Testing, Inspection, Certification – Interview with Oil Industry Veteran Bruce Carlile

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This is our first podcast on the importance of understanding the wide variety of crude oils, and the way that crude oil quality impacts the price.

It’s been a nice long ride. I started with Shell Oil company in retail sales, the service station business, in Florida. Had a couple successful years with tires, batteries, filters, motor oil.

But when I came to Houston with Shell, they put me in as a marine coordinator, handling the scheduling and logistics of the crude supply into the Gulf Coast.

Fascinating time by the way.

I scheduled foreign crude predominately, and feed stocks into their Corpus Christi refinery.

There’s a lot of you in the energy business, and listeners may remember. So I literally stumbled into the inspection and testing business, as it was known, with a top-tier company called Caleb Brett, which morphed into a global company called Intertek.

Set up a number of labs around the country in the interior non-marine space.

Did a little business development work until about a year ago, I elected to start my own small consulting business called Carlile Commodity Consulting. And here we are today.

I also know that you’re very involved with the Crude Oil Quality Association, often abbreviated as COQA.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about this important industry group?

Frankly, it was a glorified cocktail hour at that time. It was a good excuse for marketers, and buyers, and logistics people to get together, but the common theme was crude quality.

There was one gentlemen, I’ll never forget, that worked for a large refinery, that’s probably responsible for starting this. He commented that the crude oil diet versus the petroleum product make the balance in the refinery was really a very considerable loss.

He couldn’t quite understand.

Well, without getting into all the history, a gentlemen came along that had retired from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a gentleman that’s become a personal friend of mine, Harry Giles.

Fabulous gentlemen, and he took the COQA up a notch. Basically, more and more vendors joined the organization.

It’s an ad hoc group of people again, with the common theme, trying to study nuances and issues with crude, and condensate quality.

So it’s a sister organization, the Canucks, or Canadians, as they call it, come down to the U.S. meetings, there’s three a year.

And every other year the Americans go to Calgary for their meeting.

So much so, in recent years, with all the issues around blending of crudes, particularly in the Cushing area, they’ve come up with a somewhat formalized specification for WTI and sweet crude.

I should say that Dennis Sutton, who retired from the Marathon refining organization, took over the COQA in the last two years, and he’s brought it up as you would expect, to another level.

He is also an instructor for the ASTM, The American Standard of Test Methods in the side of the world. And if I can put a quick plug, he sent a nice gift in the holidays, one of his last premier booklets called Crude Oil Analysis: History and Development of Test Methods From 1854 to 2016.

So it’s interesting that to show the importance of testing in the role of the hydrocarbon business.

Can you talk over the training courses that you have planned or developed? And how you are using this content in your consulting practice?

Something I hadn’t felt in a while, that eventually in part, decided to employ my own consulting business.

Any of us that have a long tenure in the business, it’s nice to consult and make some revenue of course, but it’s also nice to help a lot of people, predominately young people, that come along and are being [inaudible 00:07:45] in the industry.

It was one research company in particular, global research company, also based in Austin.

So I had a few assignments, but every time I got an assignment to do research, it was from a different person via the internet, or their portal, their platform.

And handshake to support whatever you’re going to do, is a man’s bond.

So all the investor community, hedge funds, venture capitalists, even stock brokers, would call and engage me in, typically an hour or two hour interview, of the workings of the supply chain, and how the business works, or doesn’t work in some cases.

And the ins and outs of the TIC industry. That’s been my base to launch my consulting business, primarily.

Look for more detail on the downstream, refining, and crude pricing developments, on our website. Watch for Bruce’s upcoming EKTi podcast, and YouTube videos, presenting more detail on the importance of crude oil quality.

Thanks for listening.