We still don’t know why the Keystone pipeline shot several thousand barrels of oil onto North Dakota turf on October 29. But just five days after the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s shutdown order, TransCanada/TC Energy opened the Keystone spigot again:
The Keystone pipeline resumed moving crude oil Sunday after 1.4 million litres (9,120 barrels) of oil were spilled in North Dakota in late October.
Pipeline operator TC Energy will operate it at a reduced pressure, gradually increasing the volume of crude oil moving through the system, the Calgary-based company stated in an emailed release Sunday afternoon. The company said the repair and restart plan was approved by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
The spill was one of the largest on-shore crude oil spills in the region in the last decade and Keystone’s largest spill.
…TC Energy said it’s still investigating what caused the incident and analyzing the segment of removed pipe. “No significant impacts to the environment” have been found so far, the company’s website states [Sarah Rieger, “Keystone Pipeline Reopens After 1.4 Million-Litre Spill in North Dakota,” CBC, 2019.11.10].
But shippers are worried that Keystone’s higher-than-projected spill rate may result in revocation of TransCanada/TC Energy’s special permit to run the pipeline at higher-than-normal pressure:
…Keystone had to agree to more than 50 safety conditions to receive the exemption – given out only twice since by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Around the time the permit was granted, risk assessments the company provided to regulators indicated the chance of a leak of more than 50 barrels to be “not more than once every seven to 11 years over the entire length of the pipeline in the United States.” (tinyurl.com/y2vb7lyc)
Instead, over the past decade Keystone has had two leaks of 400 barrels and two leaks of several thousand, including the spill of more than 9,000 barrels last week, according to PHMSA data.
…Some shippers now believe regulators may revoke the permit, which allows TC Energy to run the pipeline at an operating stress level of 80 percent of the steel pipe’s specified minimum yield strength (SMYS) in rural areas. The normal operating pressure for hazardous liquid pipelines is about 72 percent, according to PHMSA.
“(I’m) concerned they may get their special permit to flow at 80% of max instead of 72% suspended,” one Keystone shipper said, citing “three spills in three years” [Devika Krishna Kumar, “Rare Permit for Keystone Oil Pipeline in Spotlight After Spills,” Reuters, 2019.11.08].
Taking back a special favor to a big corporation after they fail to keep their promises—yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?
Wasn’t the Keystone pipeline steel extra thick because dilbit had to be watered down and pumped at high temps and pressures to begin with?
Several years ago, TC came back to Yankton County and spent a goodly bit of the summer digging up and replacing sections of pipeline. The official reason was “routine maintenance”, the real reason was that some lots of pipe that had come from India and were made of lower quality steel than the specs called for. It’s nice that they were proactive in replacing the bad pipe, but it’s scary that they “discovered” the problem years after the pipeline has been in operation. How much more substandard pipe is still in the ground?
Ultimately the question is whether the water is clean.
Part of that is preventing leaks before they occur, which means better steel in the first place. Part of that is on-going monitoring, such as with non-destructive testing methods. Part of that is fine-tuning pressures in the pipeline itself. Part of that is updating sections of the pipeline on a regular basis before they fail. And part of that is containing spills when they occur.
So have any of the recent spills resulted in contaminants reaching a water supply?
If you want to power your transportation with alternative means (such as electricity or fuel cells), that is terrific. However there will be water issues with those due to the mining or recycling or manufacturing or waste management that is required.
Maybe those water issues will be slightly different than the pipeline issues, but they will occur….just not around here.
So have any of the recent spills resulted in contaminants reaching a water supply?
Would you trust Trash Can to tell you the truth about pollution? You aren’t that far gone, are you, Prof?
The North Dakota spill was in a wetland to begin with. Point source pollution at its most visceral.
“No significant impacts to the environment”
As Mike just said, we can’t trust what they tell us. Certainly the 9000+ barrels of oil had a very significant impact on the acres it soaked.
MFI,
I understand that not having the leak in the first place is the best outcome. But I also know that we keep on driving. And the world keeps on driving. Also, pipelines have leaked, and they will continue to leak.
Given those facts, and that we are not willing or ready to go off of fossil fuels, the approach we have to take is to reduce the leaks and spills and contain them when they occur.
If they are indeed containing the oil within a certain distance of the pipeline, and they (and/or third parties) can show that nothing is getting into drinking water or other sensitive areas away from the pipeline, then I’m not sure what else they can do beyond requiring better pipes and replacing them a little more often (that schedule would depend on the testing that they do).
By the way, better steel probably needs some kind of an input from metallurgical coal at some point. I don’t think they are using biomass to replace coal in that process yet.
