

So the field operators made their escape out the north door of the control room.

It just burns off.

Perfect.

Yeah.

They radioed the central control room.

They needed to activate the rapid acid de-inventory system.

That's the big.

That's such a euphemism.

I love the de-inventory.

I love to be de-inventory.

Inventory.

Now inventory.

I do think

we got to de-inventory this guy.

All of us have been on a recent de-inventory risk of AML.

It's, you know, I like that.

I mean, this guy just got de-inventoried across the room, you know?

So, this is a clever piece of kit.

Essentially, this process unit is so goddamn hazardous, the designers foresaw the need to shove all the horrible chemical contents into one big protected drum as quickly as possible in the event of a fire or other problem.

Uh-huh.

The rapid acid de-inventory system does just that.

Put that on a t-shirt.

This is so good.

I love that.

This is cool.

This is genuinely cool.

This is like

it triggers the same sort of feeling for me as the like Apollo program escape tower, you know?

Yes.

Something needs to happen very quickly and, you know, violence

will be used to

achieve this end.

Yeah.

So essentially, turn on the pumps.

All the stuff from these two tanks up here flows into this tank down here and also this tank here.

I think all you have to do is open a valve.

That's reassuring.

It's just like the mother of all valves.

Yeah, exactly.

Everything gets pumped into the big tank and it sits there off-site and protected as a horrible pile of acidic slot.

Neat.

Yeah, do you want your acidic slot on-site or off-site?

Yeah, exactly.

Ask yourself, Hogs.

So two minutes and 21 seconds after the incident started, the rapid acid D inventory was activated, but it would take some time to pump all 43,000 gallons of acid and product into the tank.

In the meantime, more problems were developing with the process unit.

Emergency responders pulled up about 4.06 a.m.

They began setting up monitors as the firefighting sense of monitor, which is a fixed water cannon that's pointed at the fire.

Ah, so not just a guy with a pair of binoculars and a whistle.

That looks bad, babe.

They set up a very low-lying 19th-century early war show.

Yeah, they got a bunch of big 36-inch gaming monitors.

Set up a bunch of Merrimacks.

Oh, God.

It's like a monitor, but more racist.

Yes.

There were additional very large permanent water cannons that were designed for to mitigate any HF release.

Those would have also assisted in suppressing the fire, which was still ongoing.

But

the remote activate controls for them had failed, and no one could get to them.

Oh, that's terrifying.

Manually turn them on.

We're going to need you to put on this suit and go activate the fucking HF cannon.

The suit is coming.

I was joking.

You got to step away from the latest.

Like the number of times this has happened, people are going to think that I read ahead.

I swear to you, I have not read ahead on this.

So the fire was too hot to get to the controls or to get to the to manually operate the pumps.

And at 4.15 a.m., the first small explosion occurred.

Then a second occurred at 4.19 a.m.

Both of these were contained within the unit, but the fire was worsening.

And then...

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah, the whole damn alkylation unit blew up at 4.22 in the morning.

This can't be good for the camera.

Oh, dear.

Yeah, that's

bleaching your sensor right there.

I did not like that the previous slide just casually had two explosions on it.

It didn't,

that was, there was, there was some unpleasant foreshadowing there.

Just two casual explosions.

A small explosion.

Yeah, a couple, a couple tiny ones.

As opposed to this, which is like a professional explosion.

Yeah.

So the treater feed surge drum, that's V1 up here.

Essentially, that was just a big tank for the feedstock for the alkylation unit.

It gives up the ghost.

It fails catastrophically and it explodes, sending refinery parts hundreds of feet into the air.

Infamously, half of this tank was found 2,000 feet away on the other side of the Schuylkill River.

That's bad.

Jesus.

So,

this explosion also woke up everyone in the city.

Bet it did.

Yeah.

Except me, because I fell asleep at like two.

You were asleep at this.

Yeah, you were asleep.

I think we were both asleep at this because we were both drunk.

The two Philadelphians who were just like, whatever.

