The local Bay Area AQMD district considers actions that will reduce supplies of aviation fuels, as the Governor remains silent.
By Ronald Stein
Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure, Irvine, California
Desiring to make the Bay Area refineries even cleaner, at any cost to the consumer, the local Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is considering amendments to Regulation 6, Rule 5 — Particulate Emissions from Refinery Fluidized Catalytic Cracking Units that will negatively impact the supply of jet fuel, which is needed to power aircraft operations in California.
The BAAQMD may not be cognizant that oil and gas are an international industry with more than 700 refineries worldwide that service the demands of the 8 billion living on earth. The California refineries are the cleanest in the world because of operating in the most environmentally regulated location on earth – the State of California.
The Bay area manages 44 percent of the oil refining capacity in California. The BAAQMD Rule 6-5, if left unchanged, will likely force the shutdown of the PBF Martinez and Chevron Richmond refineries in Northern California, as well as the closure of the many businesses that support those major refineries from the surrounding counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.
In 2019, those three major Northern California airports at Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose demanded 1.4 billion gallons of jet fuel to support passenger and cargo operations. The Chevron Richmond Refinery and PBF Energy Martinez supply 100 percent of the conventional jet fuel to these Bay Area airports.
Airlines are becoming much more fuel efficient, but the growth in the number of planes is causing the demand for jet fuel to remain large and growing.
With the availability of affordable jet fuel critical to aircraft operations and the sustenance of the Bay Area economy and considering that jet fuel is the second largest cost of running an airline, there should be concern from the Governor’s office about how the Rule 6-5 proposal could impact air service levels—and employment—in California.
The proposed rule would cause Bay Area refineries to shut down, as the means and cost to comply would be prohibitive to their refinery operations. If that were to occur, it would greatly constrict the Bay Area jet fuel supply, cause fuel delivery delays, reduce fuel quality and raise jet fuel prices just as demand for air travel returns and our nation emerges from the COVID-19 crisis.
With Chevron Richmond and PBF Martinez the only local refineries manufacturing jet fuel to support the military and the international airports at SFO, OAK, and SJC a reduction in the supply will contribute to dependency on unreliable foreign manufacturers, like China, the largest polluting country in the world, to meet the demands of the military and commercial transportation needs in Northern California.
Further, it leads to greater import dependence from foreign countries located hallway around the world and ultimately raise fuel prices not only in the Bay Area but also at other west coast locations and areas further inland linked by pipeline. The consequences would extend beyond the airlines to their customer base and their entire supply chain, including regional airports and the shipping public.
Through the states’ dysfunctional energy policies, California imports more electricity than any other state– currently at 32 percent from the Northwest and Southwest and dysfunctionally HOPES that other states will be able to generate enough power to meet the demands of the state. California is also the only state in the lower 48 states that is totally dependent on foreign suppliers as it has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 58 percent today.
Governor Newsom continues to do everything possible to INCREASE the cost of electricity and fuels, that drives up (no pun intended) the cost of everything which increases the homeless population.
The BAAQMD’s local actions that will not only cause significant issues for the viability of Bay Area refineries, but it will also impact our national security and impose higher energy costs for all 40 million residents of California. While this potential threat to our national security, and the California economy lingers, Governor Newsom’s silence remains deafening!
| Ronald Stein, P.E. |
| Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure http://www.energyliteracy.net/ |
Be interesting to see what Travis AFB and Beale AFB will do to secure jet fuel for flight ops.
I keep seeing this huge market opportunity for magic carpets.
Can you imagine going to war against a country that SUPPLIES the fuel your military requires to fight?
Talk about having you by the brass.
If you want to win….No choice but to press the “Launch” button on day 1….
+, but that’s winning?
It happened once. On July 23, 1939 in response to Japan moving troops into French Indo-China the United States froze all Japanese assets in the United States and embargoed oil sales to Japan. Japan received no oil from the United States after July 25th. (These actions were followed by Britain, Canada, the Philippines, New Zealand and the Netherlands.) This left Japan with less than a two year oil reserve on hand. And Japan was using oil at a rapid rate in their war with China. As you know on December 7th Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
2 years later in 1941. First they began to occupy oil producing areas in SE Asia to secure the needed oil supplies.
Yes Roosevelt’s and the world’s blockade of oil to Japan led to the Pacific war between Japan and countries NOT IN SE Asia.
Would the US have been better off without that action? I don’t know.
Would we be better off today with all of Korea and China under control of the Japanese empire?
