Oil in US and Houston: BusinessWeek, Mar 3, 2014 (I)

choi

Mark Hertsgaard, The Petro States of America; Big Oil’s sway over Washington makes the US a petro state in all but name, a reality that looms large over the Keystone debate.  (in the section Opening Remarks, which is the first in the content)
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... -keystone-xl-debate

Quote:

“'The United States is as much of an OPEC nation as most OPEC nations are,' Everett Ehrlich, an undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Clinton administration, once told me in an interview.

"The relationship between Washington and Big Oil began changing in the 1930s, when discoveries of massive deposits in Texas, Oklahoma, and California made the US the world’s largest oil producer. This development conferred on Washington a huge advantage: Unlike any of the Axis and Allied powers, the US had its own oil to fight World War II. Abundant domestic supply also transformed the postwar US economy as Americans bought cars and commuted from rapidly expanding suburbs. Building all those cars and interstate highways propelled a decades-long economic boom that ranks among the most spectacular in human history.

"the current shale oil and gas boom that the International Energy Agency forecasts will turn the US into the world’s biggest oil producer by 2015—and may have already by some estimates.

"Washington has showered the oil and gas industries with far more tax breaks and other subsidies than any other energy source. Oil and gas received roughly two-thirds of all such subsidies from 1918 to 2009, averaging $4.86 billion a year (in 2010 dollars), according to an analysis by DBL Investors, a venture capital firm in San Francisco. These numbers exclude the cost of deployment of US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf to ensure that the industry’s product can reach the US market. This subsidy alone had a $235 billion a year price tag from 1976 to 2007, according to Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University.

Note:
(a) The international (as opposed to the domestic) edition of BusinessWeek has the cover story--based on the same article--that says, “Oil Nation; Crude, climate change, and the meaning of Keystone XL.”
(b)
(i) I knew US was world’s largest oil producers on the eve of World War II (1941)--Middle East’s oil was not discovered yet. Quotation 2 tells us that US had won the crown less than a decade before.
(ii) Conventional wisdom is that US economy had a good time up to 1960s, because World World II ruined other developed nations. Now quotation 2 says cars and interstates contributed a lot!
(c) Pair quotation  3 with the graphic on Web page 2.
(d) There is no need to read the rest of the essay.

choi

Isaac Arnsdorf and Dan Murtaugh with Jack Kaskey, Heading to Houston? Try the Texas Chicken.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... ot-oil-and-gas-boom

Quote:

"navigating the Houston Ship Channel, a narrow waterway that connects the city’s downtown with Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. * * * Signs of America’s energy boom are visible all along the 52-mile shipping lane.

"Much of the record US growth in oil and gas output is transiting through Houston, the country’s largest export gateway and home to the greatest concentration of refineries and petrochemical plants in the US.

"At the turn of the 20th century, Houston was a provincial cotton-trading hub with only slightly more inhabitants than its coastal neighbor to the east, Galveston, home to the region’s deepwater port. Buffalo Bayou, less than 10 feet deep, was the only navigable waterway that spanned most of the distance between the two cities. After a hurricane battered Galveston in September 1900, US Representative Thomas Ball successfully lobbied Congress to dredge the bayou and Galveston Bay to a depth of 25 feet. 'At that time, Houston was still a small town,' says Janiece Longoria, chairman of the Port of Houston Authority. 'Houston owes all its bounty to the ship channel.' The resulting waterway is 4 miles longer than the Panama Canal. About 8 percent of US refining capacity lines its shores.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: The US energy boom has turned a tiny bayou into one of the world’s most crowded waterways
(b) The title comes from the phrase “play chicken.” See chicken (game)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)

(c)
(i) Galveston, Texas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston,_Texas
(During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia named the island Gálvez-town or Gálveztown in honor of Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez; Population 47,743 (2010 census)

Port of Galveston (Table: Type of harbor Natural, Minimum depth 45 feet (14 m)) Wikipedia
(ii) Bernardo de Gálvez
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_de_Gálvez
(1746-1786; Gálvez aided the American Thirteen Colonies, defeating the British at the Siege of Pensacola (1781) and reconquering Florida for Spain;
He spent the last two years of his life as Viceroy of New Spain, succeeding his father Matías de Gálvez y Gallardo [qv; whose wife--and Berbado's mother--was María Josefa de Madrid])

The Spanish forms of Matthew are Matías and Mateo, among others.

(d) "Buffalo Bayou, less than 10 feet deep, was the only navigable waterway that spanned most of the distance between the two cities."

Houston Ship Channel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Ship_Channel
(is part of the Port of Houston—one of the United States's busiest seaports; The channel is a widened and deepened natural watercourse created by dredging the Buffalo Bayou and the Galveston Bay; The original watercourse for the channel, Buffalo Bayou [qv for map], has its headwaters 30 miles (48 km) to the west of the city of Houston; The channel, periodically widened and deepened to accommodate ever-larger ships, is 530 feet (160 m) wide by 45 feet (14 m) deep by 50 miles (80 km) long))

(e) "A network of pipelines connects the [Houston's refining] facilities to oil fields throughout the Midwest and Texas and the storage depots at Cushing, Okla."

Cushing, Oklahoma
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma
(a city; named for Marshall Cushing, private secretary to U.S. Postmaster General John Wanamaker; oil boom started in 1912 but did ot last long (measured by years); Cushing is a "vital transshipment point with many intersecting pipelines, storage facilities and easy access to refiners and suppliers"/ Cushing is the delivery point for West Texas Intermediate WTI, a blend of US light sweet crude oil streams, traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange)

(f) “Kinder Morgan’s new condensate splitter, the industry term for plants that distill a light form of crude oil into byproducts such as naphtha, distillate, and kerosene. The first splitter tower lies on its side, resembling the Saturn rockets on display at the nearby Johnson Space Center."
(i) "A condensate splitter is simply a distillation tower."
(ii) fractional distillation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
("To improve fractionation the apparatus is set up to return condensate to the column by the use of some sort of reflux splitter (reflux wire, gago, Magnetic swinging bucket, etc.) - a typical careful fractionation would employ a reflux ratio of around 10:1 (10 parts returned condensate to 1 part condensate take off)"/ section 2 Industrial distillation)
(iii) So "splitter tower lies on its side" simply means it is to be erected.

(g) Galena Park and Baytown are two cities in Texas. Wikipedia