HOW THE BIG REFINERIES CALL THE SHOTS ON FAKE PROPANE
Last week, when we told you how the 1970 EPA regulations requiring oil refineries to capture SO2, so-called "desulFurization," made windfall profits for the oil refineries, we only scratched the surface. Desulfurization units cost big money, the kind of money only big oil can afford. Smaller independent refiners could not afford to comply with the new regulations, so were forced to sell out to the big refiners who could afford to comply with the new regulations. This left two new markets to the large refiners: agricultural sulfur and slop fuel for propane.
As we said last week, before the EPA regulations made the refineries take out the sulfur, the slop that that is now "commercial grade" propane was simply flared off as waste. It smelled terrible and watered people's eyes because it was loaded with sulfur. When the oil refiners had to capture the sulfur and gaseous odds and ends, or slop, that had been just flared off, they found ways to sell both the sulfur and the slop.
By 1975 oil refiners began to see profits three ways: they turned the captured sulfur into a champion money-maker when they began to sell to farming operations as fertilizer. Second, the oil refiners captured the poisonous hydrocarbons, including benzene, toluene and Agent Orange at the top of the refinery stack as "commercial grade" propane. This was possible because all the ASTM standard required of "commercial grade" propane was that it be hydrocarbon gas and hold a flame. Third, the oil refiners saved many millions a year when they did not have to
dispose of the slop as hazardous waste, since they were beginning to sell it as propane to propane customers.
What were waste products and liabilities became champion money-makers. Sulfur fertilizer became required in production agriculture, and production of counterfeit "commercial grade" propane climbed until, as the GAO recently said, half the propane was produced in natural gas processing (real olefin-free HD5) and half was counterfeit propane, consisted of desulfurized slop, including benzene, toluene, butylenes, and Agent Orange, all waste products of high-heat oil refining.
Instead of paying fines, refiners have homeowners pay them for the slop so the pollution comes from many thousands of differences places, so-called "nonpoint source" pollution. The EPA can only enforce the rules against a single point source. Under its own rules, a single point source is a "discernible, confined and discrete" source of the pollution. The millions of households that are sold slop as propane put the same poisons into the air, but the EPA cannot enforce the rules against any one of them because the source of the pollution is "diffuse."
The poisons that go into the air from burning slop also go into customers' homes, and on their food. Every other country where propane is used knows this fact. For this reason, they only allow HD-5 propane to be imported: real propane that burns clean and burns longer. Only here, where the oil refiners are so powerful that they make the rules to make them more money every day, can pollution be sold to customers as fuel. Homeowners, just trying to stay warm and pay their bills, were put on budget plans with courtesy fill, burned the slop the oil refineries weren't allowed to flare off.
The EPA, established to protect the public and the environment, is nothing but a smokescreen for big oil. When big oil makes the rules, it's easy to see why.
These are the facts, and they tell a hard story. Insist on HD-5 propane all the time, which you can count on from Thrifty Propane. Call us today at 800-879-3152!