"Pretty unacceptable" is how I'd describe the spill. 8800 bbls is 3.4% of what was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident[1]. This is in addition to the 1.07m liters in 2017, which the article also mentions.[2] So the pipeline has already spilled equivalent to about 6.5% of one of the worst human-caused ecological disasters ever.
Is there something about the pipeline, the maintenance crews, safety practices, government oversight and corporate policies, that makes North Dakota a special place where all of the problems will occur?
In terms of volume spilled, the Deepwater Horizon spill was much larger than the Exxon Valdez: 4.9m bbls (579,000 metric tons) vs 290,000 bbls (31,000 metric tons).
The percentage is rather meaningless without a clue as to how much the daily transfer is and the time-frame is completely arbitrary. You have easily picked 100% of 21.6 minutes of transfer, by the week or by the decade.
Leaks used to be reported in barrels, but the numbers aren't nearly as dramatic. I assume the media learned that headlines with 'millions of litres' get far more clicks.
Energy delivery over wires, if buried underground, mitigates this issue. Deprecating transportation dependency on oil safeguards against these environmentally devastating spills.
Oil is used for a lot more than transportation, even if it was all switched over to electric.
The only other viable oil transfer over land is rail or trucking, both of which cost much more, pollute more, and have even higher risks of spills and accidents.
You don’t need to transport crude oil over these distances. A refinery near the source would significantly reduce the risks associated with these transports.
Refineries are complex, expensive and considered national energy assets. Oil production happens all over the place and is fed from smaller regions into main trunk lines that lead to major refineries.
Also many pipelines do carry refined products, like all the jet fuel that goes to airports and diesel fuel for trucking.
For destroying infrastructure, interfering with its construction, the use of fire in doing so, illegal possession of a firearm by a felon... It wasn’t all speech and trespassing.
They're in prison for defending their ancestral land and burial grounds from foreign colonist occupiers, which not only have taken it over but are now destroying it and its waterways with leaky oil pipelines.
Usually age and inadequate maintenance, but I expect TC is within regulatory requirements. Usually Enbridge is making headlines with pipeline leaks.
There are very reliable testing methods that require shutting down the pipeline, and I understand there are some technologies available too, but both are 'too expensive'.
The position of petroleum producers is that the existing regulations are already too strict and burdensome to justify the capital cost and risk of building new pipelines. They aren't doing themselves any favors and may need to get used to lower margin business.
To me, the growing demand for petrol, the age of the existing pipelines, the relaxed regulation, low popularity of new pipelines, and the relatively low margins in the current market are a recipe for disaster. Populism is only making it worse (drill baby drill vs shut down all the pipelines), such stupidity makes my head hurt.
For one: not transport oil. Use oil (and other fossil fuels) if and only if there is no way to use something else.
Or: change the system that builds these pipelines so the incentives of the entity/entities building and maintaining it have "safety of environment" as a clear and unambiguous incentive.
> have "safety of environment" as a clear and unambiguous incentive
That's non-trivial to do in practice.
It's already incentivized, via inspections and fines. What you're presumably talking about is prioritizing it above other incentives.
Which gets into how much risk is acceptable and how much risk mitigation is reasonable to pay for. Hint: never enough that risk approaches zero.
I absolutely think fines (and especially inspections, or likelihood of catching violations) should be increased, but the world economy is still transitioning off oil.
It's easy to forget that we can absolutely put such a premium on risk that energy prices spike, that suppresses downstream consumers and economic activity, that causes worse outcomes.
IMHO, accelerating the shift to clean renewables, while simultaneously continuing to raise fines and regulation on oil pipelines as the actual energy mix shifts is the optimal choice.
> It's easy to forget that we can absolutely put such a premium on risk that energy prices spike, that suppresses downstream consumers and economic activity, that causes worse outcomes.
This kind of undermines the validity of your point, as it carries an assumption of wanting to churn through as many natural resources as possible.
If you care about environmental sustainability, every time you hear "reduced economic activity" you should think "sounds great!". We've figured out how to produce so much stuff that our homes are full and we throw things away every several years to get new ones.
Economic priests want to keep the machine running full tilt under a misguided idea that sustainability can somehow be priced in. But compare the general time to fix (or simply maintain!) something at your general hourly rate to the cost of buying a shiny new one. Thinking that this harsh dynamic can be abstracted and then recouped somewhere else is simply more unsustainable bubble thinking.
It's a straw man to cast all concerns about economy sustainability as "exploit natural resources as quickly as we can."
There are serious, life-threatening concerns about reorienting the world to a lower-growth, lower-carbon model.
And to substitute fervor for fact is just as much of a fallacy as the global free trade crowd committed, before recently admitting that maybe they should have thought harder about the dislocating side effects and funding strategic workforce reskilling programs.