Yeah.

If I go, I go.

Like, we lived like, what, two miles from it?

We would have been in the.

Hold on.

I'm measuring.

I'm measuring.

Ross, while you do that measurement, I want to briefly talk about explosions.

So, most explosions are no fun at all, and they're just like a big pump of air, and they just make a load of dust, and there's no big fireball.

This is like a proper Hollywood, like big, beautiful,

right, fireball.

Yeah.

Very, very reactive, you know?

Yeah.

And very like.

I mean, the pyromaniac in me is very pleased, but also this is in the middle of an enormous built-up area.

So

I would say we were somewhere between three and three and a half miles.

I don't think that we would have been going too good, dude.

So there's, I don't know if I've told this story before, but there's in the Scottish Central Belt near

in Falkirk, kind of near the Grangemouth refinery.

So there's all the all the petrochemical stuff in the Scottish Central Belt off the Fridth of Forth Grangemouth.

The Falkirk football stadium was built in like they didn't quite get the distances right.

And so one of the wing, one of their intended wings of the football stadium could not be built because it was inside the dotted line of the this bit gets vaporized zone if Grangemouth refinery goes up.

Okay.

So yeah, so I mean, I presume you wouldn't be doing too nice if you're on the just the other side of the dotted line either.

But, uh, yeah, so that if anyone's ever wondering why there's a half of the or a quarter of Falkirk Football Club's stadiums missing, that's why.

This this refinery is interesting in that there was actually a small residential neighborhood essentially inside of it.

Wait, what?

What?

Yeah, I probably should have led with that.

Put that up somewhere.

Yeah, I probably should have led with that.

Yeah, it's right off of Pash Yunk Avenue.

Hold on, I'll put the Google map over here.

There it is.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, yeah.

How did this happen?

How did this come to occur?

Well, it used to be two refineries.

Oh, okay.

And people just lived in the middle.

Walter Street, the nearest street.

And then the gas works was over here.

Porch Street.

The Sunoko gas station.

They got a nice big gas emeter, too.

Anyway, before I reveal secrets here,

go on Twitter.

That's the secret.

Yeah, exactly.

So almost everyone except Roz and Liam are awake now.

That's where we're at.

Sit, Red.

Everyone's awake except Roz and Liam.

How are we doing on like broken windows?

I don't think there were that many.

This is not like a

way fucking worse.

Yeah, I was just saying, like a big Hollywood one.

It's like Hollywood, so it's not a huge, like, it's not like a Beirut sort of

high-speed blast.

It's just, it's a very big, fiery, powerful, but fairly slow explosion.

Yeah.

So after the explosion,

at around 4.39 in the morning, the shift supervisor donned protective gear.

I think it's called a bunker suit.

Weird name.

Don protective gear.

Don Protective Gear.

And he finally made it to the water pumps and turned them on.

This was sufficient to suppress residual hydrogen fluoride, but not enough to contain the fire.

So he actually had to do the like Fallout 3

thing.

Yeah, you got to put on a horrible suit and go into the horrible fire.

Turn on a water canner.

The big suit from Loki Series 2.

You walk out there.

You know what?

I appreciate that it's the shift supervisor, right?

Like, I'm sure you could have got a higher ranking guy to do that, but like, it's not like, it's not like that one safety third we got where it's like, oh, the apprentice has to do.

You know,

your duties include making tea, making coffee, donning the fucking hyper asbestos suit, and like entering into the zone of danger.

Yeah, the person with the tier two health planner is for once is the person who's actually going out and putting the work in.

Okay, fine, good.

Yeah.

I apologize for this.

I really have to use the restroom.

I'll be right back.

We're good.

We'll vamp.

Yeah, we can tread more.

That's fine.

My calligraphy supplies, or my first batch thereof.

Go on.

So I got a bunch of inks from a Korean company called,

I'm going to fuck up the name.

It's like wearing ghoul.

Ghul is like a letter in Korean, I think.

And yeah,

I got a bunch of these.

