There have been several refining questions lately that were topical to this essay, originally posted in January 2007. Here I have updated it to reflect more recent prices.

When a refinery purchases crude oil, the key piece of information they need to know about that crude, besides price, is what the crude oil assay looks like. There has been a lot of discussion here at various times about “light sweet”, or “heavy sour”, and how these qualifiers affect the ability of a refiner to turn these crudes into products. So, I thought it would be good to devote an essay to this subject, and discuss how different types of crude can affect a refiner’s bottom line.

Let's compare light sweet oil to heavy sour oil by looking at a pair of assays:

Table 1. Comparison Between Assays of Light and Heavy Crudes

Most of you folks know that I recently wrote an Oil Quiz. The American Petroleum Institute (API) now has a quiz also, called the Energy IQ.

API's concern is that Americans have a low level of knowledge about energy issues, and this low level of knowledge may affect energy policy. To document the current level of knowledge, API hired Harris Interactive to perform an internet survey of 1,333 adults, then had a conference call with bloggers (Brian Faughnan - Weekly Standard; Ed Morrissey - Captain's Quarters, Heading Right; Geoffrey Styles - Energy Outlook; Stephen Spruiell - National Review; John Kingston - Platts, and Gail Tverberg - TOD) to discuss the results.

In this article, we will look at the quiz itself and then talk a little about the interpretation. As you read the quiz, you will note that the questions seem to be selected to emphasize points that API would like to make. API's discussion of the quiz can be found here, the quiz with answers and references can be found here, and the blogger conference call recording and transcript can be found here.

ENERGY IQ QUIZ

1. What percentage of the world’s 10 biggest oil and natural gas companies are owned and operated by foreign governments?

Answer under the fold

On April 18th, I participated in a conference call with the American Petroleum Institute. The topic of the call was Energy and the Environment. You can download a transcript here or the audio of the call here.

Here was a list of participants, pulled from the call transcript:

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg is from Treehugger and we just went through, briefly, a blog roll. We have on the call Robert Rapier from The Oil Drum and R-Squared; Hank Green of EcoGeek; Tom Fowler of NewsWatch: Energy which is Houston Chronicle; Marc Gunther, Fortune; Mark Gongloff of The Wall Street Journal Energy Roundup; and Carter Wood of ShopFloor.org.

I think they missed mentioning John Gartner from Wired.

I will participate in another API conference call on energy issues on April 18th, and I would like to solicit questions from readers. The topic will be “Energy and the Environment”, but I would expect they will take any energy-related questions. The speaker will be API CEO Red Cavaney.

I wrote up my impressions of the previous conference call here. You can read the transcript from the first call here along with an audio recording at the API's Energy Tomorrow site.

If you get a chance, read the transcript or listen to the audio recording. This may prompt some questions. I will try to get as many answered as possible, and then I will write up the results. Don't miss this opportunity to have your questions/concerns documented and addressed. If you have a question, please list it. First come, first served.