We don't get to a brighter future by ignoring the hard questions and consequences of proposed paths.
Sure, any sort of abrupt change has serious (possibly life threatening) concerns. But there is a difference in arguing for caution, and perpetuating the same assumptions that have lead to the current state of affairs. Drawing attention to one of those assumptions rather than letting it continue in the background does not make for a straw man.
"Economic activity" directly translates into "use natural resources". The overwhelming fallacy seems to be this idea that sustainability will somehow eventually, not today, but some day soon, be priced into the economy such that we can have large sums sloshing back and forth but the externalities will be fully captured. This seems like an economically convenient myth, analogous to the free trade crowd's handwaving about comparative advantage.
Sorry I did not see how to succinctly express the overall arc of what I said with less "fervor". If two people are having a casual conversation about say baseball, but you think it is harmful and destructive, it's impossible to express without sounding like a looney. (I used baseball because I think it's innocuous. Whereas any real example would inherently be polarizing).
It seemed like you were characterizing alternative approaches in a way in which you could more easily refute their concerns.
I'd be pleased as punch if we moved to a post-resource economy, but I also think it's going to be the hardest thing we've ever attempted (in an international sense).
The Paris climate agreements are a minor skirmish on the scale of what needs to be done.
Because, ultimately, we're talking about some wealthy countries having less (compared to business as usual) in order to strike agreement with poorer countries not to run their growth at full tilt.
So when we say things like "stricter environmental regulations," we're really saying "stricter environmental regulations worldwide." Otherwise we're just offloading pollution to the current poorest country with a labor force.
And it's going to take some serious financial and developmental persuasion (and ugly enforcement) to get someone to not do something that would make them better off.
... It is heartening to see the debate being reframed in justice terms. Because that seems to have a better chance of winning hearts and minds to the extent necessary.
> It's already incentivized, via inspections and fines.
Well, the inspections aren't happening - since major leaks are happening. And the fines are very small, otherwise a bunch of these companies would have gone under.
More importantly - no criminal charges against the management of these companies and the engineers who signed off on the thing.
To your latter point, industries with this sort of externalized risk should be required to issue real stock to stakeholders (Such as the neighbors of the pipeline, the downstream water users, upstream water users as well, groundwater users, etc)
They are already unwillling investors in the pipeline. They invest with the cost of their health and safety at a cut-rate of $0 to the operator of these critical systems.
"I got mine!" is a terrible foundation on which to build a society.
As another commenter, we shouldn’t need to run pipes. Oil is too precious for precarious forms of transportation. It shouldn’t be burned. I’m thinking it’s better uses don’t need it to be pumped like this.
Honestly, it's really tiresome dealing with fanatics who think we can meaningfully eliminate oil usage in the near future. It's nothing more than the delusional fantasy of extreme hypocrites.
In a century I could imagine a 50-80% decrease in usage in the US, but by that time Africa and Asia will have doubled in population. Any efficiency gains are totally lost with an increase in population. Every added person will guarantee a life of consumption which requires the use of oil, especially in a nation which isn't anywhere close enough to replacing their infrastructure with "green" technologies.
Just like recycling bins, that's only the virtue-signaling parts of the story. It is vital to discontinue nearly all petrochem uses of fossil fuels and leave much of the rest of it in the ground. This implies:
- massive expansions of renewables (doable since costs have dropped precipitously)
- possibly temporary use of fission (replaced hopefully by fusion)
- elimination of diesel-powered ships, replaced by electrical (battery) and/or nuclear fission (again hopefully replaced by fusion)
- elimination of FF-powered air transport with electric-powered
- derivation of reasonable amounts of polymers from recycled materials and plant sources
- improved, efficient post-consumer recycling diverting a considerable fraction of the waste stream back into raw materials
Furthermore, it is necessary and possible to spend on the order of what was spent on the wars in Afganistan and Iraq on CCS to return GHGs to pre-industrial levels... if we don't do this, nothing else matters because we (and our progeny) will all be dead. We ought to examine:
- ferrous ocean seeding of phytoplankton blooms
- blooming the kelp over-proliferation between Mexico and Africa for harvest and subterranean/hadopelagic CCS
And to be consistent, the top two other major sources of GHGs should be minimized:
The math to replace fossil fuels is staggering. Look at this analysis of what it would take to replace existing fossil fuel with net zero carbon alternatives by 2050 (11000 days from now). Here's the conclusions:
So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 [brand new] nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.
I’ve found that some people don’t like the use of a nuclear power plant as a measuring stick. So we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.
Just consider the steel (coking coal) and cement needed to accomplish this.
The taking of quality of life is a given anyway, there simply is not enough stuff to satisfy everyone. There are already large parts of the population in the US living in poverty and the middle class is being decimated.
