Oil Train Explosion Triggers Evacuation In North Dakota 199
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The LA Times reports that the small town of Casselton, North Dakota dodged a bullet after being partially evacuated when a train carrying crude oil collided with another train, setting off a large fire and explosions. Officials received a report at 2:12 p.m. of a train derailing about a mile west of Casselton, a city of 2,432 people about 20 miles west of Fargo. At some point, another train collided with the derailed train, belonging to the BNSF Railway, carrying more than 100 cars loaded with crude oil. The explosions and fire erupted after cars from a grain train struck some of the oil tank cars. 'A fire ensued, and quickly a number of the cars became engulfed,' said Sgt. Tara Morris of the Cass County Sheriff's Office, adding that firefighters had managed to detach 50 of the 104 cars but had to leave the rest. This was the fourth serious accident involving trains hauling crude in North America this year. In July, an unattended train with 72 tank cars carrying crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale fields rolled downhill and set off a major explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. The accidents have put a spotlight on the growing reliance on rail to move surging oil production from new fields in Texas, North Dakota and Colorado. U.S. railroads are moving 25 times more crude than they did in 2008, often in trains with more than 100 tank cars that each carry 30,000 gallons. Though railroads have sharply improved their safety in recent years, moving oil on tank cars is still only about half as safe as in pipelines, according to Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane University Energy Institute. 'You can make the argument that the pipeline fights have forced the industry to revert to rail that is less safe,' says Smith. One problem is that the trains go through small towns with volunteer fire departments, not well schooled in handling a derailment and explosion. Casselton Mayor Ed McConnell says it is time to 'have a conversation' with federal lawmakers about the dangers of transporting oil by rail. 'There have been numerous derailments in this area,' says McConnell. 'It's almost gotten to the point that it looks like not if we're going to have an accident, it's when.'"
This happened monday (Score:3)
It dominated the news broadcasts at the end of last year.
They said most of the people in that town could return to their homes on th 6pm news on 31 december.
I bet the cold weather was the cause. W've been having January temperatures for most of the last month in the region.
Although at the moment it has warmed up to 245 Kelvin, and not much wind.
(I live about 90 Km SE of Fargo
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I have seen railroads in both the US and in Europe, and even though we in Europe complains that the railroads here aren't up to the standard they run in Japan I would say that many of the railroads in the US are really lagging behind when it comes to capacity, reliability and safety measures.
I don't think that blaming cold weather is a good point - if you have correct safety precautions you would compensate for that.
Re:This happened monday (Score:4, Insightful)
What apparently happened is that a grain train derailed and hit the oil train. Apparently only one of the trains belonged to a major carrier which can afford the latest safety equipment. I suspect that a) the derailing grain train was the one that didn't belong to BNSF, or b) the oil train wasn't supposed to be on that track at the same time as another train was on the other track due to high risk of derailment.
North American railroads are actually quite advanced at doing what they do, which is move ridiculous amounts of freight very long distances very cheaply. Diesel is cheap, electrification is expensive because it means you have to add power equipment of some kind to every mile of track, therefore they don't use electric motive power. Diesel dominance makes electrification even more expensive because your second-hand locomotive market is all diesel. Mechanics all have extensive training on Diesel engines, some of which transfers over to electric, but some doesn't. Any employee you poach from another road because he's got decades of experience you can;t get from a fresh-faced college kid has that experience with diesels. There are virtually no North American vendors selling electric motive power. The fact that government doesn't support railroads anymore means this won't change. It's not like the bond market would actually give a rail executive enough money to electrify all his track, re-train his mechanics, etc. just because he thinks it will pay off in 25 years.
Speed of any kind is expensive. It leads to wear on mechanical parts, which need to be replaced more often. It requires higher grades of track. Accidents (mostly derailments) are worse because you have more momentum at greater speeds; which in turn means your insurance rates go up. And if you're a transportation company in a country that pays jet pilots $20k, still has a postal monopoly that delivers to every house in the country within a week, and also has multiple package companies that pride themselves on doing it tomorrow, there just isn't much demand for fast freight. So instead of investing money in figuring out how to get your locomotives to break 100 MPH, you invest money in reliability at 30 MPH. If your double tracks are only running 150% of the trains of your single tracks you don't invest money in marketing to get them up to capacity, you invest money in increasing your single tracks capacity so that you can tear up the double-track and stop maintaining it.
