Who Stores a Hydrocracker?
No one — the caverns hold barrels, not conversion: the Midwest is past its plate, the plate is shrinking, and 63 million Iranian barrels ride at anchor with no machine time waiting.
On every distillation unit in the American refining system there is, somewhere, a plate — a rated capacity, filed with Washington as operable barrels per calendar day, the number that already discounts inspections, maintenance, turnarounds, and everything else that keeps a machine full of hot hydrocarbon from becoming a news event.
The Weekly Petroleum Status Report’s own glossary is careful about the distinction: barrels per stream day is what the unit can do flat out under perfect conditions; barrels per calendar day is what it can do in the real world, downtime included.
The plate is not an aspiration — it is the ceiling with the safety margin already subtracted, which is what makes a district printing above it a physical statement rather than a statistical one.
Last week the Midwest ran at 100.3 per cent of it.
The week before, the Rocky Mountain district ran at 103.2.