And that's basically why any plan that doesn't start with better (drastically less GHG) cement and steel manufacturing is not very insightful.
Furthermore the fact that we aren't building 10 test fusion reactors all around the planet shows how less people are aware of the problem, and how little effort and resources are we willing to allocate toward really averting it.
Now, I'm no expert on either of these, but both are of extreme importance to achieving emission reduction goals, and there is huge potential for such reductions.
Sue but even if those two factors cut the problem in half (they won't) we still can't build at this lower rate. Oil consumption and electrical needs are projected to rise during the next thirty years.
“The mere act of electrification has a powerful effect on efficiency: electrifying the US economy from carbon free sources will reduce the amount of energy needed by more than half.”
You first. You can (sort of) accomplish this for yourself, and you get to benefit from the utility internal combustion provides the economy you're in, so it'll be easier than if the state imposed it.
As for single use plastics, you're going to have to narrow that down. What about medical plastics? Food service gloves? Hazmat suits?
I don't know but I do think the existing pipes need better maintenance. It's crazy that people fault nuclear when there are pipes bursting, underwater spills, etc. so often with the infrastructure we have.
None safer. Unfortunately, these are the most optimized solutions for problems with multiple parameters to tweak (safety, scalability, viability,...). If there were a better way, why wouldn't it be implemented?
I know that's a very emotive, convincing bogeyman. But like Obama used to say, "truth has a funny way of catching up"
All I'm saying is, the day a Tesla et. al become significantly more affordable than a Honda Civic, with the ability for seamless cross country travel, is the day one can accurately claim no dependency on oil
I’ve seen this argument made before and don’t understand why seamless cross country travel should be the requirement for people traveling in personal cars (like Tesla, Honda, etc). How many people need to seamlessly travel more than a few hundred miles regularly? It might be better to optimize for the majority of use cases, which, I suspect, do not require this.
It's not. We currently do it in Canada for much of our oil and we spill it with so much frequency that it makes much more sense from an environmental perspective to use a pipeline. I'm still anti-oil, but if the oil has to come out of the ground then pipelines are better. Ideally though more investment in batteries, green tech, and nuclear would be favoured by policymakers than our current situation.
Make clean energy, transport electricity, use electricity to distill ethanol.
Or just use EVs.
If you insist on transporting oil, do the same as countries did with oil tankers: force them to have an insurance policy that would cover all the environmental damage costs. Very quickly, insurers forced the shipping companies to reinforce their safeties.
In the industry we call this front-falling-off-insurance. While highly unlikely, you want to avoid the front falling off your tanker. Or at least make sure you're outside the environment when it happens!
How about the industry fix or properly decommission the ones they have, before they build new ones?
There are so many pipelines and well heads and so forth, scattered every where, which are poorly maintained, literally bursting at the seems, and at eminent risk of catastrophic failure.
The ones running under the Great Lakes comes to mind. The day when (not if) one of those fails is going to be really, really bad.
As if that’s the only possible outcome. Defending oil companies by claiming their success is in alignment with what’s best for the poor is a rather bizarre point to make.
Nobody made that point. You're underestimating how important oil is to the entire economy. Understanding all the potential issues that will affect people is necessary if you intend to actually make any changes.
It will just go onto trains and trucks which burn oil to move oil, and are much less safe. I'd much rather see the externalities priced into fossil fuels through carbon taxes, ramped up incrementally over ten years. Let the market work its magic once the real price is apparent.
A safer pipeline. It will cost more to build, so the oil will have to be sold at a higher price. This higher price will probably result in reduced consumption of oil.
Situation normal. Corps run America including all the means of justice. I'm sure they were involuntary forced into an arbitration agreement by having the oil fall on their land and not putting it back into the pipe.
Yeah the farmers were pretty much forced to sell the land to the pipeline company. There wasn't a practical choice. The best you could do is to hold out for a somewhat better offer than the first one.
The next time they roll out a new pipeline, we might see few or no protesters at all. States have passed (or are working to pass) laws that make protesting pipelines like this a felony.
I'm not sure why this appears to be interesting for HN. Are there obvious problems/possible improvements with the way pipelines are currently built, or does it cater to general anti-oil sentiments (= political)?
Because Keystone is in the name, and the keystone XL pipeline has been on Canadians, and Americans minds for about a decade now, that's the only reason this is getting attention right now. the proponents for pipelines will see this as a reason to finish Keystone because they believe that it will be safer. Others will argue that a larger, newer one will only increase the risks of a larger spill. It's been a big talking point in Canada more recently with the Trans mountain pipeline as well.
Why don't these pipelines run in wider-pipes, which are typically unused, so that spillage from the inner pipe doesn't immediately leek into the soil? Or some other technical solution?