Would China and Korea still be under the control of the Japanese empire?
Roosevelt did so many things that were bad for the US during the Great Depression, leading up to WWII and especially at the end of WWII that the damage done in incalculable. He was a VERY BAD president.
Only Roosevelt and his supermajority congress could have made the depression last 10 years, much like Obama and the Democrats made the great recession last his full 8 years. Only government action can stall economic cycles like that.
What would you have done if you were Roosevelt? Sell Japan the same amount of oil so they could continue to conquer Asia as they were? Sell them more oil so they could conquer Asia faster? Ask yourself do we really want to be a part of what Japan is doing? Your point falls flat in my view.
Yes of course, 1941, not 1939. Don’t know how I made that mistake. Let’s call it a typo.
Like you, I’ve often wondered if we would have been better off to have just let Japan build their empire. China and North Korea suffered terribly under their post-war Communist governments. We don’t even have an accurate count of how many millions died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or his Cultural Revolution. Would they have been any worse off under Japanese rule? And of course one third of the population of Cambodia died under Pol Pot in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War. If Japan had dominated east Asia there wouldn’t have been a Communist government under Mao in China, or a Korean War or a Viet Nam War. And a powerful Japanese empire would have been a counterweight to the Soviet Union during the cold war. I’m not saying that a Japanese empire would have been a good thing, but what really happened in Asia after the Japanese defeat was pretty bad. Alternate histories are fun to contemplate but of course you never know what would have happened.
I also partially agree with you about Roosevelt. The United States probably would have pulled out of the Great Recession without most of the New Deal. Maybe all that was needed was to stabilize the banks and expand the money supply. I don’t know.
Study history. China and Korea suffered terribly under the Japanese. Read up on the Nanking massacre, as just one example.
FDR didn’t just take a disliking to Japan and out of the blue decided to stop selling them oil. The decision to embargo oil on Japan was taken in the aftermath of Japan invading first Manchuria in 1931, then invading China in 1937. China was America’s largest trading partner outside of Japan in Asia at the time.
FDR’s action was not bad in any way, shape, or form. It is equivalent to what any US government would do if say Russian invaded the United Kingdom or Canada.
And as far as the great depression it was solely caused by Republican malgovernance, with not only its lassaiz faire approach to failing to regulate Wall Street, but even more so due to the GOP’s addiction to trade restrictions and tariffs – a longstanding Republican tenet of faith going back to the Party’s founding in 1854. It was Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act – a purely Republican action in 1930, done by Hoover and his GOP majority in Congress – that direclty caused the Great Depression. It led to a world wide trade war that plunged the entire world into the Great Depression for a decade. It was only possible to correct the effects of the Republican Depression with a war.
Per USEIA:
The top five sources of U.S. total petroleum (including crude oil) imports by share of total petroleum imports in 2019 were Canada 49% Mexico 7% Saudi Arabia 6% Russia 6% Colombia 4%
The USA is a net exporter of oil as of 2020.
China is the world’s largest net importer of oil.
Seems likely that our most likely wartime opponent is a helluva lot more at risk from interruptions in oil supply than is the US.
Doesn’t matter how much oil we produce if the number of remaining refineries cannot process it into vital fuels.
There is no lack of refining capacity in the US today.
Biden will fix that. It’s an election promise.
UFOs
Can’t the fly the fuel in ?
/sarc
Prohibitally expensive
It would be easier to drill their own oil well and build a refinery on base.
Airport California.
😲
♯♫♪ You can fly in, but you can never fly out. ♫♪
🤣 👍
A favorite song of a favorite band. It’s going to be alright.
They could absolutely fly it in, especially since the military has a fleet of tankers. Rail and trucking are other options. Does add to the cost if they are now getting it by pipe.
It would be better to just fly Newsom out…he is from the seed of Satan….like his auntie Nanci Piglosi.
Sometimes they do. If fuel is expensive or unavailable at a location, they will carry extra fuel in the aircraft so they don’t need to fuel at that airport. Unfortunately rules prohibit removing fuel from one plane and putting it in another. There is a risk of contamination including water that may be in the wing of the delivery aircraft. If they have to remove fuel from an aircraft, they mix some additives in the fuel and use it in ground equipment. Jet fuel is close to diesel but lacking some of the required additives so this allows them to dispose of fuel they can’t put back in the aircraft.
Now for instate flight, they might have to fly out of state for fuel and then complete their flight. Talk about an increase in emissions.
