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Lincoln County Farm Sues Dakota Access over Flooding, Says Pipeliners Lied to PUC

Hey, Kristi Noem! Instead of campaigning against the estate tax bogeyman, which hasn’t taken away anyone’s family farm in South Dakota, how about campaigning against real threats to the integrity of South Dakota farms, like oil pipelines?

Slack Family Properties LLC has filed suit against Dakota Access, alleging that the company has broken its easement contract to fix drain tile and compensate the family for any losses imposed by running the Bakken oil pipeline across their farm.

The Slacks allege that Dakota Access has lied not just to them but to the Public Utilities Commission:

Last October, the PUC was alerted to the disconnected drain tile and flooded fields through an informal complaint. Dakota Access told the PUC it had repaired the problem, but the lawsuit said no repairs had taken place.

“Defendant knew this statement and representation was false at the time it was made,” the lawsuit said [John Hult, “Dakota Access Sued over Farmland Damage in South Dakota,” that Sioux Falls paper, 2017.11.01].

Remarkably, lying to the PUC is only a Class 1 misdemeanor, the maximum $2,000 penalty for which Dakota Access could cover with, at this morning’s WTI price of $54.81, the sale of 37 barrels of oil, the volume that flows under the Slack’s land every six minutes.

It sounds like Dakota Access is lying about real damage done to real farmers. Too bad our lone Congresswoman can’t say something about that real threat to South Dakota agriculture.

60 Comments

  1. Madman 2017-11-03 09:51

    Maybe they can take the money that they are paying off the counties for votes, and youth organizations and put it back to restoring the land. Of course not all youth organizations took the tainted money, as SDSU Extension 4-H told Energy Transfer to keep the dirty money, even after Energy Transfer tried to end around an contact the county program advisors directly offering them the money without going through the proper channels.

  2. Charlie Johnson 2017-11-03 11:57

    Every drain tile line severed by dapl is a risk to our water sources. Any minor leak will forever go undetected as the drain tile takes the leaking oil to the nearest outlet , creek , and stream .

  3. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-11-03 12:46

    Good for 4-H! Who was the main decision maker on that issue… and will the SDGOP let that person keep his/her state job after such an overt act of resistance to our corporate fascist overlords?

  4. jerry 2017-11-03 13:17

    Climate change caused by humans is real.

    “The Trump administration released a dire scientific report Friday detailing the growing threats of climate change. The report stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to downplay humans’ role in global warming, withdraw from an international climate accord and reverse Obama-era policies aimed at curbing America’s greenhouse-gas output.

    The White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government’s National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law, despite the fact that its findings sharply contradict the administration’s policies. The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of potential sea level rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, and enumerates myriad climate-related damages across the United States that are already occurring due to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since 1900.” Washington Post

    The Doctor Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde republican administration continues to destroy the planet with people like NOem, Thune and Rounds in the drivers seat. Wake up South Dakota or you are gonna be oceanfront property.

  5. jerry 2017-11-03 13:21

    New York Times on human caused climate change

    “BREAKING NEWS
    The White House approved a report saying humans are causing global warming, a position seemingly at odds with the administration’s stance
    Friday, November 3, 2017 2:12 PM EDT
    The Earth is experiencing the warmest period in the history of civilization and humans are the dominant cause of the temperature rise that has occurred since the start of the 20th century, according to an exhaustive scientific report unveiled Friday by 13 federal agencies. The report was approved by the White House, but it directly contradicts much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change.”

    While trump is away hiding, we may start to get the truth out. All of this oil leaking into the environment is killing us. We have the potential here to make our own power as well as supplying a huge part of the nation with what is left. Down with fossil fuel and up with renewable, we have the technology to make it happen, let us do this.

  6. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-03 15:37

    Carbon-14 is generated by exposure to cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere and cycled through living organisms. However in fossil fuel the original Carbon-14 has radioactively decayed, and no new Carbon-14 is produced in the fossil fuel since it stays underground for millions of years away from cosmic rays.