(Yes, I know the answer: It would cost more and oil execs and investors never go to jail for polluting.)
That would be very hard to engineer. (1)Pipes change size with heat. Getting the external empty pipe to reliably keep position over the smaller pipe would be tricky. (2) pipe inspections have to happen. In burried sections this may be a non-issue but wrapping all the valves and above-ground facilities in layers would make inspection problematic.
(3) the volume and speed of material in pipes is immense. The void space between pipe layers would have to run continuously for the length of the pipe. Any blockage or constriction would produce a water hammer effect, turning one leak into many. A cracked pipe is bad, but a double-layered pipe exploding because of a crack miles upstream is horrible.
What fills this void space? Air? Air plus hydrocarbon in an enclosed/hot environment?
> (1)Pipes change size with heat. Getting the external empty pipe to reliably keep position over the smaller pipe would be tricky.
It's not like this space has to be particularly small. Double walled pipes are relatively common in many forms. Long-distance heating uses double walled stainless steel piping with insulation between the walls. HV systems sometimes use double walled conduits to have a second layer for the insulating gas (e.g. SF6) in case the inner layer leaks. Double walled pipes are used for lines containing especially hazardous materials.
The inter-wall space is often monitored for ingress of "stuff", triggering a controlled shutdown if it is flooded.
> In burried sections this may be a non-issue but wrapping all the valves and above-ground facilities in layers would make inspection problematic.
This is about risk mitigation, so total mitigation is not required. Protecting, say, 80-90 % of a pipeline would reduce spill risk a lot. Also, the facilities you mention may be suitable to other forms of mitigation (e.g. walls, flood basins).
> That would be very hard to engineer.
I don't think engineering is the real problem here. Cost and incentives are.
Cost is at play in everything. Ignoring it for the sake of discussion does nothing. Do compare they price of single wall stove pipe to double wall chimney pipe. Almost an order of magnitude difference.
Yes, there are such tight margins in oil extraction the majors barely stay in business. Little wonder they have to cut corners on safety for the sake of a few extra dollars.
If there is a need for oil, enough to merit extracting it with costly means and transporting it over thousands of miles, then surely there's a willingness to pay some more for it.
Cost is at play in everything. If one could perfectly account for the expected costs of a true cleanup, then whether to use double walled pipe would be a boring actuarial decision. The problem is that we don't perceive the oil companies as ending up responsible for the damage they cause, due to government inaction and corruption.
It’s not very hard to engineer. I used to design underground piping for locomotive fueling. In Nothern Canada where temperature differential is significant. In that case double walled piping is used and the temperature may vary greatly between the outer wall (ground temperature) and the inner wall (outside temperature due to fluid stored in an above ground tank).
They are fixed together in some places, and able to slide relative to each other in most places. Fixed points are located in the middle of straight sections and there are C-shaped “expansion loops” that allow the inner pipe to expand or contract relative to the outer pipe.
The outer pipe has a vacuum applied by a vacuum pump, and a greater than nominal vacuum leak indicates an issue.
Of course, it’s expensive compared to a single pipe.
Your post makes me hopeful that this could be possible with some political pressure by public protests. Although - we should never underestimate the power of dark side^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H oil and gas lobby.
They used to do this, before modern coating techniques. The issue is that if any moisture gets inside that annulus (which will happen eventually), you get corrosion. It's also then very hard to inspect the integrity of that inner pipe with traditional techniques, like guided ultrasonics.
Annulus is the outer pipe, right? Well, inspect it infrequently, but not infrequently enough for the corrosion to cause a spill out of the outer (wider) pipe.
But actually, scratch that. We're in the modern era now. Send a drone into the outer pipe, and use some sensors (perhaps also video) to detect excessive moisture, or corrosion, or whatever. So it's no longer expensive.
Annulus is the space between the outer and inner pipe.
Most new pipelines are inspected currently with "drones", called smart pipeline inspection gauges, or smart PIGs, that use ultrasonic or magnetic flux to measure the wall thickness over the entire length of the pipe [1]. The PIGs are propelled through the pipe via the working fluid in the pipeline.
I think creating a similar device to travel in the annulus of cased pipe would be much more difficult. The centralizers used to keep the inner pipe centered in the outer pipe would pose a pretty big obstacle. Plus, there would be nothing propelling it forward, and communicating with the device through a steel pipe would be very difficult.
This technique is already used for fuel piping and storage tanks.
The area between the double-walled pipes is called an interstice, and that's how leaks are detected. Additionally the interstice drains to a containment sump, so if any liquid is present, the leak is obvious, but there are sensors there too.