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Apparently only one of the trains belonged to a major carrier which can afford the latest safety equipment.
There you go.... the government should ban operation of any train without the latest safety equipment.
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I have seen railroads in both the US and in Europe ... many of the railroads in the US are really lagging behind when it comes to capacity, reliability and safety measures.
It's true that passenger rail service is much better in Europe, but for freight it's the exact opposite. Many people, European and American, don't realize that because mostly they see passenger trains. For all the integration of passenger train service, there are still compatibility problems between different European countries in freight service. The fancy railways are almost entirely passenger service. How much freight does the TGV carry?
The US moves a much larger percentage of its freight by rail than Eu
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I grew a block and a half from that line that goes through Casselton ND and have lived most of my life within a mile of it, It's one of the main lines from Chicago to Seattle and there's trains about every 20 minutes. There is a derailment around Casselton about every 15 years or so (usually there's no giant fireballs).
I think this story gets attention from the right who want to criticize the environmentalists delaying the XL pipeline expansion. Other criticisms fall on Warren Buffet/Berkshire Hathaway who
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I live about 90 Km SE of Fargo
Why?
Where was the dispatcher? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ordinarily tracks next to a derailed train are closed, being considered unsafe until a track inspector or officer OKs it's use.
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According to the article only one of the trains belonged to BNSF.
I would not be surprised to find out that the other train belonged to one of the short lines that takes over routes that big lines can't afford to run profitably. They manage to pull it off by running with decades-old equipment, which means that the safety equipment is decades-old, and the engineer (who is being paid less then he'd make at the big line) is expected to be so good he makes up for that. That's pretty much what happened with that
This is old news... they're already back at home (Score:2)
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Slashdot frequently has a day or so lag between interesting things happening and them being posted.
Can't Plan For What You Don't Know (Score:4, Interesting)
More importantly, the towns through which these trains travel aren't told what's being shipped through them. Even after Lac Megantic the Canadian government is doing everything possible to allow rail companies to not provide prior details of dangerous cargo being shipped by rail.
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The population of Casselton, ND is 2500.
In a town that size, who, exactly, is going to be keeping track of what runs on the tracks through town? I would wager that the entire fire department is a volunteer operation.
There's some chance that the chief is a full-time employee (Devil's Lake, where my wife is from, has a paid chief and a couple of salaried employees, but they're also a town of nearly 8,000 people), but I would bet they are all-volunteer and rely on nearby Fargo for anything beyond a car fire o
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If I had to guess, I'd assume that the actual town of Casselton has two employees. A full-time cop, and a part-time cop for when the full-time guy is on vacation. So they probably don't even have a guy who could read all the reports from the rail companies about every train.
What they probably actually want is for their volunteer fire Chief to be able to read the report when something goes wrong. Then he'll know what his guys are getting into, and he knows if he should call the Governor for reinforcements.
I
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Yes, the Smallville-Rural Volunteer Fire Company might not be equipped to deal with dozens of derailed crude tank cars, but that doesn't mean that they can get off
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Firstly, to be fair to the train companies - a lot of early towns were set up along rail
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Wacko environmentalists made it virtually impossible to trim trees and/or cut them down in their advanced age and/or deceased state
That's an interesting twist on it. I would have said it was budget cutters who decimated the urban forestry budget. The trees on private land were in much better shape than the ones on public land.
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Don't disturb his paranoid fantasies about civilization being destroyed by "wacko environmentalists". Next he may start talking about "enviro-terrorists". After that, Sasquatch. The entertainment is priceless.
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Sure, and they could charge tolls to fix the potholes in the streets, too.
Re: Can't Plan For What You Don't Know (Score:2)
Of course, their over-reliance on above ground power lines that can be knocked over by trees in the first place couldn't be to blame, could it?
Trees don't take out high tension power lines, trees take out neighborhood and individual power feeds to buildings...
Re:Can't Plan For What You Don't Know (Score:4, Informative)
The cars are labelled and in most cases the fire departments can quickly determine the range of product that might be inside and should be able to deal with it.