    Atmospheric samples show an increase in the amount of carbon emissions with a simultaneous depletion in Carbon-14. This is simply explained by emitting large amounts of Carbon Dioxide that has less Carbon-14 in it (i.e. burning of fossil fuels).

    (The same behavior allows one to determine how much biofuel you are actually mixing into a blend. Renewable sources still have the natural Carbon-14 content, whereas the fossil fuel portion does not.)

    Plants and fossil fuels also have the same ratio of Carbon-13 to Carbon-12, and the samples show extra Carbon-13…so that cannot be explained away by various geological processes.

  7. jerry 2017-11-03 15:55

    Papillion, Wyoming’s water http://www.hcn.org/articles/new-research-links-fracking-contamination-groundwater-pavillion-wyoming will light up because of petroleum based poison leaked into the water table. We will be seeing the same as these leaks may never surface. Big problem and big mistake to keep thinking it will not happen. But good news for South Dakota republicans and like voters, Scott Pruitt along with trump, will eliminate the EPA so folks in Lincoln County will just have to keep guessing if there is a leak or two. Thune and Rounds think the world of Pruitt

  8. Kurt Evans 2017-11-03 16:56

    Robert McTaggart writes:

    Carbon-14 is generated by exposure to cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere and cycled through living organisms. However in fossil fuel the original Carbon-14 has radioactively decayed, and no new Carbon-14 is produced in the fossil fuel since it stays underground for millions of years away from cosmic rays.

    The current half-life of carbon-14 is approximately 5,730 years. At that decay rate, researchers routinely detect enough carbon-14 in underground fossil fuels to indicate maximum ages in the tens of thousands of years.

    Fossil fuels that had been underground for millions of years would contain no measurable carbon-14, and the carbon-14 detected is strong scientific evidence in support of young-earth creationism.

  9. mike from iowa 2017-11-03 17:09

    Righteous fossil fuels help prevent sexual assault. So sayeth Governor Goodhair, stoopid Secretary of Energy.

  10. jerry 2017-11-03 17:12

    Don’t take the bait Doc, you’re better than that.

  11. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-03 17:18

    10,000 years is roughly two half-lives of Carbon-14 decay. e^-2 is 13.5%, so you would see Carbon-14 levels in fossil fuels that are around 14% of what is found in living organisms. You don’t see that.

    Ages past 20,000 years are tough to do in Carbon-14 counting without a background-free environment to do the nuclear counting. Other isotopes with much longer half-lives are better suited for older items. Essentially it is signal vs. noise, and the noise is competitive past a certain duration.

    https://ncse.com/cej/3/2/answers-to-creationist-attacks-carbon-14-dating

    ” Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn’t have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this?

    Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn’t work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation.”

  12. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-03 17:25

    How was that, Jerry :^)?

  13. jerry 2017-11-03 17:31

    Let the bracketing begin. 5…4..3.

  14. Kurt Evans 2017-11-03 18:28

    Robert McTaggart writes:

    10,000 years is roughly two half-lives of Carbon-14 decay. e^-2 is 13.5%, so you would see Carbon-14 levels in fossil fuels that are around 14% of what is found in living organisms.

    No, Robert. After one half-life, 50% of the carbon-14 would remain. After two half-lives (11,460 years), 25% would remain. After 10,000 years, 29.8% would remain. It would take about 16,250 years to get to 14% and about 16,550 years to get to 13.5%.

    Also, those percentages would be based on the amount of carbon-14 in the organic matter when it was buried, not on the amount found in living organisms today. Also, I referred to ages in the tens of thousands of years, not to an age of 10,000 years.

    Other isotopes with much longer half-lives are better suited for older items.

    Even most old-earthers acknowledge that those isotopes can’t be used to date fossil fuels or other organic material.

    Robert does a copy-and-paste from website of the NCSE, arguably the world’s most bitter and dishonest anti-creationist organization:

    Radiocarbon dating doesn’t work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay.

    Most young-earth creationists would obviously agree that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work well on objects older than 20,000 years (there aren’t any), but the NCSE’s explanation seems to miss the point.

