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en4bz

And yet when a pipeline was proposed it was quickly shot down [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_East

ADDENDUM: The amount of rail accidents in Canada is shockingly high. Multiple per day [2].

[2] http://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/stats/rail/2018/sser-ssro-2018....

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False dichotomy.

Let’s limit extraction instead and invest instead into clean infrastructure like power lines.

> Let’s limit extraction instead

Just blocking pipelines without restricting extraction virtually guarantees these outcomes. Restricting extraction while shifting transport to pipelines looks like a better solution than just blocking pipelines.

Bad publicity for fossil fuels is good news for the climate. Any new infrastructure for fossil fuels creates investors with an interest in keeping extraction going.

Incentives (carrots) and enforcement (sticks) are the only things most big polluters will respect. And that will require strong political will, leadership and outreach relationships to accomplish, one region at a time.

Let's render extraction unnecessary by reducing demand.

Meanwhile, use transport that minimizes environmental damage.

>Meanwhile, use transport that minimizes environmental damage.

You're gonna be hard pressed to find a means of transport that's more environmentally friendly than steel wheels on steel rails. Friction is a bitch.

To be more accurate you would say "restrict consumption" because that is what you are doing here. How do you plan to do that? If you did so by restricting extraction directly, as you seem to imply it would cause oil prices to jump dramatically. In fact, since oil is has extremely inelastic demand, this would be a massive windfall to the oil industry. The only other way to do it is rationing, which I'm sure would go over about as well as the massive price increase.

I'd say more like "redirect/rewire consumption". Oil demand is considered inelastic because we have minimal mass transit options in most North American cities. So, increase mass-transit and HVDC links combined with funded solar+wind sources and EV chargers to covert the fuel-demand into overall energy demand.

Also, the oil being consumed here is headed out to the global market. It's not being earmarked for local use. It's effectively fungible with global supply so the decrease here will simply have a small global price increase.

Actually, power lines aren't necessarily clean because they have significant losses, and would cause more emissions if they carried FF-generated electricity thousands of miles (losses as high as 60%). A better strategy is generating as close to consumption as possible, e.g., solar/wind/etc. right next to consumption to minimize losses.

Do you have a cite for the 60% loss? Perusing Google shows 8-15% average, so that's a hell of an outlier.

Gas engines on the other hand, have a maximum carnot efficiency of about 40% (that's 60%+ power loss there), which doesn't include extracting/transporting/storing as well as the kind of unplanned of losses this article talks about.

You can't eliminate pipe leaks, etc. But you can compartmentalize to minimize the damage a leak does, much like dividing a ship into watertight compartments.

The hydraulic system on a Boeing jetliner is compartmentalized so that a leak in one of the systems doesn't drain away all the hydraulic fluid in that system - only the actuators downstream of the leak get affected.

On the contrary, you can eliminate pipe leaks easily - just many areas have fairly lax integrity management requirements for operators, and those that don't only apply to new lines - very rarely does legislation cover preexisting pipelines.

New pipelines (especially ones considered DOT regulated in the US, overseen by PHMSA) typically are installed with automatic block valves and flow level leak detection systems. Those combined with a sensible internal and external corrosion control program can push the life of a pipeline without incident out past the useful life of the pipeline. But retrofitting these is expensive and most pipeline operators won't do it without regulatory or other political pressure.

> you can eliminate pipe leaks easily

Famous last words. A better design is to assume leaks occur, and design to minimize the damage. (This is how airliners are designed.)

> with automatic block valves

That's compartmentalization, not elimination.

Another method is to use two smaller pipes instead of one larger one - it reduces the scale of any leak.

  use two smaller pipes instead of one larger one - it reduces the scale of any leak.

... while doubling the exposure to failure in the first place.

This actually ends up increasing your likelihood of failure, as smaller parallel lines mean higher operational costs for smart pigs and other integrity assessment tools making internal issues harder to detect before failure, and increased risk for external failure due to cathodic protection system failures due to interference and shielding.

Of course it doubles the risk of failure, but each failure does half the damage.

Which sounds like a terrible trade-off, harm isn't linear here. Two leaks, each of 1000 barrels, will badly damage two different valleys. One leak of 2000 barrels would be better.

And cost isn't linear either, two half-capacity pipes will probably be almost twice the price. You could spend that on more steel for the large pipe instead.

Actually, I'm not so sure about doubling the risk. Failures may appear random, but they aren't. A failure may indicate a particular defect that can be corrected in the rest of the system before another one fails.

Er... I don't think you've completely taken into account what you're proposing. Due to the square-cube law, splitting a pipeline into two smaller pipelines means that in order to have the same total cross-sectional area you would need sqrt(2) times as much surface area. Not only is the surface area that is subject to corrosion increased, I would imagine the pipe wall thickness would probably decrease so corrosion would compromise the integrity of the pipeline even sooner. It's also double the number of welds that need to be made, double the length of pipeline to maintain, and as to the notion that it would do half as much damage, I doubt this claim. Why would it actually substantially decrease the damage to the environment? It's not like pipeline leaks completely sever the pipeline in half and just start inundating the surrounding area with a flood of oil. It's usually a crack or pinhole leak, so the smaller cross-sectional area of the pipe probably won't do much good in terms of decreasing the volume of oil leaking out.