And nobody’s going to advocate to get rid of coal-fired pizza joints. Well, the one in Rapid could go away, but in general, coal-fired pizza joints are high on grudznick’s list.
One coal-fired pizza for grudznick….hold the gravy.
FYI … Porter gave up driving in 2004 and gave his BMW 528i to Children’s Hospital to auction. The rest of you are the problem. That means you, McTaggart and your forty year old, oil burning Rambler. :0)
PS … grudz pigs out on Marco’s Coal Fired Pizza when he comes to the city to buy some weed.
Doc-the point of “we are not willing or ready to go off of fossil fuels.” Who is “we”, white man?, (…80 year old professor who taught Dick Butkus said to me at Wake Forest last week:) Those protestors Kristi says were supported by “riot booster” felons like Geo Soros prolly wouldn’t agree Doc. Nor would I. STOP further oil infrastructure abetting four more decades of unbridled global warming. That is the point. Do NOT delay turning the ship! Collision eminent! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding
That pesky issue of nuclear waste:
35 Olympic swimming pools of radioactive matter
The legacy of the U.S.’s Cold War-era atomic testing program is still affecting the Marshall Islands at the Runit Dome, which holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, as well as lethal amounts of plutonium. An investigation between the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism reports that the dome is now at significant risk of collapsing from the effects of climate change. American officials have declined to help address the problem, but the news report says the U.S. government withheld important information about the contents of Runit and its weapons testing program, including the fact that 130 tons of soil from atomic testing grounds was shipped from Nevada to the Marshall Islands in 1958. [Los Angeles Times]
Via 538’s “Significant Digits”
According to TC Energy about 383,000 gallons of oil leaked affecting about 22,500 square feet of land (about one-half acre). That’s about 17 gallons on each square foot; or, over 2 feet deep if none of the oil soaked into the ground!
Cummins Diesel showcases its newest addition to green energy. Soon these poison oil pipes will be doing what they have always been intended to do, steal our water. No need for dirty oil when it can be reduced to less dangerous means.
https://www.energylivenews.com/2019/10/31/cummins-new-hydrogen-truck-trucks-towards-greener-haulage/
Had a great Cummins diesel in-line 6 in 1978 White Field Boss tractor. Ran it for 31 years and 8800 hours with a broken piston/cylinder sleeve replacement the only major mechanical work done on motor. The only diesel i ever heard that sounded more like a gas engine than a diesel. Memories.
So, while i was busy around Halloween, in a ND planted field crossed kitty corner by a tar sands pipeline at about where a perpendicular shelter belt stands, high pressure oil surfaced from a leak where the pipe was routed UNDER the natural flowing wetland that coursed through the field, right where the shelter belt stopped.
(see Indianz.com drone photo-say doesn’t Gov Kristi punish anyone with felony prosecution that gets close by observing pipeline shenanigans, denying civil rights, protecting her crony TC pipeline buds that she gave a private audience to at election time and received campaign cash, “QPQ fashion”?) Perhaps a Federal Judge already had to declare some of that TC favored gubernatorial legislation illegal or unconstitutional likely at taxpayer expense. Kristi is certainly a goober, thats for sure. I think her state paid family Xmas card photo to TC this season has the egg wiped off her face anyway.
We clean up her felony riot booster law rammed through her crony Republican/Trump funded legislature, AND her smeared face. Can’t have a super model looking bad, can we!? Its not like we don’t have better things to do.
A much larger water course appears to be a few hundred yards away, and perhaps an irrigation ditch, heading downstream of the oil spill.
Standing next to the spill site appear ten 30” diameter pipes looped into the air perhaps ten feet above ground, maybe a pumping/diversion/shutoff arrangement, with two more receive/send pipes going back underground. This takes up perhaps an acre of the former field. Thirty-fifty heavy trucks and truckloads (of diapers?) are parked over many more muddy snow covered acres.
Fossil fuel industry claims development of “…new oil and gas fields is compatible with limiting global carbon emissions in line with the Paris accords intended to address the climate crisis.” (Coffee Spill on computer screen!) Doc may agree but Green Peace says “We already have far more oil and gas than we can afford to burn if we want to meet the Paris target.” https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/19/bp-pushed-for-arctic-drilling-rights-after-trump-electionTrump
2017 Keystone Pipeline leaked an estimated 407,400 gallons of crude oil into a field in rural Marshall County in the northeast corner of South Dakota near the North Dakota border.
This is a repeating scene locally in Indian country.
2015, under the Yellowstone River. Eighty miles of riverine pollution to Glendive. Montana Federal Court injunctions against the fossil fuel industry championed by the Tribes.
