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Comment by yao420 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds nice. I grew up in El Paso Texas and there is a huge refinery in the lower valley and it completely ruined the quality of life. It’s located in a poor immigrant neighborhood right in the city core.

You can see the flares burning all day and all night. The smell in the surrounding neighborhood is unbearable. Every day tankers line up outside causing traffic jams so much that the refinery has to hire police traffic controllers. More than once I recall a truck crashing and spilling its contents while growing up.

Really sucks all around.

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The Martinez refinery has had two accidental releases in the past 12 months. I have some family in the area and they were advised to shelter indoors with all their windows shut for one of them.

Officials release map of hazardous fallout from refinery mishap: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-04-11/officia...

City of Martinez page and other incidents: https://www.cityofmartinez.org/government/information-on-eve...

Martinez homes aren't cheap either, even for the Bay Area - median sale price is almost $800K.

> Martinez homes aren't cheap either, even for the Bay Area - median sale price is almost $800K

I am frequently surprised at how little of a discount there is for living in toxic or extremely unpleasant places in an otherwise expensive area. Over the years I’ve seen many listings for homes nearby to desirable areas but adjacent to superfund sites, directly facing interstate highways or elevated subway tracks, downwind of sewage treatment plants etc, and consistently I feel like the price is nowhere remotely close to cheap enough to justify the downside.

> I grew up in El Paso Texas and there is a huge refinery in the lower valley and it completely ruined the quality of life. It’s located in a poor immigrant neighborhood right in the city core.

What came first, the city core with residential neighbourhoods or the refinery?

(Some people complain about Van Nuys airport (KVNY), but the airport was there first (the famous scene in the 1942 film Casablanca was shot there), and people built residences around it.)

What is now known as El Paso has been inhabited for thousands of years, but I always think of as the formal starts to a lot of Texas cities (speaking as a San Antonio native) that we would recognize are when the Spanish built missions with the goal of colonizing the areas. It looks like that began in El Paso circa 1682. So some time before the refineries.

https://www.elpasodiocese.org/historic-missions.html

Refineries are usually built at the peripheries of towns. But land is cheap and people who want cheap houses buy there after the refineries are built. Kinda like airports --built out in the outskirts, land is cheap, then people build around the cheap land and subsequently complain about noise pollution.

Coastlines and waterways are typically highly-valued even without oil refineries on the coastline next to the homes and the port and the harbor.

FWIU there are newer AGR Acidic Gas Reduction capabilities for reducing emissions from refineries?

The Copenhill facility in Copenhagen appears to be really good at capturing flue waste; maybe the best in the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amager_Bakke

Can e.g. graphene filters be made onsite from e.g. flue gas?

Other oil things:

Fossil fuel phase out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_phase-out

Carbon-neutral fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel

Electrofuel (eFuel); Porsche, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel

Decarbonization of shipping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decarbonization_of_shipping

Civilian Drone port control; https://freetakteam.github.io/FreeTAKServer-User-Docs/tools/...

FAA UAS RemoteID: https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/remote_id

Open Drone ID: https://github.com/opendroneid/

Standby drone spill containment could be recommended?

Could a (partially-submerged) prop pull oil spill containment booms of foam and/or aerogel, in order to automatedly haul up oil spills for pressing into extant modular recapture vessels, with drift and drone sensor fusion for e.g. human in-the-loop route planning?

The Ocean Cleanup has experience with similar trawling, though plastic recycling is looking good.

SeaBin organization has dock-mounted trash-capture fluid vortices with low pressure.

FWIU, it looks like hemp aerogel just bested treated polyurethane foam just bested hair for soaking up oil spills: "Self-cleaning superhydrophobic aerogels from waste hemp noil for ultrafast oil absorption and highly efficient PM removal" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13835...

"NASA finds super-emitters of methane" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33427157#33431427

Dandelion rubber tires solve the "synthetic rubber is most of the microplastic in the ocean" problem; and dandelions can probably be planted next to refineries? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728005

"Synthesis of Clean Hydrogen Gas from Waste Plastic at Zero Net Cost" (2023) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202306763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886955 from https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rice.edu

They aren’t closing down, they are going to refine bio-diesel instead

My understanding is bio-diesel manufacturing is far more pleasant to be around, though it’s still going to have a lot of trucks etc.

Oil is just a amazingly nasty stuff.

While bad, Houston is even worse. Large parts of it are littered petrochemical plant "bombs" that explode from time-to-time.

Don't forget the copper refinery next door. :/

Lots of life’s necessities come from industrial works that aren’t pretty. We could shut all of them down and go back to the Stone Age.

The fallacy is that they are "necessary" when they are entirely elective and a conscious or unconscious choice. There's always a choice that doesn't involve a Hobson's choice.

The fallacy here is that choices of end users to use liquid fuel for transportation have not changed, and the entire scheme is predicated on regulatory incentives, that trade the local impact of refineries for the substantial ecological and social impact of biofuels.

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