With proper monitoring and a well maintained internal corrosion control and external threat control systems you can stretch out the timeline for non "acts of god" (ie natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc) to greater than the life of the structure. The methods for internal and external control are well understood and practiced to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Elimination of the hazards is impractical, so minimization of risk exposure and frequency is the best that can practically be done.

All the hubbub about stopping new pipeline construction means that more incident prone methods are used - be it trucking, rail transportation, or use of 50+ year old pipelines. The new lines are better engineered, understood, and have more stringent operational controls in place. I've worked on pipelines from the 1940's that are still safely operated, and lines from the 2010's that have already self excavated. These things can be controlled with the right engineering, organizational, and governmental oversight.

Compartmentalizing risk as acts of god is a rather pointless exercise. If you can’t eliminate risk you need to be intellectually honest and say why that risk is acceptable. The Midwest for example gets large earthquakes in seemingly random locations, that’s a known issue and needs to be accounted for in a risk assessment.

As to other transport methods being less safe that also comes down to building safe systems. Car gas tanks for example are designed to survive crashes without spilling their contents. You can also build tanker trucks/trains to appropriate standards.

It seems you're not familiar with the history of US pipelines. It doesn't matter what theoretical technologies or regulations exist, because oil extraction industries get away with leaking hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil with little or no punishment or recompense, including on the farmlands they steal from people to run their pipelines across.

See the thousands of dots? Each is a spill.

https://projects.propublica.org/pipelines/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/10/dakota-acces...

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dakota-access-pipeline-l...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/us/keystone-pipeline-leak/ind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents_in_...

Out of curiosity, did you intentionally choose examples reminiscent of the Titanic and 737MAX?

First off, my first real job was designing the flight critical stab trim system for the 757. I have an enduring interest in airplane flight control systems, and follow airliner crashes and the resulting fixes. The hydraulic changes preventing leak propagation resulted from the Sioux City crash where the compressor disk in the tail engine came off and sawed through each of the triply redundant hydraulic lines, resulting in total loss of the hydraulics. The 737MAX troubles have nothing to with the hydraulic system.

The Titanic disaster did popularize the notion of watertight compartments, but these are well known and used in warships. Warships are very hard to sink because of it. The Bismarck is suspected to have sunk only because the captain flooded it to prevent its capture.

Submarines use compartmentalization to minimize flooding risk, and surely the space station must, too.

Pipes: bad.

Trains: worse.

Clean(er) energy generation and chemical manufacturing: mucho mucho better.

And yet there are lots of excellent reasons why. There's nothing safe about pipelines. In Canada alone there over a hundred pipeline leaks or explosions every year [1,2].

[1] https://equiterre.org/en/news/new-report-oil-pipeline-safety...

[2] https://apps2.neb-one.gc.ca/pipeline-incidents/

How many do you think is the appropriate number? Surely not zero, since this can only be approached in the limit of infinite expenditures. So what principle would you use to tell?

> Surely not zero, since this can only be approached in the limit of infinite expenditures.

What proof do you have of the lower bound here?

There's no physical device with zero failures over an unbounded time. Whether it's human errors or material degradation, things will fail at some point. Materials also have production faults which can make them break on the first usage. Everything has a non-zero chance of failing.

The "infinite expenditures" part comes in because you can introduce redundancies and fail-safes, but those introduce complexity / more work / more materials, which have extra costs. Then you need to spend time/money making sure the whole system works together / testing failure modes. But that may also fail, etc.

There's at least one (idealistic) method to reduce the number of pipelines leaks and explosions to zero. This will also eliminate the risk of another Lac Megantic disaster, and reduce emissions to zero! It's just not an immediate-term proposition.

This issue is too theoretical to contribute to deciding what should be acceptable.

I will open the bidding by suggesting that Canada's frequency of dangerous pipeline failures should not exceed its frequency of airliner crashes.

I assumed the parent referred to the zero lower bound. A realistic lower bound discussion is more complex/interesting of course.

I meant to segue into a realistic lower bound, not a zero bound, though I definitely wasn't clear about it.

> There's nothing safe about pipelines

They're safer than trains. The problem is new pipelines usually enable new extraction. If we could decouple those two, i.e. shift transport of existing extraction from trains to pipelines without creating lots of new extraction, that would be a net benefit to all.

Pipelines are different than trains.

- They can leak much more in an unit time than trains... hundreds of thousands of gallons, and regulatory enforcement on leaks in the US is very weak because of corporate capture.

- They are built usually by legally-stealing land (easements, eminent domain) from people along the way.

- If they leak on people's land, they don't have much recourse.

- All the safety tech and building codes in the world don't matter if the operators don't really care about leaks because the risks of fines and lawsuits is so comparatively small.

There are hundreds of oil leaks per year, and they can be absolutely huge, but because they're usually in the middle of "nowhere," they rarely make the mainstream news.

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