Thursday, July 23, 2009

I was in one of the office towers in the Financial District this morning to attend a deposition (a lawyer buddy of mine needed to fill out his team so that the other side didn’t have more people in the room than he did). Anyway, the building had an amazing view of the harbor, and smack in the middle of the harbor is this massive ship wallowing in the water with at least three tugboats that I could count and few Coast Guard boats as well. I kept on having my eye wander out to this monstrosity in the harbor while the two primaries argued about settlement terms (yawn).

I called up one of my old EPA contacts (the same one with the information on all the submarine dealings in New London last week) to ask about this thing. The Pilin Leon, named after a Venezuelan beauty queen, is an Ultra-Large Crude Carrier – an industry term for honking-huge oil tankers.  She’s been dispatched by Citgo on the direct orders of Hugo Chavez to help relieve any energy crisis here in Boston and New England.  Since we don’t have much of our own refining capacity, she’s apparently been filled with fuel oil, gasoline, and jet fuel in her various tanks instead of the usual crude.

Boston also doesn’t really have the facilities for off-loading all that oil, so it sounds like Pilin Leon will be sitting in the middle of the harbor with some temporary pipelines running out to her for the duration.  I suppose that is Mr. Chavez’s point in sending the ship here.  It is as blatant and public an insult to the Bushies as he can fashion.

International politics aside, I’ll take whatever help we can get.  There are plenty of things that we don’t produce here in New England and trade with the ‘mainland’ US is pretty sparse right now.