US Pipeline Caused Biggest Spill in Decades, We’re Just Hearing About It | Hacker News Reader

US Pipeline Caused Biggest Spill in Decades, We’re Just Hearing About It

earther.gizmodo.com

215 pointsshalmanese60 comments

> The 2016 back-to-back spill and explosion, for example caused gas shortages in six states.

Resident of Raleigh, NC. That leak is part of why we own a Chevy Volt. I remember thinking: "I don't want to be beholden to gasoline." But I also remember thinking: "I don't want to be beholden to the electric grid."

> Enbridge has estimated that properly deactivating its aging Line 3 pipeline and taking it out of the ground would cost more than $1.2 billion dollars. The company is currently considering simply abandoning it and paying off the landowners involved, which it says would cost a relatively paltry $85 million, but leave corrosive pipes littered underneath the landscape.

Privatize the profits, socialize the costs. These companies should have been taxed for these costs, with the money going into a fund earmarked for cleanup.

Enbridge is simultaneously attempting to get permits to build more pipelines on Native American land.

In this particular case, there’s an obvious solution: Clean up all your messes, or no new permits for you.

....only if you can tie this to enough politicians that they fear for reelection and fight for it. These events are barely covered by major newspapers; there's zero chance of the reasonable solution happening.

Also, I think the cleanup should be required when someone wants to build this sort of project. Absurd that they don’t have to clean up the whole mess.

We had the same thought when we bought our Volt. Electricity is fine for 99% of our driving, but it’s nice to have the fossil backup in case it’s needed.

Yeah, I’d like to know why the payoffs are that much cheaper than the work. Just a question of relative negotiating power between the parties involved?

I fully agree with you but companies will just declare bankruptcy and the government will still be left holding the bag. Corporations will always find a way to worm themselves out of taking responsibility.

It's not like there's zero options here. There are lots of options. You seem to be implying we should just give up trying anything.

Even the example provided doesn't seem to fall to your bankruptcy idea. If you collect the money for the cleanup on an on-going basis during operation, how does bankruptcy get them out of it?

You can change bankruptcy rules. You can even make leadership personally liable. Hell, you could make shareholders liable if you really wanted.

We're talking about legally created entities operating at a large scale, and the government. If the government gets around to making a serious stab at changing things, they absolutely can.

Admittedly, that's a monstrous 'if' there. But it's not some foregone conclusion that we should just give up on even thinking about holding corporations accountable because it's not even possible.

You make cleanup costs part of the initial construction costs/operating costs.

> I remember thinking: "I don't want to be beholden to gasoline." But I also remember thinking: "I don't want to be beholden to the electric grid."

Then you'll need your own solar panels. Either on your roof or on your car or both:

- Sono Motors Sion: https://sonomotors.com/

- Lightyear One: https://lightyear.one/

- Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a small panel as an option. Maybe useful if you live somewhere sunny: https://pvbuzz.com/hyundai-ioniq-5-solar-panels/

One additional "car with solar panels" option is the upcoming Aptera car that can charge (ideally 40 miles per day). https://www.aptera.us

I used to captain a solar race car team. I don't really want solar panels on my car; I'd much rather have them installed as stationary infrastructure. On-vehicle there are pressures to stay compact and lightweight, which costs durability. Cars are also almost always more-shaded than rooftops.

A super tiny panel to run a cabin fan is reasonable, but on an EV with an enormous battery pack it's unnecessary complexity.

Also, solar panels on a car are natural targets for idiots. Has to be protected against rocks and paint.

> Margolis said that gasoline’s physical composition—it sinks to the bottom of bodies of water, unlike oil, which stays slick on top

This doesn’t match my experience where water contamination in pure gasoline very quickly settles to the bottom of a test jar and where gasoline spilled while boat fueling clearly floats on water.

Gasoline is around 6 lbs/gallon and water a bit over 8 lbs/gallon. I don’t see how gasoline could sink given those wide disparities in density.