Fuel is more corrosive than crude oil. However the sludge in crude can cause pitting corrosion over time. These systems are built such that corrosion and leaks are expected and inevitable. Gas stations and places like data centers, or anywhere with fuel storage or dispensers must be inspected monthly for this reason.
Source: I work for an environmental compliance company, and built software to model and report on these types of fuel storage, transport, and dispensing systems.
You mean where people KNEW that kind of a car was a risk and tried to get it removed from use but oil and rail companies valued their profits for than safety?
From your link:
> Even before the Lac-Mégantic accident, attempts were made to require redesign or replacement of existing cars in the U.S.; these were delayed amidst fierce lobbying from rail and petroleum industry groups concerned about the cost.
I don't see why we should be forced to accept this risk when the companies that profit off this risk won't pay to do it responsibly?
Should car companies stop making cars because they profit off of the death of 35,000 people per year in the US?
As a cyclist, I don't see why I should be forced to accept the risk of cars when the companies that profit off this risk won't pay for separate bike lanes.
Everything in life has risk/reward. What is the alternative that is a more palatable risk/reward?
I think there is something to the idea that car manufactures should bear some of the cost of the risks associated with the vehicles they sell.
When they bear less of the risks to pedestrians, cyclists and the environment, they don't do anything to minimize those risks and even do things to accentuate those risks when doing so will increase their profits.
For those opposing pipelines, you're fighting the wrong battle. It will just go onto trains and trucks which burn oil to move oil, and are much less safe.
Some would argue we shouldn't be using oil in the first place now that we know the true cost. And those people are right. But when it comes to disincentivizing oil, I'd much rather see the externalities priced into fossil fuels through carbon taxes, ramped up incrementally over ten years. Let the market work its magic once the true cost is accounted for. People will switch so fast to greener alternatives it will make your head spin.
Agreed, but keep in mind that shipping via vehicles raises the cost which potentially lowers consumption and or production. Nothing inconsistent about both fighting for a tax and fighting to keep costs higher at the same time given uncertainty about the success of a tax.
Using vehicles is also much more risky. They've done studies before and accidents like the Lac Megantic disaster that blew up a town show that pipelines are safer compared to alternatives.
”It will just go onto trains and trucks which burn oil to move oil”
“burn _more_ oil”. It also takes energy to move oil through pipelines, but given that we want to move lots and lots of oil between two fixed locations, building a pipeline and pumping the oil through it is cheaper than building rail tracks or roads and using trains or trucks (I would hope and expect it also uses less energy, but that isn’t necessarily true; having to pay train/truck drivers may be the deciding factor)
Pipelines are far more energy efficient. A cost comparison isn't that interesting to me. Pipelines are usually cheaper over time, but I don't care about bringing costs down for fossil fuel production.
1. It's not as trivial as that for a Canadian tar sands operation to send oil by truck into the US to some port.
2. There are alternative routes for pipelines. Some areas struggled against pipelines and they were rerouted in a way which doesn't threaten their area. Of course this can threaten some other place, but not every piece of land is the same.
3. Instead of trucks, the pipeline-laying entity may consider safer dual-pipe solutions which will, effectively, not leak.
4. You're only saying that there's another parallel struggle, which is preventing regular oil transport by truck because it's unsafe. Well, possibly.
5. Prices are not set according to what we believe they should be set, but according to various relations of power in society (including but not limited to supply, demand, ability to pressure the state etc.); this is doubly the case for strategic resources like oil, where there's a literal international body for price-fixing...
One of these spills happened near where I live they always do a great job of cleaning up the EPA sees to it.I know it's probably not the normal and probably rare but they actually revitalize the area that got the leak here it was a garbage mess with trash and junk and they had to clean it up and make it a wetland so it's actually better off now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] thread1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/keystone-spils-over-1-milli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
This is why people protested so hard. Not some vague Luddite treehugger ideal. Not even global warming although that was a distant second.
But because this was a really fucking stupid place to have an oil spill. Let alone two. And of course there will be more.
The title states North Dakota, where this Aquifer is not. lettergram is most likely correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline
Where does the existing pipeline go? Where does the proposed one go?
And the area seems to be part of the Hudson Bay watershed: https://www.environment.fhwa.dot.gov/Pubs_resources_tools/re... So it doesn't seem that even the runoff would threaten any American aquifers.
Leaks used to be reported in barrels, but the numbers aren't nearly as dramatic. I assume the media learned that headlines with 'millions of litres' get far more clicks.
The only other viable oil transfer over land is rail or trucking, both of which cost much more, pollute more, and have even higher risks of spills and accidents.
Also many pipelines do carry refined products, like all the jet fuel that goes to airports and diesel fuel for trucking.
In a different state altogether, for that matter.
And not one Native American XL protestor is in prison.
Other than all that, your comment is totally cogent.