In the case of the Lac Megantic accident, the cars were labelled to be less volatile than they really were. If they had been correctly labelled, maybe someone would have objected to leaving the train unmanned at the top of a hill on the main line overnight.
Re:Can't Plan For What You Don't Know (Score:4, Insightful)
(securely, of course, because we wouldn't want everyone to know what is moving where)
Wait...why? This is a commercial shipment. It's not the old west where we have regular train robberies. There's no reason why the DOT hazard designation and classes can't be accessible. Except, of course, the people who go cray when you try and ship tankers of hazardous materials through their back yards. Best not to let them know or they might make a stink about it.
I'm sending in more trains! (Score:3)
At some point, another train collided with the derailed train
I'm sending in more trains! [youtube.com]
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zr3H8inpNw [youtube.com]
This one, at least, still has the right words.
Major evacuation plans underway (Score:2)
Besides which, the South Dakota village hall doesn't have enough space to hold them all.
How volatile is crude oil? (Score:2)
Apparently quite when you run into it with a train, but for some reason I would have thought that crude oil was ultimately flammable with high enough ignition temperatures or in the presence of an accelerant capable of burning alongside it but generally difficult to ignite.
I would think that it would be hard to get it to ignite, especially in the winter when the temperature of the crude would be pretty close to the ambient air temperature. The low temperature for three days prior to the accident in nearby
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Crude such as North Sea Brent has a high API gravity & viscosity, is considered sweet (low sulphur) and is more flammable.
Crude from the Alberta tar sands (bitumen) is low in API gravity, worth less commercially, is sour (more sulphur), and way less flammable.
Two things... (Score:2)
Well, duh. Refusing to build pipelines hasn't caused oil production to be capped, the increased supply has simply found alternative paths to market that are
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Exactly - the problem isn't that the firemen aren't prepared or that pipelines aren't available - it's that the train companies are so unbelievably lax in their safety requirements and testing that they cause catastrophes when their "usual and customary" business practices of crashing on a regular basis with non-volatiles gets used for volatile shipments. Besides, pipelines take a long time to actually build and have collateral damage which is not as immediately spectacular as a train explosion, so it's not
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when their "usual and customary" business practices of crashing on a regular basis with non-volatiles gets used for volatile shipments.
Yes.... you do realize the railroads carry a lot of "non-volatile" hazardous industrial chemicals, many that are highly flammable or explosive -- and many that are likely to be released in a derailment -- and in sufficient quantities to cause immediate threat of death upon inhalation for large populations --- materials, such as Chlorine gas, Anhydrous Ammonia, Hyd
A plethora of conspiracy fodder (Score:2)
So let's see here. One could posit that the tracks or the rolling stock were intentionally damaged to cause the derailment because the environmentalists are hell bent on casting a dark shadow on fossil fuels. One could also posit that the derailment was created by people who are are trying to encourage the completion of the Keystone pipeline. One could also look to see if anyone shorted BNSF stock. One could also posit that sh*t happens no matter who is doing what even though there is plenty of regulati
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So let's see here. One could posit that the tracks or the rolling stock were intentionally damaged to cause the derailment because the environmentalists are hell bent on casting a dark shadow on fossil fuels.
This is unlikely.... the tracks are fairly robust, and attempts to damage them would likely be detected and set off alarms and alert the railroad security patrols, resulting in the perpetrator being quickly apprehended, and tossed in jail with the felony charge of trespassing on railroad prope
Railroads run cheap (Score:2)
Loud Buzzer! No Points. (Score:2)
A tanker did not just "roll downhill"!!!
From the Bakken offices in ND to Lac-Megantic QC is 1,939 miles!
Pretty big fucking hill.
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody have statistics on ton-miles transported per accident rate for petroleum pipelines vs railroad tank cars?
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:5, Insightful)
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The railroads did exactly that in many cases when they were first laid down.
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:5, Informative)
Because pipes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_River#2011_oil_spill
are always - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_River_oil_spill
safe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Mayflower_oil_spill
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:4, Insightful)
We have 47 people exploded and vaporized thanks to the last oil train explosion in Quebec. I don't see that happening in the pipeline oil spills you mentioned. Are there any that have resulted in mass deaths yet?
