Refinery risk and technology rules were adopted last week on September 29th. They are expected to have a significant impact on the refining industry. The rules require additional control and monitoring of the emissions from the refineries and the emission reporting that is available to the public and other neighboring communities.

Turnaround time intervals approaching 60 months are becoming more frequent as processes and procedures improve over time. The incentive to extend the turnaround cycle beyond 60 months does nothing more than prolong turnaround times.

The LTOs generally do not contain a higher concentration of nitrogen. LTOs are typically characterized as light, sweet, low-sulfur, low-nitrogen crudes. For example, the Eagle Ford and the Bakken nitrogen typically contains less than 2 ppm. Nonetheless, the gasoline processing units are impacted when refineries process higher percentage of the LTOs because of the crudes.

Even without potential regulatory increases in minimum octanes, in a low-price gasoline environment, it seems clear that lower prices result in premium gasoline demand.

That was a great Keynote address this morning because it talked about the LTOs, and Ramón Loureiro described them in detail. A couple of other options are to take the light naphtha through an isomerization unit and separate out the C5s and C6s to possibly get the benzene precursor removed from the reformer.

Shell and Motiva have been on a journey, for well over 15 years, to educate our operators and provide them with the information necessary to operate their units within the safe operating window. The starting point is to define the unit operating window in terms of temperature, pressure, flows, etc.

Our main concern here is iron sulfide, which is pyrophoric; meaning that if it is exposed to air, it will self-ignite. There is also hydrocarbon present, so you can get a sustained fire if these lights are off.

The corresponding OSHA regulation 1910.1082 states that the actionable limit for contact with the airborne benzene is 0.5 ppm (parts per million) on an eight-hour time-weighted average (TWA) and 5 ppm for a 15-minute TWA basis. In our facility, we have set our practices to meet that standard.

Our expectation would be that there could be issues on both the slurry side (tube side) of the exchangers and the shell side in FCC feed preheat service. Of the two, we would expect fouling on the feed side of a slurry/feed exchanger to be most impacted due to the waxy nature of shale oils with the propensity of paraffins to undergo thermal cracking to form coke in high temperature services.

Slurry oil pump life can be influenced by a number of factors including catalyst carryover from the reactor (which is indicated by BS&W measurements) and the design of the pump itself.