A Heartfelt Message from an Anti-Pipeliner

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

Okay, let me start by saying that I am aware it's wrong to make fun of people, especially young people with starts in their eyes and great ideas in their heads. But there is acertain level of blatant ignorance I just cannot ignore.

Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion Oil Pipeline Is Threatening Indigenous Peoples' Land

Note the... what is it, an engine? on the boat. Note the Arctic Sunrise, which last I checked still did not run on unicorn droppings. Note the whole story in fact. It's both hilarious and really, really depressing.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Actually, the First Nations teenager is right:   one tanker busting up in Burrard's Inlet and you can kiss that ecosystem goodbye.  

The Kinder Morgan pipeline and terminal have this underscore: it can never have a failure.  The first failure is a disaster, and cannot be recovered from if it is of any size.  So the assumptions of the pipeline/tanker people is that there never will be a failure in the trans-shipment system, ever.  And that is an interesting proposition, as I see no redundancy in the engineering that would lead me to the conclusion that there will never be a failure. 

The last time the West Coast had a huge failure, it was both a design and a human-factors failure: the captain of the Exxon Valdez was drunk and asleep, leaving an incompetent third mate at the controls, and the ship itself was a single-hulled beast, not exactly suited to the rocky shores of Alaska. And you know what a mess that turned into.  That terminal in Vancouver is not exactly the greatest place to be shipping oil through; they use it because it is convenient, that's all. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

11 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

But there is acertain level of blatant ignorance I just cannot ignore.

Willful ignorance while proclaiming to be a genius can be ... amusing.

Here's a side project from Nigel Cheese, cold fusion enthusiast, self proclaimed IQ of 207, and a believer in perpetual, unlimited, free energy. 

"The image below, is known as a "Gravity Pump", it uses Gravity against itself.  If built correctly, the pump has the ability to irrigate the whole of Australia, (or) any continent, at next to no cost."

The original "Gravity Pump" article was wiped from LinkedIn, but here is a followup:

http://gaea.company/technology-gravity-pump/

Abstract:

The Gravity Pump is a self-contained pumping system that can move a quantity of fluid over distance with no external power source.

 

/ edit... want more?  Here's a short video demonstrating free, perpetual LED light power.  Notice he is barefoot...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E0u7j0U0jsVDY2S3BUVEVBQmM/view

[DanilKa + 443]

6 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Actually, the First Nations teenager is right:   one tanker busting up in Burrard's Inlet and you can kiss that ecosystem goodbye.  

The Kinder Morgan pipeline and terminal have this underscore: it can never have a failure.  The first failure is a disaster, and cannot be recovered from if it is of any size.  So the assumptions of the pipeline/tanker people is that there never will be a failure in the trans-shipment system, ever.  And that is an interesting proposition, as I see no redundancy in the engineering that would lead me to the conclusion that there will never be a failure. 

The last time the West Coast had a huge failure, it was both a design and a human-factors failure: the captain of the Exxon Valdez was drunk and asleep, leaving an incompetent third mate at the controls, and the ship itself was a single-hulled beast, not exactly suited to the rocky shores of Alaska. And you know what a mess that turned into.  That terminal in Vancouver is not exactly the greatest place to be shipping oil through; they use it because it is convenient, that's all. 

would it be worse than ~billion liters of sewage affluent a day?

http://www.focusonvictoria.ca/july-august-2018/vancouvers-role-in-the-chinook-sewage-orca-death-spiral-r10/

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, mthebold said:

What leads you to conclude that the ecosystem cannot recover from a failure?

The waters are cool in the North Pacific; that dramatically slows oil disintegration.  If you look at the underlying sediment of the oil spill in Prince William Sound, you will find thick tarry sediments on the sea bottom.  Those tars contain poisons that kill off marine organisms and cause cancer growths on the fish. These heavy oil spills don't do well, as contrasted to say a spill of ethanol, which would rapidly be dissipated and absorbed.  If you want to take a long time-line, say 300 years, you will see some absorption and dissipation of oils, but that is more than anyone local is willing to countenance. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

40 minutes ago, DanilKa said:

would it be worse than ~billion liters of sewage affluent a day?

http://www.focusonvictoria.ca/july-august-2018/vancouvers-role-in-the-chinook-sewage-orca-death-spiral-r10/

That is an interesting question.  What the City of Vancouver does to the estuary waters is totally criminal, in my view.  Cleaning that up should be a top priority, but it is not. The politicians involved are pathetic.  Useless, worthless drunks. OK, so you already have that mess, are you prepared to add in more pipeline capacity and hope nothing ever goes wrong?  In all candor, there is probably a better spot for the pipe to end and the transload to take place. That estuary is already under huge stress, no question; adding to it is a risky gamble.

