Refinery Quotes

Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible.

All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

He couldn’t understand why union rules prevented him from helping others at the refinery, or allowed employees to sleep on the job and then complain at union meetings.

The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

The liberal political system was shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries, and television sets. It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.

When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked.

Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Most

Effective immediately all fuel, whether in possession of a refinery, a fuel wholesaler, or even your local gas station, is property of the United States government and will only be available to first responders and the military. He stated that all fuel sales to the public would be halted immediately and anyone caught selling fuel in violation of this Executive Order would be arrested.

First Church of the Unleaded God & Ace High Refinery WELCOME KEEP OUT

And false hope is worse than no hope. That’s what I read on Refinery29 anyway.

The Hale [telescope] is a refinery for light.

The beginning of Greater things starts as a seed. Passion, willingness to learn and tenacity is the key to rising above the average and the mediocre. Keep pushing and the refinery of life will bring out the Gold within you.

This is the deep-space commercial tug Nostromo, registration number one eight zero, two four six, en route to Earth with bulk cargo crude petroleum and appropriate refinery. Calling Antarctica traffic control. Do you read me? Over.

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.

The liberal political system has been shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries and television sets. It finds it difficult to deal with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.

The air bit into your lungs because it was filled with poisonous gas escaping from the refineries. That sting in the air which made breathing so hard and unpleasant and choked your throat constantly meant that people were making money- much money.

Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres.

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.

In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.

I greet you jar of jam. You glass who once was sand upon the beach, Washed back and forth and bathed in foam and seagull cries, but who are formed into a glass until you once again return to the sea... I hardly give the computer a second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that's a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object. And yet I mean no disrespect for the diatoms and the marine invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make the case of my laptop or the cap of the aspirin bottle- but being mindful in the vast network of hyperindustrialized goods really gives me a headache. We weren't made for that sort of constant awareness. We've got work to do.

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.

By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction—at the very least, New England’s soil did not lend itself to large plantations—but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery: it still held slave auctions in the 1750s and was also linked through its sugar refineries to the West Indies. Even in the 1790s, one in five New York City households kept domestic slaves, a practice ubiquitous among well-to-do merchants who wanted cooks, maids, and butlers and regarded slaves as status symbols. (After

That was not all. When the Jamaican government wanted to buy the country’s oil refinery from an Exxon subsidiary, Marc Rich + Co lent it the money. The trading company even helped to fund Jamaica’s team at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and paid for it to send a bobsled team to participate in the 1988 Winter Olympics – whose unlikely journey to the Games was chronicled in the Disney film Cool Runnings.15

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.

Treating strategy like a problem in deduction assumes that anything worth knowing is already known—that only computation is required. Like computation, deduction applies a fixed set of logical rules to a fixed set of known facts. For example, given Newton’s law of gravity, one can deduce (calculate) the period of Mars’s orbit around the sun. Or given the costs and capacities of tankers, pipelines, and refineries, one can optimize the flow of oil and refined product within an integrated oil company. If everything worth knowing is already known, the problem of action reduces to crank winding.

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.

Each day it’s the same. Wake up. Get dressed. Ride through cheering crowds. Listen to a speech in our honour. Give a thank-you speech in return, but only the one the Capitol gave us, never any personal additions now. Sometimes a brief tour: a glimpse of the sea in one district, towering forests in another, ugly factories, fields of wheat, stinking refineries. Dress in evening clothes. Attend dinner. Train. During ceremonies, we are solemn and respectful but always linked together, by our hands, our arms. At dinners, we are borderline delirious in our love for each other. We kiss, we dance, we get caught trying to sneak away to be alone.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood of the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on a highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk. But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation. Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black. Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments. Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.

Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel. The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere. The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the

The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 to maintain the control of the family’s oil empire. Today this foundation is the most important shareholder of Exxon with 4.3 million shares. Additionally, the foundation has two million shares in Standard Oil of California and 300.000 shares in Mobil Oil. Other smaller foundations belonging to the Rockefellers have three million shares in Exxon, and 400.000 shares in Standard Oil of Ohio. The total asset of this group of Rockefeller companies, amount to more than fifty billion dollars.[20] For a researcher who concentrates on the Rockefeller family, it won’t be difficult to prove that this immensely rich family has played an important role in the American politics of the twentieth century. The drift and decisions of American politics lead directly back to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers immigrated to America from Spain. The best-known member of this family was the influential industrialist, banker John Davidson Rockefeller. He asserted himself as the richest man of his time. Before going into oil transport, he was a wholesaler of narcotic drugs.[21] With an unbridled energy, he set up the Standard Oil Trust, which now possesses ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.[22] John Davidson Rockefeller also bought the Pocantico Hills territory in New York, which is the domicile of over a 100 families with the name Rockefeller. David Rockefeller, an absolute genius in the field of finances, has been managing Chase Manhattan Bank, the most important bank in the world, since 1945. The power of this bank is great enough to bring about or destroy governments, to start or end wars, and ruin companies or let them flourish worldwide, ultimately exerting great influence on the entire human race.