Governor Newsome is struggling to avoid being recalled in an upcoming special election. He therefore calculates everything in terms of re-election. I watched his performance talking about the recent shooting at San Jose, and thought here is the perfect example of a guy who won the fart-bubble contest at his fraternity and has gone on to find ways to slime his way around the political environment. No aviation fuel for Kalifornia? Don’t go there. In a related story the recent census showed Kalifornia with the first ever documented population decline. That’s what they call a clue, sparky.
Unfortunately the Californians leaving aren’t recognizing their own voting habits are what destroyed the West Coast, so they’ve turned Colorado blue and are inching closer to turning Montana, Idaho, Arizona and Texas blue as well. In Colorado my sales tax has gone up 25% in the last two election cycles, and my property tax doubled even though my home only went up 55% in value. Now my governor recently announced a plan to add 8 cents per gallon of gas prices in “fees.” It’s never enough. No idea what they’re spending the money on. Our roads and schools are still crap.
Based on my first hand observation, I agree with you. They can’t even manage to properly plow snow and repair potholes in the roads, but they think they can micromanage every other aspect of our lives.
Jeremiah and Scissor, the effect is called “Californication”.
Apparently, so many New Yorkers have now moved to NE Pennsylvania that it may flip the state completely blue.
I am not so sure the issue is that they don’t recognize their own voting habits. I think for the past 4 generations our colleges have become more and more radically left and mastered the art of graduating indoctrinated socialists. They then assist their gradiates (they are well brainwashed but most of them can’t spell) in getting jobs in your aforementioned states. It has finally become so bad they have critically infected private sector corporations.
60 years these gradiates have been procreating and sending their collectivists off to public school indoctrination. Until we put an end to socialist indoctrination in our nationwide school systems we have no way of winning the voting war.
It might be too late because we now live in a Corporatocracy. They have the best politicians money can buy. Who, out of loyalty appoint the Crony Capitalists henchmen into the Permanent Bureaucracy (Deep State) that really governs our once Representative Republic. We no longer need courts since we try our non-conformists in the court of public opinion thanks to a leftist controlled troika of Social media: Google, Facebook, Twitter.
I thought legalizing marijuana eliminated the need to increase taxes, since it created so much tax revenue. Did that go up in smoke, or was it all just a pipe dream from the start?
From your humble on-the-ground correspondent: I do live here in the Bay Area and this is the only place where I would read something like this although, with my head being a libtard-free zone, I don’t go out there actively seeking their phony virtue-signaling. Seems to me that shutting down the Martinez plant would lose him a lot of votes in his recall (which is irrelevant, given how we probably have the best of the best banana republic vote-counting system). Not really sure why he’s doing it except that he continues to get budget surpluses through the massive Silicon Valley industries (I assume), so he doesn’t much care. If and when Facebook and the like inevitably crater, it will remain to be seen if Apple and Co. can rescue us from being the Detroit of all time.
Cali has only one saving grace, the climate.
Wherever I have visited in Cali, I always looked at the real estate. Always too expensive, but the climate made me want to stay. Temperatures like FL but almost no humidity most of the year. In Florida, I never do, too humid too often.
Now if the new Republican SEC and Justice Department (after 2024 election) will only start suing major corporations for wasting income by staying in expensive locals, we shareholders can get a better return and places like silicon valley, Frisco, NY, Chicago, etc. etc. can collapse under the weight of their overblown leftist policies.
I can dream, can’t I?
The glaring irony is that the state with the BEST climate (the warmest, driest, most attractive to people who can afford to move there) is the most hysterically off-the-charts paranoid about AGW.
Waybackwhen Moonbeam Brown called CA “the epicenter of global warming”. We all laughed, but the sheeple of CA drank the koolaid. To this very day they still don’t get it. Warmer Is Better. Live it or live with it.
Yep. That’s about all I can say.
Enjoying the blue sky and sunshine this wonderful afternoon. It’s a little cooler than recent years for May, but certainly the usual excellent climate here.
Where is it that they have a crisis again? Nick? griff? loydo? Simon? Izaak? Anyone?
I fled there in 2008, and my current wife did so in 2014. Both of us regard the moves as the best of our lives.
This could cause problems for John Kerry if he wants to visit California.
Oh, I forgot, he probably claims the cost of running his private jet on expenses, so the taxpayer loses again.
Why the flag ?
