Meditations O

O . . . oil, petrOleum, fuel, which I’m guessing is the sixth boro’s most valuable cargo; not to say sand, rock, scrap, cement lack value.   Wonder fuel of the past 150 or so years, thanks to what Edwin Drake started.  But what will power home and industry and what cargo will hold greatest value  150 years from now, or a hundred, or fifty, twenty.

Tankers move crude in, and other tankers move petroleum products both in . . . and out.  We export petroleum products –like diesel–due to relative refining capacity, but I’ve no clue where Stena Performance goes when she leaves the Kills for sea.

Adriatic Sea, southbound on the Hudson near Bear Mountain Bridge, pushes what might be petroleum or might be ethanol.

Here Taurus pushes a fuel tank.

As does Curtis Reinauer.
Bering Sea has a loaded fuel tank on the hip.

When a tanker comes into this terminal on the KVK, they hook into hoses like these.

Here’s the whole set.  Is there a technical term for these, both individual hoses and the entire set?

Scorship King Douglas, exactly a year old, came in this morning, but it hardly seems loaded to capacity.  Why not?  Tug is Rowan M McAllister.

When Eagle Atlanta came in, she seemed deeper in the water than King Douglas, but maybe  both were to capacity.  Tug is Marjorie B McAllister.

What was uncomfortable about writing this post is all the unknowns, and I know I don’t know a lot related to oil.  Yet, my daily life could not happen without oil.  Very few people on the face of the Earth can say they are totally free of a reliance on oil.  It’s an amazing admission, given that it’s a finite resource.  Yet, I think I can safely say that most of us don’t know much about the source, international supply and refining chain, and transportation of items in their lives stemming from petroleum.  Like the gas I put in my car today, I’ve no clue where it lay in the Earth for hundreds of hundreds of thousands of years before–relatively recently–it started the journey toward the gas tank of my car.  And the oil that refining transformed into plastics and chemicals in my house, which pocket beneath the surface did that come from?  If I burned wood to run a steam engine, I might at least know which tree I cut to get this nice hot fire, but oil . . . not a hint.   And it all bothers me because I’d like to know.

Metaphorically, oil as fuel and lubricant . . . it’s potent stuff, without which, nothing good happens.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Unrelated to this post, but go back to “Meditations M” . . . on masts.  Les Sonnenmark labeled almost all the units on Yankee‘s mast.  Can anyone help with the topmost one?