Open All Night" (originally by Bruce Springsteen) I had the carburetor cleaned and checked With her line blown out, she's hummin' like a turbojet Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks For a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points I'm goin' out tonight, I'm gonna rock that joint Early north Jersey industrial skyline I'm a all-set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you're all alone Gotta hit the gas, baby, I'm runnin' late This New Jersey in the mornin' like a lunar landscape The boss don't dig me, so he put me on the nightshift It takes me two hours to get back to where my baby lives In the wee wee hours, your mind gets hazy Radio relay towers, won't you lead me to my baby? Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch Goodnight, good luck, one two powershift I met Wanda when she was employed Behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy Fried chicken on the front seat, she's sittin' in my lap We're wipin' our fingers on a Texaco roadmap I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill With them big brown eyes that make your heart stand still 5 A.M., oil pressure's sinkin' fast I make a pit stop, wipe the windshield, check the gas Gotta call my baby on the telephone Let her know that her daddy's comin' on home Sit tight, little mama, I'm comin' round I got three more hours, but I'm coverin' ground Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours Sun's just a red ball risin' over them refinery towers Radio's jammed up with gospel stations Lost souls callin' long distance salvation Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer? Hey ho rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere Ryan Adams, Nebraska (2022)

Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress and misery depression starvation and degradation are inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage of the population. The periods of economic stability also ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom and among the industrial Western democracies today despite occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while we may not admire always the personal motives of our business leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the good life as it comes down through our native American soil. You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries and no one will hurt you.

Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.”17 Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string. Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. “No,” said Cettie, “we will buy just one for all of them.” “But, my dear,” John protested, “tricycles do not cost much.” “That is true,” she replied. “It is not the cost. But if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”18 So the children shared a single bicycle. Amazingly enough, the four children probably grew up with a level of creature comforts not that far above what Rockefeller had known as a boy.

In order of importance: 1. Self, 2. Marriage, 3. Child. Of course all are as important as each other, but neglecting the one before is a disservice to the one after. - in an interview with Refinery 29

How about,” Jane suggested, “some dumb question as to what a refinery does?” “Good idea,” fired back Col. “What does a refinery do?” Connie asked. Anneena and Col groaned.

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This single Koch refinery is now responsible for an estimated 25 percent of the 1.2 million barrels of oil the U.S. imports each day from Canada’s tar sands territories.” The Kochs’ good fortune, however, was the globe’s misfortune, because crude oil derived from Canada’s dirty tar sands requires far greater amounts of energy to produce and so is especially harmful to the environment.

By the 1920s, sugar refineries were producing as much sugar in a single day—millions of pounds—as would have taken refineries in the 1820s an entire decade. With

the Koch brothers—owned virtually all of what had become under their leadership the second-largest private company in America. They owned four thousand miles of pipelines, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, the Georgia-Pacific lumber and paper company, coal, and chemicals, and they were huge traders in commodity futures, among other businesses. The company’s consistent profitability had made the two brothers the sixth- and seventh-wealthiest men in the world. Each was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2009. Charles, the elder brother, was a man of unusual drive, accustomed to getting his way. What he wanted that weekend was to enlist his fellow conservatives in a daunting task: stopping the Obama administration from implementing Democratic policies that the American public had voted for but that he regarded as catastrophic.

Fred Koch’s political views were apparently shaped by his traumatic exposure to the Soviet Union. Over time, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet acquaintances, giving him a firsthand glimpse into the murderous nature of the Communist regime. Koch was also apparently shaken by a steely government minder assigned to him while he worked in the Soviet Union, who threatened that the Communists would soon conquer the United States. Koch was deeply affected by the experience and later, after his business deals were completed, said he regretted his collaboration. He kept photographs in the company headquarters in Wichita aimed at documenting how the refineries he had built had later been destroyed.

In 1997, for instance, the EPA moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of air pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, came up with a novel criticism of the proposed rule. The EPA, she argued, had not taken into account that by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution were controlled, it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.

The sign over the gate read: First Church of the Unleaded God & Ace High Refinery WELCOME KEEP OUT

What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.” In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

The Japanese had poured into Singapore, and the mighty British troops fell apart under the onslaught. Singapore surrendered in seven days, and thousands of British, Indian, and Australian troops were captured and sent to internment camps. “I hear a Japanese submarine even shelled an oil refinery near California! The Americans want to retaliate, but what can they do? They have navy aircraft carriers in Hawaii, but they don’t have long-range bombers to fly across to Tokyo and return to Hawaii.

