It seems to me that it could, but I am not an expert. Natural gas has a smell added because it has historically exploded...
> If you are comfortable with oil being transported through densely populated areas, you should be fine with this.
What if I'm not comfortable moving crude but train?
Natural gas is an explosion hazard in enclosed spaces. If you walk into your house and smell gas, that's very dangerous. Note also that even if there is no explosion hazard, fire is still dangerous.
If you are uncomfortable with rail transport of crude, that's a perfectly legitimate stance to take. Honestly, transporting any flammable substance (and many non-flammable ones as well) does pose risks. If you know the risks and benefits and think the former outweigh the latter, let people and especially your representatives in government know. However, society generally seems to accept rail transport of oil and similar chemicals, so outrage over the transport of a less dangerous substance seems like it would be more likely to come from a place of ignorance than rational analysis.
> Ray Mentzer, a chemical engineer at Purdue University, spent his career working on LNG projects for Exxon Mobil. He says the specially designed containers that transport hydrocarbons have a good safety record. But he says transporting the gas through densely populated areas increases the risk if there's a leak.
> "It's not flammable until it's vaporized, but it's going to be vaporized pretty darn quickly and then it's going to seek an ignition source," he says. "Believe me, it will find an ignition source pretty darn readily."
I will also note that those train tracks in the town in the photos had a derailment only a few years back. I am familiar with the area and know people who live there.
https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/train-dera...
I would also note that the engineer's use of informal language here is clearly alarmist.
Well yes, but actually no.
You can't get a freight train up to the kind of speed you need to create an "instantly dump the contents of the pressure vessel" type crash without creating a "slowly vent the contents out" type crash first.
You would need to use a bomb to rupture a pressure vessel to get the kind of fuel/air mix you need for an explosion or fireball. Fuel-air explosives operate in this manner. But they are devices with countless engineering man-hours spent making them actually work and fairly precise manufacturing. Parking ye ol' Winnebago (or Penske, if you're a history buff) beside the tracks and waiting for the train to go by is not going to be a very productive approach. Look at people blowing up propane tanks on YouTube. At best they get a fireball.
I'd much rather have nat-gas wafting up and away rather than crude oil, propane, or some other volatile that sits at ground level.
Lighter-than-air gas is crucially different. If you let that leak out it won't flow downhill through the city, it'll go straight up. Of course you can argue that gas is dangerous, but not by example of an accident where most of the flammable material flowed away (and caused harm elsewhere) instead of either burning or exploding at the site.
Again it’s a question of scale, you don’t think of say molasses as fast moving liquid but increase the scale to 2.3 million gallons and you can be talking about a 25 foot tall 35 mph wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
You can't have your cake and eat it.
Read up on how you can get temperature inversion layers in the atmosphere. In your model that kind of effect shouldn’t happen, but actual fluid dynamics gets complicated.
Or were you thinking about transporting LNG together with something that that would help start a fire?
At which point those secondary fires can easily ignite the literal pools on LNG being described.
Would you describe this as a noticeable risk compared to driving around in a car, in urban traffic, with gasoline? Or are you comparing it rather to an alternative that more or less avoids transport of LNG?
I think the worry is that the volume of shipments for LNG would be much higher, and hence the probability of something happening is higher. A singular shipment of LNG would be no worse than a single shipment of car gas.
Any such aerosolization would rapidly go up into the sky.
It would make a fire, but not a disaster.