Oil

Attention, Middle East oil barons! Some scientists toiling away in a South Philadelphia warehouse say they can give you fits. Their secret: Turkey guts and old tires. Those unwanted items, as well as plastics and anything else made of carbon and hydrogen, can be turned into oil. The scientists claim that the stuff is generally cleaner than what comes out of the ground, and that it would sharply reduce our dependence on foreign oil producers. Don't believe it? Neither does anyone else - at first.

TECHNOLOGY innovations are invariably hailed for their efficiency and convenience but might also be thought of as "power grabs" benefiting one sector to the detriment of another. For a century, coal miners did one of the most brutal and dangerous jobs of the Industrial Revolution. After a long struggle they became organized to the point of being able to get wages and benefits commensurate with the rigors. But they began to be perceived as having too much power, via the United Mine Workers.

It was, said Edgmont Fire Chief Chip Miller, "like one of those big fountains at Longwood Gardens. " Except that the mist hanging 45 feet in the air was dark and greasy home heating oil, gushing up from a 9-inch-long rupture in a pipeline outside Charles Denardo's brand-new house. A total of 50,000 gallons of oil was sent into yards and nearby waterways in the western Delaware County municipality late Wednesday night, forcing the evacuation of 35 homes, said Sun Pipeline Co. officials.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett said Wednesday he had no plans to comply with a request by an environmental group to return a $3,000 campaign contribution he received May 13 from a part-owner of the deepwater well that is billowing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania, an affiliate of the national League of Conservation Voters, asked last week that Corbett refuse any money from Anadarko Petroleum until the Texas company contributed to the cost of the cleanup.

It was a vague, empty feeling in his gut that brought Tino Garza from the oil fields of Austin to San Antonio yesterday. His wife, Irene, just wanted to see the pope, but for Garza, the reasons went deeper. As he stood listening to Pope John Paul II at the giant outdoor Mass a few miles from San Antonio, the 31-year-old Garza struggled for words, and then was silent when they didn't come. "I feel an emptiness inside," he said finally. "I want to be at peace with myself and God. " There were many sensitive-looking souls among the 300,000 people at yesterday's Mass, but Garza, who works on an oil rig, didn't appear to be one. His tanned face had a rough edge.

If you want to make a statement about the gushing oil in the Gulf of Mexico, should you still wash your hair, put on lipstick, and take aspirin? Should you also wear flip-flops, use scotch tape, and paint the living room? Those items are much more connected to the BP catastrophe than they might seem. Every day a tsunami of petroleum goes into myriad consumer products, including those listed above, and it's all but impossible to avoid them. The petrochemical industry started to saturate our lives in the 1950s and '60s.

Sheldon S. Somerman - the oil-drilling entrepreneur and owner of Philadelphia's bankrupt Yellow Cab Co. - violated federal securities laws when he sold limited partnerships in more than 100 oil deals, according to a complaint filed yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The complaint charges that Somerman misrepresented the deals and failed to register them with the SEC. The partnerships were offered between 1979 and 1985 and raised more than $170 million from approximately 2,300 people.

Calling the Northern Montgomery County Waste Systems Authority's experimental oil-recycling program a failure, the township Board of Commissioners has voted to wash its hands of it. In the pilot program, the first of its kind in the state, the authority provided the township with equipment to collect used engine oil from residents and to burn it to heat the municipal garage. But the supervisors and township manager said the two-year, $66,185 endeavor, sponsored in part through grants from the state Department of Environmental Resources, was inefficient and ill-suited to this small municipality.

Has anyone out there noticed that people have been driving less since Saddam Hussein and the oil barons socked us with a 45-cent hike in gasoline prices? Neither have I. Constipated highways and city streets are still with us, and parking at meters and malls remains a major competitive pastime. Some of my fast-lane friends have put their motorized thoroughbreds on slightly lower- octane diets, but that's the only behavioral change I've seen. More than any other people on earth, we are addicted to oil. We gripe and groan, but we pay what we must to fuel our trips to and from work, play, the store and grandma's house.

Robert H. Campbell, who steered Sunoco Inc. through two major restructurings during the '90s, will retire as chairman and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia oil refiner in June, the company announced yesterday. During his nine-year tenure as CEO, Campbell took Sunoco out of the oil-exploration business and refocused the company as a gasoline retailer and chemical and coal-products manufacturer. "This whole decade has been a matter of changing from an integrated business to focusing on our core businesses - refining, marketing, lubricants and coke," said Campbell, 62, who began his career at Sunoco as a research engineer in 1960.