The CEO of refiner Valero is telling the electric grid operator that serves its Texas City refinery it needs to do more to improve power reliability.
Valero’s Texas City refinery has been hit by four major power outages this year, each caused by problems with the power transmission and/or distribution equipment owned and operated by TNMP.
The outages, which hit other Texas City refineries including facilities owned by BP and Marathon, led to equipment shutdowns and flaring as the companies scrambled to burns off dangerous emissions. In one instance Texas City officials declared a shelter-in-place when emissions levels became dangerously high.
In a letter of the CEO of TNMP and its parent company, PNM Resources, Valero CEO William Klesse said he is concerned that the companies are not doing enough preventive maintenance, or PM, on the power grid in Texas City.
“Even though TNMP has made efforts to address the April and May power outages, with these recent incidents, we remain very concerned about TNMP’s focus on PM work and the reliability of your equipment,” Klesse said in the letter (see it below). “We believe that all four of the power outages discussed above could have been prevented by a more rigorous focus on PM for TNMP’s insulators and transformer, as well as a commitment to following written procedures for maintenance work. These are serious events.”
Klesse asked for a meeting the PNM/TNMP executives “to discuss these issues and ensure that there is the proper commitment to and focus on PM work.”
The April and May outages were caused by “flashovers” where a build-up of debris on insulators allowed certain lines and equipment to ground. TNMP used power washers to clean off the insulators – something that normally isn’t required during normal rainfall patterns — but Klesse notes in the letter the transformers involved in the incidents should have been better able to isolate the outages.
On July 25 there was another outage that occurred when TNMP was working with Valero to remove a transformer at the Bayview Substation in Texas City. This led to the shut-down of Valero’s coker unit.
Most recently, on Sept. 22, TNMP transformer at the Cherokee Substation failed, leading to the shutdown of several large electric motors at the refinery and several processing units. The same happened to BP and Marathon’s facilities, all of which had to activate flares.
Refiners are usually fined when they activate their flares.
Earlier this month PNM said it would sell its retail electric business, First Choice Power, in order to focus on less volatile businesses. The announcement moved PNM a step closer to investment grade.
Here is a novel idea, how about using generators and batteries to sustain your processes in case of an emergency power outage? Hospitals do it, why can’t you?
I don’t think you fully appreciate the power required to run a refinery. There are batteries and generators to power control systems and control rooms, but the equipment requires several orders of magnitude more power to run.
Just to give you an idea of how large some of these motors are, think about your air conditioner in your yard. It probably consumes somewhere between 2 and 6 kilowatts when running. The generators a hospital uses might be between 100 and 500 kilowatts. The motors in these refineries will draw between 200 and 50000 kilowatts. Usually they have hundreds of motors of various shapes and sizes. Usual power load for a refinery can be in the hundreds of thousands of kilowatts. Maybe more.
Many refiners have “back-up” generators…they’re actually natural gas fired turbines that generate between 5000 and 150000 kilowatts just like the ones that generate the power for the grid. Look up Calpine, they provide over 400000 kilowatts of power in Texas City alone.
No battery system on the planet will sustain the processes that occur in a refinery.
I understand very well, I think you are skewing the numbers. I find it highly unlikely that the refinery is using 200+ MW a day. I find it hard to believe that one refinery uses an eighth of the electricity generated by a solitary power plant. They can use turbines for co-generation using their product and they could have plenty of industrial generators to power the rest of the processes. I know it is expensive… but I think profit margins are large enough right now to afford it.
I bet dollars to doughnuts that if the fines for the pollution were high enough, that they would find a solution. That being said, why we still have lines above ground is beyond me.
Of course, if you can provide a link proving the power consumption I will be more than happy to recant.
http://www.eia.gov/emeu/mecs/iab98/petroleum/onsite.html
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_con_by_pet_ref-energy-electricity-consumption-petroleum-refineries
http://hesreport.sunocoinc.com/fw/main/Energy_Usage-51.html
Refineries take a lot of energy to run.