`Venezuelan oil boiler failure`

Resumption of a prior anecdote. Tom uses it as the setup to the "right answer is worth a lot of money" moral about consulting fees and John Wulff. The technical content: V₂O₅ from vanadium-rich Venezuelan crude forms a low-melting eutectic with the protective Cr₂O₃ scale on stainless steel boilers, destroying the boiler overnight.

So we could track down whatever year that was. He said the oil in Venezuela is high in vanadium, because he had been studying for ten years different trace metals and where they are in different oils in different parts of the world. I didn't even know what vanadium was, probably, but John Wulff had been studying corrosion and oxidation of steels, and it turns out chromium oxide mixes with vanadium ethoxide [pentoxide], I think it is, to form a low-melting eutectic. The protective chromium oxide scale on the stainless steel — when they fired their boilers with this oil containing vanadium — just melted away. The chromium oxide protective scale for high temperatures, and the whole thing just destroyed overnight.