    At its current decay rate, researchers routinely detect enough carbon-14 in underground fossil fuels to indicate maximum ages in the tens of thousands of years. Fossil fuels that had been underground for millions of years would contain no measurable carbon-14.

  15. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-11-03 18:47

    I can’t fully figure out how this thread developed.

    Robert, if I understand correctly, your point is that C-14 exists in fossil fuel deposits, since radiation from Earth itself can replace some of the cosmic-ray-created C-14 that long-ago decayed in those underground deposits. Earth’s radiation doesn’t make as much C-14 as cosmic rays do, but there’s some. Nonetheless, when we burn fossil fuels, we add a bunch of carbon to the atmosphere that has less C-14 than the current environment, right?

    Of course, the Harrisburg farmers can’t wait for C-14 to decay to get their compensation for the drain tile Dakota Access busted up.

  16. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-03 20:23

    Sorry Kurt, as you see I was thinking in base “e” instead of base “2”. But your case just got worse….all fossil fuels should then have more than 25% of the natural Carbon-14 found in surface sources if the world is younger than 10,000 years…and they don’t!

    https://www.perkinelmer.com/lab-solutions/resources/docs/APP_differentiationbetweenfossilsbiofules.pdf

    I don’t think Perkin-Elmer has anything in the argument one way or the other :^). Figure 2 shows that the Carbon-14 concentration goes to zero when there is no biofuel in the sample.

    You got it Cory. We can tell by isotopic counting in the here and now due to the signal strength that the emission of large quantities of carbon depleted in Carbon-14 is responsible for the rise in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. The Carbon-14 and Carbon-13 evidence proves it.

  17. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-03 20:37

    Speaking of the here and now…there are two fundamental problems. The first is to reduce the amount of carbon we emit into the atmosphere, and the other is to do so while providing the amount of energy people will actually use (both in the U.S. and around the world).

    Essentially this means slowly displacing coal from electricity and oil from transportation.

    Unfortunately that guy Shazam isn’t going to zap your car whenever you need to recharge….it will take some time for us to make the transition.

  18. Rorschach 2017-11-04 07:54

    The young earth theory is anti-science. It’s fringe Christian mythology. Ironically Kurt is trying to use science to prove his mythology, or at least he thinks he is.

    Kurt, what you’re actually doing is claiming that science disproves the young earth creationism theory that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Do you understand that you just crashed your own spaceship?

  19. jerry 2017-11-04 08:12

    Oil, coal, nuke and gas must be eliminated from out planet to survive or we will all add to the carbon more sooner than later. This outrage in Lincoln County is the same underhanded business the fossil fuel industry uses all the time. If you thought that Whitefish Energy in Montana was a crooked deal, check out Cobra, a newer company with the same kinds of interesting operations to lift the cash from taxpayer wallets https://theintercept.com/2017/10/31/puerto-rico-electric-contract-cobra/ Another 200 million to 500 million down the drain for nothing that will last.

  20. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-11-04 10:33

    Interesting: in 2016, Puerto Rico got 98% of its electricity from burning fossil fuels and 3/4 of its total energy needs from petroleum products. Maybe Dakota Access should extend its pipeline all the way to Puerto Rico. There’s a story problem: what would cost more to build an operate, an oil pipleine running across over 1,000 miles of seabed from Miami to San Juan (or maybe a hybrid sea/land route swinging down through Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic) or tankers shipping an equal volume of oil across that route?

    But keeping Puerto Rico hooked on oil is part of a century-plus-long tradition of energy colonialism. Puerto Rico produces no oil, natural gas, or coal. Renewables offer Puerto Rico a chance to kick its addiction to imported fuel and produce its own power from local inputs.

    In 2013, USGS reported that an undersea zone south of Puerto Rico may hold 19 million barrels of recoverable oil, which is equivalent to 40 days of Dakota Access volume pumped under the Slack farm, or 123 days of Puerto Rico’s regular petroleum consumption.