I have a bunch of like cheap Chinese fountain pens from AliExpress, which are very, very good.

And I'm just

like, while we're recording, I'm just like fucking around on Scratchpad trying to get back into some calligraphy.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

Having a great time.

Yeah,

one of the things I used to really enjoy doing when i did um art and design uh

uh hire advanced hire in fact was uh was i used to love just getting in getting in and getting into the pens and like just doing some really nice pen and ink stuff it was it was yeah uh and i suppose that kind of foreshadowed my interest in typefaces and stuff which i'm a nerd about so yeah

So I can't draw at all for shit, but I'm not a horrible calligrapher.

You know, something I used to do.

And, you know, so I'm going to try and get back into it because I really like the kind of like,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, obviously, like, another tremendously expensive and annoying hobby.

Oh, dude, you have to post some of the results.

I'm super keen to see.

It sounds really good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If I get any that I'm like happy with, I need like a proper workspace for it.

But I'm hopeful for having one of those soon.

Yes.

And yeah,

I really like

black letter calligraphy.

Like

Fractal.

Self-support.

yeah yeah yeah yeah um very like i to me easier right because you're just um you're like holding the pen flat you're not doing any of the like um

weird sort of like you know like copper place or spenserian stuff um but yeah yeah you don't even have to like have a kind of like um uh

I don't know.

It works for like thick line weights as well.

One of the calligraphy style that's always appealed to me is the, is, is ornate, but obviously, uh,

kind of obviously crafted in a sense.

So, so you, you know, some of them are so exquisite that you almost cannot tell that it's not been mass-produced.

And I mean that in a positive way, because it's so intricate.

Oh, yeah, perfectly created.

I've always quite enjoyed ones where you've got all the serifs, all the sort of the really fancy stuff in the in the style, but but also you can see, you can almost see the hand rotations to achieve the different marks.

I don't know why.

I kind of, I suppose it's a bit like a locomotive that's been hand-bapped, that's all the part, all the metalworks like hand-bashed, and you can see all the dents from the original hammer that built it.

I find a satisfaction in that, but uh, yeah, a lot of the little sort of like imperfections or like textures and

yeah, you can sort of see the person who's who's who's kind of holding the pen, which is quite nice.

That's brilliant.

Hmm.

Yeah.

This has been calligraphy hour.

Calligraphy hour.

Calligraphy hour begins now and does not.

You will be subject to calligraphy hour.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, like, calligraphy in itself could be a decent episode.

I'd be happy to record that.

Because, like, yeah, there's a lot of history there.

Oh, I'm sure there are some disasters as a result of

misincerted or misrepresented.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I mean, the reason why black letter calligraphy exists, even though it's less legible than stuff that preceded it, is because it's like faster to write.

Like, when I say it's easier, I'm not just saying that.

It's like a technological advancement in the sense of like, fucking, like, I don't know, Middle Ages Corey Doctoro, early modern Corey Doctoro would call it in shittification, right?

But like,

because what you're getting is a scriptorium that can produce books much more quickly, but they are harder to read.

And like, ultimately, what you had was you had this kind of like return with a V to tradition of like a Carolingian

hand, which is much more readable, much more humanistic,

and which like

but like which would otherwise take longer.

So yeah

I mean I

let's just let's just do this.

We don't need to talk about the aftermath of this horrifying explosion.

I'm absolutely hooked now.

There is absolutely now going to be a Wikipedia tab explosion that's going to keep me entertained until 4.30 in the morning.

Interesting thing to read about is a court hand or Anglicana, which was the like one of the distinctly like English forms of calligraphy, but which existed solely within the legal system.

And it was like

court roles and stuff like that had to be written in Anglicana.

And even as late as like, you know, 19th century,

you know, after it was sort of like banned, after it fell out of use, like to go into legal archives, you still needed to be able to read this very strange kind of like

script.

that kind of like long since no longer exists.

