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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> defending it as the more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly option

Is that not true? What's the best option for transporting oil and gas?

I think the fundamental issue is that nobody else wanted the pipeline on their land, so it got shoved onto the nominally sovereign Indian tribes where the white man's bullshit always gets pushed. (And I say that as a white man.)

From Robert Caro's The Power Broker:

Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.

Not transporting it. A better solution can still be a bad solution.

If you absolutely are going to burn it (sigh), burn it on site for electrical generation. Transmission lines don’t leak methane, and HVDC cables can be buried in a similar fashion to a pipeline. Methane extraction aligns well with geographies that have strong renewable growth and need combined cycle gas turbine backing until battery replacement can occur.

Now, if you’re trying to export it and need it in original form, this doesn’t work and you’re going to try to avoid externalities of transport, which is what regulation is for.

You can suffer 60% loss on HVDC long range transmission alone, and that's assuming you have the tech for it.

There's a reason why coal is hauled to power station, instead of being burned near mines.

Have a citation for those losses? I haven’t seen HVDC lines with losses above single digits.

“HVDC transmission has typically 30-50% less transmission loss than comparable alternating current overhead lines. (For comparison: given 2500 MW transmitted power on 800 km of overhead line, the loss with a conventional 400-kv AC line is 9.4%; with HVDC transmission at 500 kV, it is only 6%, and at 800 kV it is just 2.6%.)” [1]

Also, there are many coal plants sited right at coal mines.

[1] https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/201...

According to the Wikipedia HVDC losses are below 3% per 1000km. To have 60% loss you'd need to transmit the power halfway across the globe.

I stand corrected.

> There's a reason why coal is hauled to power station, instead of being burned near mines.

Not really.

Power stations need a ready and ample supply of water for power generation and cooling. This is why they can often be a long way from mines and oil/gas fields.

Condensate is not typically burned for electrical generation. It's value is as a very low viscosity liquid so it can be blended with heavy oil to make it's transport more efficient. This also necessitates taking it to where the heavier oil is being produced.

It's also typically not composed of methane but propane+, and while there may be a correlation with renewable energy in the same areas, those regions tend to be quite a distance from the ultimate consumers. high capacity electric transportation is not environmentally neutral and underground networks in these areas would be as costly as pipelines, which is why they are almost always above ground.

These are fair points.

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