Incidentally I am involved in the design of pollution removal machinery, which when properly set up takes effluent and leaves totally pure water as the discharge, and the other components converted into a precipitated solid, able to be trucked (or railed) away to a burn plant. Installation of this type of separation machinery would resolve the effluent problem.  I anticipate my sales to Canadian municipalities to be precisely zero.  (My sales to US buyers should run to about $6.5 billion, Once the plant is fully up to speed). 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, Jan van Eck said:

That is an interesting question.  What the City of Vancouver does to the estuary waters is totally criminal, in my view.  Cleaning that up should be a top priority, but it is not. The politicians involved are pathetic.  Useless, worthless drunks. OK, so you already have that mess, are you prepared to add in more pipeline capacity and hope nothing ever goes wrong?  In all candor, there is probably a better spot for the pipe to end and the transload to take place. That estuary is already under huge stress, no question; adding to it is a risky gamble.

Incidentally I am involved in the design of pollution removal machinery, which when properly set up takes effluent and leaves totally pure water as the discharge, and the other components converted into a precipitated solid, able to be trucked (or railed) away to a burn plant. Installation of this type of separation machinery would resolve the effluent problem.  I anticipate my sales to Canadian municipalities to be precisely zero.  (My sales to US buyers should run to about $6.5 billion, Once the plant is fully up to speed). 

Excellent.  So, I either want to buy shares in this venture or yours, or a job!  Or both.  I'd say the odds are way better than trying to play the markets.

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

9 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Actually, the First Nations teenager is right:   one tanker busting up in Burrard's Inlet and you can kiss that ecosystem goodbye.  

Then why does she travel on an icebreaker fueled by a fossil fuel? The fact of an environmental risk does not make this risk a certainty, which seems to be the attitude of this teenager and many others of various ages. But what I mind the most is the hypocrisy. If you are SO against fossil fuels be so kind as to not use them, especially for your anti-fossil fuel purposes.

@Tom Kirkman, using gravity against itself? Wha?

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

52 minutes ago, Marina Schwarz said:

@Tom Kirkman, using gravity against itself? Wha?

If you are interested in Nigel Cheese wonderously looney and ranting articles about free perpetual energy, here's a link that hasn't been memory holed yet:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/notice-public-served-nigel-cheese

"Therefore, the QB  [ Quantum Battery ]  will replace lights, will replace all batteries within the portability market, will replace the entire planetary need for Hydro Carbon and Nuclear fuels."

===========================

While his articles tend to make Flat Earth believers look sane by comparison, I don't see the need to memory hole his bizarre, unique view of the world.  He's nutty as a fruitcake, but not Ima gonna shoot people kind of nutty.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

4 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

While his articles tend to make Flat Earth believers look sane by comparison, I don't see the need to memory hole his bizarre, unique view of the world.  He's nutty as a fruitcake, but not Ima gonna shoot people kind of nutty.

I'm glad to hear that, Tom.  I was idly looking at his "equations" in the drawing and could not figure out what he was driving at. For a while there, I thought I was really stupid, or maybe had drifted into senility.  OK, so maybe he is just nutty instead.  

An interesting study was done a while back (probably a few decades by now, considering how old I am getting) by some people in the psychology department of Columbia University, on the mental state of the inhabitants of the Island of Manhattan. Now, this excludes the commuters; only the people living there. They found that roughly 30% of the inhabitants were sufficiently mentally ill to warrant immediate in-patient psychiatric care.  

Another study was done on the rural population of the Province of Quebec, in Canada.  They came up with similar numbers (30%).  I conclude from this that mental illness is far more widespread than is generally appreciated. Toss in the vast quantities of narcotic substances being consumed in the USA, and you have an  entire continent walking around in an altered mental state.  Amazing any actual work ever gets done, all things considered. All these crazy people wandering around. Oh, well. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

6 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

Excellent.  So, I either want to buy shares in this venture or yours, or a job!  Or both.  I'd say the odds are way better than trying to play the markets.

Here's the thing, Dan:  I don't get into deals where there is any negative cash flow, in my view you have to make money on the first machine going out the door, or you get into some sinkhole.  I appreciate that Elon Musk disagrees with me. 

