Ramstad: At the gas station for Minnesota’s gas stations, an emergency came at a bad time

Pine Bend Refinery — that place south of the airport on the way to Rochester that at night looks like a landing base for space aliens — is more critical to your life than you know.

It is the biggest of the two oil refineries in the state, with nearly four times the output of nearby St. Paul Park Refinery. If Pine Bend stops working, Minnesota would also literally stop working.

It supplies most of the gasoline consumed in Minnesota, nearly half the gas consumed in Wisconsin, nearly all the jet fuel at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and huge volumes of other by-products from crude oil, including most of the asphalt in the state. Tanker trucks are constantly pulling into the refinery, filling up, then driving off to gas stations around the region.

It’s also the largest construction site in Minnesota, with hundreds of contract workers there at any given time. Its owner, the Flint Hills Resources subsidiary of Koch Industries, has spent more than $9 billion on it over the past 20 years. That’s the equivalent of building nine Minnesota Vikings stadiums, or nine of that new hospital up in Duluth.

And one night last September, it looked like it might stop refining for the first time in ... well, no one is sure if Pine Bend has ever completely stopped since it started in 1955.

During a nerve-wracking, middle-of-the-night drive to the refinery, plant manager Geoff Glasrud remembers thinking, “Can we even run the refinery at all?”

We’ve all had moments in our careers — or, if you’re young, you will have these moments — when something goes awry or something really big happens. And we are tested. We work harder and smarter. We learn we are capable of more than the everyday.

Gov. Tim Walz and the people around him are experiencing that right now. A few weeks ago, because of a software glitch, thousands of Delta Air Lines employees went through that same test as it took days to restore normal operations.

At Pine Bend last fall, 1,000 Flint Hills employees and 3,000 contractors had that moment, and they will remember it the rest of their lives.

Like every refinery in the nation, Pine Bend occasionally goes through a massive process called a “turnaround” in which portions of the plant are turned off to be cleaned, updated or rebuilt entirely.

“Picture a NASCAR or Formula 1 pit stop with the quality and precision of a hospital operating room. That’s what we’re expected to do,” said Andrew Jakubowski, who leads a department of more than 100 people responsible for turnarounds at Pine Bend.

No refiner announces turnarounds since they always involve a reduction of output, which affects fuel prices. Companies could be accused of market manipulation if they even acknowledge them. Industry analysts, however, watch for signs of those events.

One of the easier ones to spot is when refinery parking lots fill up. The 3,000 temporary workers at Pine Bend last fall came from 65 construction firms, and they worked 24 hours a day for about six weeks. At over 1 million staff-hours, the turnaround was one of the largest in Pine Bend history.

“We 100 percent tap the Minnesota trade halls and, from there, they are pulling travelers [boilermakers and other trade workers] from across the U.S.,” Jakubowski said.

Critically as it turned out, the turnaround included the shutdown of one of Pine Bend’s two main sulfur plants, the units that remove sulfur from gasoline and help meet clean fuel standards. A few days into the turnaround, engineers had completed the shutdown of the sulfur unit and were starting to take it apart.

Late in the night, however, the other major sulfur unit shut down. A pipe inside a large heat exchanger-like component broke apart.

“That really put the refinery in a pinch for how much [gasoline] we can create and send out to people trying to drive their vehicles,” Jakubowski said.

Though there was no danger at the plant, controllers put Pine Bend into emergency mode, and Glasrud and others came rushing in. A million thoughts filled Glasrud’s head on that drive to the plant, he said.

“You could choose to run and pollute. You can’t do that. How do we run and be safe and reliable? It’s not easy with your two biggest sulfur plants down,” he said.

By the time Glasrud arrived, decisions had been made and engineers were already putting back together the sulfur unit they’d started to take apart. The unit that crashed would need its own team to rebuild. The effects would ripple through all the other work.

“The first thing that goes through my head is the team,” Jakubowski said. “They’re looking at it from ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be in this turnaround longer.’ I’m thinking about making sure they’re focused on doing the tasks they’re supposed to do safely. How do I make sure they’re not overcome by the distractions?”

The company informed state officials of an emergency and that it would start drawing on inventory. “Just balls and strikes,” spokesman Jake Reint said.

Flint Hills couldn’t discuss or speculate on market impact externally. It was clear, however, statewide fuel shortages would occur if they couldn’t quickly put back together the sulfur plant they’d taken apart.

They had it rebuilt in four days. Pine Bend was back to producing gasoline and other fuels at the reduced level expected during turnaround, which no one outside the industry noticed.

All other maintenance continued through October, and the sulfur unit that crashed was fixed in 30 days. Then, Flint Hills and its contractors turned back to the sulfur plant that had been taken apart and quickly put back together.

Because it was Unit 26, the company set a goal of taking it apart again and updating it in 26 days. It took 27.

“26 in 26 was our rally cry, but it was one of our fastest sulfur plant turnarounds ever,” Jakubowski said.

The Flint Hills employees and those thousands of contractors tore up plans, wrote new ones, reshaped teams and changed their personal schedules when the turnaround stretched on because of the emergency. When everything finished, the contractors moved on to other work knowing that, under extreme stress, they kept a vital cog in the Minnesota economy running.

None of us driving our cars and trucks and getting on airplanes knew. If they failed, we would have.