Now I'm fascinated to know about the history of like the ability to read who a particular, like what a particular school or even trained individual that were the origin of certain forms and within the or or certain text within the form

and protections again, doing things like deliberate errors to protect, but repeated ones to protect against forgery and stuff like that.

Now I'm very okay.

The tabs continue.

Let's go.

Let's go.

I gotta do a bunch of shit.

Okay.

So, anyway, so the shift supervisor turns on the

fixed monitors, right?

This is enough to suppress the residual hydrogen fluoride that's in the atmosphere around the process unit, but not enough to contain the fire, right?

Additional firefighters make it to the scene, including the both firefighters from the plant itself, from the local private industrial fire department, which just sort of covers all of the chemical plants in this area.

Horrible job.

Yeah.

Well, they got a lot of specialized knowledge, you know, which is useful.

And from the Philadelphia Fire Department.

It took over 24 hours to extinguish the blaze with the final embers being put out on the morning of Saturday, June 22nd.

The stored HF mixture had to be neutralized over a period of months, which was completed on August 27th.

Just slowly pumping fucking Peptobismol into the fat will kill you instantly chemical.

ultimately how do you neutralize a giant HF spit like that?

I mean you joke, but I just visualize it.

It is just guys with like 250 crates of peptobismol just emptying those pink little balls in there

one at a time.

Yeah, you have to

send in the Gavascon cum fire classes.

You have to turn it into a salt in some method.

Okay.

Yeah, you got to precipitate out all that fluoride.

I don't know exactly how it works.

Nasty, nasty ways.

If you do know,

ultimately, there's no injuries and no fatalities, which is astonishing considering how bad it could have gotten.

That's amazing.

I mean, so

even with all of this, like, extreme degeneration of like the plant and everything else around it, like the system works, sort of.

Sort of, yeah, sort of things still blew up.

Hi, milkshake.

Oh.

No, that's the microphone.

Hi, Milkshake.

Milkshake unpaid contributor.

I was about to say, yeah.

So let's talk about what almost happened here.

This is one of the goldfish tests, right?

Where the Department of Energy released large quantities of hydrogen fluoride in the desert to study what would happen.

Oh, the Department of Energy is some scary fucking bureaucrats.

Closest thing to the Federal Bureau of Control going.

They're just fucking around in the desert.

They're just out there doing shit.

Hope you're not an armadillo in this cloud.

Prior to these tests, oil refiners thought that in a large HF release, it would remain liquid.

Milkshake, get out of the way of the notes.

He's very happy to see me.

I've been away for a bit.

It would remain liquid and pool

on the ground.

Thus, alkylation units were protected by the standard containment dikes that you see around oil tanks and things like that.

How much did they actually believe this?

How much was this just I don't like want to pay

stuff?

Very much sort of I don't want to think about this.

Yeah, let's hope it doesn't happen.

When these tests were performed, of course, a different condition was observed.

The HF forms of massive vapor cloud that, goddammit, milkshake

saboteur.

I was about to say.

The HF forms a massive vapor cloud that then spreads out over the landscape, reducing animal and vegetable alike into sort of goo.

Oh, I do not like that.

Yeah.

This is not ideal in the middle of a major city, particularly when prevailing winds would drive the HF cloud directly into the densest parts of South Philly.

Can you imagine Philly 9-11, but it's just like everybody you know know gets reduced to goo?

Yeah, everyone gets turned into a sort of slop.

Yeah, that would not be good.

Supergunate, you might say.

Well, I'm imagining, I don't know, maybe there's a house show running really late, and the gas comes in and, you know,

concentrates in the basement.

Oh, my God.

Jeez.

Not good.

Not good.

At least it didn't happen in Pittsburgh because that would have taken out a bunch more of them.

Because of the basement toilets.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

No, the house shows in the basement.

It would be a, I don't know, maybe it's like a metal band with one of those insane logos.

Oh, yeah.

And then all of a sudden everyone in there looks like that insane logo.

Metal Sucks used to do unreadable metal logo of the week when I was always a

I love your life, Liam.

