Allocation rules could hurt petrochemicals The U.S. petrochemical industry could suffer serious feedstock shortages under present government allocation rules for oil and natural gas, the General Accounting Office declares. A GAO report, "Emergency Allocation Rules Fail to Recognize Needs of Petrochemical Industry," says the situation exists, because in the event of a shortage petroleum and natural gas would be allocated solely on the basis of its use as a fuel and not on its use as feedstock. The result would be a disproportionately harsh impact on the petrochemical industry. According to GAO, the problem of getting sufficient feedstock to the industry is made worse on two counts: There is no standardized definition of the petrochemical industry, and current data for the industry are often old and scattered throughout several federal agencies. The report emphasizes that these problems must be cleared up before the allocation system can be revised. A strong case is made for a better allocation to petrochemical companies. The report says that declining U.S. petroleum production and President Carter's decision to limit petroleum imports to 8.5 million bbl per day will lead to supply shortages throughout the 1990's. The use of crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids as feedstocks consumes a very small percentage of the total of these materials—only about 7%. In fact, the report states that the petrochemical industry could be allocated 100% of its needs with little effect on other parts of the economy. To provide adequate allocations, a thorough understanding of feedstock materials inventories and the flow of these materials in the industry is needed. However, GAO cautions, collection of inventory data could prevent the buildup of private stocks if these stocks are seen as becoming the basis for a future allocation scheme. The report lists seven agencies that collect data on the petrochemical industry. The information is not gathered together and it cannot be used to assess accurately fuel or feedstock requirements. Most of the current information, GAO claims, is duplicative, incomplete, unreliable, or extremely out of date. The GAO report has been reviewed by the Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the International Trade Commission. All agree with its basic findings and with
the need for a better allocation process for feedstocks. They also indicate that much of the work suggested by GAO is under way already. Commerce and DOE are meeting to try to get a handle on the definition of petrochemicals, and ITC comments that some new census forms, MA-451 and MA-452, will provide much of the data needed to set up the allocation program. D
Pioneer orbiter maps Venus surface details The rolling plains of Venus feature a shield volcano larger than Hawaii and two rugged highland regions as large as continents, say scientists who have analyzed radar mapping data from the National Aeronautics & Space Administration's Pioneer Venus orbiter. The northernmost highland, tentatively named Ishtar Terra after the Babylonian goddess of love and war, is roughly the size of Australia and on the average is 1000 feet higher than the Tibetan plateau. The equatorial highland, named Aphrodite Terra after the Greek goddess of love and beauty, is half the size of Africa and is fractured by an immense system of rift valleys. Notably missing, however, are the spreading centers and subduction zones so central to the process of plate tectonics and continental drift on Earth. Venus is a one-plate planet, the geologists say. In fact, it seems to consist of a single continent. These findings are based on radar
altimetry data from the Pioneer Venus orbiter, which has circled the cloud-wrapped planet since Dec. 4, 1978. The final major gap in the data was filled on May 18; last week NASA released topographic maps of the surface of the planet and artists' conceptions of its major features. The coverage includes 83% of the planet, missing only the regions near the poles. "We're now in the first, descriptive phase of analysis," says Patrick Cassen of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., although geologists already are attempting to extrapolate from Pioneer Venus' surface information to learn what is going on in the interior. William Kaula of the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, believes that the chemical evolution of Venus' crust has been strongly influenced by that planet's 900° F surface temperature. Venus is about the same size and has much the same composition as Earth, he says. Presumably it also has a hot interior. But because Venus' surface starts out so much hotter, its subsurface rocks should soften and become plastic at a much shallower level than do Earth's—say, 20 to 30 km vs. 100 km. In geophysical language, Venus should have a thinner lithosphère. At the same time, Kaula says, a higher overall temperature in the lithosphère should make it easier for lithospheric basalt to fractionate, with the lighter, silica-rich granitic materials rising to the surface. Therefore, Kaula believes that the chemically differentiated part of
Artist's conception of Venus' surface, shown without its cloud cover, is based on topography measurements made by the Pioneer orbiter spacecraft June 2, 1980 C&EN
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