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Quality Control
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| Lab technician Brian Warmen arranges fuel samples for testing at AmSpec's Galena Park facility, where he said anywhere from 70 to 80 samples from across the nation are analyzed each day. |
This Houston-based lab is answered to by some of the biggest names in oil and fuel.
JOSH HARDWICK
On the outside AmSpec looks like just another of the many obscure industrial businesses that line Federal Road in Galena Park. However, the simple red-and-white painted steel building harbors something much more than just another machine shop or trucking company.
Stepping inside the building and beyond the small office, however, one might think they had walked into a laboratory pulled straight from a Hollywood sci-fi movie set.
However the rows of machinery, beakers, test tubes and computers seen here are not for show, for it is here in our own backyard that some of the biggest - and smallest - names in the petrochemical industry come to get the facts about their products.
AmSpec is a nationwide inspector of both petroleum-based oils and chemicals. Founded in 1987 by Ed Levy, the company began as a three-man operation based out of Linden, New Jersey.
Today the company has grown to over 100 employees operating laboratories near harbors along the Gulf and East coasts, including right here at the Port of Houston.
“AmSpec has acquired customers along the Gulf coast that have really prospered over the years, which over the years has opened the doors to expand our business,” said Ruben Hernandez, vice president of AmSpec’s Texas Gulf coast operations. “We have worked with everyone from Exxon, Shell and BP to Coke, and they all expect us to tell them the quality of their products.”
The company offers testing for such common petroleum products as gasoline, diesel, kerosene and jet fuel, in addition to analysis of alternative fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel.
Neil Boone, vice president of special projects, said that AmSpec acts as both an independent laboratory -testing product samples as they are being bought and sold between companies – and as an advisor that reports back to their clients on any problems or deficiencies in their product.
“If company A wants to buy what company B has then we take a sample, test it and give both companies the results,” Boone said. “Based on those results, they decide what they are going to pay for that product.”
Depending on the type of fuel, testing can be as simple as finding out the product’s octane rating (or in the case of diesel, its cetane rating) or as complex as rating phosphorous and sulfur content, benzene ratings, flash points and oxidation stability.
And that’s just for testing gasoline.
Being a nationally-operating tester of fuel products has also given AmSpec a front-row seat to witness the developing green energy industry.
Boone said that the number of samples of ethanol, biodiesel and other “green” fuels passing through the company’s hands have increased substantially over the past decade.
It is progress, he says, that when combined with a conscious reduction in U.S. energy consumption will prove critical in helping to bring down the price of oil – perhaps drastically.
“We have to get the cost of a barrel of oil back down between $60 and $80, or else it’s going to hurt every industry out there,” he said. “But it will take all of us cooperating to get it there. Windmills, natural gas, biogas, biodiesel, and ethanol – all of those little pieces put together are going to help us.”
Hernandez added that regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are keeping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil off the market.
One such regulation, he explained, stipulates that portside storage tanks cannot be drained below a certain level to prevent a buildup of gaseous vapors that could leak from the tanks and into the atmosphere.
“These tanks are always filled with gas, but whereas before they could be taken down to at least 6 or 7 thousand barrels, now they have to leave 27,000 barrels in there,” Hernandez said. “That’s 27,000 barrels that stay in the tank instead of going to market – and that’s just one tank.”
Despite the obstacles, however, Hernandez warns that we shouldn’t fret just yet. He recalled the time he spent living in Peru in the months before Alberto Fujimori became president, and how the once nationally-regulated fuel price of seven cents per gallon jumped to over $3.50 overnight.
He said the shock to the Peruvian economy was so great that for a month the city of Lima was, “like a ghost-town.”
Even from this incident, however, the people recovered and business resumed. Such a recovery bodes well for our current predicament, Hernandez thinks.
“We’ve had the lowest fuel prices of any country in the world. People in South America pay higher gas prices than we do and don’t make anywhere near the minimum wage of a U.S. citizen,” he said.
“Eventually we’ll come out of this and our economy will prosper.”
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