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. [wikipedia.org]
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I don't think that Bellingham, WA is that economically disadvantaged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Pipeline_explosion [wikipedia.org]
Three people died in the accident. The first was Liam Wood, 18, who was fly fishing in the creek. He succumbed to the fumes, fell unconscious into the creek and drowned, dying before the explosion.[6] Two children, Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas, both 10, were playing near the creek confluence during the explosion. Both survived the blast, but died the next day in the hospital.
Olympic
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:4, Insightful)
Pipelines by their nature are run through low population areas, the land is cheaper and fewer people to complain about. Trains by their nature run through high population areas. Rail carries a variety of cargo, cargo that people need. If the rail does not stop at as many population centers as possible that rail does not make as much money. Pipeline on the other hand only needs to serve two customers, the supplier and the consumer, so the path can avoid the population.
I've seen some spectacular failures of pipelines before, some notable ones were from poor site choices. One I recall is from a rocket fuel plant built on top of a large natural gas pipeline. That just had "fail" written all over it.
The argument isn't if transporting oil is safe, it isn't. Nothing is "safe", even hiding under the bed from the evil world contains the risk of getting killed from a meteor strike. The argument is if the pipeline would have been safer than transport by rail. There is little evidence that the train is safer.
If you want to argue about the safety of oil transport then I'll have that argument. I'd then demonstrate the statistical safety, low cost, and minimal carbon output of nuclear power.
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the late 70's I used to work for the only company in Canada that manufactured very large ball valves for pipelines. We are talking in excess of 10 ton's with 42" flanges. We supplied Trans Canada Pipelines, Foothills, etc. I designed the pressure testing rig and tank for these very large units.
Know what the biggest problem was/is with pipelines? Materials used in manufacturing.
"Sour" gas vs "Sweet" gas valves (and the pipeline itself) are made of completely different materials. An "O" ring housing for example may be made from Titanium for a corrosive sour gas and Stainless Steel for sweet non corrosive gas.
More than once, on smaller valves (gate or ball, I forget now) we had to investigate why a valve failed and it was always the incorrect material. Some worker swapped a part behind QC's back thinking "no big deal, they look the same".
Perhaps traceability and manufacturing has improved (I would hope so) by now though.
On an interesting side note, the big guy's were tested at 20,000kpa, or about 2900psi. The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half.
Nothing is perfectly safe, but I do think a pipeline is "safer" than rail transport.
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Given your experience, I actually had a question about the pipelines. It would seem most of the failures are caused by a combination of pressure and time. Assuming that you have to operate on a sliding scale of perfect safety for infinite cost and reasonable safety for much lower cost*, is there a way to build pipelines with specific failure points such that you avoid failures at costly points? Something like a fuse in an electrical circuit; you certainly don't want it to blow, but it's there to blow so tha
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" The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half."
An old way to check for live steam leaks is to hang a rag from a broomstick. The steam is quite capable of cutting as well as burning the rag.
3000 psi oil and hydraulic leaks can certainly cause injury by injecting oil into flesh and sometimes cutting. Hydraulic and diesel (injector lines are high pressure) mechanics have to be
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" The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half."
Are these high pressures, truly necessary for oil pipelines, OR are they simply used to maximize number of gallons that can be transmitted per hour?
It seems if safety were the priority, there would be a legal pressure limit of 5 to 10 PSI for the pipeline.
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" The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half."
Are these high pressures, truly necessary for oil pipelines, OR are they simply used to maximize number of gallons that can be transmitted per hour?
It seems if safety were the priority, there would be a legal pressure limit of 5 to 10 PSI for the pipeline.
It is clear from the GP post that 2900psi was the test pressure. The operating pressure would be much lower.
If you limited the pipeline to 10 or 15psi you would need a pump every 50 feet.
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Nuclear power has an intrinsic government subsidy that you (and all nuclear advocates) ignore: disaster insurance [wikipedia.org]
Re: Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:2)
Because "spill" = "explosion"?
Pipeline deaths seem to occur, as best I can remember, when natural gas pipelines explode, not when crude oil is spilt - oil spills result in clean up operations, natural gas explosions result in numerous corpse-less funerals... See the difference?