So anyway, we have a lot to thank the control room workers for.

Had that HF not been de-inventoried so quickly, there would have been a lot of people just turned into sort of

goo.

Well, we would have been de-inventorying HF.

We'd have been de-inventorying a third of the population of Philly.

Yeah, exactly.

Now they had quite a lot of truck like a septic tank truck to, you know, just sort of suck everyone's drain people into the drain.

You would have been sort of justified red mist.

They just pumped it out of the environment.

Yes.

Funniest thing you can do with this is just like, we'll just put this over here.

I'll just put it somewhere else.

Yeah, now it's not a problem anymore.

Cool.

Well, anyway,

around $750 million of damage was done to the PES refinery, which, to remind you, was old, expensive to operate, only took expensive feedstock, generally very annoying to own and have to operate.

More so now, I imagine.

Yes.

Yeah, because it doesn't have that alkylation unit.

You can't even make the high-quality fuels anymore.

If you don't schedule time for maintenance, the maintenance schedules the time for you.

Yes.

For whom the maintenance tolls.

So PES has to idle the plant.

Then they declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for a second time on July 21st.

It quickly became clear that

chapter 11 was not feasible, and so the process moved to chapter 7.

liquidation.

Which is what was going to happen to all the people in South Philly.

Yes.

Mass Chapter 7 event.

Oh, God.

This was, I mean, I assume that's what happens if you declare chapter 7 personal bankruptcy.

Well, they just liquidate you.

They just liquidate you.

Yeah.

You're getting the fucking HF

pressure washer.

So, Chapter 7, new nightmarish weapon invented.

Watch a pressure washer filled with hydrofluoric acid.

You're going to need a hell of a protective suit for that one.

Oh, yeah.

So, this was opposed by PES's union.

It was opposed by the Trump administration, and it was even opposed by a few creditors, right?

Because losing a refinery this large would eliminate good union jobs.

Keep in mind, this was one of the largest union employers in the city.

This would affect national security because, you know, this is a very, very big refinery that's good for refining domestic crude oil.

And it would put put unsecured creditors at risk of losing their investments, respectively.

Right.

That being said, there were plenty of people who were in favor of closing the refinery, not the least of whom were the people living near it who were almost liquefied.

Understandable.

And so it wound up: okay, the refinery is closing.

We can't reopen it.

There's a wide range of proposed ideas for the site, right?

Mayor Jim Kenney's administration convened the refinery advisory group to involve the public in decisions about the future of the site.

Drexel's Lindy Center for Urban Something or Other released a wide-ranging report on future uses for the area after remediation.

All of this involved, you know, public stakeholders, blah, blah, blah, you know, the sort of thing that you do when you release a big, long report.

All of this was completely ignored, and the site was sold to Hillco Development Partners.

Wait, what?

This is a site that's.

What?

So this is a site that's bigger than Center City, right?

This is a huge area.

It's massive.

It is a massive, massive site.

It just got sold.

Just straight off to the development part.

It's not seen as like a genuine public good that could have been

usefully expanded at a nice, walkable new part of the city.

Condos.

No.

No, it's not condos either.

It's worse.

Oh, God.

So, anyway, the workers were laid off.

The refinery was closed permanently.

The future of this massive site directly adjacent to the center of the fifth largest city in the country, was thoroughly and completely in private hands.

Oh, here's the disaster part then.

Yeah.

Now, before we get to that, I will say: okay, what was the cause of the incident?

It was corrosion.

Yeah, it was corrosion.

It was corrosion.

Yeah.

Namely, it was different metals corroding at different rates.

Huh.

I mean, this will get you on a bridge as well, as we've discovered.

Most of the carbon steel piping on the alkylation unit was made from an alloy which was low in nickel and copper.

This elbow, however, right here, was made from Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company's proprietary YOLOI.

Oh, that Yoloy.

Yeah, I heard a Drake song about that once.

It had a much higher nickel and copper concentration.