A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?

Hydrotreating is widely used in refinery unit to remove sulfur, nitrogen, and metals from petroleum-based feedstock. The facilities used for the production of petroleum-based fuel such as catalysts, types of reactors, and distillation facilities can be used for the production of green diesel as well.

During this process, the feedstock reacts with hydrogen in the presence of catalysts at high temperatures (300–400 °C) and pressure of almost 10 MPa. Heterogeneous catalysts like Ni–Mo/Al2O3 and Co–Mo/Al2O3 are used in this process to produce hydrocarbons in the range of C15–C18. Hydrotreatment also results in the removal of heteroatoms like oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur [81]. Green Diesel has a similar chemical composition as that of petrodiesel and can be used in existing refinery infrastructure such as pipelines and storage tanks. It has similar advantages to that of biodiesel in terms of its use in diesel engines without any engine modification. It can be either used in its pure form or can be blended with petrodiesel [78]. Although several other methods are being developed to produce green diesel, hydrotreatment is mostly accepted and is also commercially available

Kieselguhr, also known as diatomaceous earth, is the remains of tiny marine animals and has a number of other uses: as a filter in sugar refineries, as insulation, and as a metal polish. Further testing showed that mixing liquid nitroglycerin with about one-third of its weight of kieselguhr formed a plastic mass with the consistency of putty.

In the 1640s, the Jews had a hundred ships plying the sugar trade and the Periera family in Amsterdam owned the refineries that turned the brown sweetener into the white crystal grains everyone desired. Recife became known as “the port of the Jews,” and its main thoroughfare was Rua dos Judios, the Street of the Jews.24

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life. Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost. The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family had become strangers, as had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life. Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost. The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family has become strangers, does had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.

But even the biggest Wall Street banks were at a disadvantage when they went up against the traders at Koch Industries, British Petroleum, or Amoco. The Wall Street banks didn’t have access to inside information. Goldman Sachs didn’t own refineries or pipelines and couldn’t get a sneak peek into where markets were headed. The banks had to resort to second-rate information that was publicly available, like government reports on monthly energy supplies. It was a losing proposition. In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street banks came to Koch Industries, asking for help. “We kept getting approached by banks, who say, ‘Hey, Koch. You guys are so good at this physical stuff, we’d like to partner with you,’ ” recalled a former senior Koch executive who was heavily involved in trading operations. The banks came to Koch with the same pitch: the banks would handle “all this financial stuff,” while Koch handled the physical end of trading and shared information from its operations. If Koch executives were flattered by the attention from Wall Street, they didn’t show it for long. “We kind of got curious—or, suspicious is the better term,” the executive recalled. Rather than help the banks out, Koch set up a team to study why the banks were so interested in their business. Koch hired the outside consulting firm McKinsey & Company to study what was happening in commodities markets during the 1990s. McKinsey reported that the world of trading had grown even larger and more profitable than Koch Industries had suspected. As it happened, the futures contracts that Koch was trading had become the “plain vanilla” products in a rapidly booming market. Now there were more exotic, more opaque, and far more profitable financial products on the market. These products were called “derivatives.” That’s where the real money was.

Back then, Ron Howell’s job might have seemed easy enough: he sold the gasoline and other fuels that Koch Industries produced at its refineries. As the senior vice president of supply and trading at Koch, Howell made sure that Koch’s fuel went straight from the refineries to the highest-paying customer. Gasoline was the kind of product that seemed to sell itself—there was always demand for fuel. People at Koch referred to Howell’s job as the “dispossession of molecules,” meaning that he simply had to find a home for the various fuels that Koch produced. This seemed straightforward. But Howell’s job was the kind of job that produced insomnia and ulcers. It forced him to retire when he was in his thirties before the job killed him. When he talked about oil trading, even decades later, Howell often used words like whippin’ and savage. The savagery of Howell’s average workday began when he walked into the office in Houston every morning and picked up the phone to sell the first barrel of gasoline or diesel fuel. The stomach acids started to boil the instant Howell tried to establish what might seem like a basic, simple fact: the price of oil that day. Determining the price of oil at any given minute was an arcane art practiced by a network of traders around the world. They spent their days on the phone with one another, arguing, cajoling, bluffing, and bullying. The fact is that nobody really knew the price of a barrel of oil, or gasoline, or diesel fuel. Everybody had to guess, and the person who could guess with the most precision walked away with profits that were almost limitless. The person who guessed wrong faced instant, brutal downsides in the market. There was a common misperception that the price of oil floats up and down on a global market. Every day, business commentators and journalists talked about the “price of oil” as if it were like the price of General Electric stock—a price that was determined by millions of buyers and sellers who traded on large, open exchanges. In fact, there was no global market for oil. Oil was bought and sold inside a constellation of thousands of tiny nodes where transactions and prices were totally hidden to outsiders.