  21. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-04 12:31

    I expect Puerto Rico to do more solar and receive American liquefied natural gas. But the Caribbean is a potential location for geothermal (in much the same way that Iceland uses geothermal).

    I’m going to disagree with jerry on the need to get rid of nuke ;^). We need to do nuke differently…it is just that the once-through cycle with water-cooled reactors is cheaper than the alternatives that would enhance all facets of the fuel cycle.

    The bottom line is that nobody is going to stop driving or voluntarily turn in their internal combustion vehicles. So until the alternatives are competitive in the marketplace, one is left with making sure the gasoline fuel cycle (extraction, processing, delivery, emissions) is as safe as possible.

  22. jerry 2017-11-04 19:18

    Doc, the worry for nukes in Puerto Rico are hurricanes and tremendous water surges. This is not the place for that kind of danger as we saw in Japan with Fukushima Daichi. My point was and is that renewable sources, sun and wind would be a much better replacement. Interesting the geothermal though, this from 2011 http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/submarine-cable-from-geothermal-project-in-nevis-to-puerto-rico-finds-u-s-support/ and then we see 2017 and natta, from the greatest failure Russia has ever put into power, trump.

    If we only had legitimate senators and a legitimate house member, we could work to have the protection against what happened in Lincoln County. This is just the tip of the problems we will continue to have as time goes on with these dangerous pipelines, count on it.

  23. jerry 2017-11-04 20:36

    Yikes, trump will put a surcharge on all of our electric bills to subsidize coal and nukes. Co-ops in South Dakota, get ready to tell your customers, usins, that we are gonna get stuck more for nothing. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3936141-Murray-s-letters-to-Trump-administration.html I would say that you should contact the PUC on this, but they are so in the bag to energy corruption, that they will do nothing. Bring in Henry Red Cloud to straighten this malfeasance up.

  24. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-04 20:40

    The primary issue with Fukushima was that their emergency back-up power was not secured against the tsunami, and they lost any connection with the external grid, so nuclear fuel could not stay cooled. The plants all survived the earthquakes and were successfully shut down.

    Funny what the right engineering and the correct site selection can do for a successful nuclear facility, be it a power plant or a waste storage facility.

    I guess if you don’t drive any more, then there won’t be as much of a need for delivering gasoline to the pump. If you really want to reduce the use of pipelines, then improve the feasibility of the alternatives and provide enough clean energy to power them.

  25. jerry 2017-11-04 21:01

    Earthquakes happen in South Dakota, thanks for pointing that out, so those pipelines are even more at risk. We have had a couple of pretty good jolts over the years so we can expect them to happen. Now with more poorly constructed pipelines like in Lincoln County, we can expect more leaks. The problems pointed out in Lincoln County are the lies and damn lies being told to all involved. If the legislature was legitimate in South Dakota, it would set a task force to bring the culprits to justice. That was not snark.

    Puerto Rico is “an island in a big ocean” so when those water surges happen in a hurricane, power plants can be inundated with that big ocean water.

  26. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-04 21:29

    Earthquakes occur everywhere, but they are small around here. Nevertheless, I don’t mind regular inspections/monitoring and a closer look once events of a certain threshold have happened for any form of energy production, not just oil/gas pipelines.

    But if you build a lot of solar today, you will need to build a natural gas plant on that very same island as back-up, which is susceptible as any power plant to ocean issues (flooding, corrosion due to salts, etc.). So if ocean surges are really a problem, then shouldn’t you avoid the solar energy that would require natural gas plants?

  27. jerry 2017-11-04 22:24

    Once again, here is the answer http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/submarine-cable-from-geothermal-project-in-nevis-to-puerto-rico-finds-u-s-support/ Last time on this thread for me to post this too. This is one helluva direction you found. You bought it up doc and yet you do not want to read it, why is that?

    As we are having leaks in the pipeline, and lying about those leaks, why are we allowing that? Where is the PUC and the South Dakota legislature to protect the citizens of Lincoln County from this? When we do have a serious earthquake like we have had here centered in Pierre, South Dakota that set off alarms at Oahe, what will happen to the pipelines that were so quickly and poorly put into the ground doc?

