Driving back from the San Francisco Bay Area, we couldn’t help but notice a particularly illustrative landscape off the side of I-80. Priscilla snapped a photo, resulting in all sorts of interesting reflections.
Not exactly your typical California scene, we were immediately struck by the solar panels in the foreground juxtaposed with the large storage tanks on the horizon. It all seemed to be a microcosm of the current energy transition landscape.
And we didn’t even know the half of it at the time. It turns out we were looking at the first major oil refinery to be established in the Bay Area. Or at least the location of that refinery. The Phillips 66 San Francisco Refinery was originally built on 16 acres in 1896, processing about 1600 barrels of crude oil a day. It would go on to encompass 1100 acres and process 120,000 barrels per day.
But the energy landscape has changed dramatically over the last couple decades. At this time, the facility processes no crude oil at all. Renamed the Phillips 66 Renewable Energy Complex, it is currently processing about 50,000 barrels per day of renewable fuels.
Going further, the facility recently added 30 megawatts of solar power, reducing the grid-based energy needed to run the complex by 50%. And thus providing another way of looking at how the landscape has changed:
The picture we took displays a few other energy-related aspects. The airplane contrails visible in the sky above, for instance, are another part of the landscape. And of course the photo was snapped during a 600-mile road trip that required no gasoline whatsoever .
Finally, perhaps a bit harder to notice, is the suggestion in the lower left: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”