Farmland’s plants had a key advantage: they were located right next door to their customers—the farmers. This gave them an edge on transportation costs. If these plants closed, there would be a dramatic fertilizer shortage. It would be simply impossible to import all the fertilizer that midwestern farmers needed. The Farmland plants were similar to Koch’s oil refinery in Pine Bend. They were perched on exclusive real estate, giving them an advantage over their competitors. Demand wasn’t going to disappear, and it wasn’t feasible for new competitors to set up shop nearby. Perhaps most important, nobody else in the marketplace attributed this value to the Farmland plants. When Farmland put the plants up for sale, the co-op got very little interest. There were two big, publicly traded fertilizer companies that seemed like natural buyers, called Agrium and CF Industries. But these companies were also embroiled in the natural gas crisis and seemed obsessed with their quarterly losses and the near-term economics of the fertilizer business.

As he watched his traders run from office to office, Howell had a pivotal realization. Every time a trader sold a barrel of oil, the transaction produced an ultravaluable by-product: information. Each sale was a price signal. And as Koch bought and sold hundreds of thousands of barrels of fuel around the world, it began to accumulate this ultravaluable information in one place. This information could then be paired with yet more ultravaluable information that only Koch Industries had access to: the huge output of price signals that were generated by Koch’s oil refineries and pipelines. These physical plants gave Koch’s traders a window into the future. Koch knew, for example, when it was about to shut down the Pine Bend refinery for repairs, or when it might be shutting down a pipeline. When this happened, Howell’s traders could start gaming the downstream effects on local energy markets—all those opaque nodes that would be affected. And they could do this before any other traders even knew it was happening. There is no way to overstate the value of this kind of inside information.

Koch Industries would grow in a way that reflected Sterling Varner’s approach to business. Varner was “opportunistic,” in a way that Koch employees used the word, meaning that he was always looking for new deals that were connected to businesses in which he already operated. When Koch was shipping natural gas, for example, Varner pushed the company to build a specialized natural gas refinery in Medford, Oklahoma, to process the gas into liquid by-products. In this way, Koch could expand while building on the skills it already possessed. The gas refinery, or “fractionator” as they called it, became a huge moneymaker.

Koch’s oil gathering division delivered a steady flow of cash and profits into the company. This money gave Charles Koch a chance to put his management theories to the test. He encouraged his employees to look for new growth opportunities and to act like entrepreneurs. He wanted to lead by example. In his first years as head of Koch Industries, Charles Koch put together one of the most brilliant and profitable deals in the history of Koch Industries. The deal involved an oil refinery. Since the late 1950s, Fred Koch had owned a minority share in the Great Northern oil refinery outside of Minneapolis, near the Pine Bend Bluffs natural reserve. The other shareholders in the refinery were an oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall II and the Great Northern Oil Company. In 1969, the refinery didn’t look like a gold mine. Competition in the sector was fierce, with new refineries being put into production monthly. But the Pine Bend refinery, as everyone called it, had a secret source of profits. And this source of profits could be traced to exactly the kind of government intervention that Hayek hated most. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower capped the amount of oil that could be imported into the United States, in one of the federal government’s many ploys to protect domestic oil drillers. (Imported oil was often cheaper than domestic oil, so US drillers wanted it kept out.) But there was a loophole in that law that allowed unlimited imports from Canada. As it happened, Canada was the primary source of oil processed at the Pine Bend refinery. Pine Bend was one of only four refineries in the nation that was able to buy cheaper imported oil in unlimited quantities, giving it a huge advantage over firms that were forced to buy mostly domestic oil.

In 1969, Charles Koch executed a secret plan that would increase those profits beyond anything Fred Koch could imagine. Charles approached J. Howard Marshall and convinced Marshall to sell his share in the refinery in exchange for shares in Charles Koch’s newly created firm, Koch Industries. When that secret deal closed, Charles Koch was a majority shareholder in the Pine Bend refinery. He then approached Great Northern, now a minority shareholder, and convinced that company to sell its ownership stake. By the end of the year, Koch Industries was the sole owner of the Pine Bend refinery. Charles Koch saw something in the refinery that others didn’t see.