This made the steel...

It's the worst elbow thing to happen since the keyboard player turned out to be a turf.

This made the steel more ductile and easier to work.

And in fact, it still had pretty good corrosion resistance, but not so much that it could be used continuously, subjected to trace hydrogen fluoride from 1973 to 2019.

Oh, good.

At some point, it's about to hit its McFucking limit, right?

Yeah, I don't want any components in an oil refinery to be called YOLO.

I just, I don't like that.

No, it's the YOLOI.

Wow.

They've been working on a cocktail called Grounds for Divorce.

There were random inspections to determine corrosion in pipes,

but not on every component.

So somehow everyone admits that while this elbow was installed,

when this elbow was installed, it had a wall thickness of a third of an inch.

And when it ruptured, it had a wall thickness of a hundredth of an inch.

That's not a lot.

That's very thin.

That's half the thickness of a credit card.

Yeah, that's gold floor levels of thickness there.

This is paper thin

level of yeah, okay.

Good.

You got to hire more pipe inspectors, I think.

Pay your pipe guys.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, this is far less than the standard for retiring and replacing a section of pipe like this.

And of course, you know, this has been a very unloved facility for about for a good chunk of this time, right?

It was, you know, it was old.

It it was decrepit.

If the oil refinery doesn't feel loved, it will explode.

Yeah.

It's very needy.

Yeah.

Who amongst us?

Oh, same.

Yeah.

I'm referencing a vice article some of you will know.

As a result of this, there are now more stringent practices in the industry about inspecting piping on alkylation units.

All pipes must be inspected and not a random sample.

I feel so much better about this.

And anyway.

Problem solved.

There we go.

Yeah, job creation for the pipe inspector district.

Now we have some great job creation coming, thanks to Hilco Development Partners.

What are they putting on this shit?

The Bellwether

District.

They're building the Bellwether District.

What the fuck is a Bellwether District?

It's a bunch of fulfillment warehouses.

Oh, my God.

Are you shit?

Great.

Amazon Fulfillment Center,

but it gives everyone who works in it cancer and also probably you cancer from getting the Amazon password.

And also Amazon is an unusable website now because it's all full of like knock-off bullshit.

Do you know why this is?

And I say this as someone who's lived on the last two places I've lived have been on former industrial sites and therefore have had to have ground remediation.

This is to avoid doing the onerous ground remediation.

This is so they all they have to do is basically drive a dozer over the top of it until it's flat and then put the put the rapid-fire giant Amazon fulfillment warehouse on top.

Just sprinkle some Amazon workers over it and call it good.

Exactly.

I think they've been doing some amount of remediation, but yeah, they're obviously not aiming for residential or commercial uses here, at least in this part.

Further up, I think they have something they're calling an innovation district up here.

The good thing is

that they're innovating new kinds of cancer to go down.

The good thing is you can probably put they probably put more biomedical space up there so they can cure the cancers as quickly as they can make new ones.

The good thing is that when when

the city gets taken over by

when we see the good future take over, you can quite easily flatten this lot, redo the ground remediation, and actually convert it into useful human space.

Yeah.

I mean, the other thing that gets me about this is this site has excellent rail access.

Well, they're going to use it.

I think there's one building down here that can theoretically get a spur.

Oh.

I looked at the website.

Oh, God.

They advertise rail access.

They don't plan for it.

Oh, boy.

And,

well, I guess this is what environmental justice is.

What a nightmarish little story.

Yeah, I mean, you know, and you got to think, okay,

you know, there's still...

Like, this is the largest polluting facility in the region.

But the thing is, of course, we're still completely surrounded by oil refineries.

Yeah, and any one of them could turn you into goo at any moment.

Yeah, exactly.

There's one in Trainer, there's one in Paulsboro, there's one in Delaware City.

I think the one in Trainer is actually operated by Delta Airlines, which refines the wrong fuel.

I mean, I suppose we've got to be glad that, I mean, this is maybe a happy story in that we didn't kind of

like convert

a lot of.