Without more clarification this appears to be nonsense. Do any search for gasoline floats on water and every explanation says gasoline floats on water, not the other way around.

If there is any hope in this disaster it is that interstate pipelines transport raw gasoline (more or less a natural fraction of petroleum) without the additives. It is the additives like MTBE (now I believe outlawed) that create the most lasting ground pollution. Light petroleum fractions naturally migrate towards the surface, where they are either consumed by microbes that eat the light fractions (and leave the heaviest fractions) or they evaporate.

Actually the MTBE was simply more easily detected by smell if the groundwater had come from a source where underground retail storage tanks had leaked MTBE-oxygenated gasoline.

The portion of the fuel which does not evaporate can sink with gravity until it rests upon a water table within range.

The vast majority of the wells contaminated by leaking gasoline went largely undetected until MTBE was widely introduced to gasoline according to the Clean Air Act of 1990. When compromised retail tanks in use started to recieve gas containing MTBE, it still took a while to seep down into some people's water just like the plain gasoline had been doing, before they started to notice since the MTBE has a characteristic non-hydrocarbon smell of an ether.

MTBE itself is far less toxic than the hydrocarbons it had replaced in the fuel.

Technically, by experts not considered dangerous to health in the trace amounts found in the contaminated water, just bad taste.

Physicians have treated patients using pure MTBE with therapeutic effect, with side-effects that would be expected also from the more traditional USP Ethyl Ether.

https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/MTBE

The natural components of gasoline like the benzene are recognized as far worse but they are not so easy to taste.

Agreed. The statement also caught my eye and the only thing I could find that seems even remotely relevant is http://www.earthdrx.org/specificgravitylesser.html. This is very specific to lighter fluids injected into a subsurface ground layer below a water layer, and theorizes as to why the lighter fluid may not percolate through the heavier fluid above.

Yup. It’s actually opposite of what he (the attorney) said. Gasoline (with a density of 0.72kg per liter) floats, and in fact it also evaporates. Which makes it partially self-cleaning (although there always seems to be some residue...). Not that gasoline vapors are great, but the local environmental problem could in principle be less than for an oil spill as oil is almost identical in density with water (light crude oil floats on water and heavy crude oil, like tar sands oil, sinks in water... although both tend to have both lighter and heavier components so both things happen).

That's right, gasoline has always floated on water.

Mostly it evaporates but it still toxifies the water for a period of time.

Gasoline is not the only thing going through Colonial:

https://colpipe.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/media/6.4.4-cpc-p...

All are consumer products also preferred by military operators.

It can be noted that the two cleanest fuels on the list, butane and R100 renewable diesel, are not like the others.

Butane is never transported along any of the main lines, and at this time R100 still exists only on paperwork.

But if the gasoline evaporates, doesn't it just rain down again later? It still has to go somewhere. Or do we just have ever-increasing gasoline clouds?

EDIT: Thank you to everyone for the informative responses.

>do we just have ever-increasing gasoline clouds?

Well, not quite.

It does remain in the atmosphere as it dissipates and is diluted, but the whole time even at the source its concentration is usually too low to condense.

It just becomes air pollution, categorized as Air Toxics although some of the same natural hydrocarbons are referred to as "Unburned Hydrocarbons" when they are emitted after incomplete automotive combustion.

No, volatile organics are quickly degraded by sunlight and oxygen. The atmospheric half-life of mid-length aliphatic hydrocarbons such as octane is less than a week.

I don't know for sure, but my guess is that only a small portion of evaporated volatiles is scrubbed out of the air by precipitation. The people living around that spill are going to be breathing some nasty shit for the foreseeable future.

It turns into smog, partially. It will condense on surfaces, and some fungus and bacteria will consume it, or its products of decomposition eventually.

Some of it goes into peoples and animal's lungs, etc

Yup. And around 1% of the volume of gasoline is benzene, which is wonderful.

