Hassan ElBanhawi

About this Book (Preface):-

My mother was cheap. She would never buy anything new.
“Norman,” she would say. “Use what you’ve got. We’re
poor people.”
Actually we weren’t all that poor. But Mom was cheap. She ate
potato skins because she couldn’t allow food to be wasted. She would
walk a mile to save the dime for the trolley. No wonder she had her
health until a month before she passed on. Too bad that my mother
was not in charge of our little planet.
“People,” she would have shouted. “Listen! We live on a poor little
planet. We can’t afford new things. Use what you’ve got. There won’t
be anything left for my grandchildren.”
“Don’t waste food or water or air or hydrocarbons. Listen dummies!
Money doesn’t grow on trees.” She would have commanded.
I’ve spent my career trying to make my mother proud of me; to
show her that I’m not a dummy. That’s why I wrote this book. It’s all
about using what we have to make gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel oil
without wasting hydrocarbons or electricity or combustion air or
boiler feed water. We don’t need new naphtha reformers or catalytic
cracking units or sulfur recovery plants or new delayed cokers. We
certainly don’t need any new refineries. We have all the hardware
we need; if we will just interface with the equipment in the field at a
technical level.
Ladies and gentlemen, get out of your office. Forget about
the meetings, the reports, the emails, and the other bureaucratic
nonsense. “Get out of the house Norman!” Mom would yell. “Get
some fresh air. It’s a nice day outside. The sun is shining.”
Okay Mom. We’re all going. We’re all going out to save our poor
little green planet. We know that time is short. But we’re no dummies.
We know what we need to do and how to do it. We’ll get it in the end.