This is a good one :
¨ will contribute to dependency on unreliable foreign manufacturers, like China, the largest polluting country in the world, to meet the demands of the military and commercial transportation needs in Northern California.¨
So the Pentagon, all gung ho for nuclear war, depends on China for military transportation?
I must say people have gone stark raving mad, and not just the Governor.
Positively Tea-Potty.
Edited to explain the joke. In the end, the oil was sold to the Japanese Navy.
Don’t even ask where lead for bullets comes from…
So in what passes for your mind, standing up to evil is no different than being “gung-ho for nuclear war”?
What do politicians think of their electorates?
Well, in the UK at least, they detest them. In our recent local council elections yet again the mask slipped:
“A DEFEATED Labour council leader has sparked outcry after claiming “the voters have let us down” following his election defeat.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1433833/Labour-Party-news-Keir-Starmer-election-defeat-Boris-Johnson-conservatives
Is it really any different in the US?
To my mind, California has a man made existential crisis on its hands. Newsom seems much like some of our Labour politicians (oh dear).
Except they cannot be recalled.
Who needs voters?
Voters are such a nuisance, politics would be so much better/easier without them.
Rather like some shops think about customers.
Voters are such a nuisance
You do know the Solution?
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The Democrats are working on that.
The regs will affect the FCC units – this is a much larger issue for gasoline than jet fuel, which largely is taken as a cut from the crude distillation unit.
Definitely it affects gasoline. Today, pretty much everything has to be hydrotreated at some point, however, including jet because of its boiling range overlap with diesel.
I spent a fair amount of time in the Bay Area refineries, especially Shell Martinez, now PBF. The main lab consists of a long skinny building due to the fact that it had originated as the refinery’s stables.
Jet fuel is made from the kerosene cut, with a boiling range of about 330 to 500 F, where the low end overlaps with naphtha (used to make gasoline) and the high end overlaps with diesel fuel. Straight-run kerosene contains less sulfur than straight-run diesel, and needs less hydrotreating (to remove sulfur) to make jet fuel because most jet fuel is burned at high altitudes, and the sulfur regulations are less strict than for diesel fuel, which is burned at ground level.
But trying to import jet fuel instead of producing (refining) it near the airport can lead to hidden costs and additional sources of pollution. Pipelines are the most efficient method for transporting fuel over long distances, but building separate parallel pipelines to transport jet fuel and diesel fuel is extremely expensive. What is normally done is to transport a jet fuel / diesel mixture (called “transmix”) in a pipeline, then distill it at the destination to separate the jet fuel from the diesel fuel. But distillation requires an energy input (burning fuel), which increases fuel consumption and generates air pollution at the destination (near the airport in California, in this case).
Murphy’s law of unintended consequences strikes Ravin’ Gavin–again!
A FCCU is the heart of a modern refinery. It gives it the flexibility required to swing both products and feeds and keeps the refinery profitable. Refineries operate on razer thin margins and without that flexibility the entire refinery is not worth operating.
Pressure groups have been trying to get rid of the Richmond refinery for decades.
A win – win would be California shutting down all of its electricity use to limit greenhouse gas generation. Politicians are happy, greenhouses gases would be down significantly, rightly doing California’s fair share to reduce emissions, thereby helping entire to balance the entire country’s and making California more in line with the rest of the country in causing. California out of proportion causes the US emissions problems… and it’s about time it tries to do its fair share. Maybe just shut down all electricity generation and use, how about it?
At what point must observers conclude that Newson, et al. are intentionally destroying the U.S.?
Guess Biden needs to propose another trillion to spend on developing electric airplanes. /sarc
Do treason, today it seems to be ‘woke’, highly profitable, and ‘virtue signals’. Back in the day, here, that was a capital offense.
Maybe California should have an election audit.
High taxes, job killing regulations and an environmental policy that destroys more than it benefits causing people to flee the state can only keep the same people in office with fraud. And yet China will benefit from all this.
Cat Crackers don’t make jet fuel. However they are the heart of a refinery and produce gasoline and diesel. So increasing the cost of running an FCCU will cause the refineries to shutdown and lead to the majority of refined fuels to be imported.. This will also raise the prices of gasoline and diesel. I’ve heard that personnel at Martinez have their resumes out already.
Halfway, perhaps?
Hitting the Hollywood Jetset where it hurts, right in their jets. If Lenny Dicaprio can’t fly to Canada to proselytise against the evil of oil sands, will he just stay home and shut up? If any place ever deserved to be deprived of jet fuel, it is Hollywood.
