Cracking idea.
The idea that's hatching at our refinery is a real cracker. A £150 million catalytic cracker complex, no less — replete with delights for the technology buff: alkylation, isomerisation, deisobutanisation, the lot.
But to most people outside the oil business, that could be good news, bad news, a tax dodge or an excuse to put up prices.
So why should anyone care?
For one thing, it should boost Britain's balance of payments by around £40 million a year.
And for another, it anticipates a conservationist trend in the way Britain uses oil. Most British refineries, ours included, produce large quantities of heavy fuel oil — used mainly for industrial heating and electricity generation. But those jobs can be done just as well by other fuels. In years to come, it won't make sense to burn a scarce resource like oil for heating when it could be used to make petrol, jet fuel and lubricants — products for which there's no satisfactory alternative.
That's where the cracker comes in. It's an 80-foot vertical steel column in which heavy fuel oil molecules are cracked up into smaller structures; when they're reassembled, we end up with less fuel oil — and an extra supply of petrol. Good news for us, because petrol is a more valuable product.
Good news for Britain, too. Instead of having to top up our petrol supplies with expensive imports, we'll have a healthy surplus to export. Which is where the balance of payments benefit comes from.
Too good to be true? Certainly it's risky trying to anticipate changes in market demand, especially with a project which takes four years to complete.
But we had to find £150 million to fund the project; and you can't raise that kind of money without convincing some pretty shrewd people that your idea is all it's cracked up to be.
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