Someone cutting a hole in the pipe to steal oil? Structural supports of the pipe failing and the pipe cracking?
There are very reliable testing methods that require shutting down the pipeline, and I understand there are some technologies available too, but both are 'too expensive'.
The position of petroleum producers is that the existing regulations are already too strict and burdensome to justify the capital cost and risk of building new pipelines. They aren't doing themselves any favors and may need to get used to lower margin business.
To me, the growing demand for petrol, the age of the existing pipelines, the relaxed regulation, low popularity of new pipelines, and the relatively low margins in the current market are a recipe for disaster. Populism is only making it worse (drill baby drill vs shut down all the pipelines), such stupidity makes my head hurt.
Or: change the system that builds these pipelines so the incentives of the entity/entities building and maintaining it have "safety of environment" as a clear and unambiguous incentive.
That's non-trivial to do in practice.
It's already incentivized, via inspections and fines. What you're presumably talking about is prioritizing it above other incentives.
Which gets into how much risk is acceptable and how much risk mitigation is reasonable to pay for. Hint: never enough that risk approaches zero.
I absolutely think fines (and especially inspections, or likelihood of catching violations) should be increased, but the world economy is still transitioning off oil.
It's easy to forget that we can absolutely put such a premium on risk that energy prices spike, that suppresses downstream consumers and economic activity, that causes worse outcomes.
IMHO, accelerating the shift to clean renewables, while simultaneously continuing to raise fines and regulation on oil pipelines as the actual energy mix shifts is the optimal choice.
$1M fine for every gallon spilled. Any attempts to falsify data will lead to imprisonment and 5x fines per gallon. Boom, properly incentivized.
I'm not seeing a downside.
This kind of undermines the validity of your point, as it carries an assumption of wanting to churn through as many natural resources as possible.
If you care about environmental sustainability, every time you hear "reduced economic activity" you should think "sounds great!". We've figured out how to produce so much stuff that our homes are full and we throw things away every several years to get new ones.
Economic priests want to keep the machine running full tilt under a misguided idea that sustainability can somehow be priced in. But compare the general time to fix (or simply maintain!) something at your general hourly rate to the cost of buying a shiny new one. Thinking that this harsh dynamic can be abstracted and then recouped somewhere else is simply more unsustainable bubble thinking.
There are serious, life-threatening concerns about reorienting the world to a lower-growth, lower-carbon model.
And to substitute fervor for fact is just as much of a fallacy as the global free trade crowd committed, before recently admitting that maybe they should have thought harder about the dislocating side effects and funding strategic workforce reskilling programs.
We don't get to a brighter future by ignoring the hard questions and consequences of proposed paths.
"Economic activity" directly translates into "use natural resources". The overwhelming fallacy seems to be this idea that sustainability will somehow eventually, not today, but some day soon, be priced into the economy such that we can have large sums sloshing back and forth but the externalities will be fully captured. This seems like an economically convenient myth, analogous to the free trade crowd's handwaving about comparative advantage.
Sorry I did not see how to succinctly express the overall arc of what I said with less "fervor". If two people are having a casual conversation about say baseball, but you think it is harmful and destructive, it's impossible to express without sounding like a looney. (I used baseball because I think it's innocuous. Whereas any real example would inherently be polarizing).
I'd be pleased as punch if we moved to a post-resource economy, but I also think it's going to be the hardest thing we've ever attempted (in an international sense).
The Paris climate agreements are a minor skirmish on the scale of what needs to be done.
Because, ultimately, we're talking about some wealthy countries having less (compared to business as usual) in order to strike agreement with poorer countries not to run their growth at full tilt.
So when we say things like "stricter environmental regulations," we're really saying "stricter environmental regulations worldwide." Otherwise we're just offloading pollution to the current poorest country with a labor force.
And it's going to take some serious financial and developmental persuasion (and ugly enforcement) to get someone to not do something that would make them better off.
... It is heartening to see the debate being reframed in justice terms. Because that seems to have a better chance of winning hearts and minds to the extent necessary.
Well, the inspections aren't happening - since major leaks are happening. And the fines are very small, otherwise a bunch of these companies would have gone under.
More importantly - no criminal charges against the management of these companies and the engineers who signed off on the thing.
They are already unwillling investors in the pipeline. They invest with the cost of their health and safety at a cut-rate of $0 to the operator of these critical systems.
"I got mine!" is a terrible foundation on which to build a society.
The problem is the people who write the rules benefit from political support of the very companies that need to be regulated.
In a century I could imagine a 50-80% decrease in usage in the US, but by that time Africa and Asia will have doubled in population. Any efficiency gains are totally lost with an increase in population. Every added person will guarantee a life of consumption which requires the use of oil, especially in a nation which isn't anywhere close enough to replacing their infrastructure with "green" technologies.
