It will get shipped by rail instead, so thats good for the railroads. I don’t want to make this politcal but from a practical side the oil pipeline was way way oversold, it was pitched as the greatest job creator since the Transcon, but in reality it only benefitted the owner, and in the short term the builder, because piplelines once built are low low tech and only require a handful of people to operate and maintain, so all the ballyhooing about job creation was a red herring. Anyway, good for the railroads.
Asside from job creation, what about the cost effectivness of oil by pipe versus oil by rail. Surely this was decided by the hard economic facts and not just ballyhooing.
I didn’t see any of the allegedly offending political or personal posts. But over time, there has been an intolerance on here (bias?) against any deviation from an unregulated economic system, as though the latter were some divinely revealed, absolute truth. If moderation were more open, they would also say economics is another strengst verboten topic.
And I did not take it as an insult, I found it mildly humorous in fact.
The thread seemed pretty tame to me, which surprised me after I left for several hours only to come back and find it had gone MIA. Inspiring me to wonder if the climate had heated up after I departed.
Crude via pipeline only travels at 8 mph …extending transit time considerably, and has to be temperature maintained in order to flow.
You also forgot that the entire length of the pipeline has to be filled with material before any of it starts to be delivered – Midland Mike and others can comment on how much.
On the other hand, the pipeline can currently be constructed with very effective nanoinsulation, the pumping power requirements can be quite small (and of course there is no effective ‘tare weight’ to be carried or empty cars to be returned) and it is relatively easy to ‘slug’ different (compatible) liquids in a pipeline separated by some pig arrangement. I had thought the relative operating economy of pipeline over rail transport to have been decided in the 19th Century and only more strongly demonstrated since then – where you have dedicated unidirectional flow at continuous high rate, sufficient to fill capacity at ‘best’ flow rate, even net of construction cost the pipeline will be superior. If for some reason economical throughput needs to be greater, use multiple lines; I suspect the cost-effective refining capacity is more a critical-path restriction than line throughput. Remember that “8mph” is continuous, whereas… so far… nobody is running monster trains of 8 miles or more of oil cars, separated by draft gear, requiring individual tank connections to charge and discharge.
The other ‘ringer’ here is that there’s likely some diluent used to make the crude in question liquid enough to flow in a cost-effective pipeline structure, and presumably there is some infrastructure to deliver that to the pipeline ‘head’ and then use it gainfully at the destination refinery. To me it would make little if any sense to ‘recycle’ the diluent either by pipeline or train.
When it comes to hydrocarbon type such as heavy crude. Rail is only competitve when its undiluted. Rail cost increase substanially with diluted (dilbit) heavy crude. Field production also plays a role. High production fields favor pipeline due to cost. The cost to transport crude is currently in the 5 dollar/barrel range. Rail is about double that.
That is my assumption, that is that shipping by pipe would be the most cost effective. My comment above was in response to this comment:
Posted by vsmith on Monday, June 14, 2021 12:41 PM
It will get shipped by rail instead, so thats good for the railroads. I don’t want to make this politcal but from a practical side the oil pipeline was way way oversold, it was pitched as the greatest job creator since the Transcon, but in reality it only benefitted the owner, and in the short term the builder, because piplelines once built are low low tech and only require a handful of people to operate and maintain, so all the ballyhooing about job creation was a red herring. Anyway, good for the railroads.
This is my comment to the co
And don’t forget that in 20 years when most cars are electric, who will be willing to pay the cost of dismantling a disused pipeline? At least with rail you can use the rail bed one last time as you dismantle it. [C):-)]
I think pipelines are on thin ice as far as public policy goes. For oil by rail, the ice is even thinner. Most people believe that oil by rail is less safe than oil by pipelines. Therefore, one more big oil train disaster could lead to a national ban on oil by rail.
After the bitter lesson of Lac Megantic, the oil by rail industry was facing calls for a safer practice. An ECP brake mandate was prepared, but the industry stopped it by offering to make tank cars more crashworthy, thus solving the safety problem of derailments. But gradually the news leaked out that the stronger tank cars were only stronger at very low speeds such as maybe 10-20 mph. They made no difference at road speeds typical of oil trains.
I expect what will result will be fuel prices rising so high that it self-rations and greatly reduces consumption. Where that leads, I don’t know. Can we be a society that simply does not travel?
Elon Musk knows. and so do we. Presumably we’ll get the 21st-Century counterpart to Insull to figure out how to build the electric supply infrastructure to make that alternative as pervasive as gasoline supply currently is – alternatively, there is blue hydrogen with sequestration.
The breakeven for syndiesel from renewable sources was a market cost of about $2.33 in the 1970s, and very little in the underlying technology has changed. The supply architecture for liquid hydrocarbon fuels has been silently and demonstrably ‘safe’ in the eyes of the public for many decades; only the lack of an effective alcohol that is 'pipeline-capable (e.g. butanol) has kept the ethanol trains running.
Fuel and its transport are economic, not practicable, concerns.
There are ways to implement an ECP conversion effectively within a reasonable period. They hinge in part on easy control conversion in equipment as designed, and in part on the ability of the equipment to do BITE whether actively running as ECP or not. I think it is ECP as unfounded-mandate a la PTC that produces much of the nominal resistance to the idea.
In my opinion the ‘big oil train disaster’ was solved, and rather effectively, by the degassing requirement – if there is an explosive component to undiluted bitumen in tank trains, someone will have to point it out to me; the question then becoming what transportation-safe diluents would satisfy the economic criteria I mentioned earlier.
Where’s all that electricity to run those cars going to come from?
It was once suggested (more jokingly than anything else) that there were two pipelines running into some city - one “high test” and one “regular.”
The public doesn’t realize how many pipelines there are currently operating. Odds are they are driving around with fuel delivered to their area via pipeline. All natural gas arrives via pipeline.
During my last visit to Michigan, my bike ride along a popular trail was cut short by a major pipeline replacement project. As far as I know, there was no public discussion of the project.
I am not referring to public opinion putting pipelines on thin ice. I am referring to regulatory policy of the public sector doing that.
Indeed - but the installation and maintenance of pipelines continues. Unless there’s a political reason not to do so.
The previous thread on this topic was deleted because oil pipelines are not trains. You might make the argument that the cancellation of an oil pipeline will affect oil shipping via train, but in the previous thread, nobody was talking about that. They were talking only about the pipeline.
If you want to discuss how train traffic is affected by this pipeline cancellation, feel free. If you just want to talk about pipelines, that remains off-topic, and off-topic threads get deleted.
So, a social benefit of oil by rail, is that the right of way is not constrained to a single commodity and can be utilized to transport a broader range of products…affording a larger base to defray costs.
I see the point of this interruption – the last few posts are turning into the very sort of discussion that is ‘rail-free’.
But most of the current discussion in the thread explicitly concerns the differences between shipping oil by rail and pipeline. Any removal of that discussion is unwarranted micromoderation and WILL be complained about.
Incidentally, thanks for the selective redaction of posts in certain recent threads. That would be the model I’d like to see followed in threads that drift away from ‘permissible’ context…
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