Update: It turns out the risk assessment on which I’ve based my thinking leaves out pump stations, opening an important question about the legitimacy of the method that produced the numbers I’ve cited below and on many other occasions. It also turns out that risk from pump stations is not negligible when trying to put together a reasonable estimate of per-mile spill volume and frequency. If I find out what this risk looks like when pump stations are included, I’ll write another post on this topic. Until then: limiting the number of pump stations is obviously a good idea, and I think that strengthens the “accomplish the goals with the shortest possible route” position.
Enterprise Products Partners LP and Energy Transfer Partners LP said Tuesday they are forming a joint venture to build a 400,000-barrel-a-day oil pipeline from Cushing—a major U.S. trading and storage hub for crude oil—to Houston, near the heart of the U.S. refining industry.
From the first I became aware of it, my concern has been the fact that it is impossible to engineer a pipeline that does not leak and that while TransCanada’s hoped-for per-mile leak rates on some completed parts of Keystone actually look pretty dang good compared to US averages, they look awful compared to the “no change” alternative State is considering for Keystone XL:
Overall, the likelihood of a leak greater than 50 barrels anywhere along the pipeline is estimated to be about 0.14 per year, or once every 7 years. The leak volume per mile for Keystone is approximately 0.37 bbl per mile per year. For purposes of comparison, pipelines in the U.S. had a leak frequency of 0.49 bbl per pipeline mile per year during the period 1992 to 2003(OPS, 2006).
My view is that because every mile counts, the best option from both an environmental and an engineering perspective is to choose the shortest possible route, that is, a straight line.
I think something like the Enterprise Products Partners LP and Energy Transfer Partners LP proposal should satisfy those who advocate (1) Albertan tar sands development, (2) free trade and (3) a role for the US to play in helping Canadian oil reach global markets as well as (4) those of us who look at Keystone XL as an unnecessarily huge project. I think TransCanada could have saved itself and everyone else a headache had it been willing to do the Cushing-Houston portion apart from the much-longer section that has angered Nebraskans, but the company has insisted that its voluntary investment in Keystone XL will be all-or-nothing, 2,000 miles or zero miles. The free market has now generated a 450-mile alternative—one that common sense says may carry only about a quarter the environmental cost of Keystone XL.
The Texans who are angry over yielding their land to *any* pipeline will doubtless still be angry, but I have to say, the logic behind eminent domain makes sense to me when it is limited strictly to projects in the national interest. While I think Nebraskans can win the narrow argument over whether the upper section of KXL is in the national interest, I think the necessity of a route through Texas is much harder to dispute. Obviously, I’d prefer an alternative that does not invoke eminent domain at all, but if it is going to be invoked, it should be invoked in the most limited and principled way possible.
I accepted a job offer from the Idaho County Free Press today, and I have to say I’m excited about it. Leaving Denver friends and family behind is a hard choice, but living in Grangeville will be an adventure. I’ll definitely be writing more about this once I make the move, but will probably hold off posting until I have have a bunch of photos of my own to add.
[Note: I'll be writing a little more often on sports in days ahead, both here and at ybrsports.net, which is under construction.]
With a loss to the Dallas Stars on Thursday, the Colorado Avalanche assured themselves of finishing with no more than 31 wins—one fewer than the low water mark set in 2008-’09. The Avs were trailing Dallas 2-1 at the time of writing and, mercifully, the season will end Sunday afternoon against Edmonton.
Thinking back on the season as a whole, I’d imagined Colorado picking up about where they left off in 2010 but the truth is that this Avalanche team at no point matched the overachieving bunch that vaulted into the playoffs before falling in the first round. I’d forgotten that in October 2009 an oh-so-similar group of players won ten games and scored three or more in every win. As well as they played that year, they won only three games when scoring two or less. With two games left in 2011, the Avs have scored three or more in under half their games, in under a third since Jan. 1. Since beating Vancouver 4-3 in overtime on January 18, Colorado has struggled to keep its scoring average above two goals per game—this from a team that simply cannot win with defense and was, at one point, among the highest scoring in all of hockey.
After sustaining a freak knee injury in the warm-ups of a game he was slated to be the backup in, “Andy” just hasn’t been the same. His 3.21 goals against average is ranked 43rd in the league, and his barely average .900 save percentage is ranked 35th.
Anyone with eyes could see how bad defensively the Avs were well before that, and what difference goalie play makes in offensive output is a mystery to me. Amid a withering losing streak in February, Anderson was shipped to Ottawa.