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Given the choice of some oil spilled, and 50 people dead due to the explosion caused in a train derailment ---- I would pick the oil spilled any day.
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That would be a much more convincing argument if there were any fatalities at four of the five rail accidents you mentioned.
If your definition of "dangerous" is killing people all you've got against rail pipelines is one accident, and since there's only one of it you can't prove it wasn't a freak accident.
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I know somebody whose response to everything is to blame it on a conspiracy to murder people by denying them cheap energy is not terribly rational, but I'll humor you because I'm bored.
I'm one of the people who opposed the pipeline. If I opposed cheap energy my response to this wouldn't be "shit, some asshole fucked up, that sucks, I wonder which company the asshole worked for," it would be "It is impossible to transport oil by rail safely, therefore Obama should immediately ban all crude oil shipments from
Re:Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:4, Interesting)
Problem with solar is that its hard to run cars on it. Fix that, and we're walking in tall cotton. As much as you might like, we just can't leave this stuff in the ground. Yeah, cheap oil is possible, its called fracking. We're accessing billions of barrels in N. Dakota alone, and there's more in lots of other places. Too many of those places are on gov't land, which "O" is obstructing from being explored / exploited. We need to do everything we can to make oil production cheap, and rely on industry to research cheaper ways to make solar into electricity, and run cars on electricity. As soon as someone invents the magic battery, the devil will be out for breakfast in terms of building new electrical generating capacity.
Electricity: See if I can work this math again. Chevy Volt gets 35 miles on 7.5 Kwh of electricity, so use that as an efficiency for cars. 4.6 miles per KwH. There are about 3 trillion vehicle miles driven per year in the USA, so that's ( 3 X 10^12) X 4.6 = 13.8 trillion KwH or 13.8 X 10^15 watt-hours. Our largest nuke is in Arizona and has a capacity of 3,875 Mw or 3.875 X 10^9 watts. So, you have to run a plant this size for 13.8 / 3.875 X (10 ^ (15-9)) hours per year to power all the cars in the USA that have the efficiency of a Chevy Volt. That'd be 3.56 X 10 ^ 6 hours per year. Unfortunately, there are only (24 X 365) = 8,760 hours in a year, so you'd need 3.54 / 8.76 X (10 ^ (6 - 3)) = 0.404 X 10 ^ 3 or 404 new nuclear plants the size of the one in Arizona to be built to power these electric cars. But wait, almost all cars are far less efficient than the Chevy Volt in terms of size, weight, and frontal area, and then we need to include trucks. Multiply the need for new, giant nuclear power plants by a factor of 4, ballpark. 1600 new giant nuclear power plants the size of our largest one in Arizona. 32 per state on average. What do you think the chances of that happening are? Probably more likely than being able to afford the construction of enough wind machines and solar farms that produce seriously expensive electricity. The Arizona nuke produces at 6.33 cents per KwH, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station [wikipedia.org]
You can do the math for the wind machines and solar panels to generate that same amount of electricity. Think we'd have any birds left after all the wind machines knock them out of the sky with their whirling blades occupying probably every square foot of the country that has any significant wind? Cost comparison for electrical generation shows Wind and Solar putting up some really ugly numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [wikipedia.org]
So, solve the envirowacko opposition to new nuclear plants, envirowacko opposition to new power lines, the hideous cost of solar and wind energy, and then we can talk about leaving the oil in the ground. But until then, we NEED it - we simply cannot support the size of our population without it. People have to get to work, get back, go to the store and buy things, and yeah, recreation is necessary. Trucks and trains and airplanes have to bring us things. You probably couldn't cut the transportation required by more than a few percent, and doing so would make everyone miserable waiting for buses to arrive and trains to depart and force them to live like sardines in a can in some high-rise apartment complex, which would be miserable enough for me to contemplate suicide. I've got an acre on which I have a really fine ham radio antenna system, with another tower / antenna planned, and not being able to do that hobby, with my other hobbies also requiring lots of transportation (I have 70K miles on my car for 21 months of driving due to my other hobby) and without being able to do them, I'm miserable.
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Problem with solar is that its hard to run cars on it. Fix that, and we're walking in tall cotton.
Done!