Now, 2019, under a ND/Canadian watercourse near the border. A SD Federal Court Injunction against the governor/fossil fuel industry.
Injunctions ad infinitum against Trump, their puppet. IMPEACH DA MTHRFKR, now!
Leslie, by “we” I mean everybody. Willing may not be the best word. I am certain there is a lot of good intentions to get off of fossil fuel.
But nobody is going to stop driving…or stop having someone else drive them or stop taking the bus, etc. Even the protestors are driving to the protests. At least in buses the footprint per person may be smaller, but carbon is still emitted.
Debbo,
I agree that the use of nuclear weapons has produced a legacy that has been hard to handle. But remember, radioactive debris from nuclear weapons testing (particularly when it was above ground testing) could not be construed as coming from a controlled process.
Nuclear wastes from nuclear energy on the other hand can be controlled. The waste matter stays in the fuel pellets. The nuclear material is placed in concrete casks which can be air-cooled.
Moreover, we could reduce that volume and its radioactivity to much smaller levels. Containment would require a couple hundred years, not a couple hundred thousand years. But that would solve a problem. And it is more fun politically to keep a problem alive so you can hit someone else over the head with it.
It’s come this far, McTaggart? People disagree with you and now you’re a victim being hit over the head with peoples justifiable fears? Are you mentally stable? You teach young minds this stuff? Turn around and see where you used to think.
Leslie,
The discussion appears to be focused on the spill or leak, not the actual contaminant level that is found. I get it. Spills and leaks are bad and should be reduced if not prevented. Particularly if Porter keeps driving his Rambler around…
If you have data there are two things you can do with it. One is to do things better. This has more short-term costs, which is tough in our present politics. The other is to use it to stop doing things (i.e. we join the cancel culture club). This basically stops any potential benefit from occurring.
What is necessary to replace oil and gas in the transportation sector is to pair nuclear energy with our renewables. And by “our renewables” I mean yours and mine.
Why? Carbon capture is not ready. Batteries are not ready. We are not going to stop driving. We are not going to stop using energy. So we can either keep using fossil fuel and complain about it (which is the modus operandi at the moment), or use nuclear to back-up renewables without emitting carbon.
When renewables are abundant on the grid, use nuclear to make hydrogen for fuel cells, process heat for biofuels, or to power the recycling of renewables. When renewables are lacking, make up the difference with clean electricity from nuclear.
Porter,
Please solve the problem. Batteries will not work any time soon. We are not recycling renewables (there is a reason they are not called recyclables).
If climate change is the most critical problem that we face, why do we need to wait when time is of the essence and solutions are available?
We know how to do nuclear. If batteries come on board, then nuclear and energy storage and renewables can help solve the problem faster.
If you are not going to do that, then support better and safer pipelines and more efficient vehicles. I do not believe that telling people that some people can have energy and others cannot will be politically viable.
If you’d stop acting like a victim, reject nuclear, and put your mind to new solutions, you wouldn’t need my help. Now, do what I just told you to do and stop wasting time! I’m giving you the key to fame. Don’t squander it.
We can implement solutions that work right now, while continuing to develop other potential solutions. It is called walking and chewing gum at the same time.
You need nuclear not only to backup renewables, but also to provide the bulk energy that our growing energy consumption demands.
Africa is set to add another billion people soon. Are they going to be happy to go without energy so that you can be politically pure anti-nuclear?
And speaking of more clean water, Africa will probably have needs for desalinating seawater to generate enough fresh water.
Porter….if only there were a way to generate the energy intensity required to produce an abundance of clean water without emitting carbon….
Inventing a false crisis didn’t work for Al Gore and it won’t work for you, Bob. Try again. Preaching to virtually no one is getting you where? It’s gaining you what? It’s foolish, isn’t it, Bob? What’s your point? Are you too lazy or shy to go big time with your plans? You know the reality as we all do. We’re going to burn natural gas until it’s all gone and pollution be damned!
Doc- good responses. Will think them thru when things lighten up. This however is frightening. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists?__twitter_impression=true
In the studio now with some brilliant players. Nailed “The French say…”, “Meadowlark” and “April”, and plausibly walked through an arrangement of “Lakeside”. Maybe “Cabin in the Western Mountains” tomorrow. A life’s work. So satisfying. “Pleiades”, will only be if we are lucky. Will explain later, too.
Thanks Leslie.
Porter, if you are going to be for clean water….be for clean water.
It sounds like instead of being a climate change denier, you are a population growth denier. A growing population has an impact on water resources. And throwing up your hands in the air and then waving them around like you actually do not care is not a solution. It is fun to do that however :^).