  28. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-11-05 08:31

    Ah, geothermal! Puerto Rico sits on a continental plate boundary, so there’s lots of hot, rocky bumping and grinding nearby.

    I’d much prefer more vertical pipes transmitting that fissile heat to the surface for sustainable energy generation than more pipelines slicing across our farmland for a few corporations to squeeze some extra profit before they drain the Bakken and other reserves of their dirty fuel.

  29. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-05 17:22

    Leslie,

    If we were able to quickly remove coal we would have done that already, but market forces have been doing that work steadily. But it doesn’t look like we are getting rid of oil any time soon either, as that is increasing.

    https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.cfm

    “EIA forecasts total U.S. crude oil production to average 9.2 million b/d in 2017 and 9.9 million b/d in 2018, which would mark the highest annual average production in U.S. history, surpassing the previous record of 9.6 million b/d in 1970.”

    So if we were really in a crisis, we would find a way to ameliorate our misgivings and move forward with nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass/biofuel, hydrogen, natural gas immediately. The problem is that there are sunken costs that we need to recoup (and more) before reinvestment can be done.

  30. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-05 17:23

    Jerry,

    The only problem with any underground/underwater power network is that it would be difficult to maintain since it is underwater, and more expensive to install for the same reason. So in order to pay for that extra reliability it needs to work well for a long time to get your money’s worth out of it.

  31. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-05 17:43

    Cory,

    I agree that Caribbean geothermal would be a good idea, since it is a potential local resource.

    We’ll see if extraction of deep geothermal energy becomes more feasible elsewhere in the U.S. Not every location is perfect for solar or wind, and the footprint for geothermal is likely to be a lot less than the requisite wind farm or solar farm.

  32. jerry 2017-11-05 18:19

    Submarine cable is already approved and has been approved. No drilling necessary.

  33. Kurt Evans 2017-11-06 22:10

    Robert McTaggart had written:

    10,000 years is roughly two half-lives of Carbon-14 decay. e^-2 is 13.5%, so you would see Carbon-14 levels in fossil fuels that are around 14% of what is found in living organisms.

    I’d written:

    No, Robert. After one half-life, 50% of the carbon-14 would remain. After two half-lives (11,460 years), 25% would remain. After 10,000 years, 29.8% would remain…

    Also, those percentages would be based on the amount of carbon-14 in the organic matter when it was buried, not on the amount found in living organisms today…

    At its current decay rate, researchers routinely detect enough carbon-14 in underground fossil fuels to indicate maximum ages in the tens of thousands of years. Fossil fuels that had been underground for millions of years would contain no measurable carbon-14.

    Robert McTaggart replies:

    Sorry Kurt, as you see I was thinking in base “e” instead of base “2”.

    Yes, it reminds me of the time in January when you didn’t seem to know that the phrase solar mass refers to a unit of measure rather than to an actual physical sun:
    https://dakotafreepress.com/2016/12/30/hickey-reviews-2016-previews-2017-and-calls-for-open-party/#comment-71086

    But your case just got worse…

    No, correcting your mathematical errors didn’t make my case worse.

    … all fossil fuels should then have more than 25% of the natural Carbon-14 found in surface sources if the world is younger than 10,000 years…and they don’t!

    Under the assumptions typically embraced by old-earthers, fossil fuels would then have more than 29.8% of the carbon-14 found in surface sources. Old-earthers generally assume that the amount of carbon-14 in the organic matter when it was buried was as high as the amount found in surface sources today. They also generally assume that radioactive decay rates have always been as low as they are today.

    Since most young-earth creationists accept the possibility that either or both of those assumptions may be invalid, variations from the results to which those assumptions lead don’t undermine the young-earth position.

    Cory had written:

    Robert, if I understand correctly, your point is that C-14 exists in fossil fuel deposits, since radiation from Earth itself can replace some of the cosmic-ray-created C-14 that long-ago decayed in those underground deposits.