Assuming 3 kWh / mi (less efficiency than your number) and driving 12,000 mi year for a consumption of 4,000 kWh / year.
In Phoenix, Arizona (one of the sunniest areas of the USA, 1 kW of solar PV will generate about 1600 kWh / year (data from PVWatts)
In Seattle, Washington (one of the least sunny areas of the USA, 1 kW of solar PV will generate about 1000 kWh / year.
So in Seattle you need about 4 kW of solar PV and in Phoenix you need about 2.5 kW of solar PV. Solar PV is only around $4 / W or less for
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$4 / watt doesn't cover a off grid battery system that would last 20 years. So your not going to charge your car anywhere near the getting 100% of the output of the solar system unless it is connected to that grid all day, so now your only using your car at night? Currently you will need the plant to charge your car at night, then make up for it by day, or maintain 2 battery packs... likely not cheaper than gas if scaled at todays tech to even replace a 1/4 of the ICE cars today, luckily we don't have to
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Getting enough solar PV so that grid storage is required to make use of it is not going to happen overnight.
By the time you get to that point you'll have enough used EV batteries from old EVs to use for static grid storage for load shifting and the cost of solar PV will decline even further. The rest of the time, you'll plug in at work to charge instead of plugging in at home.
Solar PV will never be the sole energy source except in localized areas. It will always be more cost effective to use some other sour
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$4 / watt doesn't cover a off grid battery system that would last 20 years. So your not going to charge your car anywhere near the getting 100% of the output of the solar system unless it is connected to that grid all day, so now your only using your car at night? Currently you will need the plant to charge your car at night, then make up for it by day, or maintain 2 battery packs... likely not cheaper than gas if scaled at todays tech to even replace a 1/4 of the ICE cars today, luckily we don't have to replace at that rate currently.
Most people drive to work, park there all day, then drive home. Maybe they run some errands but it probably sits at home in the garage for at least an hour a day during daylight too. You don't need grid storage for those people, they just charge the car wherever their workplace is. Electric may never be a solution for salespeople / deliverymen / plumbers, but for a lot of people it could work.
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>Getting enough solar PV so that grid storage is required to make use of it is not going to happen overnight.
Well, you did average over 20 years, in order to get the affordability to work out. The level where PV storage saturates the daytime grids needs in the residential neighborhoods will likely occur in 5 to 10 years in Arizona. Electric vehicle charging at night will likely make use of the grid for storage mostly dead before that 20 year payoff period. My guess is we will be having alot more EV ba
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If/when solar becomes big enough so that it overwhelms the grid during the day, like I said earlier, we can easily shift charging to daytime from night. There are a lot of industrial loads that run at night to take advantage of low off-peak rates that I'm sure would prefer to run during the day as well.
Low interest loans are available that let you take advantage of solar with low money up front - you can easily roll the cost into your home loan.
At some point we will have enough solar so that storage is requ
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So fracking produces oil cheaper then the oil sands, and it produces more oil then the oil sands, but it isn't taking off solely because nobody in North Dakota is smart enough to take an 18-wheeler to the Keystone pipeline's start in Alberta? It seems to me that we're getting plenty of oil from ND without building a pipe-line, which makes your insistence that anyone who opposes the pipeline opposes fracking in ND pure BS.
The rest of your post is an excellent example of straw-man construction. I never claim
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we simply cannot support the size of our population without it.
There is an answer for that, the same answer that Mother Nature gives any animal that exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment. We either have to reduce our population, or Ma Nature will do it for us and she's a bitch. We're like deer on an island with no predators, at some point the cheap oil/cheap fertilizer/cheap food/rising population lines are going to converge, and it won't be pretty.
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Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.
I'd be very in
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I'm guessing that, just like three everyday, it was going to travel about 100' from my office desk in Everett, WA. Where it then turns east and travels under downtown. I'm guessing that it's going to either the Cherry Point or Arco refinery.
https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d1611!2d-122.2011388!3d47.9790728!2m1!1e3&fid=7 [google.com]
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Shouldn't run oil by rail or pipeline. Leave it in the ground.
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Keystone XL is a pipeline to haul CANADIAN oil that ran through American enviromentally sensitive areas and over ogalla aquifer which supplies water
to 27% of the irrigated land in the US.