But don’t worry…if we continue on our present course, we will continue to consume more natural gas. The problem is not using natural gas to displace coal. The problem is not using natural gas to boost renewables when they are not enough. The problem is using increasing amounts of natural gas without any carbon capture.
Even a slow exponential growth in the consumption of natural gas will eventually generate more carbon than we do from coal today. And population growth in Africa and Asia will drive a lot of that growth as they demand our modern conveniences.
My solution, in the lack of suitable energy storage or carbon capture, is to use more nuclear with our renewables. I will take what storage or capture comes about, but we shouldn’t have to wait for 50, 100, etc. years for them to be completely engineered.
Bob McTaggart … I’m not denying anything. I’m 66 years old and have worked to help the ecosystem since my high school suspended classes to celebrate the very first Earth Day. But, that was all for naught because your group of Republicans elected Trump and dismantled all we accomplished. Just yesterday his EPA pronounced that science research wasn’t enough to influence future policies if it contains personal anecdotes. It’s up to you young people to fix this, now. Good luck and don’t blame we boomers. We did what we could and you guys discarded our progress.
Signed,
No Guilt -Just Remorse
Here’s some encouraging info from National Geographic:
Price break. The cost for a utility of generating solar or onshore wind energy has dropped to about $40 per megawatt hour, which is lower than the cost of building new power plants that burn natural gas or coal, writes Peter Orzag for Bloomberg. “It’s even close to being competitive with the marginal costs of running the coal and nuclear plants we already have,” he says. What that means, says Orzag, is that we may be able to cut carbon emissions without painful economic consequences.
True, the upfront cost of solar and wind is low. In addition, they get first preference on the grid. We don’t store it, so it gets sent out onto the grid and we do everything else given what they put onto the grid.
The long-term cost is higher. There is no recycling of the solar panels or wind turbines or other infrastructure. I don’t disagree with using renewables, I disagree with not taking care of the back end of the cycle, and then choosing to compare upfront costs only.
Ummmm…..those are your Republicans, Porter. Your policies didn’t take care of the workers in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, and they voted accordingly to support their perceived interests.
Sorry, Bob. That’s a Republican propaganda story. Those voters you say were ignored and voted Trump we’re actually racists and minority haters who see Trump as agreeing with their racism. Do more research. You have potential.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/how-trump-helps-his-supporters-justify-racism/?outputType=amp
Bob… Are you sure you want to stake your reputation on your statement that solar panels aren’t being recycled? Maybe your rhetoric is going to get you fired as you’ve become looser with facts, lately.
– PV Cycle, a European photovoltaics association, in 2016 developed a process that it says achieves a 96 percent recycling rate for silicon-based panels (the majority of the global market). Non-silicon-based PV panels can have a recovery rate of up to 98 percent. In the U.S., a subsidiary of the trade group offers PV manufacturers membership in a take-back and recycling program for both modules and battery waste.
Research more, Bob. You have potential and I won’t always be around to correct you.
Porter,
Where is the recycling plan that is required for a new solar farm or new wind farm in South Dakota? Or in Colorado? If you were to build a new nuclear plant in SD, there would definitely be a plan for waste management.
Europe is ahead of the game, but it is very uncommon in the U.S. because up until now, the solar footprint has not been that large. A primary issue for recycling is cost. We should be incorporating the cost of said recycling and/or waste management into the costs of solar and wind power. Maybe that should be an upfront fee paid at the time of installation, or a flat rate paid for by ratepayers.
The other issue is that such recycling efforts are always energy intensive, and we could be using nuclear power to provide that energy on a carbon-free basis.
Furthermore, the more efficient solar cell designs do not use silicon. Congratulations, you now have a heavy metal waste management problem on the back end. I hope that they can do something with graphite/graphene to improve the efficiency, as that would consume carbon and provide a carbon sink…while being more sustainable. Silicon and carbon are both plentiful enough….just a matter of getting enough efficiency out of them, and getting them paired with the right energy storage.
If a “fart smeller” like you wasn’t so negative he would put his mind toward tweaking the process and mitigating any roadblocks (like European and Chinese scientists do). Alas, just more “That won’t work” from the self limited brains of the prairies.
Porter,
It didn’t help that Hillary did not visit those areas (or visit them enough), nor provide a plan that they could buy into.
In Appalachia they heard clearly that she was going to put coal miners out of work, and she did not have a viable plan for anything that could replace coal mining jobs with something that had the same or better salary. Something similar likely occurred with other industries in the Rust Belt.
You see the same thing happening today with the green new deal. But if the winners are on the coasts, and the losers are in the heartland, that does not bode well for winning some of the critical states the Democratic candidate will need to win. How many elections need to be lost before the lesson is learned? How many elections do you want to lose to stay ideologically pure?
