This is what innovation looks like.
It will take some time to totally transition from oil. In the mean time minimizing health and safety concerns during transportation is essential. And reusing coal cars is a great repurposing of existing assets.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bitumen-balls-pellets-pipelines-rail-train-transport-energy-alberta-technology-1.4277320
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We can't afford any more of this. EROEI of tar sands oil is truly the bottom of the barrel and we do have better options out there.
ReplyDeleteThere are renewables but the shifts won't happen over night. It will take time to get existing equipment to end of life.
ReplyDeleteIt might take time, but this sort of "investment" represents the worst kind of foot-dragging.
ReplyDeleteExcept for the fact that burning these things isn't going to be clean. You still get the carbon, and you still get the air pollution.
ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate fact is that pipeline leaks are actually a minor problem compared to burning the oil when it comes out of the end.
G Kochanski They're only minor problems if you don't actually live where one happens.
ReplyDeleteIf a train load of these derails, it's a much easier cleanup than a pipeline leak hitting a water source. Sure, renewable energy would be great, nuclear fusion too, if it were realistic. But we're not there yet. We're going to keep burning oil until we run out. If we can make things a bit safer in the meantime, why not?
ReplyDeleteI'd love to go to an electric vehicle. Problem is, if I have to drive 5,000km (like I did last week), there is no electric option to let me do that in remotely the same time as petroleum can. When electric charging is as available as gas stations - and refueling gets to be even twice the time to fill a tank - it will be a different story. Especially in Canada, where we have vast expanses of literally NOTHING. This is one of those chicken/egg problems. Nobody who does lengthy travel will switch until the infrastructure is there. Nobody will build the infrastructure until the demand is there. But the infrastructure has to come first. Same issue with hydrogen fuel cells.
Sure. But remember that 99.99% of the oil in a pipeline makes it to the end, where it is burned, and where people breathe the fumes. Spills are bad, but relatively small. Even big spills are relatively small compared to the total amount flowing.
ReplyDeleteSo you'd prefer to see more events like the Exxon Valdez spill because they're localized and 'relatively small' than see that oil burned? I just can't get behind that train of thought. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteNo, I wasn't saying that.
ReplyDeleteI was saying that if you compare the damage from burning the 10,000,000 barrels of oil that flows through a typical pipeline, it's larger than the damage from the 1,000 barrels that leak.
Specifically, in 2014, sixteen billion (16,200,000) barrels of petroleum liquids flowered through US pipelines. That's a lot! About 20,000 barrels are spilled from pipelines in a typical year. While that's still far too much, it's quite small compared to the total amount transported.
The clean up effort for the Exxon Valdez had a bigger carbon footprint than the spill, by, iirc, a factor of 10s at least.
ReplyDeleteA spill that size happens so rarely, and is such a miniscule amount of petroleum compared to how much is consumed, that it's very nearly completely irrelevant.