Can we cede Hollyweird, San Fransicko and Sacrademento to China? They already seem to be completely bought off by the CCP, so it wouldn’t change their policies and actions one iota; but right now those three areas are destroying the rest of the state they control!
Note to file: Importation across a border is advantageous for “central-planning-oriented government” as opposed to the “let’s build it ourselves” concept. No infrastructure to build out, no services to provide, and you can still make as many tax dollars as you would with employment taxes by pushing sales tax, road use tax, carbon tax……you don’t even need to sponsor a trade school, youth will move away due to lack of jobs, environment won’t be stressed due to housing construction, win-win…
Ravin’ Gavin wants the refineries in the Bay Area to be “clean”, but has to import jet fuel refined in other states. Ain’t he great, “cleaning” his state by pushing the pollution into other states to the east, from which the prevailing westerlies will blow it further away from California.
I foresee a much bigger problem from this than aviation fuel.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Why-gasoline-costs-so-much-in-California-4988144.php
What a great rule. Shut down the cleanest refineries in the world, only to import jet fuel from the dirtiest refineries, that then has to be shipped over the pristine Pacific Ocean thousands of miles, just to keep a tiny amount of pollution (a fraction of a few years ago) Out of Our Backyard…BRILLIANT! Only a F-ing genius could come up with that rule. Oh, and where is all the Only in California, Special Gasoline going to come from??? We’ll all be pushing our “electric” cars around sooner than expected.
Silently supports importing or supports silently importing. He wants the abortion, parts, sequestration, and have her, too.
The Chinese are already rivaling the U.S. in refinery capacity. They need to keep expanding capacity in order to become the dominant exporter of refined products to the dysfunctional world.
Slowly but surely the virtue signaling is changing to actions. This is when the people realize what the true impact of removing fossil fuels from their lives will mean. Can’t afford to buy or don’t have a way to easily charge that EV? Can’t sell your home before installing a heat pump first? Road trip vacations now a no – no? What do you mean 50 million people have been added to unemployment benefits because their jobs disappeared? How will we pay for those benefits if no one is working? I can’t grow my own vegetables because I don’t have the land for a simple garden and besides it gets too cold here …. why can’t you truck/train/fly them like we usually do? I thought only third world countries had planned times for no available electricity and water, now us too? Let’s see how long it takes for people to get wise to the plans in store for them.
All part of the plan
Serious question, does the bay area have a pollution problem?
I got run out in the 90s because nuclear power was not the right flavor.
I don’t think levels of PM2.5 were ever about the threshold of harm. Not that I think it was ever a problem t begin. PM2.5 is a manufactured problem with junk science.
After 30 years a mechanism of harm has not been found seems to be a bad theory.
Nowhere does the article mention that California imports 25% of its foreign oil from Ecuador. Ecuadorian oil production is the most polluted, environmentally damaging and archaic producer of oil in the Amazon basin.
But then again, 10% of California’s foreign oil is imported from Indonesia, under exclusive importing rights negotiated by Pat Brown in the ’60s and now owned by the Brown family. That’s right, Jerry Brown is an oil magnate.
But it gets even better. William Newsom, Gavin Newsom’s father, had been an attorney for oil magnate J. Paul Getty and best friends with Pat Brown. Gavin Newsom had been informally adopted by the Getty’s after his parents divorced. And it also just so happens that the Getty’s own the rights to Ecuadorian oil imports.
So, much of California’s imported oil is all in the family.
I’ve decided that now is the time to begin an accumulation of oil stocks for when whatever manifestation of the Green New Deal falls flat on it’s face.
Shipping is also in a quandary:
WSJ
Imagine going to a car dealership for a new vehicle that’s climate friendly and being told that it isn’t clear what clean fuels will be available to fill it up, or how much those fuels will cost. You probably would walk away or opt for a car that runs on gasoline.
That’s the dilemma faced by the shipping industry as it looks to shift to cleaner vessels to meet emissions reduction goals.
The industry has agreed to boost the global fleet’s energy efficiency by at least 40% over the next decade and cut overall greenhouse-gas emissions from ship exhaust in half by 2050 compared with 2008 levels.
The difference with cars is that a cargo ship’s lifespan is around 25 years and it takes around two years to build a cargo vessel. If the owners want to meet the deadlines without crashing their operating budgets they will have to start buying zero-emission vessels within a few years, but there is no consensus yet on how green ships will be powered.