By GREG OLMSTED – After a six-year effort Chevron finally sold their refinery on Oahu. It was probably a fire sale – you may remember that Tesoro sold their Hawaii refinery in 2013 for only $75 million cash and it was almost twice as large. Chevron started hemorrhaging last year (lost more than a half billion dollars in one quarter) and is furiously selling assets. Word in the industry is that they are slashing spending by 40 percent for each of the next two years. Ouch! Long story short: according to the Star-Advertiser, Island Energy Services LLC, a subsidiary of One Rock Capital Partners of New York, now owns a 58,000 barrels per day refinery, 58 gasoline stations (to be rebranded as Texaco, really?), and four fossil fuel distribution terminals (one on each main island) in Hawaii. That’s right, HAWAII.
Transporting crude to Hawaii for refining is a disaster waiting to happen. Read the first four chapters of my book Under Threat, A Strong Current Trilogy Book 3. Under Threat describes the dramatic effect of a catastrophic oil spill when a supertanker breaks it’s back off the coast of Waikiki after colliding with a longliner fishing vessel.
Before the sale, Chevron had promoted a future utility-scale solar photovoltaic project on Oahu that would produce 1 megawatt, displacing 10,000 barrels of oil per year. Will Island Energy Services continue that project? Any hope for the solar thermal demonstration project that Chevron had considered for the refinery?
Dirty Business Publishing 