Now if you want to make an argument for a pipeline to haul American oil that doesnt involve danger to aquifers
and enviromentally sensitive lands im all ears.
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Not to mention that the refined products will be exported to other countries. So American land/water is put at risk for the benefit of oil refiners loading their product onto ships destined for overseas sales. But that's not a problem, I guess. When the aquifers are messed up from oil spills and rendered unusable for drinking or irrigation, I suppose we can buy our water and food from China.
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They're already fracking the hell out of the ground below the Ogalla Aquifer, I'm not optimistic about its long-term health already.
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Pipelines aren’t necessarily safe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Qingdao_oil_pipeline_explosion [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Nairobi_pipeline_fire [wikipedia.org]
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-12-17/noida/45294234_1_ntpc-plant-ntpc-employees-pipeline [indiatimes.com]
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Dilbit is corrosive, abrasive, toxic. (Score:2)
If you want to pipe it through my yard,*
fuck you.
I suppose its important to some folks that we continue the quest for global desertification through carbon augmentation, but I can do without that, as well.
* The Enbridge Northern Gateway will run through my yard, so I reiterate, FUCK YOU.
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Thank everyone against green power.
Green power...where you pay Feed In Tariffs, at a rate of anywhere between 38c/kWh to 86c/kWh. And watch as your electricity rates climb through the roof so fast, you'll soon be making the decision as to whether or not you'll be paying rent, electricity, or food on the table. Last news article I saw on everyone's current favorite "green energy" country Germany, 1.3 million people can no longer afford the electricity rates. And here in my home province of Ontario, we're now looking at between 30% and 48%
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So it's ready, it's just more than you're willing to pay. Maybe you should cut back on your energy usage instead?
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Re: Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:2)
The publicly stated alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline is not railroad cars in and out of Canada, it's a purely Canadian pipeline that will run the crude oil to the west coast, where it will go on to tanker ships and be carried over to China.
Will anyone argue that running all that crude oil in oil tankers to China's refineries to be burned in China is better for the GLOBAL environment than running that same crude through a pipeline right to the refinery where our own US EPA controls the emissions of th
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No, ONE of the alternatives to Keystone XL is one (or more) pipelines West (to the coast) or East to the (other) coast...
But realistically given the amount of oil in the ground its not a question of which pipeline but how many and on what schedule. Keystone was promoted as an early contender because of the additional oil in the ground in (for example) North Dakota and because of the existing infra-structure in the southern US (refineries and shipping.)
The net result is that Keystone --XL will be built, basi
Re: Shouldn't have to run oil by rail (Score:2)
The pipeline is safer than rail transport of crude oil - that's kind of important...
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Most of the Keystone Pipeline is already in operation, another portion is being built. The only part currently being blocked is the portion that would bring Alberta Tar Sands product to the Gulf Coast, which is not what this train was carrying anyway. Face it, that portion of the pipeline is a retarded idea anyway, the Canucks should be refining it nearby rather than sending it several thousand kilometers away for refining. The only reason they wanted that portion of the pipeline is because oil company e
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Don't forget the crony capitalist resistance from the railroad to the construction of the pipeline in order to prevent loss of revenue.
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Don't forget the crony capitalist resistance from the railroad to the construction of the pipeline in order to prevent loss of revenue.
Do you know for a fact that this is a serious factor? There's lots of crony capitalism in the US, but I haven't heard of railroads trying to stop pipelines.
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Wow. Talk about a tenuous implication (to put it as politely as possible).
Re: Stupid unnecessary consequences (Score:2)
The real issue with the Keystone XL pipeline is that it crosses an international border, allowing the Federal government to play an over-sized role in the approval process. Were this a truly domestic pipeline, the impacted states would be the decision makers... Once federal land or national borders are crossed, the Feds take over, and it's much easier for the anti-pipeline groups to petition the federal government than a handful of individual states.
Mod parent up! (Score:2)
It seems like Slashdot mods are becoming worse censors by the day, trying to hide any opinion they don't agree with.
I completely disagree with the PP, which is an extreme libertarian PoV. However, it's not a troll or flamebait in any way. I was going to tell him just how wrong he is, but instead find myself complaining about the fact that in order for a non-AC poster to get a -1, he had to have been modded down by at least 2 points.