    Robert replies:

    You got it Cory.

    Decaying uranium can transform traces of nitrogen into a carbon-14 atom here and there, but it doesn’t come close to producing the quantities of carbon-14 detected in fossil fuels.

    “Rorschach” writes:

    The young earth theory is anti-science. It’s fringe Christian mythology.

    Modern science was born amid the rapid spread of traditional evangelical Christianity in the 1500s and 1600s, and it has deep roots in the conviction that beauty and order can be discovered in the universe because our loving Creator has put them here.

    Those who rejected the Bible and insisted on millions of years of earth history didn’t get a firm foothold on most scientific institutions until the mid 1800s. Since then, unfortunately, those with an anti-Christian axe to grind have been attracted to certain fields of scientific endeavor in greater and greater numbers.

    Ironically Kurt is trying to use science to prove his mythology, or at least he thinks he is.

    I’m wondering how you claim to know what I think.

    Kurt, what you’re actually doing is claiming that science disproves the young earth creationism theory that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

    No, I’m pointing out that the carbon-14 detected in underground fossil fuels is strong scientific evidence in support of young-earth creationism.

    Do you understand that you just crashed your own spaceship?

    Not at all.

  34. grudznick 2017-11-06 22:14

    Mr. Evans wrote:

    blah blah blah

    Mr. Evans, do you understand that the spaceships that are hovering over your volcano just want you to put on the shirt made from a sheet and drink the grape koolaid? Listen to the spaceships, Mr. Evans.

  35. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 10:12

    The ethanol industry demands verification of the biofuel content in fossil fuel blends. This is one of the methods they use.

    https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/10/easier-way-tell-fossil-fuels.html

    “For those seeking carbon credits for selling or using biofuels, it’s important to know that the fuel actually came from plants that were recently alive, and not from fossil fuels, which are made of plant matter that’s been dead for hundreds of millions of years. ”

    “The most reliable way to tell fossil fuels apart from biofuels lies in their carbon isotope composition: In fossil fuels, all of the carbon-14, which has a 5,730-year half-life, has undergone radioactive decay long ago, while biofuels retain a 14C signal.”

    The accuracy of that C-14 accounting can be improved with accelerator mass spectroscopy…but that is just more expensive. Ring-down spectroscopy shows some promise for reducing costs and delivering better accuracy than regular liquid scintillation counting.

  36. jerry 2017-11-07 10:35

    Still, the pipelines leak in Lincoln County and in all the other pipelines as well. PUC got lied too again and again. Or maybe they did not get lied to, just got paid to look the other way.

  37. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 10:44

    If you are a gasoline consumer, you should support maintenance and monitoring of pipelines for safe delivery, if not more efficient use of gasoline.

    Or you can go cold turkey and go electric. If the demand for gasoline is not there, the need to build pipelines will go away.

    Technically they aren’t delivering ethanol by pipeline today, but that is due to the chemistry of ethanol, not because they do not want to.

    http://www.ethanoltoday.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&fid=14&Itemid=6

    “The current question is not whether pipelines are an option for ethanol transportation, but whether they are a viable option for this industry examining logistical potential on all fronts.”

  38. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 11:00

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ethanol-rail-analysis/new-safer-u-s-rail-cars-gather-dust-even-as-ethanol-trains-grow-longer-idUSKBN16M2SA

    “But the incident in Iowa underscores the growing risk of another serious accident along with the increasing volume of the biofuel being moved in unit trains that are mile-long with about 100 rail cars – dubbed “rolling pipelines” – to slash freight costs.

    That is because ethanol shippers are still primarily using the type of rail cars that were deemed too unsafe to carry crude after the Quebec disaster, even though the biofuel is more explosive than oil. “

  39. jerry 2017-11-07 12:52

    The good people in Lincoln County got lied to. Simple as that. Why is that acceptable to the county commissioners, the PUC, and to the legislature? Who cares if you are a gasoline user or not?

