Whether the weather for rollover?

Weather could play a factor for Y2K rollover problems relating to oil refineries. As many of you know, I've posted the inherent risks to oil refineries IF electric utilities go out in colder regions of the country where oil refineries are located. Should a cold-weather oil refinery lose power from its local utility the systems that keep the crude oil lines warm could/would likely go down and thus exposing the crude lines to "candling" effects in which the crude oil congeals in the lines creating a whole new set of problems. If prolonged, it could force a refinery to shut down.

The key factor is outside temperatures that are below 40 degrees F. That is the point at which candling can take begin to take place. The colder the air temps the greater the problem and the faster it developes. Temps of zero to 20 degrees (espec at midnite) IF/or when power could or would be lost would produce a quicker effect. Temps below zero hastens the process very quickly. With that in mind, weather forecasts can give us some preliminary indications whether or not short term outages might have cascading effects due to weather on oil refining. What's the weather forecast?

Across the coldweather regions the Weather Channel is showing an extended national forecast calling for moderate conditions across much of the colder parts of the nation. This is a small piece of brighter news. Still over much of the midwest we'll see overnight temps dipping below 30 degrees, so it could still be some sort of factor if an outage were to occur for a few hours at a refinery. Here's a snippet from the WC forecast:

"Bundle up for a bundle of fun. New Years Eve could be a long one, and a cold one, for some revelers. For example, temperatures in northern New Mexico may be colder than in northern Maine on Friday"

"At the moment the long-range forecasts indicate pretty run of the mill temperatures for this time of year across the whole country, according to Senior Meteorologist Tom Moore. In fact we are all wondering why it isnt colder given the current weather patterns we are watching, he said."

"... and the good news is we arent expecting any big storms anywhere in the U.S. at this point, according to Moore."

Sounds good to me.

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 28, 1999

Answers

Me to, RC!

-- yup! (fan@of.rc), December 30, 1999.

RC, Many thanks for your reports & hardwork.Guess I ought to check out the temperatures across Europe.Are there any maps/info on thelocation of European Refineries?

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), December 30, 1999.

Temperatures will be above freezing (zero Celsius, whatever this is in F) for most of central/western parts of Europe for the next week.

-- Rainbow (Rainbow@123easy.net), December 30, 1999.