After everybody was settled, Paulson presented his offer. Koch would unilaterally rewrite all the work rules inside the refinery. The seniority system the union enjoyed would be gone. The rules that barred employees from doing work in different “trades” would be gone. The employee shuttle truck? Gone. The rule about a bonus payment for overtime without two hours’ notice? Gone. And then Paulson showed the union men that there would be precious little room for negotiation. These were the new rules. This was how things would work at the refinery. End of story. This might have seemed like a bluff; like a way for Paulson to start the contract negotiations with a Texas swagger. But after Christmas, and into the first frigid days of the new year, it became clear to the union that Paulson was not bluffing. He was not going to negotiate. In the eyes of the OCAW men, there was no choice as to what to do next. On January 9, 1973, at four in the afternoon, the entire unionized workforce left their stations and walked off the property grounds.

Paulson started making phone calls back to Texas, back to the oil-patch state where Paulson had friends and employees who thought the world of him. He called these old friends and asked them to come up to Minnesota to work. Shortly after the picket line was erected outside the refinery gates, Paulson arranged for helicopters to fly these workers into the refinery. The helicopters swooped in low over the refinery fences and landed on the refinery grounds to drop off his new workers from Texas and Oklahoma and other states where unions were not only rare but widely hated. Inside the main office building, Paulson converted a large room in the basement into a barracks for the new workers. On the picket line, the OCAW men watched as the helicopters passed over them, hovered, and landed inside, delivering the workers who would replace them. The picket line was becoming symbolic.

When the workers got violent, Paulson seized on their mistake. He went to court and filed a motion that would bar the OCAW from picketing in front of the refinery. Paulson’s lawyers argued that the OCAW’s property destruction and violence went far beyond the scope of legal union activity. A local district court judge agreed with the company and handed down a temporary restraining order against the union.

The sessions went on through the night. At one point, Paulson laid down on a conference table and fell asleep while waiting for the courier to return from the OCAW’s room. It was useless. Even prodding from the labor secretary could not push the two sides to an agreement. The kernel of the dispute still remained the work rules at the refinery. It was a fight over control, and neither side would budge.

Employees at the Pine Bend refinery remain unionized to this day.III But the strike of 1973 broke the union’s power. This fit into a pattern that was being played out across the United States between 1973 and 1993. Unions disbanded and broke apart. Solidarity became an artifact. The remaining unions became something like a shadow human resources department.

Oil that was drilled in Texas or Saudi Arabia, by contrast, was known as “sweet” crude because it had very low sulfur content. This made it a lot cheaper and easier to process—you didn’t need coker towers to take the sulfur out. So many of America’s oil refineries sprang up around the Gulf Coast because that’s where sweet crude was imported and processed. Very few firms wanted to install the kind of expensive equipment that ran at Pine Bend, but Great Northern had done so. When Paulson took over, Pine Bend was one of very fewer buyers in the upper Midwest that offered to buy Canadian crude. Because there were so few buyers, the Canadian crude piled up—there was an excess of supply. This meant that prices dropped. Koch could buy the sour oil at a price that was significantly lower than oil prices elsewhere in the United States. But the cheap Canadian crude was only half of the equation. When Koch turned around to sell the gasoline it made at Pine Bend, it sold that gasoline into a midwestern region where there were very few other refineries, causing supplies to be relatively tight and prices high. This made the economics of Pine Bend almost too good to be true.

Paulson surveyed the market and saw one large competitor. There was a pipeline company called Williams Brothers, which shipped about a hundred thousand barrels of gasoline into the Minnesota area each day. Paulson knew that it cost about 6 cents per gallon to ship the gas from the Gulf Coast, where most American refineries were located. This meant that Koch had a 6-cent advantage over Williams Brothers that it could exploit. “I said, ‘We can expand. And we can dry up Williams Brothers,’ ” Paulson recalled. The strategy worked.

Bernard Paulson was often contacted by outside business consultants who offered to help him run Koch’s refineries. These were reputable men whom Paulson knew well, and he knew that there was good reason to hire them and borrow their expertise. But hiring them would have required Paulson to show them how Koch operated. Paulson would have to show them around the banks of computers inside the Wichita headquarters. He would have to share the computer models and explain how they were created. For this reason, Paulson always turned the consultants away. “I didn’t want people to know what we were doing,” he explained. “Because we did have a method that was, I thought, unique.

If Koch bought the Corpus Christi plant, Paulson realized, the acquisition would open up an entirely new market for the company: the market for paraxylene and other petrochemicals. And, true to Koch’s philosophy, the market would be new but not entirely foreign. Koch knew the petrochemical business already. It could apply the expertise developed at Pine Bend to manufacturing paraxylene in Texas. On top of all of this, it appeared to Paulson and others that Sun Oil wasn’t aware of the opportunity it was missing in Corpus Christi. Sun was making and selling paraxylene but not at nearly the levels that it could. In September of 1981 Koch Industries paid $265 million in cash for the refinery, and Paulson immediately started expanding it. He more than doubled its paraxylene output. He bought a used hydrocracking tower from a refinery in Europe and had it shipped to Texas, bragging to Charles Koch that he bought the tower for 40 percent of what it would cost “off the shelf.” Koch Industries became one of the largest paraxylene producers in the United States.

