[sammyg2]

I work for an independent refiner in Wilmington but I've worked in 11 different refineries over the past 3 decades including Chevron El Segundo. I was a reliability consultant for a while and bounced around quite a bit.

Regarding the age of the infrastructure, some of it was built in world war II. Most of it has been replaced over the years many times.
Every refiner and pipeline operator has a corrosion monitoring plan. It's the law, you can't operate without it.
The plan typically details every place that will be measured and monitored, how often it will be measured, by whom, and what corrosion allowance is acceptable. If the pipe gets thinner than is acceptable it must be taken out of service immediately. We all do that. Where I work we have an army of inspectors crawling all over the hundreds of miles of piping checking the thickness with ultrasound, radar, and x-ray. They do it constantly.
Why did that refinery lose a line? Was it corrosion? What is defective? Did it freeze? did some brain-dead contractor run into it?
You suggest it failed because it was old. I'd be interested in knowing more about that. Pipes in certain services last a hundred years. Others have to be replaced every 5 years. it depends on the severity of the conditions the pipe sees.

I am curious why you suggest that "big oil" didn't spend more on infrastructure. Please elaborate. Just exactly how much did they actually spend on infrastructure in the past 12 months and how much did you think they should have spent? Since you came to the conclusion you must have some numbers to back that up besides just a hunch, right?

The refinery I work at is relatively small and is owned by a smaller company, but they have dedicated $1.1 BILLION in infrastructure and equipment improvements over the next 5 years for just this one refinery. These are not necessarily improvements to boost production either. Most of them are just to make the place more reliable and safer and more environmentally compliant.

While we're on the subject of "big oil", lets elaborate on those huge profits. We're talking 40%, 30%, 40% net profits, right?
Nope. Not even close.
Try 11% for the pacesetter in the group.
A significant portion of their gross earnings did go to infrastructure, maintenance, and exploration.
The rest belongs to the owners of the company. The shareholders. People with 401Ks and retirement savings plans. That is who owns the big bad oil companies.
People who scrimp and save and manage to stash away a few bucks after the bills are paid. They take that pitifully small amount that they worked so hard to get and they invest it so they won't have to eat dog food when they get old. They would like to get decent return on their investment. 10% historically is what everyone talks about, right?
OK, they are trying to get a 10% return on their investment. For 8 quarters out of the last 400, they manage to get closer to 12% and that bothers some people. They ask why the company didn't spend that money. They seem to suggest that a company that makes 11.8% net profit for it's shareholders (owners) is somehow a bad thing. I don't get that. They are being manipulated by the sensationalistic stories the media puts out hoping to get a rise from people who are too ignorant to know better. They say things like "XOM reports record profits" and "oil company makes biggest profit ever".
They don't say things like "oil company profits look huge but aren't that big compared to sales" or "oil company record profits are still small compared to many other industries".
If they did that it wouldn't sell papers or advertising.

Lets take a closer look to see who owns exxonmobil:

% of Shares Held by All Insider and 5% Owners: ZERO (it's not a few fat cats. It's a whole bunch of very small investors like you and me).

% of Shares Held by Institutional & Mutual Fund Owners: 51%
This is who owns most of exxonmobil:

VANGUARD 500 INDEX FUND
SPDR TRUST SERIES 1
VANGUARD TOTAL STOCK MARKET INDEX FUND
VANGUARD INSTITUTIONAL INDEX FUND-INSTITUTIONAL INDEX
COLLEGE RETIREMENT EQUITIES FUND-STOCK ACCOUNT
FIDELITY EQUITY-INCOME FUND
SELECT SECTOR SPDR FUND-ENERGY SELECT
WASHINGTON MUTUAL INVESTORS FUND
SPARTAN U.S. EQUITY INDEX FUND
VANGUARD SPECIALIZED-ENERGY FUND

Sounds pretty evil to me, until I look closer and figure out that I probably have money invested in a couple of those funds and I'm not getting rich off of them. Why not? At a historical average return of 4% from XOM, I should be as rich as Bill Gates, right?
Nope, Microsoft usually pulls in around 25% net profit.

That makes exxonmobil's one time record 11.85% profit seem kind of puny, doesn't it?
What about the rest of the oil companies who typically earn a small fraction of that?