Injuries do not fully explain the mid-winter swoon. To be sure, the Avs were stung, particularly by the losses of Tomas Fleischmann, who went out with a blood issue in January, and Peter Mueller, who missed the entire season after a preseason concussion. The count of lost man-games did peak in December, and there’s a case to be made that Milan Hejduk’s early-season resurgence was curtailed by a groin injury. In the first 21 games, Hejduk scored 11 goals. In the 52 since, he’s scored 10. But even before the injury, when Hejduk scored the Avs were just 4-5. By contrast, Chris Stewart missed the entire month of December—but the Avs were 6-2 when he scored and 11-5 when he had at least a point.
As big a factor as he was in the early part of the year, the team went 0-4 when Stewart scored in 2011. He was traded to Saint Louis on February 19 and promptly scored two goals in a 9-3 Blues win over Anaheim. (The Blues are 6-4 when he scores.) The Stewart trade came a day after Anderson’s and also included Kevin Shattenkirk to net Erik Johnson, Jay McClement and a first rounder. The deals prompted franchise legend Peter Stastny to say this:
“This young team was ready to challenge, almost, for a Stanley Cup this season. They were so good. All they needed was some more chemistry, and some synergies. Instead, they destroyed the team. I mean, that was a one-way deal. Mr. Armstrong will look like a genius. I don’t know what they were thinking in the Colorado organization. I should not have said this, but I’m so, so mad what they’ve done to this team. They’ve moved the team about two to three years back again.”
The long losingstreaks will be forgotten. Combined with the Fleischmann and Mueller acquisitions, the Johnson trade will do more to define how the Avs 2011 season is remembered than either the Adam Foote retirement or the final Peter Forsberg unretirement. The last two are indeed bitter pills for Avs fans to swallow. Going forward, there will be no more reminders of the 1996 Stanley Cup but those fading sweaters hanging in the rafters. This group of young, energetic scorers—led by an again-resurgent Hejduk—will be on their own in 2012. Collectively, the Avs have been overachievers. Now they’ve endured underachievement. Soon, the full weight of Denver’s hockey hope will fall to these men to carry. Being young wasn’t good enough to fill the seats this year, and if these men are not ready to perform under pressure, the seats may be even emptier come next April.
The one obvious agreement between environmentalists and industry is that there are more anecdotes of possible fracking catastrophes than EID wants to acknowledge in anything more than the blandest Newspeak: the unfortunate (and inevitable) reality of the situation is that the occasional incident will occur. (You’ll notice that EID hasn’t yet made good on its pledge to follow up, but NRDC has updated as recently as February 15. At the time of publication, EID noted 18 incidents; it advised those interested to bookmark the page, but the page appears not to have been updated since May 2010. It currently lists six responses. The NRDC page now lists 33 incidents in 10 states.)
It bugs me that EID didn’t actually bother to update the page it promised to update, but, credit where credit is due.
Now, on EID’s claim to have debunked “speculation on top of conjecture on top of supposition on top of outright fantasy” I have to say it’s hard to take seriously an argument built on slashing and burning its own citations. To wit:
What Christian Science Monitor actually said on February 5, 2009, via EID’s link:
While 50 methane drilling wells and active hydraulic fracturing operations are nearby, a lack of independent monitoring and testing has made it impossible to prove that fracing created pathways for methane to collect in Bounds’s domestic water system.
So then, we have EID purporting to disprove conjecture with…conjecture? Lacking a precautionary principle in this country, I suppose EID can feel pretty secure in its hope that the burden of proof in these matters will never fall on the drillers it represents. But this is not the debunking I’ve been waiting for. This is just one example chosen from EID’s list at random (well, not quite random; being a Coloradoan, I chose the first new one on that part of the list) and it looks like scorched earth and bad logic to me. (The logic of it would be fine and dandy if EID supported a level of independent monitoring and testing appropriate for providing proof in these cases. Apparently, it does not.) So I’m temporarily rescinding all of that “credit where credit is due” until I have time to check out the whole list.
Here’s a bit more from that Christian Science Monitor piece EID linked:
When Lisa Bracken noticed gas bubbling to the surface of Divide Creek, which runs along one side of her 60 acres in western Colorado, she suspected another gas “seep.” It had happened once before, in 2004, after faulty natural-gas drilling in the vicinity contaminated the creek with benzene and methane. … Colorado fined EnCana $371,000 – the largest fine in state history for a drilling-related incident – after finding the company responsible for the 2004 gas seep in Divide Creek. But the state is allowing drilling to continue in the area.