Officially, the program was for the peaceful development of nuclear energy. The entire world knew this to be a lie, for the simple fact that Iran was blessed with massive oil and gas reserves. Economically, it made no sense to spend billions developing a nuclear program when cheap oil and gas were abundantly available. What they needed were refineries.

How long will it be until the two countries I love forgive each other and move on . . . I'm not even sure what there is to forgive. Something about Cuba seizing ownership of oil refineries. It's all so confusing. Why should something as ugly as oil affect friendships between nations?

Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price

Here is America Now: smoke, greasy fumes, the friction of tire rubber, the memory of terrifying refineries with their rubbery rotten-egg smells.

Where things get really complicated is when the philanthro-capitalists use their money to finance a political agenda that dovetails with their personal business interests or with the interests of the plutocratic class as a whole. The Koch brothers, for instance, have pushed for less government regulation of industry, including state efforts to protect the environment. They are lifelong libertarians who are genuinely skeptical about climate change. They also happen to own a company whose assets include oil refineries, oil pipelines, and lumber mills—all businesses that would benefit from a weakened EPA.

I am fortunate. For instance my house and shop cost me a little over three hundred dollars….”   “Three hundred dollars?” Dennis asked shocked.   “Yes. In Cuba if you can afford to buy a house you buy it from the government. When you want to sell your house you sell it back to the government and they give you what you paid for it.”   “Oh I see and of course the extra you’ve made in profit.”   “No senor. You are not allowed to make money from the government. You only get back what you paid. Is this not the same in your country?”   “No definitely not. Many people have become very rich from property trading.”   “It is not so here. When I or my wife sell our house we will only get back what I paid. Did you know that Fidel Castro in 1960 forced all private property and foreign businesses to be nationalised, all banks, sugar and oil refineries.

In fact, Tung himself was also a businessman. Born in Shanghai, Tung took over his family business after his father, shipping magnate Tung Chao Yung, died in 1981 and managed Orient Overseas, one of the world's leading shipping and logistics service providers. Sitting next to Tung at the meeting with President Xi was Li Ka- shing who made a statement on Oct. 15, calling on the Occupy protesters to go home and not to "let today's passion become tomorrow's regrets." The Asia's wealthiest man did not make it clear whether or not he agrees with the appeals of the protesters. Li built his family business empire from plastics manufacturing and accumulated wealth through real estate, supermarket chains and mobile phone network. Other Hong Kong tycoons, such as Lee Shau-kee, nicknamed "Hong Kong's Warrenn Buffett," Kuok Hock Nien known for his sugar refineries in Asia, and Woo Kwong-ching whose businesses range from Hong Kong's cable TV to the Star Ferry, have all remained mute.

In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, for example, a group of fishing families had lived since 1914 on islands in the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 1998 the Usina Trapiche sugar refinery petitioned the state to take over the land. The islanders say that the refinery then followed up its petition by destroying their homes and small farms, threatening further violence to those who did not leave. When the fishing families rebuilt their homes, they were burned down. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use Usina Trapiche sugar in their products, but until Oxfam’s campaign they denied responsibility for the conduct of their suppliers. Oxfam asked all of the Big 10 food brands to show ethical leadership by requiring that their suppliers obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous and local communities before acquiring land. Nestlé was the first to support this principle fully. Then Coca-Cola declared a policy of zero tolerance for landgrabbing by its suppliers and bottlers and committed to disclosing its suppliers of sugar cane, soy, and palm oil, to conducting social, environmental, and human rights assessments, and to engaging with Usina Trapiche regarding the conflict with the people of the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 2014 PepsiCo also accepted the principle of responsibility for its suppliers. Associated British Foods, the largest sugar producer in Africa and another Big 10 food corporation, is now also committed to the same principle.12 The gains from these policy commitments are more difficult to quantify than in the example of Ghana’s oil revenues, but in the long run they too may be very substantial.

