The market at work, with dollar store clothes and propane torches

Via the always excellent Polymerist Substack, this amusing article: 

HOUSTON (Bloomberg) --Chris Bird first saw the rumors Friday morning on Twitter.

Physical natural gas prices were soaring in Oklahoma amid a cold blast that was gripping much of the U.S. and only stood to get worse. Bird, owner of a small gas producer in Tulsa, called one trader who confirmed the heating fuel was going for a staggering $350 per million British thermal units. Then he called another who said it had risen to $395.

That’s all Bird needed to know. He and his production technician grabbed some winter clothes at the dollar store and drove the stretch of highway to Osage County some 20 miles north. They met up with a buddy who owns a propane torch and began melting ice off idled gas wells to get them back online.

“We’ve got four of us in the office turning on every single gas well that we’ve got,” Bird said. “We have old wells that haven’t produced in 10 years, and we’re like, ‘open the taps, let’s go.’”

I imagine that the demand for natural gas is going down a bit, but it's always interesting to see what high commodity prices will get people to do. 

Bad times in petroleum engineering

Via the New York Times, this article: 

Sabrina Burns, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, had thought she would be launching a lucrative career in the oil and gas industry when she graduated in a few months. But the collapse in the demand for oil and gas during the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted her well-laid plans and is forcing her to consider a new path.

“We got a slap in the face, an entirely unforeseen situation that rocked our entire mind-set,” said Ms. Burns, who is studying petroleum engineering. “I have applied for every oil and gas position I’ve seen, like all my classmates, and nothing really has turned up. I’m discouraged.”

With fewer people commuting and traveling, the oil and gas industry has taken a punishing blow. Oil companies have laid off more than 100,000 workers. Many businesses have closed refineries, and some have sought bankruptcy protection...

...Ms. Burns, 22, said her choices have narrowed considerably over the last nine months. With opportunities in oil and gas limited, she recently accepted an internship with an engineering consulting firm specializing in energy conservation, and she may eventually apply to graduate school in environmental science. She is also considering moving in with her sister after graduation to save money.

“I feel like companies are going to be pretty cautious about coming out of this, about taking new hires,” she said.

Ms. Burns was enticed into an oil and gas career by stories her father, a helicopter pilot, told her about the successful female engineers he had met servicing offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But while her professors have talked up the future for oil and gas companies, she is worried.

This must be a near-historically-bad time to be an entry-level petroleum worker, i.e. there's the problem of the pandemic, and there are also cross-pressures in the broader energy industry. I'm a bit surprised that her professors didn't seem to warn her about the up-and-down nature of oil and gas, but perhaps they sent missed signals. 

I presume that the same issues that have hit Ms. Burns have also hit the various chemists who work in and around the oil and gas industry. Best wishes to them, and to all of us. 

Petrochemical fire blocking the Houston Ship Channel

Via Reuters, this update on an ongoing situation: 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Fallout from a petrochemical fire outside Houston continued for a sixth day on Saturday, with emergency workers struggling to remove volatile fuels from exposed tanks and ship traffic disrupted on the nation’s busiest oil port. 

A fire that burned for three days broke out last Sunday at Mitsui & Co’s Intercontinental Terminals Co site in Deer Park, Texas. It damaged or destroyed 11 giant tanks each holding up to 3 million gallons of fuels used to make gasoline and plastics. 

On Friday, flames again erupted for an hour and halted efforts to remove volatile fuels that leaked when a containment wall breached. There were no injuries reported on Friday.

According to this Houston Chronicle report from Sunday, the fire is out, but the Ship Channel is still closed. It will be interesting to see if this incident has any repercussions - I suppose I don't know what the baseline is for incidents with petrochemical fires in the Houston Ship Channel. 

What kind of jobs are available for chemists at ethylene cracker plants?

Also in this week's C&EN, an article by Marc Reisch about SABIC's jump into ethylene crackers in the United States: 

ExxonMobil Chemical and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. are planning a multi-billion-dollar petrochemical complex on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The jointly owned project marks SABIC’s first major effort to take advantage of U.S. shale gas feedstock. 

SABIC already operates ethylene crackers and derivative plants alone and with partners in Saudi Arabia, Europe, and Asia. The proposed U.S. facility would include a 1.8 million metric-ton-per-year steam cracker—the world’s largest, the partners say—and downstream ethylene glycol and polyethylene plants. Sites in Louisiana and Texas are being considered...

This brings to mind a recent question from the inbox:

I’ve been looking online for what jobs are available for B.S. Chemists at cracker plants and what they pay and I can’t really find anything. 

I talked with someone who has familiarity with the oil and gas industry, and this was their speculation:

Depending on the company, I'd think they should be paying in the $35K (low) to about $50K(high) range, experience, location and largeness of the company dependent. ExxonMobile will probably pay more than Bob's Distillation Column, Inc. 

They may train [them] in operations or formulation in pilot plant operations... 

So, readers, your thoughts on where a B.S.-level chemist can work at a cracker plant? There's definitely room for them in the lab (they have testing labs, I presume), but there's also probably work for them in the plant (although it will probably be more of an engineering path.) 

The shale gas boom

In this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News, Alex Tullo talks shale gas:

...Until 2005, shale deposits—which lie beneath a wide swath of the country—were an eccentric source of natural gas. That was about the time that exploration companies perfected horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques to liberate gas that was tightly locked into shale. Shale has since become the source of more than one-quarter of the natural gas produced in the U.S.
The new output has driven U.S. natural gas prices below $3.00 per million Btu for the first time in more than a decade. At more than $100 per barrel, oil is more than five times as expensive as natural gas on an energy content basis. 

The main feedstock for North American petrochemical facilities is natural gas liquids, a mixture of ethane, propane, butane, and other hydrocarbons that is extracted from natural gas and then usually separated into its components. The remaining “dry” natural gas, primarily methane, is then piped to the industrial and home heating market. Cheap natural gas liquids put U.S. producers at a big advantage over European and Asian chemical producers that primarily use petroleum-derived feedstocks such as naphtha. 

This advantage of natural gas liquids over naphtha is enormous. According to Carlo Barrasa, director of natural gas liquids and cracker economics at the consulting group IHS Chemical, the cash cost of making ethylene from ethane is 18 cents per lb. The cash cost of using light naphtha as a feedstock, in contrast, is about 46.5 cents per lb. Ethylene sells for about 68.5 cents per lb, IHS says.

I'm not a petrochemicals guy, so I approach this subject with a great deal of humility. It seems to me that the shale gas boom will last as long as the shale gas keeps coming and as long as the natural gas producers can keep using whatever techniques they're using to get at that gas (i.e. hydraulic fracturing, etc.) It will be incumbent on them to be smart about their public relations regarding the water table pollution problems that seem to come with the technique (or to innovate better techniques in general.)

Also, I'm terribly curious as to the new chemistry jobs that must be cropping up around shale gas. Doubtless there are chemists needed to formulate the fracturing fluids, track the water purity and help run the ethane cracking plants. Here's hoping there are plenty of jobs for them all.