So once everything is up and running, the machine should cost out at about $125,000, this for a machine designed for the dairy farmer with say 700 cows to 1,000 cows, whose manure output is going onto the farmland and then running off into the streams, then to grossly pollute Mississquoi Bay (which has these monstrous cyanobacteria outbreaks). The machine sits on a flatbed trailer so it can be towed as a package right to the farm's barn door, the manure scooped out of the barn and into the hopper, for processing. The machine is sold to a 3rd-party financing entity for $250,000, so you have this fat 50-55% gross margin built in. The institution then does a net operating lease to the farmer, so the farmer gets that machine no money down, "sign and drive" type lease, and the institution gets the accelerated depreciation that they can use to offset other income streams. The farmer pays say $2,200 a month, but his manure volume (remember a cow does 130 lbs/day of fresh manure) generates him between $6,500 and $22,000 a month in sales of the dried, packaged manure to the burn plant. The burn plant pays $50/ton for the dried fuel, which burns hotter and cleaner than the wet wood chips it is buying now, and makes electricity with the stuff  (which they are pressured to do by the Greenies). The manure is gone, the phosphorus that is driving the cyanobacteria is gone, the lake recovers, the boaters and swimmers can spend their money, the Governor is happy, and I am picking up $125,000 on each machine out the door. The farmer makes money, the leasing company makes money, I make money, the public is ecstatic, hey we call that capitalism, ya gotta love it. 

If you figure the market size is 25,000 machines, run the numbers, should be 6.5 billion in sales, so the company picks up $3.3 billion in free cash flow.  For that kind of cash, even I will get out of bed. Elon Musk is doing it wrong, he wants to lose money on each unit out the door. I don't think that is a good idea. Seems to work for him, but sure won't for me.  Cheers.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

6 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Then why does she travel on an icebreaker fueled by a fossil fuel? The fact of an environmental risk does not make this risk a certainty, which seems to be the attitude of this teenager and many others of various ages. But what I mind the most is the hypocrisy. If you are SO against fossil fuels be so kind as to not use them, especially for your anti-fossil fuel purposes.

@Tom Kirkman

Marina, you are quite right to state that a risk does not a certainty make.  But here's the underlying problem: you are dealing with variables over which you as the engineer and the operator have at best only tenuous control.  Take for example the episode of Bhopal, India.  The Union Carbide Company has a plant there, I recall to manufacture components for pesticides, whatever.  The chemical precursors were exceptionally dangerous and exceptionally poisonous.  The critical component was methyl isocyanate ["MIC"], an exceptionally dangerous poison. At some point in the operation some flunky on the night shift allowed water to backflow into the MIC tank, it blew up, and killed some 8,000 neighbors to the plant in the gas cloud that swept out.  Another 8,000 died in the next weeks.  Some 500,000 were injured, of which some 4,000 were permanent disabilities. In the ensuing investigations, charges flew back and forth that the water got into the MIC tank because of "deferred maintenance" [translation: incompetent managers] or by industrial sabotage [translation:  mentally ill employee wanting to wreck the place and didn't care how many died]. 

Competent engineers and managers don't allow these types of situations to develop.  First, they have careful protocols put in place.  Second, there are redundancies installed.  Third, they don't allow some shanty town with 500,000 impoverished Indians living in those shacks right outside the gates of a plant making volatile pesticides, for heaven's sake, how totally stupid can you get?  You can argue, hey it's India, they have people riding on top of trains and hanging off the windows and doors over there, so life is cheap and nobody cares, but if you are the plant engineer, you don't permit that to happen, if the govt is going to let the locals go camp out, then you shut the plant down until the govt moves them away, period.  They call that "risk management;" I call that elementary brainwork. It took 17 years to clean the mess up.

In the oilpatch, arrogance and stupidity in the workforce can have disastrous results.  I point to the decision-making of some moron buffoon on the payroll of British Petroleum. This arrogant fool was sitting on a sub-contracted drilling platform in the Gulf, and then bits of rubber from the blowout preventer started coming up the pipe in the drilling mud. Even a complete incompetent dimwit like me knows that when that happens, everything stops, because now you have no defenses against vast amounts of oil under high pressure down there underwater, just waiting to blow out.  The moron demanded that the sub-contractor continue with pulling the pipe without repairs to the blowout preventer. Even more stupid, the engineer in charge of the platform did not shoot the moron, or dump him overboard to the sharks. They continued pulling the pipe, and you already know where that went. The president of BP wrote a cheque for $25 Billion to the US Govt as a down-payment on the damages. 

And that is why, when you build pipelines or set up terminals for tankers or do anything else, you have to keep in mind that you will end up with drunk sea captains or stupid people doing incredibly dumb things, all on your payroll. So you build your infrastructure in the anticipation that something will go wrong, and that when it does, the damages will be limited and contained. So you don't send some giant single-hulled tanker to Valdez Alaska because the place is riddled with sharp rocks instead of nice soft sand and if that drunken idiot captain whacks it into the rocks you are going to have a gigantic mess. Drunks are everywhere, including on your payroll.  Now if you use a double-hulled tanker and the ship is smaller and you escort each ship with a tugboat then you have constrained your risk. Nobody wants to do that because it costs more money.  And that, in my view, is seriously dumb.