I hate the smell of the stuff. Since going electric, I hate the smell of gas stations and avoid going to them for any reason.

Evaporated gasoline would be classified as a VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) AFAIK - but certainly that is a good keyword to use to look for the environmental/atmospheric effects.

Maybe the gasoline contains ethanol and it formed some compounds when exposed to the environmental moisture?

Ethanol doctoring of the fuel (whether E10 or E85) typically happens at the wholesale terminal, after the pipeline transportation.

It's easier to float in salt water.

Indeed and noticeably so. Salt water is 2-3% more dense than fresh water. That’s all the more reason to think that ~28% less dense gasoline would float.

"The Colonial pipeline is owned by a company of the same name, which is, in turn, controlled by companies including Koch Industries (its largest shareholder, which made $85 million in dividends from the pipeline in 2016) and Royal Dutch Shell. The pipeline was initially built in 1963, and stretches from Texas to New Jersey. According to the company, the pipeline transports around 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day, mostly underground, that supplies 45% of the entire East Coast’s gasoline. In 2016, North Carolina alone got 70% of its gasoline from the pipeline. Its owners have said that technology can detect leaks as small as 3% of the pipeline’s daily flow–which works out to around 1.8 million gallons."

"Margolis pointed out that the Colonial pipeline is so old that its anti-corrosion mechanism is simply a coating of coal tar. “That’s scary,” he said, pointing out that newer pipelines with updated technology still have accidents."

"as small as 3%"

imagining them spilling a million gallons a day undetected is so depressing

You should see how much water your local water utility loses on the way to deliver water to your house. They're fascinating numbers.

Losing water is one thing. Oil or gasoline, or other toxic liquids, are another.

Gasoline also costs a lot more than water.

Spilled gasoline probably is tax free

probably tex deductible!

I read that about NY, which used wooden water pipes made of hollowed-out tree trunks for its aqueduct: https://aqueduct.org/article/historic-wooden-water-pipes-une...

About ten years ago a contractor lowering the floor of a garage in San Francisco found a 6 foot diameter pipe made of redwood and iron bands.

It was still in use.

Yes, NYC has an identical problem: most of those pipes were not documented or the documentation is lost. They're there, they know they are, they just don't know where.

Friend said the contractor called the city, who then accused him of working without a permit. And then after that was squared told him the pipe was abandoned. The contractor said okay I'm going to cut into it with a chainsaw. At which point they sent out an inspector and all hell broke loose.

City's maps showed the pipe running in the middle of the street. But it was under a row of 12 houses.

I find that hilarious. It's like they immediately assume fault, because they get used to having everything so perfectly documented, except the old technical documentation can be very imprecise. Heard stories like these, too.

Yeah, you'll find lots of surprising stuff if you care to look. For instance, when I took NASSCO certification I was exposed to the sewers that are made of brick in San Antonio. Pipes made of redwood are new to me but not that surprising.

Secondarily, don't be too suspect of the city not knowing where in-ground infrastructure is. This business is tricky. You have to take calibrated GPS land markers out (that are hopefully properly calibrated) and document things like depth. Often it's contractors doing it rather than the actual city workers, and they're usually paid on a per inspection basis (but this can vary). Much of this was drawn on really huge maps that went into equally huge books back in the day, now of course ESRI is used for everything but much of that was lift and shift in most cities that I'm aware of, so data should be trusted but verified.

I think they were commenting on the pollution, not the inefficiency.

Then what are they?

There are about 4,000,000 miles of road in the US, and about 2,500,000 miles of pipeline.

Pipelines will be used for the next century as we transition over to clean energy. If pipelines are blocked, the fossil fuel gets transported on the road or by train and has a higher climate change impact, because friction forces that are seen inside of pipes are lower than the rolling friction of wheels. This is the transport energy barrier that has to be overcome by pumps.

Pipelines leak because they are pressurized pipes that are filled with oil. The amount they leak annually is comparable to large tanker spills, but since it occurs constantly at a low level in a way that is less visible this type of leak is under reported. This also has a carbon and environmental cost that must be weighed against alternatives.

