Tweet reported from the bastion of stoner-dumb Mother Jones:
Trains hauling crude oil across North America just keep exploding http://t.co/yiEqe5ntwX pic.twitter.com/PySNv502IZ
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 17, 2015
More info at the NYT here.
BOOMER, W.Va. — A train hauling millions of pounds of crude oil that derailed on Monday was still burning Tuesday night as oil poured from the wreckage. Residents relied on bottled water that was trucked into town after the utility West Virginia American Water, fearing that oil had been dumped into the Kanawha River, closed a treatment plant downstream, in Montgomery, on Monday.
The company reopened the plant on Tuesday afternoon, saying tests had shown “nondetectable levels of the components of crude oil” in the river. Still, aerial photographs appeared to show oil in a nearby creek, and the utility advised its 2,000 customers in the area to boil water before using it.
STOP THE PIPELINE WE DON'T NEED IT!!! (...and my CSX stock is at 5 year highs!!!!)
10 comments:
SOP for Dems. Block the pipeline, wait for the explosion and dead people then suggest that oil is too dangerous and try to prosecute everyone for negligence to cover the tracks. And then stand on ideology and say that we shouldn't be using oil at all and should instead install a solar panel on our car roof.
Finance people will recognize the pattern of behavior. They were called Banksters. Maybe these are railsters, oilsters, buffetsters. No.. hmm, Demo-nsters sounds like a good bet to me.
The railways could upgrade the oil tanker cars, which are built to an outdated and inferior safety standard. But that would cost money.
SOP for Dems. Block the pipeline, wait for the explosion and dead people then suggest that oil is too dangerous and try to prosecute everyone for negligence to cover the tracks. And then stand on ideology and say that we shouldn't be using oil at all and should instead install a solar panel on our car roof.
Not a bad strategy to help get the country off its oil addiction (which even W admitted).
People apparently are not waking up to the health degradation of carbon-based pollution, so some more pressing strategy seems to be required.
I got it in 1973 when I was walking down a street in Washington DC and one of the bussed just about gassed me. I moved to the country and haven't spent much time in pollution-ridden places since.
The railways could upgrade the oil tanker cars, which are built to an outdated and inferior safety standard. But that would cost money.
There's "not in my backyard" opposition to this too. Same with transporting nuclear waste by rail.
http://priceofoil.org/2014/05/28/runaway-train-reckless-expansion-crude-rail-north-america/
Today there are 188 terminals in Canada and the United States actively loading and unloading crude oil onto and off of trains. At least 33 of these terminals are expanding their capacity to handle more crude. An additional 51 new terminals are under construction or planned.
Over 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil were shipped on U.S. railroads in 2013, a 70-fold increase from 2005. Including Canada, total North American crude-by-rail shipments are currently around one million bpd.
However, crude-by-rail loading capacity is already at 3.5 million bpd, which is 3.5 times the current traffic level. By 2016 capacity could grow to over 5.1 million bpd.
So much for NIMBY.
This train was using the newer approved oil tank cars, yet they still failed. Safety standards need to be upped some more.
The solar panel on the roof of a car doesn't work, not because it isn't a good idea, it would be a wonderful idea. The physics simply can't work. A simple light-weight economy car that meets US safety standards consumes a minimum of around 300 Watt hours per mile (for a very, very light weight car).
While the earth only receives from the sun, depending on your local latitude and weather, elevation in the US, somewhere between 1300 and 2000 kWhs/m2 per year. So in theory, under perfectly efficient conditions, a rooftop solar panel could capture a theoretical ~1500 kwh * 1000 kw/w / 352 days in a year ~4500 wh of power per day from the sun. The wrinkle comes in that only a fraction of the incident radiation from the sun can be converted to electricity so the most efficient solar panel produced have come close to 50% in a lab. In reality on a car you can't maintain perfect angles and stay out of shade and other things so you are unlikely to even get anywhere close to these laboratory numbers. A typical rooftop solar model usually gets maybe ~20% efficiency in good conditions and a car isn't as good as a roof. That would give a range of about miles 20% * 4500wh/d / 300 wh/m ~ 3 miles/day. And that assumes you can leave the car parked in the perfect sun and not drive it during daylight hours. Battery charging loses energy we haven't even added in. Reality is probably closer to under 1 mile per day.
The bottom line is that the amount of energy that flows from the sun to an area the size of a car roof isn't enough to power a vehicle for a distance people expect of their vehicle even assuming nearly perfect efficiency of all the components (Solar panel, motors, tires etc). Periodically car companies, like Toyota have included roof solar panels, but they only control power windows or ventilation fans or maybe keep the battery topped up. To move a car, takes ALOT of energy. Whether the energy is stored in batteries, hydrogen, or carbon additional energy has to come from somewhere. To power a car, you'd need a much larger solar array on the roof or a wind turbine or something that can capture more energy from the environment. For larger and heavier vehicles, like trains, boats, airplanes, and trucks, that consume most of the fuel in the world, they really need higher energy density fuels. The people who study these things and make long term decisions on investment that look beyond the end of oil have been pushing for biofuels to fill that need, while electric makes good sense for light vehicles and some intercity transportation especially as batteries are about to improve multiples over the dangerous toxic lithium polymer used in the first generation electrics like Tesla to new cleaner, more efficient and powerful models in the next year or two. I've heard GM is slated to be one of the first.
I actually agree with the Obama admin and am against hydrogen fuels because hydrogen is usually made (inefficiently) from fossil fuels, electricity or solar panels that could make better use of the energy directly. And a large portion of hydrogen that leaks into the atmosphere is lost forever into space. If all Humans were using hydrogen on a large scale, the consequences for life on earth could be really, awful. Oceans could be lost, atmosphere oxygen/carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen levels would be thrown off balance. Not a few parts per billion like with carbon "global warming", but massive earth altering problems. Additionally when hydrogen gas leaks up into the upper atmosphere, it goes through the ozone layer and destroys ozone turning it into water. It's bad news and the hydrogen genie should never be let out of the bottle. In theory, burning hydrogen and oxygen sounds good but the reality is risky and messy on a large scale. It's why the option is usually dropped after study.
Ryan, sometimes /sarcasm can save us work.
What are your thoughts on this article (and similar ones):
http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
Biodielsel is simply dumb physics gone real, it cannot be a serious alternative to oil either, ever (and less so with an expanding world population).
Just for the same reason we should eventually cut down meat consumption, it's abysmal efficiency of soil and sun resources.
The problem of solar is that it still has a very low EROI compared to carbon.
You know, all these fancy solar panels are actually made with resources and distributed with the logistic chain powered by the black gold. As long as we do not get something with a similar EROI some sort of global or regional down-shifting would be necessary if we stopped using oil (or it as it gets more expensive). So far only wind is coming close and being really scalable (tidal, geo and hydraulic all got the potential but how scalable they are... well with applied MMT we could find).
The technology is improving with solar but not fast enough. OFC the problem of vectors and logistics is a different type of problem.
It's pretty much the same with every energy source including the scam of heavily subsidized and externalized nuclear energy.
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