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Gasoline prices slither upward
Published May 1, 2007
SWEENY — Even with a dip in oil, worried commodity traders couldn’t stomach the after-effects of a fried chicken snake.
A brief power outage at ConocoPhillips’ refinery in Sweeny — caused by a 6-foot chicken snake shorting out a substation, a company spokeswoman said — was cited by an analyst as one of the reasons wholesale unleaded gasoline prices jumped 7.92 cents a gallon Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It closed at $2.4405 a gallon.
Oil prices, meanwhile, retreated 75 cents to $65.71 a barrel.
The gas hike was caused in part to “the shutdown on Saturday of portions of ConocoPhillips’ 247,000 barrel per day refinery in Sweeny, Texas, due to power outages,” Man Energy analyst Edward Meir told the Associated Press.
The outage lasted less than a minute, ConocoPhillips spokeswoman Regina Slaydon said, was caused when the chicken snake entered a Texas-New Mexico Power Co. substation on the south side of the refinery at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday
“We experienced a brief outage Friday due to a chicken snake entering a Texas-New Mexico Power substation,” Slaydon said, describing a small cinderblock building with transformers on the outside — not an uncommon sight along Texas highways.
“The snake caused a fault in the TNMP system. The outage lasted less than a minute as we switched to alternate power source,” she said. “It did not have any lasting effects and refinery operations were restored. There were no reported injuries or impact to the community.”
Except the snake.
“It apparently went through the fence and managed to crawl up onto the line outside the building and caused a a short,” Slaydon said. “He was crawling across the transformer line.
“There were eyewitnesses to the fact that the snake did not make it.”
Sweeny’s outage and a fire and explosion Friday at a 50,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Oklahoma were among national refinery problems putting more pressure on U.S. gasoline inventories, which have fallen for 11 weeks in a row, the AP reported. Last week’s U.S. Energy Department report showed an unexpected drop of 2.8 million barrels of gasoline stockpiles and stated refinery use declined to 87.8 percent of capacity.
“We are looking at strong demand,” John Person, an independent energy trader and president of NationalFutures.com, told the AP. Analysts wonder if there will be adequate gas for the summer driving season, about a month away. “We’re below the five-year average (for gasoline supplies),” Person said.
The last appreciable power outage at the Sweeny plant occurred when a tree fell March 19, interrupting a TNMP transmission line delivering electricity to an Old Ocean substation. That short interruption was not internal and had no lasting effects, Slaydon said.
Saturday’s snake problem is not a regular occurrence, said TNMP spokesperson Valerie Smith.
“I don’t know how common a snake is. It’s not unheard of but it’s not common,” Smith said. “Wildlife in general can cause outages, but generally you hear more about squirrels.”
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