Instead of calling me names, why won’t you support an upfront recycling plan for renewables that is paid for?
So, Bob. You don’t believe those coal miners voted for Trump racism? Have you ever been to W. Virginia?
Have a little more faith in the electorate, and try to understand why they are voting a certain way.
Do you know what “Montani semper liberi” means? Have you lived the spirit of montani semper liberi every day? True mountaineers do wherever they are, and wherever they go.
Once again, why not put renewables on a more sustainable path, and pay for their recycling and waste management upfront?
Yes….it would cost more. But it would be worth it.
To answer your question, I think they voted based upon their pocketbook issues. Recall that West Virginia was once one of the bluest states in the nation due to the support of coal mining labor unions.
The road infrastructure is not as good as elsewhere, same with the internet infrastructure. And the terrain is hilly, so you cannot build the same large manufacturing infrastructure as elsewhere. So there are hurdles.
But issues with the second amendment (hunting is popular there), if not the declining use of coal have flipped the state to red. If you want it to be blue, you must find an alternative to coal, if not several alternatives.
Today there is a lot of interest in natural gas and related industries, including natural gas storage….but it needs a more diversified portfolio.
WV is the test case. If they succeed in a world with more renewables, the transition will happen.
I don’t think that’s correct. Trump’s Russian and Cambridge Analytica fake social media posts convinced them Clinton was against them, when it wasn’t true. Like yesterday, another instance of Trump cheating to steal states.
I think we will just have to disagree on this one.
Clinton had a plan for Appalachia that wasn’t really vetted by Appalachia. And she didn’t hit the trail hard to deliver it. It did not replace the coal economy with something that delivered better paychecks. That was true regardless of what anyone put up on the ole interweb.
Solve the kitchen table issues, you’ll do a better job in the election regardless of the opponent. Have the better ground game, you will do a better job in the election. More people will be motivated to go to the polls.
In hindsight, Hillary’s campaign assumed just being the un-Trump was enough. It was not last time.
Speaking of desk top issues Doc, here is something that could replace dirty coal, and dirty oil and more importantly, dirty dangerous nuke waste. So let’s get down to down and dirty on this. We shall call this “cold fusion”. Booyah!
” A desktop-sized nuclear reactor that generates energy without radioactivity – it sounds too good to be true. Indeed, the discovery of a novel form of nuclear energy called “cold fusion,” proclaimed in 1989 by the chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, has long been dismissed by the mainstream scientific community as a case of faulty measurement or even self-delusion.
Some scientists disagreed, however, finding more and more evidence for radioactivity-free nuclear energy generation occurring under the sorts of conditions Fleischmann and Pons had created: in crystalline materials infused with large quantities of hydrogen or its non-radioactive isotope deuterium.”
This will give you and your students something to work on doc.
Of course in Switzerland they’re creating antimatter with mind boggling energy potential. 😲 It will be a while before that’s mastered however. Many years. Many, many years.
No Doc. “you put these two together — an intensely hostile and dishonest conservative movement combing every word and act for anything that can be distorted, plus a mainstream press endlessly credulous toward each new faux scandal — and then add, in 2015, an intensely hostile and only moderately more informed Bernie Sanders coalition feeding in their own faux scandals from the left, you have, to put it mildly, a inclement information environment for Clinton.”
Did you vote for trump and the gop so you can’t admit this truth? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/15/16306158/hillary-clinton-hall-of-mirrors
Ms. leslie, you realize that you’re replying to Dr. McT’s bloggings from half-a-year ago. Nobody has seen Dr. McT for months, maybe weeks, and grudznick, for one, fears perhaps the covid bugs got him. Or perhaps he’s just been busy inventing some real serious batteries so the impractical greenie power sources can actually be efficient.
Distract much? NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL INFRASTRUCTURE ENABLING (Wy, Nd too, not just Doc’s blame HRC for “hating” coalminers.) stop wasting peoples time with trolling:(
You have plenty of time on your hands to read 6 month old bloggings. You welcome my attention. I’m the best looking and most loved Conservative with Common Sense on this blog for 5 years running, as voted by your peers.
Well, I exaggerate about the best looking part, quite a bit.
Kettle black your posting habits.
https://mobile.twitter.com/steve_vladeck
Steve Vladeck
@steve_vladeck
The Justice Department just filed another application for emergency relief with #SCOTUS—its 29th in just over three years.
Trump moves to bring in his republican scotus majority to enable keystone fossil fuel infrsstructure. Global warming. One of two main election, (and 2nd impeachment) issues! Bastard