Refinery Engineering Blog | PSM Compliance Insights

OSHA Mechanical Integrity Enforcement Tightening

July 11, 2026

OSHA Mechanical Integrity Enforcement Shift + Financial Cost Quantification OSHA’s mechanical integrity enforcement just tightened. 40% of all Process Safety Management (PSM) violations in 2026 audits are mechanical integrity (MI) related—overage inspections, missing thickness-measurement records, undocumented QA on pressure vessels. With the 2026 violation cap at $9,259 per violation, a single refinery audit can stack […]

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Domain Expertise in Refinery CAD Design (AI Products)

July 11, 2026

Domain Expertise Moat in AI-Native Product Design (Refinery CAD Focus) Most CAD tools are built by people who’ve never designed a refinery. You can tell the moment you open them. A CAD system built by a graphics engineer solves “how do I render millions of points in real time?” That’s a hard problem. But it’s

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Distillate Margin Window & Turnaround Economics

July 11, 2026

Distillate Margin Window + Turnaround Economics Diesel margins just hit their July peak. $26–35/bbl is not typical summer noise. We’re running 90%+ Gulf Coast refinery utilization on distillate strength while inventories sit historically low. Export demand to South America East Coast is keeping pressure on the system. This is the window that changes how you

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The Distillate Squeeze: Refinery Closures and the Coming Diesel Shortage

June 21, 2026

The U.S. removed 1.2 million bpd of refining capacity in 15 months. Why diesel and jet fuel are tightening into a structural shortage — and what it means.

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TRISO: The Fuel That Lets a Reactor Sit Next to a Data Center

June 19, 2026

TRISO coated-particle fuel gives every grain of uranium its own ceramic pressure vessel — the physics that lets a reactor sit beside the load it powers.

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The Modular Refinery Market Hit $2.4 Billion. Nigeria Has 25 Licensed Projects. The U.S. Has Almost None.

June 19, 2026

The modular refinery market hit $2.4B. Nigeria has 25 licensed projects. The U.S. has closed 1.1M BPD of capacity since 2020 and built almost no modular replacements. The gap is a capital structure problem.

The Modular Refinery Market Hit $2.4 Billion. Nigeria Has 25 Licensed Projects. The U.S. Has Almost None. Read More »

The US Naval Blockade Changed the Headline. The Capacity Math Changed the Market.

June 19, 2026

US refining capacity has fallen by 1 million BPD in 12 months while the Strait of Hormuz is under naval blockade. The oil price is noise. The capacity math is the signal.

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The One Word DOE Just Added to Title XVII That Changes the Math for U.S. Refining

June 19, 2026

DOE’s interim final rule on the Energy Dominance Financing Program added one word to Title XVII — refining. Why that re-prices every modular refinery feasibility model in the U.S.

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Eighteen Months to Eight Weeks: AI Digital Twins Are Now Nuclear’s Throughput Play

June 19, 2026

TerraPower’s NVIDIA-powered digital twin cuts site design from 18 months to 8 weeks — and DOE wants deployment schedules halved. The bottleneck is throughput.

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