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I may be child-centric, but that doesn't make me anti-feminist. In an interview with Garage Magazine, Beyoncé (Queen Bae), who I can safely say is at the top of her profession as a singer and entertainer, said "Of everything that I've accomplished, my proudest moment hands down is when I gave birth to my daughter Blue." Cue the firestorm of criticism! On Mic.com, Jenny Kutner reacted, "Wouldn't it be refreshing for one of the most professionally accomplished women in the world to value her career accomplishments equally?" To which Elizabeth Kiefer on Refinery29 responded, "It would be, if that were the truth for whoever spoke that perfect sound bite of progressivism. Yet, it would be even more refreshing if we allowed women to choose their greatest moment without fear that they were being judged against some ever-moving metric of what it means to be a good feminist." To which I say "Amen".

lit white tanks of oil refineries and petrochemical plants. “Well,” said Giordino without any particular expression in his voice, “is now a good time for a chorus of ‘Old Man River’?” “The Mississippi,” Pitt muttered. “That’s Baton Rouge to the north across the river. The end of the line. Why dig a canal to this particular spot?” “Who knows what weird machinations lurk in the mind of Qin Shang?” Giordino said philosophically. “Maybe he has plans to access the highway.” “What for? There’s no turnoff. The road shoulder is barely wide enough to hold one car.

delight in putting colonies everywhere.  The Tadpoles noted the terraforming project on the fourth world with bemusement.  There was no shortage of habitable worlds beyond the tramlines either.  Why the humans considered an attempt to reshape an old and dry world into something suitable for them was beyond the factions.  It looked like an expensive and pointless project to them. Let them waste their resources, if they must, one sub-faction stated.  It only weakens them. We will set course for the fifth planet, the Combat Faction said.  There was nothing to be gained by trying to understand humans.  They were alien beings.  Their society and history spoke of nothing, but war.  They were too dangerous to be allowed to infest space.  And they will follow us. Doubt floated through parts of the Song, but not enough to force a change.  The fifth planet was a massive gas giant, one of the largest recorded.  And the installations orbiting the giant planet were easy to identify.  Cloudscoops and refineries ... if they were destroyed, they’d hamper human reconstruction.  It wasn't a direct way to win, but it would work.  And it would force the humans to give chase.  They’d have no choice. And then we will win, the Combat Faction stated.  It will only be

That was a long time I used to sit on my suburb balcony looking over a distant horizon and faraway flames of oil-refineries on the other side of the city’s horse-shoe. - Vladislav Khalyavkin, The Operator

You still seeing her (Maddie)?” “Platonically.” I spat out the word like it was profanity. It seemed acutely unfair to get shoved into the friend zone like a pair of dirty socks after I’d given her enough orgasms to light up a refinery. I shrugged as if I didn’t care. I did care. “Her funeral.

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage. Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true. Who could ever pay for the pain of rising day after day year after year in a dim room dancing with cockroaches, and looking out on a street like a sewer of slow death? All her life it felt to her she had been dying a cell at a time, a cell of hope, of joy, of love, little lights going out one by one. When her body had turned all to pain, would she die? Die and poison the earth like a plague victim, like so many pounds of lead?

Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.

United States oil companies were taking Hitler’s money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs.

In 1988, Koch Oil had taken 142,000 barrels of oil without paying for them and cleared pure profit on each of those barrels when it sold them. In 1986 and 1987, the other years that Ballen’s team investigated, Koch was over by 240,680 and 239,206 barrels, respectively. The second-highest overage of any other company in those years was the Phillips Petroleum Company’s overage of 2,181 barrels in 1987, still just 0.009 percent of Koch’s overage that year. The set of numbers was the only clear thing that the Senate team could determine about Koch. As investigators dug further into the company, they discovered an organization that seemed built to obscure its very existence. There was a reason that no one had heard of Koch Oil, even though the company operated huge pipeline networks and two major oil refineries (one in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the other just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota).

To take just one example: Koch derives much of its profits from oil refineries. The entire economy depends on refined oil, but no one has built a new oil refinery in the United States since 1977. The industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. A single refinery shutdown causes gasoline prices to spike across entire regions of the United States. The underlying cause of this dysfunction is a set of loopholes in the Clean Air Act, a massive set of regulations passed in 1963 (and significantly expanded in 1970) that imposed pollution controls on new refineries. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding clean-air standards that would apply to new facilities

