It's true..

[Daniel ~]

and a large Chinese population! Though I think Jubail may have a few more than we do!":O}

[cloasters]

Al Jubail, in sunny Saudi Arabia. Had to look it up, I had no clue. Talk about a dry "county," makes you wonder if the local power structure hides a beer up its sleeve. Probably not, they leave for the sinful West and lap it up there. One would imagine. Dang Kaitain, whut the heyell is you doin' thereabouts? Probably maintaining some sophisticated machinery? Hope you depart for more liberal shores before you die of thirst!

[Kaitain]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

and a large Chinese population! Though I think Jubail may have a few more than we do!":O}

Um... Jubail's in Saudi Arabia, and has rather a small Chinese population. Lots of Arabs, though...

[Kaitain]

Originally Posted by cloasters

Al Jubail, in sunny Saudi Arabia. Had to look it up, I had no clue. Talk about a dry "county," makes you wonder if the local power structure hides a beer up its sleeve. Probably not, they leave for the sinful West and lap it up there. One would imagine. Dang Kaitain, whut the heyell is you doin' thereabouts? Probably maintaining some sophisticated machinery? Hope you depart for more liberal shores before you die of thirst!

'round these parts, the locals are within driving distance of Bahrain, Qatar or the UAE, where people don't take themselves quite so seriously. Once there they do all the things that they forbid people from doing here.

Anyway, another year, another ethylene plant. So the usual round of wiring changes, on-the-spot re-engineering, reprogramming systems I've never seen before, handling client engineers that failed kindergarten, but have a powerful uncle and generally doing all the things that make industry fun.

I'd rather it was somewhere nice, but sadly not this time. Next plant, maybe.

Anyway, what this has to do with 64 bit... well:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20091002 Gentoo Firefox/3.5.3

That do?

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by Kaitain

Um... Jubail's in Saudi Arabia, and has rather a small Chinese population. Lots of Arabs, though...

Stop moving about your making me look stupid! LOL

[cloasters]

Sounds like good clean fun, especially dealing with those brainy engineers. Can I ask an ignorant Q, please? What do you do with ethylene, is it safe to assume that this is derived from oil? And is it turned into plastics, or summit like that? Can it go boom in a spectacularly deadly manner? Are those miles and miles of pipes fun to be around? Is having a lot of ignorant questions considered untelligent in your fair neck of the woods, er, sand? Somebody stop me. Thank you very much!

[Kaitain]

Originally Posted by cloasters

Sounds like good clean fun, especially dealing with those brainy engineers. Can I ask an ignorant Q, please? What do you do with ethylene, is it safe to assume that this is derived from oil? And is it turned into plastics, or summit like that? Can it go boom in a spectacularly deadly manner? Are those miles and miles of pipes fun to be around? Is having a lot of ignorant questions considered untelligent in your fair neck of the woods, er, sand? Somebody stop me. Thank you very much!

Ethylene (IUPAC: ethene, C2H4) is ultimately derived from oil. If you heat any hydrocarbon in the presence of steam, it will break up and reform into some other form of hydrocarbon.

We stuff a given hydrocarbon (in this case ethane, C2H6 or propane, C3H8 but actually anything short of tar will do) into a furnace at a rate timed to favour stripping just one hydrogen molecule, H2, from the hydrocarbon. Obviously it's not perfect. We actually get a mixture of products ranging from atomic carbon through to xylene out of the back. Much of the plant is devoted to cleaning up the product, extracting everything that's useful to the chemical industry and burning the rest (recovering as much heat as possible to save wasting gas).

We could in theory stuff plastic bottles into a furnace and crack it back to ethylene and propylene. Problem there is getting powder into a furnace fast enough. There's a challenge for any budding inventors

The major products go either into plastics (polythene and polypropylene respectively) or they go on to make other chemicals: ethylbenzene for polystyrene making, ethylene-glycol for refrigerants, or as a basic stock for fine chemicals. (Fine chemicals covers everything from paint to anti-cancer drugs).

Yes it can go boom, but not all that spectacularly. The hydrogen makes a bit of a pop, though.

[Daniel ~]

Can you make me one of those Cupie dolls that have heads that wobble K? ":O}

[Kaitain]

Er... what?

[Daniel ~]

You know! Ya see 'em on dashboards of cars or in the back windows doing the hooola and such like...can ya make me one...I'll send ya my address if ya can! You've got to have Some spare plastic laying about!

[Kaitain]

What comes out the back of the plant is a slightly sweet-smelling gas. Well, it would be gas at room temperature and pressure. It's exported at 30 bar and -50 Celsius (ish). I doubt you'd want any of that...

[Daniel ~]

No...The Cupie doll will be fine!

[cloasters]

Holy crap, this stuff is far more complicated than I unintelligently thought. Ramming pure highly combustable liquid (?) propane or those other tasty substances into a furnace? I'da never thought of doing that, 'cause it sounds like one would be begging for an explosion of singular merit. My understanding (yeah, right) of refineries extends to cracking towers--that concept I get. I thimk. I get the picture that you're far downstream from a simple (?) refinery.

I'm very glad that you are on the job there, if they hired me for the position the havoc would be epic. Such accolades I'd receive--if they could find the pieces.
Be well, the best to your family! Please drop us a line now and again, so we'll know you're not as one with refrigerated xylene!

[cloasters]

I got a "chemistry set" for Christmas when I was eleven or so. It was fun, but to this day chemistry confuses me, totally. Ethylbenzene sounds like my long gone Aunt Ethel, but I'm guessing that she was far more 'user friendly.'

Long ago, super grade gasoline was popularly called "Ethyl." Trivia, how much is too much?

[cloasters]

He has blisters on his fingers. Behold! Or do you wish for blisters on your own fingers?

[cloasters]

Uh, no. Blisters hurt and they're evidence of too much work. What would Margaret Thatcher say? She liked blisters on fingers that didn't belong to her.

[cloasters]

A new month, yay. Well, not new but my sixtieth crack at it. How to make this a memorable span of thirty days? First, kill the lawyers. But wouldn't you need a lawyer if you're nabbed after offing them?

[Daniel ~]

Nope! Who would prosecute you? Only a lawyer would think of prosecuting a person for performing a public service!

[cloasters]

LOL, you have a good point!

[cloasters]

A pal scored very high on the LSAT's. "But not good enough for Harvard Law," so he shelved the project. A tragedy, for we need more lawyers every day. Gnot!