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I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

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Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#91

Post by esaym »

oxymoron wrote: post #33
comex wrote: post #4

Another notable excerpt from the linked state safety agency document ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_wsh_cet5041_90142_7.do... ): -- Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern an…

I once took a university course called "Chemical Equilibrium" which required some lab time. The labs were about examining solutions with unknown ions and figuring out what they were. A common tool in doing so is by bubbling hydrogen sulfide gas through the solution, which will cause the precipation of certain cations. Needless to say, we were warned about the dangers of H2S, and told that if it ever escaped the fume…

>"For those who do not know, H2S is also a key part of the vile smell in flatulence, so strictly speaking it's a rather common substance in nature albeit in "safe" concentrations."

Funny story and probably TMI.

I used to work in aviation maintenance on large military aircraft. We regularly had to enter into "confined spaces" (fuel tanks, wings, ect) and were required to take a hand-held "air sniffer" with us that would alarm if any of about 5 or so monitored gases got too high.

I would always fart into the thing to see what would happen and it would always read 0 on all monitored gases. However on one day, I had perhaps the worst smelling "flatulence" ever and while inside the center fuel tank of a P3, I let one rip right into the sniffer. H2S went from 0 to 1ppm, but strangely carbon monoxide (CO) went from 0 to 7ppm. I always expected the H2S, but I don't know what the heck CO was doing in my bowels..

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#92

Post by vinceguidry »

benten10 wrote: post #18
iheartmemcache wrote: post #8

Not in petrochemicals, but neither is this is this reporter. I get it, it's supposed to be a joke, but it's such a poorly executed one fraught with so many major components glossed over that it detracts from any humor the article could have had. When the Onion writes something, it's humor is wonderful because not only the wit is there but there are few if any inconsistencies even for pedants who dissect things such a…

To reply with the response such posts usually get: You must be really fun at parties! This post was entertaining to most of us because we are not in the industry, knew little about the presence of hydrogen sulfide, and did not realize that the industry was so reluctant to sell to random interested buyers. Yes they could have written "This reporter tried to buy a barrel of oil, but sellers were reluctant, and it was c…

What you're saying is true, but it could have been much better if they'd paid attention to the details.

One of the things I love about HN is that not only will interesting and funny articles like this come up, but also that I can hit the comment section afterward for the real story. Your parent's comment was more interesting than yours.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#93

Post by jallmann »

kyleblarson wrote: post #49

I worked at a small quant fund and we once had a bug that caused our roll forward trade to fail on a rather large position of front month WTI contracts. We technically were going to have to take delivery since we were long the contracts at expiry, but our brokerage was nice enough to fix the situation for us.

This is a recurring nightmare of mine: forgetting to close out a commodity futures contract, then suddenly having 20,000 bushels wheat (or whatever it was) show up on my doorstep one morning. Brrrr.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#94

Post by jkyle »

comex wrote: post #4

Another notable excerpt from the linked state safety agency document ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_wsh_cet5041_90142_7.do... ): -- Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern an…

This entire description is like a text book example of what not to do from one of the many, many safety classes I had take as a construction worker.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#96

Post by mindcrime »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #71
bostonpete wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the accident in question happened nearly 50 years ago. Who knows what kind of training was in place at the time or even how well understood this sort of problem was.

"Little House on the Prairie" has a scene where the father digs a well and tests the air downhole with a candle. That's awareness of the danger in a literary work more than 100 years ago. Farmers and well-diggers have been aware of the phenomenon for centuries , it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.

it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger

Not as much as you might think. Firefighters routinely fought fires without SCBA up until at least the 70's, and probably into the 80's in rural areas. And if they weren't using SCBA for structure fires, they probably weren't using them for rescue calls in most cases. It was a cultural thing... for a long time, firefighters just didn't understand/appreciate the importance of SCBA. In hindsight that seems hard to believe, but it's been a slow process to get to a place where every firefighter is rigorous about making sure they use SCBA at all required times. (To some extent, that could be said about other protective gear as well, including turnout gear and PASS alarms).

Also consider that many (probably most) fire departments don't receive a lot of specific training on confined space rescue. Of course, you might ask, "why not?" and the simple answer is "time". Especially with volunteer firefighters, you can only get folks out for so much training a week. And fire calls are many times more common than confined space calls, so most training time is spent on the routine firefighting stuff.

Similar thing with hazardous materials training... it's a relatively recent thing for the majority of fire departments to receive specific haz-mat training, and even then, unless the department runs a specialized haz-mat team, their personnel probably only train to the "awareness" level.

I don't mean to excuse the fire chief, as I don't know the details of that specific story. But for something like that to happen, especially that many years ago, isn't a complete surprise.

Source: I was a firefighter and certified firefighting instructor throughout most of the 90s / early 2000's. My dad was also a volunteer firefighter and I've had a lifelong interest in the fire service.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#97

Post by shocks »

bigethan wrote: post #6

Relatedly(?) When I had a diesel car, I bought and stored a small barrel of biodiesel in the basement of our apartment (saving like $0.05 a gallon!). I was told that diesel doesn't burn except under extreme pressure, and that you could throw a match into an open cup of diesel and it would just go out. Never actually tested that out.

You might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nL10C7FSbE

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#98

Post by digi_owl »

mikeash wrote: post #81
LoSboccacc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then there's FOOF https://web.archive.org/web/20150825171826/http://pipeline.c... (Webarchive since original seems down)

"If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic." I've seen this article before, but I will never get tired of reading it again.

Given that a number of tests listed beforehand are with compounds that have their own "won't work with" articles, yeah one do wonder about the sanity of the chemist behind the paper.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#99

Post by graedus »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #32
benten10 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reply with the response such posts usually get: You must be really fun at parties! This post was entertaining to most of us because we are not in the industry, knew little about the presence of hydrogen sulfide, and did not realize that the industry was so reluctant to sell to random interested buyers. Yes they could have written "This reporter tried to buy a barrel of oil, but sellers were reluctant, and it was c…

Bloomberg is a really targeted news institution on which people rely for not comedy but financial information. It's reflected in the fees you pay to get access to their terminals, it's reflected in their promos, and even the corporations who select to advertise with them know they're trying to hit a target reader. Usually, that reader is not someone looking for a comic laugh. Imagine pulling up a Linux news site and…

> "What happened when I tried to install Linux on my leather shoes!"

I, for one, would definitely click through and read this.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#100

Post by Florin_Andrei »

chimeracoder wrote: post #83
comex wrote: post #4

Another notable excerpt from the linked state safety agency document ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_wsh_cet5041_90142_7.do... ): -- Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern an…

Unrelated, but reading this reminded me of the story. One of my chemistry teachers in high school made a lab where we had to identify various substances by smell. H2S was one of those substances, and we were told it had a distinctive sulfuric smell. I remember trying to smell the substance by wafting[0] (as previous teachers had instructed us) and thinking 'hm, I thought I smelled that a second ago, but now I can't'.…

Well, I made H2S on a few occasions in high school, and I always thought it has a powerful odor of rotten eggs. I have no doubt about it. You make a little H2S in a test tube, you will know, along with everyone else in the room and perhaps in adjacent rooms too.

I don't doubt that it deadens the sense of smell, I'm just saying it's nowhere near odorless on first contact.

Of course, I never made an amount large enough, nor did I stuck around long enough, for the sense impairment to occur.

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