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I might be wrong, but I think roman_mir has been downmodded so many times he posts at 0 to start with, so it would only take one moderator.
It would have been a waste of electrons anyway, he's of the opinion that absolutely everything on the planet should have a private owner, up to and including the fucking Great Lakes (really). He probably thinks the same about the oceans as well, although I haven't seen him explicitly say that. His solution to any issue that might have to do with the concept of the Co
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It would have been a waste of electrons anyway, he's of the opinion that ...
I think his opinion is, to put it nicely, ridiculous. So what? I don't know about roman_mir in particular, but I see a lot of this downmodding of posts that are clearly not trolls or flamebait.
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Then anyone could hold the rest of the nation hostage and block development.
The deaths and injuries from both pipeline and rail accidents are trivial compared to the enormous national benefit of the rail and pipeline systems which were built largely by granting rights of way and could not be done affordably any other way.
Ideals are adorable but often the greater good is attained by making practical choices.
ANY transportation choice has casualties, including tens of thousands dead each year from auto crashes
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Add to it the fact that the quality of most of the railroads in the US are a century or more behind the leading railroads in Europe and Japan. Only a few have a reasonable quality standard, and even fewer are electrified.
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That's not true at all. If you are considering *passenger* rail, then yes, it's terrible. But we don't really use much passenger rail. That chicken and egg problem aside, US freight rail is pretty good.
For instance: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576136-quiet-success-americas-freight-railways-back-track [economist.com]
"Even the American Society of Civil Engineers, which howls incessantly (and predictably) about the awful state of the nation’s infrastructure, shows grudging respect for goods railways in a re
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The railroads themselves don't care about the cars running on them, but my word for some the US rails where they transport goods is "scary".
Ties that are overage, crooked tracks, missing track binders etc. And on those tracks trains there's a lot of dangerous goods transported. Crude oil is harmless compared to some stuff that's transported.
I'm just waiting for an upcoming accident with a chlorine car in a city...
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You don't walk the rails, I take it. I've spent plenty of time walking down miles of railroad track over the years, and it has always surprised me how few incidents there are considering the state of the tracks.
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It's that last bit in the article: In the last quarter of 2009 about 2,700 carloads of crude oil were moved by rail. This had grown to 81,100 in the last quarter of 2012.
One main problem is that they are so swamped with crude orders that they are running old and out of date DOT-111 tanker cars.
The train that derailed would have, about 20 hours later, come next to my office and then under downtown Everett, WA. That concerns me a bit.
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NPR ran without follow-up a rail industry spokesperson saying "99.9997% of all rail trips occur without serious incident." Without giant fireballs in the sky? Yes, we knew that already!
The workers on the train managed to unhook some of the cars that had not yet caught fire. No free speech for them though, so we get the shill.
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I'm waiting for Google to buy the railroads and integrate them with personal rapid transit.
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If we built a PRT that handled automobiles instead of just people, we could get millions of cars off roads, run transportation more on electricity which is cleaner and cheaper, and avoid millions of auto accidents that kill and injure people and animals (deer, dogs, cats,skunks, & possums, mostly.) With cars carrying families, it would be far cheaper than airlines, and at an operating speed of 80 mph, would be fairly efficient and fast enough to get coast-to-coast in about 40 hours, with their own cars
Re: Thanks Obama... (Score:2)
You do realize a century is 100 years, right? You argue that the the US rail system is over 100 years behind 'everyone else'?
What, exactly, did the European rail system look like in 1914? Is THAT what the US Rail system looks like in 2014? I think not.
The US freight railroads are doing fine, passenger service is limited to regions it makes either practical or political sense - rail service isn't cost-effective, and is typically subsidized extensively. I am not aware of ANY passenger railroad in America that
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It doesn't have to be faster or cheaper than a commuter air flight. It just has to scale better.
I don't know how often you fly SF LA, but there are a lot of flights going on there and frequently I've been bumped or heavily delayed because of something that happened far before I even turned up to the airport.
Anything that can change how the transport system works and scales over changing loads will be welcome.
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If they'd just made the rails out of Rearden metal....
They'd have a railroad just as realistic as any of Ayn Rand's fantasies.