No one got gooped.

Yeah, no one got gooped.

We did not make, you know, we didn't end up with a situation that made threads look like playday.

You don't experience Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Yeah, we didn't de-inventory a third of the population of Philly.

That's good.

You just have to get

a steam hose and

shove bodies of body.

Oh, God.

Massive sewage buildup.

Oh, my God.

Kind of fat burg situation.

Yes.

I mean, praise be to the engineers who put the de-inventorying system in.

It's an actual, you know,

very much a W for that safety system.

Oh, yeah.

Build safety systems in.

It worked.

You know, fair play.

Well, what did we learn?

Don't live near an oil refinery.

By near, I mean within 20 miles.

Hey,

the trainer and the Marcus Hook refineries are,

they have two blocks of houses right in between.

They sure do.

Yeah, so

this is the story of the PES refinery.

Yeah, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Oh, God, I got a 50-50 chance here.

Shake hands with danger.

Pro.

Hello.

Hello, Nova, Liam, and Justin.

No, hello from Earth.

Missed one.

Yeah, fuck that guy.

And Liam left early.

So you're wrong twice.

Today I bring you a story laden with danger, sexism, every pronoun imaginable, and workplace neglect in the private yachting industry.

I did not see that coming.

You have my attention.

Trigger warning for loss of life.

As I read through this, it's not directly in the story.

Okay.

These days I am a card-carrying member of the No Voice Train Gang.

Hell yeah.

Solidarity.

My pronouns are he and him.

But years ago when this story took place, I was deep in the closet and still presenting as femme with she-her pronouns.

Hang on to

I spent a couple years working as a deck hand on private yachts.

God, I'm so sorry.

Yeah.

Yachting is a blatantly sexist industry.

Men are deck crew, officers, and engineers.

The girls are stewardesses.

When I started working, I didn't quite understand that I was trans, but I did understand that being perceived as a masculine worker filled me with a joy that I couldn't quite recognize, and I wanted to replicate it as often as possible.

Though the men around me set the bar pitifully low, I was regularly lauded for showing up to work on time and mostly sober.

I was still passed over for a lot of jobs because girls aren't strong enough to be deckhands.

Maybe this is my naivete happening, but what kind of like

heavy physical labor are you doing on the yacht for like the 1%?

Stupid boat stuff.

Yeah, I guess so.

Like fucking around with anchors and stuff, you know, hurling Robert Maxwell's bloated body over the back.

back yeah crates of crates of uh illegal alcohol that sort of things of this nature

illegal cigars illegal um

i don't want to be able to lift and carry uh you know a weight of principles a pallet of bricks of cocaine yeah

when i finally did land a job my position was precarious it was made known to me that my

It was made known to me that my employers had never hired a female deck hand, and whether or not I succeeded at the job would determine determine whether they continued to hire women in my role.

Oh, fucking hell, no pressure.

Extremely illegal.

You know, it's the sea, so whatever, you know.

Exactly.

International law has no HR

or maritime law, whatever it is.

If at any time they thought I would be unable to perform the duties in the exact same capacity as a man, I would be immediately fired and sent back home.

It's also important to note that yachts have very little in the way of worker protection.

You can be fired for anything at any time.

All this made me, number one, determined to prove that women, because they're women, not girls, can do the damn job.

And number two, the deck hands,

number two, the deck hand liable to be handed all of the shitty jobs because I wouldn't or couldn't say no.

Great.

On this particular day, the boatswain, who we'll call Phil, this is Phil right here.

Oh, yeah.

And this lovely hand-drawn image.

Oh, it's beautiful.

Nice.

Love this.

post-it note shout out to 3m

shout out to 3m yeah

phil wanted me to polish the forward flagpole

which was which was about 15 to 20 feet tall we did not have a 15 to 20 foot ladder but we did have a hydraulic crane that we used to lift the jet skis off the bow and lower them into the water i think if i think the rich people here should probably

i think we can say that if you if you if your yacht has a like a jet ski crane i think you should be

phil instructed me to climb up to the peak of the crane arm with my polishing equipment and balance on it while he used the remote control to maneuver me to the top nope don't like that beautiful beautiful idea phil the crane was not rated for people to be standing on top of it and it was painted with very shiny very slick white all grip with aesthetic rounded edges.