  40. jerry 2017-11-07 14:52

    What does France have to do with the lying liars from the pipelines in South Dakota? We have these existing pipelines in South Dakota, Lincoln County for a fact, that are leaking. That is our issue.

  41. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 15:10

    If you use gasoline, you will need pipelines. In that regard let’s build those as safe as we can.

    If you want to avoid the need for pipelines altogether, you will need something else to power the replacement vehicles.

    France is discovering how much electricity they will really need if they go without gas or diesel.

  42. jerry 2017-11-07 15:18

    I have been to France last spring and have seen the shut down coal fired generators. I have also seen many areas of wind and solar. France is a big old country too so they have much to consider. We here could do that replacement if we had the desire to do so, we could also cure cancer if we had the same desire. It is all about the money doc, it is not about the feasibility of doing renewable, it takes away the money from the utility companies. When have you ever seen a utility company not post dividends?
    In case you may have missed it, a couple grouchy old farts put an end to a wind farm just because.

  43. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 15:29

    Are you going out tomorrow to buy an electric vehicle and get rid of any other vehicles of yours that run on gasoline?

    If the answer is no, then whether you know it or not, you probably have a good idea as to why such a transition is not happening or has not happened yet.

  44. mike from iowa 2017-11-07 16:03

    $7,500 electric car tax credit goes away under GOP plan. Not good.

  45. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-07 16:38

    If the electric car is better and makes sense over a decade, then it will do fine without the subsidy. But delivering abundant clean energy needs to be done in parallel.

    Wind and hydro aren’t bad for that, but charging cars would be an extra load on top of what we are already doing in SD…that is the real problem.

  46. mike from iowa 2017-11-07 17:03

    Doc- come to iowa and adopt a wind turbine for your very own. Just looking around it appears we have dozens to choose from.

  47. jerry 2017-11-07 18:22

    mfi, you may be onto something there, adopt a windmill, be like Don Quixote. Or adopt two and show some love for Sancho Panza. When you get the adoption papers, you pledge, say $25.00 to a Democratic choice for public office. The twofer would be just $40.00. Put someone into office that has some integrity and run those PUC hombres out of office. What a crock.

  48. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-08 09:34

    Instead of having a wind turbine all to myself, I would rather see schools have a mini-grid of wind/solar/batteries/geothermal. If that is donated, then the money currently applied for power could be allocated towards teacher salaries.

  49. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-08 10:02

    Heck, get the schools insulated with a soybean-based or other renewable product too…

  50. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-08 16:06

    http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/underground-power-lines-trnd/index.html


    The industry rule of thumb holds that burying lines costs at least $1 million per mile — perhaps much more, depending on location — or at least five times the cost of overhead lines.

    “It’s very handy to say, ‘Let the utility pay for it.’ But what people forget is that utilities don’t pay for anything,” Kury said. “It’s the customers that pay for the expenses.”

  51. jerry 2017-11-08 16:49

    The pipeline has already been laid. Simply run the lines in the pipelines. Hint, cables do not leak like crude, so much better use of existing infrastructure. Lincoln County residents would then know that the poison of the crude oil will not pollute their systems.

  52. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-08 16:55

    Would you run electrical wire through your plumbing?

  53. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-11-08 18:28

    Soy-based insulation, straw bale construction… the best energy policy minimizes the use of energy to meet our needs and extends the lifetime of available energy reserve

    Robert, would there be any practical problem with running electrical transmission lines through the pipeline instead of oil?

  54. Robert McTaggart 2017-11-09 08:57

    I worry about potential grounding issues if not done properly, as well as maintenance, or what happens if the pipe corrodes. Plus the width of the pipe may not work any way.

    If you want to talk about using the corridor made for pipelines and allowing for underground transmission infrastructure, that’s different. Do they win people like jerry over if every pipeline would also allow the installation of new electricity transmission infrastructure along side it? Jerry would get a half loaf instead of the whole thing in that case. Not sure regulations would allow that today, but who knows?

    But in any event I still don’t think such electricity will power the trucks that people have already bought in Lincoln County. And those trucks are not cheap.

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