TFA says 190k miles of petroleum pipelines, 2.4m total with natural gas included

The maddening thing about these pipelines is that fixed infrastructure should have such high payoff for moving petroleum compared to roads or, when possible, trains. As long as politicians show such an unwavering commitment to neglecting old infrastructure in favor of building more, however, we would be crazy to support any more of it being built. But outside the NRC, I don't know of any US agency with sufficiently thorough cradle-to-grave scrutiny (which even they are denied by politicians, considering the disposal debacle that is Yucca Mountain).

A lot of the time, the right solution IS to build new infrastructure to replace the old. You can only patch a bridge so long. New nuclear reactors are simply safer than old ones, no matter how much money you pump into maintenance.

You're setting up a catch-22 here where increasingly decrepit infrastructure continues to fail despite being a money pit, but nobody has the agency to simply start over with a better design.

Maybe I've misunderstood the issue, but I thought the new pipelines were for expanding capacity and service areas.

It's also possible I wasn't very clear. When I rail against the new, it's not against replacement (e.g. complete overhaul of a road instead of patching potholes.) I get upset when my low density metro creates seemingly endless new highway lane miles at the same time that potholes in core areas reach ages and heights consistent with average toddlers.

I think you overlooked the cradle-to-grave, whole system optimization aspect of the focus on the NRC. We don't apply the same systems thinking to the rest of our civilization. I think the parent is advocating for more systematic long term thinking.

How is it possible that even in this day and age such huge infrastructure projects do not account for decommissioning costs and build everything as if it will last forever. It seems that the calculations are made by only incorporating the building and maintenance costs, then subtracting them from revenue and putting everything that remains in the profit line. Then they act surprised when they see a huge amount of money that is required for decommissioning and are not willing to pay even though they have been profitting all along.

Since the projects are meant to last a long time, it's reasonable to include the rate of inflation into the calculations and then not be surprised that the costs are so large.

On a related note, software projects are done the same way. Very often thinking a few steps ahead is frowned upon and written off as "overengineering" although the costs of replacing an obsolete software product with a modern one are also very costly to the company and society.

In my experience with new projects of this kind, these costs are included in economic studies since legislation has changed to make companies pay for decommissioning.

This does not solve the problem however, because larger companies can just sell aging assets to smaller companies who then bleed them dry and when the time comes to decommission, declaring bankruptcy.

In my opinion the only way to prevent this is to introduce legislation which makes executives liable for cleanup costs in some way. E.g. (1) Force companies to buy "cleanup insurance" , or (2) make it illegal to trade "insolvently" where company assets < Cost(cleanup). Either the executives pay for cleanup or are imprisoned. This is probably a naive policy prescription, I'm sure someone in the field could easily come up with something better.

The entire article reads like a classic PG "submarine article" from anti-pipeline activists, who use lawsuits, protests, and sabotage[1] to thwart the construction of new pipelines (even to replace old ones, like in the article) and upgrades or even necessary repairs to existing pipelines.

It also hypocritically criticizes companies for considering abandoning aging pipelines, which these same activists fight to prevent them from upgrading or replacing.

Clearly the goal is to make fossil fuels so expensive, to speed up adoption of renewables. But do these people not realize that these chemicals have other uses (e.g., plastics, rubbing alcohol), and that they need to be transported regardless, and pipelines are much safer (and cheaper) than rail or road transport?

[1]https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2017/07/24/dako...

Can pipeline owners be fined for leaks?

Are pipeline owners obligated by law to rehabilitate spills?

Depends on jurisdiction. Even if a locale does have rules on the books, enforcement is a major issue.

What they didn't address was if Charlotte needs to get evacuated (ha!), how they get their water, how they plan to limit the damage. This is oil in the groundwater. Expect cancer cases rising in Charlotte by the thousands

does no one in that place use the internet?

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