We were also, you know, on a boat in the water,

which is a substance famed for continuous movement.

It's kind of like holding on to an icicle in this situation, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

This has got to be like, I'm imagining this crane is like something that's been designed very aesthetically in this very sleek, horrible yacht, you know?

Uh-huh.

You know, it's like all white and it's like, you know, it looks like it's made of renderite.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yogurt pot.

When I asked for a harness, Phil replied I didn't need one as the fall wouldn't be that far.

Oh, yeah, that's okay, fair.

Cool.

It's only 15 to 20 feet.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can walk that off.

And as long as I kept my balance on the very shiny, very slick, all-grip paint with my very sweaty bare feet, I would not fall.

Now, if I had been asked to do this about six months before, I might have swallowed my fears in the name of being manly and gone to work on the hydraulic balance beam of death because it's probably going to be okay, right?

And dudes rock, right?

But just a few months prior to this incident, a friend of mine in a similar situation in the yachting industry said

yes

and ended up falling over 100 feet to her untimely death.

Jesus.

While I missed my friend terribly, I also knew she would be annoyed if I showed up in purgatory so soon after her for the same reason.

Giving men, especially men in a position of power, an outright no, usually ends pretty poorly.

So I suggested we check with the first mate Patrick, who was our acting captain at the time, before starting the job.

Phil wasn't happy about this, but decided to radio Patrick just to be sure.

Patrick took one horrified look at the setup and forbade anyone from standing on the crane, and gave Phil a good chewing out for even suggesting it, and suggesting we do elevated work without the required safety harnesses.

He prevented a serious workplace disaster for me, and, as I am sure, I would have lost my balance and broken my neck on some useless billionaire's shitty jet ski.

I stayed in the industry for a couple more years until I finally realized that being a man does not necessate manual labor and cargo shorts.

Yeah.

I am now settled on land as a happy little twink and working on a law degree so I can provide legal counsel to unscrupulous orcas carrying out vigilante justice without fear of seasickness or being asked to sweat on the job.

Maritime law.

Let's go.

Thanks for a great show.

I found Well, There's Your Problem on an R/slash ask Reddit thread back in May, and have been binging the podcast since.

November, I've always been self-conscious about my voice, but listening to you presenting unapologetically as yourself has been a joyfully affirming experience.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You're very welcome.

I'm just too lazy to do it, but

I'm glad that people seem to, to get something from it.

Yeah.

Respectfully, fuck you.

Hey, whoa, fuck you, Chef.

You and the Lord.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Let's get this twink out of here.

Yeah.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Rail Natter.

Oh, yeah.

Kill James Bond.

And no Gods, No Mayors.

No Gods, No Mayors.

I've excitedly.

I've been thinking about Mayors, and I've thought of one that is so much in

everything's wheelhouse that I've already, I need to suggest it because I'm excited to think about it.

Yeah, yeah, please do.

I think about Mayors.

I'm always happy to hear mayoral suggestions.

You got so many mayors to choose from.

Oh, it's yeah, no, the spreadsheet is getting out of control at this point.

Excellent.

The mayoral masterless, yeah, yeah.

So many mares, Zillis, do a mare cage match.

Oh, the one I'm thinking of, the color of puce that he can go when threatened.

Yeah, that's uh, yeah, I'd redeem quite fun standing in a cage.

All right, well, with some of the worst technical difficulties we've had in any podcast in a while, well, actually, that's not true at all.

Um, no, no, when we lost the four and a half-hour episode, that was the worst technical difficulty.

That was probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

This is a mere two hours 12.

Exactly.

All right.

I'm going to say that was a podcast.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

If it is in.