Nicola Mathys started at Z Energy four weeks before the Strait of Hormuz closed.
She came into a graduate role from Waikato University, where she studied accounting and supply chain management. It wasn’t a topic that drew a lot of attention at parties – until recently.
At Z Energy’s Seaview operation, across the harbour from Wellington city, Mathys works with the team in charge of getting fuel off the ship and into storage. To most Kiwi, this is an invisible process. Mathys says it’s more complicated than you might think.
Freshly out of university and working at the Seaview terminal as part of Z’s Graduate Programme, Mathys had four weeks of normalcy before fuel supply became front-page news. Since then, she says, the learning curve has been steep – but rewarding.
Most people only interact with the fuel system at the pump, what Mathys calls “the end product”. Before it even gets on the road, it has to get off the ship, and for most ships travelling to New Zealand, the Seaview plant is their first port of call.
Since 1929, the terminal has sat in Seaview’s industrial area, east of Petone. Most people only pass by on the way to Eastbourne.
The office itself is a small building on a much larger fuel storage campus, where several cylindrical tanks protrude from an asphalt depression. Linked by a network of pipes and valves, they stand like swollen, metal cacti in an industrial desert.
Steve Flanagan has been tending to such operations for 20 years. “Too long,” he says, but he loves the work.
Flanagan is the operations manager for Z Energy terminals throughout the South Island. In Seaview, Flanagan offers to act as Newsroom’s tour guide – a job that’s not always in high demand at a fuel import terminal.
Standing atop one of the tanks, Flanagan explains why it’s important to keep things in good shape. A few other abandoned tanks, languishing on other depots, host a patina of rust and algae, but the Z tanks are spotless.
Flanagan says you don’t want passers-by to think their fuel system is anything less than top-notch. “It’s important to keep up your reputation as a good member of the community,” he says.
He bounces on the top of the tank, and the metal roof flexes under his weight. “Does that freak you out?” he asks. The roofs don’t actually rest on the metal struts beneath them; they’re welded to the rim of the tank and otherwise stand as a free structure.
It’s a safety feature, in case of a fire. If pressure built up inside the tank, the roof would pop off rather than let the pressure build. Inside the tank are more safety features to prevent this from ever being a possibility, including a blanket of aluminum hanging about 10 centimetres above the fuel.
A floating blanket helps limit evaporation and suppress fire risk by reducing the oxygen in the space above the fuel.
The facility here can store about 22 million litres of fuel, if every tank was full, and Flanagan is proud of the station’s track record. “We’ve operated for nearly 100 years without major incident, which tells us what we’re doing is working,” he says. “But there’s always an opportunity to learn from the past.”
Flanagan says regulation is where people fall into traps: “When they think ‘Oh, we need to cut costs’. And what’s the quickest and easiest way to cut costs? Cut maintenance spend.”
When Flanagan points out a safety feature like the ventilation ducts, shutoff valves and vapour detectors, there’s one name that keeps coming up: Buncefield. In this industry, it’s shorthand for disaster.
At 6am on December 11, 2005, London residents were jolted awake by a massive explosion at the nearby Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal. At the time, it was the largest in peacetime UK history.
The night before, operators at Buncefield had been filling a tank with a known faulty gauge. When the gauge froze, the alarm meant to warn the tank was overfilled failed too.
Because the gauge was faulty, the alarm that was meant to sound when the max fill line was passed didn’t go off. So, at 3am, when flammable vapours began spilling out of the tank, it was up to eyewitnesses to spot the danger.
By the time the first fire alarms sounded, it was too late, and the campus was awash with gasses. The spark that ignited the explosion and subsequent fire came, of all places, from the fire suppression systems designed to stop the problem in the first place.
The explosion was large enough to register as a small earthquake. The UK’s fifth-largest fuel depot was flattened, 40 people were injured, and a nationwide fuel crisis followed.
Flanagan says a “Swiss cheese” situation led to the explosion and fire. By that, he means a series of coincidences had to line up perfectly to keep on track to disaster – like lining up all the holes in a stack of Swiss cheese slices. Miraculously, nobody died.
It was a watershed moment for the fuel industry. Its findings and recommendations were adopted globally, and Flanagan can point to safety measures across the Z terminal designed to stop those holes lining up again.
On his tour around the terminal facility, Flanagan highlights dozens of sensors designed to prevent an accident. Some of these are vapour detectors, which sniff for fuel vapours like the ones which leaked from the Buncefield tanks. There are drains, vents and valves all over the facility.
But the risks facing the Seaview operation are more than just human error. Flanagan says the most unique factor for this facility is the wind; Wellington is the windiest city in the world, and the tanks have to be strong enough to withstand the weather.
Unlike Buncefield, or most other facilities worldwide, Seaview is also exposed to seismic risk, including the possibility of liquefaction and tsunami in the event of a major earthquake. In this case, there is only so much Z can control.
The flat, coastal land which made this site ideal for an import terminal also puts it at risk: an earthquake on the Wellington fault or the Hikurangi subduction zone would likely trigger a tsunami in the harbour. The flat, coastal land which made this site ideal for an import terminal also puts it at risk.
After the Kaikōura earthquake, attention turned to the terminal’s pipeline wharf – a 1 km long pipeline which stretches out along Point Howard, and a critical link between tanker and storage. Although it appeared undamaged, underlying movement in the seabed had caused subtle but significant deformation.
“It exposed a weak point in the system,” Flanagan says. The response has been the Seaview resilience project – designed to strengthen the infrastructure, including moving key sections of the pipeline underground to improve resilience.
With that work now largely completed, the final stages are underway, including reconnecting the pipeline at the wharf head and on the shore side.
The recent global disruption has underscored the importance of such upgrades, which don’t usually attract public attention.
When a ship arrives here, which happens about every two weeks, it hooks up the nozzle and starts discharging at a rate of 900,000 litres an hour (for comparison, at a service station pump, the nozzle dispenses about 40-50 litres a minute).
Despite the scale of the operation, it takes just five people to unload a ship. At each stage, from ship to storage to distribution, the fuel is sampled and tested to ensure it meets specification for the end consumer – a bit like a blood bank testing for blood type.
From the ship, to the tanks, to the trucks, the operation is tightly controlled and monitored. Flanagan says his job has attracted a lot more interest from friends and family in the wake of the fuel crisis, but on the ground, it’s business as usual.
“There’s been a lot more interest in what we do,” Flanagan says. “But on the ground, the job is the same.”
That job remains straightforward in principle: receive fuel, store it safely, and ensure it reaches customers. “Fuel in, fuel out,” he says. “Safe and reliable operations.”