There the modern stone age family
From the town of Bedrock
There a page right out of history
Plastics and ICS are here for 2-3 decades at least. Like it or not.
If we're to make progress on climate change, more practical solutions than those a grade schooler can trivially dream of, need to be discussed.
If we could cold turkey cut off single use plastic and IC engines without disrupting the economy and civilisation, we already would
- massive expansions of renewables (doable since costs have dropped precipitously)
- possibly temporary use of fission (replaced hopefully by fusion)
- elimination of diesel-powered ships, replaced by electrical (battery) and/or nuclear fission (again hopefully replaced by fusion)
- elimination of FF-powered air transport with electric-powered
- derivation of reasonable amounts of polymers from recycled materials and plant sources
- improved, efficient post-consumer recycling diverting a considerable fraction of the waste stream back into raw materials
Furthermore, it is necessary and possible to spend on the order of what was spent on the wars in Afganistan and Iraq on CCS to return GHGs to pre-industrial levels... if we don't do this, nothing else matters because we (and our progeny) will all be dead. We ought to examine:
- ferrous ocean seeding of phytoplankton blooms
- blooming the kelp over-proliferation between Mexico and Africa for harvest and subterranean/hadopelagic CCS
And to be consistent, the top two other major sources of GHGs should be minimized:
- meat agriculture
- clinker production (Portland cement / concrete)
So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 [brand new] nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.
I’ve found that some people don’t like the use of a nuclear power plant as a measuring stick. So we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.
Just consider the steel (coking coal) and cement needed to accomplish this.
source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...
Its a simple method and easy to validate on your own.
It has to be a combination and there will have to be painful adjustments to the current western lifestyle.
We need to find better ways of moving around, buy less stuff and produce food in better ways.
I feel quite confident in saying “that will never happen.”
If you want to avoid a mass revolution from the people, you can’t take away quality of life.
Furthermore the fact that we aren't building 10 test fusion reactors all around the planet shows how less people are aware of the problem, and how little effort and resources are we willing to allocate toward really averting it.
1. No energy savings.
2. No carbon sequestration.
Now, I'm no expert on either of these, but both are of extreme importance to achieving emission reduction goals, and there is huge potential for such reductions.
https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8d...
“The mere act of electrification has a powerful effect on efficiency: electrifying the US economy from carbon free sources will reduce the amount of energy needed by more than half.”
As for single use plastics, you're going to have to narrow that down. What about medical plastics? Food service gloves? Hazmat suits?
All I'm saying is, the day a Tesla et. al become significantly more affordable than a Honda Civic, with the ability for seamless cross country travel, is the day one can accurately claim no dependency on oil
If those aren't us to snuff (I suspect) we should probably remediate the deferred maintenance and implement all planned upgrades.
I have never compared the safety records, so my assumption was pretty baseless in retrospect.
Or just use EVs.
If you insist on transporting oil, do the same as countries did with oil tankers: force them to have an insurance policy that would cover all the environmental damage costs. Very quickly, insurers forced the shipping companies to reinforce their safeties.
https://www.travelers.com/business-insurance/oil-gas/midstre...
At the moment, some governments charge a bond that barely covers the clean up costs.
As someone said, the costs are externalized and companies will go bankrupt if they are forced to clean it all up.
There are so many pipelines and well heads and so forth, scattered every where, which are poorly maintained, literally bursting at the seems, and at eminent risk of catastrophic failure.
The ones running under the Great Lakes comes to mind. The day when (not if) one of those fails is going to be really, really bad.
I’m sure that single mother working two jobs would love to have her grocery bill go up by 50% so that we can accelerate the adoption of green energy.
I remember many complaints that the pipeline was shoddily built and was using sub-standard materials.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/08/25/what-is-w...
(PS- I know you're being sarcastic. Just naming the tactic. Mostly out of anger.)
That thing we were protesting happened in the worst way, maybe you will pay attention now?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/wave-of-...
I'm not sure why this appears to be interesting for HN. Are there obvious problems/possible improvements with the way pipelines are currently built, or does it cater to general anti-oil sentiments (= political)?
(Yes, I know the answer: It would cost more and oil execs and investors never go to jail for polluting.)
(3) the volume and speed of material in pipes is immense. The void space between pipe layers would have to run continuously for the length of the pipe. Any blockage or constriction would produce a water hammer effect, turning one leak into many. A cracked pipe is bad, but a double-layered pipe exploding because of a crack miles upstream is horrible.
What fills this void space? Air? Air plus hydrocarbon in an enclosed/hot environment?