I’d be thrilled to find out hydraulic fracturing is an environmentally sound way for America to meet its energy needs, but if this is the best evidence industry can offer in support of that hope, maybe it should go back to shadowboxing over the causes of blazing tap water with Josh Fox:
A top official with Transocean Ltd. — owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded last year in a fatal accident — is expressing remorse over its claim that 2010 was the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”
1) Agriculture by the numbers is a post by High Country News that explores some of the most recent Census of Agriculture numbers. The numbers date to 2007, but may be useful for grounding wonkish observations like “The 2007 percentage of farms receiving government subsidy payments for Colorado was 31%.” If I were still living in Kansas, I’d be using it to “investigate changes in the size of farms at the … local (county or ZIP code) levels.”
2) Via Andrew Leach comes this interesting exploration of the assumption about oil that underlies so much of our American policy and public discourse. It allowed me to read the first four pages before throwing itself behind a wall, so I feel obligated to get some fair use out of what I think are the most valuable paragraphs:
In 1997, Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser, two political analysts at the Rand Corporation with long records of US government service, estimated that the United States spent “$60 billion a year to protect the import of $30 billion worth of oil that would flow anyway.” A 2006 study by James Murphy, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Mark Delucchi, at the University of California Davis, similarly found that when the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were taken into account, the expenditures ranged anywhere between $47 billion and $98 billion per year. But the amount of oil coming to the United States from the region was worth less than $35 billion per year.
“Why is it that American consumers are bearing a disproportionate cost of having oil flowing to the international marketplace?” said Christopher Preble, head of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. …
The costs to US foreign policy, of course, cannot be calculated in dollars and cents alone, although certainly the cost here has been very high. But it looks even higher when one considers the lost opportunities and squandered chances — what we could be achieving if we weren’t so concerned about a threat that looks increasingly like an illusion.
“If we are going to commit our troops to prevent something from happening, it should be something that would be an existential threat to the United States,” said Auerswald. “Having people wait in line for five days for gas in one part of the US is not an existential threat.”
Your op-ed reads that pipelines are safe. Typically, sure. But you forget to make an important distinction, here. Tar sands oil pipelines are not safe. Canadian pipelines of this sort fail 16 times more per mile due to internal corrosion — 840,000 gallons of tar sands oil spilled into a Michigan river from what I suppose your editorial board would call a “safe” pipeline. TransCanada’s first tar sands pipeline, Keystone I, has leaked seven times in 10 months.
People object to the pipeline for many reasons. Many environmentalists do oppose the project because of its large carbon footprint, but many East Texans oppose the pipeline because of the likelihood of a leak of this heavier-than-water tar sands and the dangers to our water supply. Not to mention that East Texans tend not to be fond of a foreign company treading on our private property rights.
The NYT editorial is hardly unique is tabling the broad arguments over oil sands development in favor of evaluating the Keystone XL pipeline project on its own merits. Even the Washington Post editorial (which is cast in stark contrast to the Times editorial) argued that “there are other objections to the pipeline that have to do with safety and the environmental sensitivity of particular places along the proposed pipeline route. The Obama administration should carefully consider them and adjust the project accordingly, ensuring it’s done responsibly.”
I think the broad case against tar sands development has a lot of merit, but it is certainly not the only cause for concern being leveled at Keystone XL.
BP has asked United States regulators for permission to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, two company officials said on Sunday, creating a delicate situation for the Obama administration as it seeks to balance safety concerns with a desire to increase domestic oil production.
You should know you’ve done it wrong when the mad polemicists behind South Park resort to a three-parter likening your engineering choices to licentious sex acts culminating in the rise and fall of Cthulhu. [1, 2, 3] Of course, you may be able to absolve yourself certain kinds of responsibility even after apologizing, but absolution and hand-washing are poor substitutes for honor. More proof shame is dead—and has been for a while—I guess.
Update: According to Politico, Ken Salazar today said: “There is nothing here with BP that is different from what we will be doing with all the other companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.” This would be a problem if shame were alive, because BP crapped the bed and befouled the Gulf for everyone else including its fellow drillers. That BP still stands on equal footing with everyone else who now wants to use the Gulf’s resources is exactly the problem shame would help solve….you know, if shame were alive.
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