Notes of an old refiner

Last Thursday the school No. 12 invited me to speak to the 9th and 10th grade, the "meeting with the veterans of the labour". It is the school where Lyudmila taught. The director remembered her and gave me the first row.

The four bottles for the school: crude, diesel, gasoline and the catalyst powder.

I brought a bottle with crude oil, a bottle with diesel, one with gasoline and a plastic bag with the catalyst powder. One boy asked whether I am rich. I said: with 38 years of work I have two good knees and a dacha. The class laughed and I felt that it was the correct answer.

A girl asked why I stayed in one workplace so long. I said: because at the refinery every day is different, and also nobody offered more. Then one more question, how does the refinery smell? I said: like money, but only for other people.

Today a long post for the technical people, others may skip.

The refinery in Kobozev was built in the late fifties, and in 1974 they expanded it. I was there as a young senior operator when they brought in the new catalytic cracking unit: a tower the height of a ten-floor house, the reactor, the regenerator, and the pipes that I knew by heart afterwards, like the veins of my own hand. The commissioning team was from Baku and Moscow. They said it will take three months to bring the unit to the full load. We did it in five weeks, because the shift of Nikolai Stepanovich did not go home. The chief of the plant, I remember, brought us tea in the thermoses himself at four in the morning.

What is cracking? Simple version: the heavy oil is a long chain, like a long wooden train. At 500 degrees with the catalyst powder the train breaks into small wagons, and these small wagons are gasoline. A good shift engineer feels the unit with the soles of his shoes. If the floor trembles in a certain way, you go to the panel before the alarm.

In my 20 years as a shift engineer I had two serious incidents and no one was hurt. I am proud of that more than of the medals.

"A refinery does not forgive, but it also does not forget the good." (Nikolai Stepanovich, 1975)