Strange glow in New Jersey? Refinery gas!

Residents of Union County, New Jersey were apparently concerned yesterday morning when they noticed the sky was lit up with a strange glow. According to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, it turned out the glow was caused by the ConocoPhillips oil refinery in Linden, New Jersey "releasing excess gas." Sounds healthy! I don't know the exact ingredients of said gas, but one definition of refinery gas says the "common components include butanes, butylenes, methane, ethane, and ethylene. Some products found in refinery gas are subject to controls as a result of programs which are designed to address climate change." "N.J. residents baffled over strange glow in sky"

• [Chauncey Scott]

  Live in Union Co. near Linden, didn’t notice anything strange.  Will be on the lookout for a strange glow in the future.

• [bcsizemo]

  At least the factory wasn’t on fire:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us/07chemcnd.html?_r=1

  On the plus side my wife and I were out of town on vacation…  The irony here, we heard about all this through a nice middle aged couple dressed in leather bike gear (end of bike week in Myrtle Beach, SC) while having dinner at a Japanese steakhouse.  At first I though they were just bullshitting us, but then the server hears them talking about it and says it’s true.  I was half expecting to have someone with a camera pop out.

• [Corey Williams]

  “Releasing excess gas” is slightly misleading. From my experience, I am pretty sure the excess gas was flared rather than released as a giant roving cloud of gas. The glow was probably caused by the reflection of the flare on low clouds.
  Not an uncommon occurrence in beautiful SE Texas. Doesn’t even make the news.

  • [billstewart]

     Yup.  The reason there’s a glow in the sky is that they’re burning the stuff – as they almost always are in some of the refineries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

    A few years back I was living in Alameda County, California.  My wife woke me up around 5:00 one morning in a panic because of the bright purple-green glow in the sky, and asked which direction Livermore was.   (Different direction, fortunately, so it wasn’t the nuke labs exploding 10 miles away, it was an electric substation that had caught on fire about 10 miles north of us, but it was a very wrong color, almost octarine.)

  • [Feargus Stewart]

    Exactly what I was going to say.

    Flares are REALLY common.  It’s almost certain that was what was seen.  So, instead of straight petro-carbons, you get the byproducts.  Slightly safer.

    The flare is like having a filter on a cigarette.  it helps a little, but just a little.

  • [MrBillWest]

    I second that opinion. Releasing refinery gas with out flaring is an explosion hazard. A flare is used to burn off the gas. Weather reports at Newark Airport just north of the refinery state that it was overcast all morning. So, flaring could make things glow.

• [Listener43]

  Bah. Why do they always blame gas, whether excess or swamp? We all know it’s something more “interesting” than that.

• [Tom]

  Modern industry enhancing Mother Nature’s beauty for the lucky residents of New Jersey!

  (submitting my resume to a Big Oil PR firm..)

• [Crockett]

  The gas was *very* likely  not pumped out into the atmosphere to form a giant cloud.  Regardless of the EPA requirements, which are fairly stringent about flaring events and gas releases (particularly from a NOx and SOx perspective),  “refinery gas” (which is really a composite stream of various byproduct streams throughout the plant/refinery) has a relatively high BTU content, which makes it prime fuel gas feed for things like furnaces, boilers, gas turbines, and the like.  As such, there is a pretty serious economic penalty for venting this gas, as it has to be replaced with purchased gas (typically, natural gas or something similar).

  Also note that there are very serious and well established design criteria for flare system sizing, allowable by-products,  stack height for sufficient combustion by-product dissipation, and allowable thermal exposure.  Basically, there’s a lot of science and engineering that goes into that giant match stick you see on the horizon.

  • [EvilTerran]

    … why isn’t all that science and engineering being used to put it to good use somehow, if it’s “prime fuel gas feed”? Seems awfully wasteful to just burn it in huge quantities if it’s such a good fuel. Can’t be good for the atmosphere, either.

    • [Purplecat]

       Most of the time, it’s used as fuel, or as a feed for other processes. It’ll only be flared off if there’s a build-up of excess refinery gas, that can’t be used.  . 

  • [sean]

     Well thank YOU, Mr. Crockett, for sucking all the fun out of this story. There’s no chance of enjoying and sharing crazy theories, rampant hysteria gripping the populace, or mutant gas-monsters threatening New Jersey Civilization NOW. What a party pooper.

• [sean]

  We here in new Jersey always enjoyed our skies with a little extra glow to them. 

• [bkad]

  Probably this is not actually that newsworthy or worrisome, but it does make me chuckle. I moved to New Jersey from upstate ny a few years ago, and while I’ve seen much to inform me the public perception of NJ is incorrect, every now and then I’m reminded that perception didn’t come from a vacuum.

• [NoneofYourPenguins]

  Back, late in 1991, I was standing gangway watch on a car carrier ship docked at Long Beach, CA.  Sometime around 4:00 AM, the sky lights up with this geyser of flame from one of the local refineries.  The flame looked like must have been several hundred feet in height from the distance I was at.  It looked like it was reaching right into the clouds.  Freaky bad.

• [bwcbwc]

  Back when I was a kid in Joisey, before the EPA even existed, the sky was almost always orange at night around the refineries. Glad to see it’s now become such a novelty that people don’t know what it is.

• [juepucta]

  That’s John Galt’s orange cloud of liberty – choke on that you NJ collectivists, you!