It’s difficult for outsiders to even understand the nature of a contango market. In essence, the price of oil in spot markets, which reflect the price of oil today, tends to be lower than the price of oil to be delivered in the future. This is attributable to a host of complex reasons.I In the relatively rare scenario when oil today is cheaper than oil in the future, the markets are said to be in contango, and it doesn’t tend to last very long. Usually the market reverts to its normal state of cheaper oil in the future. When the market goes into contango, it presents a whole host of ways for Koch’s traders to profit. In late 2008, the potential profits were extraordinary. The size of the contango became enormous—the gap between oil sold today and oil sold for delivery a few months out became roughly $8 a barrel. A more common level of contango would be in the range of $2 or $4 a barrel. And the gap wasn’t just wide, it was long-lasting. The markets remained in contango for several months. Koch Industries, and a handful of other giant oil producers, were able to exploit this gap in a special way. Because Koch Industries traded in both the futures markets and the physical markets, it could execute something called the “contango storage play.” One former senior trader within Koch Supply & Trading called the contango storage play a “bread-and-butter” strategy for Koch’s crude oil department. The mechanics of the contango storage play seem deceptively simple. A trader at Koch Industries buys oil in the spot markets, where it is cheap. Then, the trader sells oil for delivery in the futures markets, where oil is more expensive. When the contango gap is $8, it is easy to picture how quickly the profits pile up. The trader can buy oil for $35 and sell it for $43, almost instantly. There is a catch, however. To execute the contango storage play, the trader must be able to do something that most traders can’t do—they must be able to deliver the actual, physical oil in that future month. If a typical oil speculator—who did not own an oil refinery, storage tanks, or an oil tanker ship—tried to execute the contango storage trade, they could find themselves shut out. Executing the contango storage trade didn’t just require deep knowledge of arcane shipping markets and transportation law; it also required deep relationships in the private world of oil production.

at Koch Industries, there was no such thing as a senior manager. Within the confines of Market-Based Management, Roos was known as a process owner, or someone who acted like they had an ownership stake in the company. The refinery at Pine Bend was divided into five groups, which were known as “profit centers.” Each profit center was like a separate piece of property owned by a boss who was responsible for everything that happened within their domain. Koch measured the financial results in each profit center, which, in turn, determined how much money would be steered toward that profit center in the future. Brian Roos was the process owner over the Utilities Profit Center, a division that included the refinery’s wastewater treatment plant, boiler house, cooling system, and other equipment that kept the cracking units running efficiently.

Charles Koch seemed to make that shift effortlessly. “He goes back to his core thinking of: What’s our point of view around what’s going to happen? How long is this downturn going to take? How is that going to affect people’s buying patterns?” Jones recalled. “And how long is it going to take—given this housing crisis—to get through this deleveraging?” If Charles Koch was more confident in his company’s future, he had reason to be. The company he oversaw in 2008 was larger, more diverse, and more adaptable than it had ever been before. It was built to withstand market shocks. Some divisions were hit hard, such as Koch’s building products divisions and its carpet fiber factories. But other divisions fared much better, such as its oil refineries and trading desks. The financial pain was very real, but there never seemed to be any doubt that Koch Industries would come out the other side as a healthy and profitable enterprise.

Chase Koch began a rotation of high-level jobs that exposed him to the strategic pillars of Koch Industries’ modern business. It was telling what Chase Koch did not learn. He was not sent to the oil refineries, or to a pipeline farm, or to a natural gas processing plant. Charles Koch didn’t necessarily want to teach his son about the energy industry. Instead, Charles Koch selected a series of jobs that reflected what Koch Industries had become over the last decade and how it planned to carry on into the future. The rotation of jobs was set forth, roughly, as follows: Class 1. Private equity acquisitions and mergers. Class 2. Accounting and taxes. Class 3. Market-Based Management training. Class 4. Trading. One of Chase’s first assignments was to Koch’s development group, the internal committee that looked for new companies to acquire. He joined a division called Koch Equity Development, which bought shares of publicly traded firms. Chase worked in this office when Koch’s acquisition spree was at its peak, shortly after the Invista and Koch Fertilizer deals and during the $21 billion purchase of Georgia-Pacific.

Charles Koch could make the case that his company wasn’t just perpetually growing, but perpetually transforming as well, entering new industries, abandoning the old, always searching for the next opportunity. And bolstering these experimental efforts were the reliable cash cows. The Pine Bend refinery, still refining cheap crude and selling expensive gasoline, throwing off cash around the clock. And now Corpus Christi, repeating the same trick thanks to the fracking revolution. And the trading division, still selling derivatives, still trading in markets where it had an unparalleled view into real-time shipments and inventories.

Only such witnessing could have inspired the mildly epiphanic passage in Seeds of Man, in which the clear air of the mountainous borderland all too briefly serves as an antidote to the industrial poisons that had choked the life out of both Okemah and Pampa. As Guthrie recalled it: “The feel and the breath of the air was all different, new, high, clear, clean, and light. None of the smokes and carbons, none of the charcoal smells of the oil fields. None of the sooty oil-field fires, none of the blackening slush-pond blazes, none of those big sheet-iron petroleum refineries, none of those big smoky carbon-black plants. No smells of the wild oil gusher on the breeze. No smells from that wild gas well blowing off twenty million feet into the good air every day.”30

There is no industrial smog in Miami. No steel mills, no oil refineries. Heavy industry is cocaine processing, and high technology is money laundering.

1997, for instance, the EPA moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of air pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, came up with a novel criticism of the proposed rule. The EPA, she argued, had not taken into account that by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution were controlled, it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.