It's not like this space has to be particularly small. Double walled pipes are relatively common in many forms. Long-distance heating uses double walled stainless steel piping with insulation between the walls. HV systems sometimes use double walled conduits to have a second layer for the insulating gas (e.g. SF6) in case the inner layer leaks. Double walled pipes are used for lines containing especially hazardous materials.
The inter-wall space is often monitored for ingress of "stuff", triggering a controlled shutdown if it is flooded.
> In burried sections this may be a non-issue but wrapping all the valves and above-ground facilities in layers would make inspection problematic.
This is about risk mitigation, so total mitigation is not required. Protecting, say, 80-90 % of a pipeline would reduce spill risk a lot. Also, the facilities you mention may be suitable to other forms of mitigation (e.g. walls, flood basins).
> That would be very hard to engineer.
I don't think engineering is the real problem here. Cost and incentives are.
They are fixed together in some places, and able to slide relative to each other in most places. Fixed points are located in the middle of straight sections and there are C-shaped “expansion loops” that allow the inner pipe to expand or contract relative to the outer pipe.
The outer pipe has a vacuum applied by a vacuum pump, and a greater than nominal vacuum leak indicates an issue.
Of course, it’s expensive compared to a single pipe.
But actually, scratch that. We're in the modern era now. Send a drone into the outer pipe, and use some sensors (perhaps also video) to detect excessive moisture, or corrosion, or whatever. So it's no longer expensive.
Most new pipelines are inspected currently with "drones", called smart pipeline inspection gauges, or smart PIGs, that use ultrasonic or magnetic flux to measure the wall thickness over the entire length of the pipe [1]. The PIGs are propelled through the pipe via the working fluid in the pipeline.
I think creating a similar device to travel in the annulus of cased pipe would be much more difficult. The centralizers used to keep the inner pipe centered in the outer pipe would pose a pretty big obstacle. Plus, there would be nothing propelling it forward, and communicating with the device through a steel pipe would be very difficult.
[1] https://primis.phmsa.dot.gov/comm/FactSheets/FSSmartPig.htm?... [2] https://kwikzip.com/ (example)
The area between the double-walled pipes is called an interstice, and that's how leaks are detected. Additionally the interstice drains to a containment sump, so if any liquid is present, the leak is obvious, but there are sensors there too.
Fuel is more corrosive than crude oil. However the sludge in crude can cause pitting corrosion over time. These systems are built such that corrosion and leaks are expected and inevitable. Gas stations and places like data centers, or anywhere with fuel storage or dispensers must be inspected monthly for this reason.
Source: I work for an environmental compliance company, and built software to model and report on these types of fuel storage, transport, and dispensing systems.
All hail he magnanimous and great corporation.
The alternative is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste... which was 7M L and dozens of deaths.
From your link:
> Even before the Lac-Mégantic accident, attempts were made to require redesign or replacement of existing cars in the U.S.; these were delayed amidst fierce lobbying from rail and petroleum industry groups concerned about the cost.
I don't see why we should be forced to accept this risk when the companies that profit off this risk won't pay to do it responsibly?
As a cyclist, I don't see why I should be forced to accept the risk of cars when the companies that profit off this risk won't pay for separate bike lanes.
Everything in life has risk/reward. What is the alternative that is a more palatable risk/reward?
When they bear less of the risks to pedestrians, cyclists and the environment, they don't do anything to minimize those risks and even do things to accentuate those risks when doing so will increase their profits.
Some would argue we shouldn't be using oil in the first place now that we know the true cost. And those people are right. But when it comes to disincentivizing oil, I'd much rather see the externalities priced into fossil fuels through carbon taxes, ramped up incrementally over ten years. Let the market work its magic once the true cost is accounted for. People will switch so fast to greener alternatives it will make your head spin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
“burn _more_ oil”. It also takes energy to move oil through pipelines, but given that we want to move lots and lots of oil between two fixed locations, building a pipeline and pumping the oil through it is cheaper than building rail tracks or roads and using trains or trucks (I would hope and expect it also uses less energy, but that isn’t necessarily true; having to pay train/truck drivers may be the deciding factor)
1. It's not as trivial as that for a Canadian tar sands operation to send oil by truck into the US to some port. 2. There are alternative routes for pipelines. Some areas struggled against pipelines and they were rerouted in a way which doesn't threaten their area. Of course this can threaten some other place, but not every piece of land is the same. 3. Instead of trucks, the pipeline-laying entity may consider safer dual-pipe solutions which will, effectively, not leak. 4. You're only saying that there's another parallel struggle, which is preventing regular oil transport by truck because it's unsafe. Well, possibly. 5. Prices are not set according to what we believe they should be set, but according to various relations of power in society (including but not limited to supply, demand, ability to pressure the state etc.); this is doubly the case for strategic resources like oil, where there's a literal international body for price-fixing...
Go fuck yourself.