

13 Spills. 30 Days. Nearly 1.2 Million Toxic Gallons - zoowar
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/12-3

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jws
Put some numbers on it! It will look sciencey!

Math does not work when applied to the data.

Most of the volume is from 60000 barrels stolen from pipelines (people
drilling holes in the pipes and catching in buckets), undoubtedly some portion
spilled. That is almost 3,000,000 gallons. The rest of the data is lost in the
fudge factor that brings that down. (Two of the spill events are from about 10
gallons each, probably should list every car accident that splits a gas tank.)

1.2 million gallons sounds like a lot. In the US we've recently added vapor
recovery devices to our cars to condense the gasoline out of the air in the
tank. That keeps ~1 gallon per car per year out of the environment. The
equivalent of making all of these spills every two days, but it is invisible.
(That's why you may have stopped seeing vapor recovery nozzles at the filling
station, your car is doing the work now.)

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pico303
Dismissed like an industry spokesman!

These pipelines are ecologically dangerous, primarily because (a) they are
aging (many are over 50 years old) and (b) we don't, as a country, do a very
good job of holding oil companies responsible for the maintenance and upkeep
of their equipment.

Oil is a dirty business, literally, and just outright dismissing spills as
little more than a numbers problem is as criminal as exploiting the problem
for a cheap headline.

Check out this article on the recent spill in Arkansas:

[http://www.apr.org/post/arkansas-oil-spill-sheds-light-
aging...](http://www.apr.org/post/arkansas-oil-spill-sheds-light-aging-
pipeline-system)

"According to federal statistics, they have on average 280 significant spills
a year...Federal data show that on average over the past decade, nearly 3.5
million gallons of oil spilled from pipelines each year."

This is for the US only. That's a considerable problem that should be
addressed. You may be willing to accept a damaged environment and write off
spilled oil as "theft" (which I doubt is a big problem in the US). I think we
should be doing everything possible to keep our planet clean and safe, even if
it costs a few extra dollars.

~~~
jws
_3.5 million gallons of oil spilled from pipelines each year_ , or 2% of what
consumers were leaking from their gas tanks until just a few years ago. A drop
in a bucket is .000625%, so I can't use that phrase and "two thousand drops in
a bucket" doesn't have quite the right ring…

 _criminal_? You publicly defame me as a criminal‽ Maybe you meant to say
_irresponsible_ or something similar that doesn't so directly involve libel
laws. Let's save _criminal_ for where it belongs, like BP's Deepwater Horizon
spill.

I reject your assertion: _we don't, as a country, do a very good job of
holding oil companies responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of their
equipment_ unless you can provide evidence. The EPA oversees cleanups which
are notoriously expensive, deterring pipeline companies from accepting leaks
as a cost of doing business. (The one I'm familiar with cost about
$1000/gallon of leaked oil (mostly to experts and analysts, not so much to the
guy with the shovel and buckets). Small leak, probably makes it on the high
side per gallon.)

For another data point, when BP blew out some lines in Alaska in 2006 they
spilled about 6000 barrels and were ultimately fined $20M. I'd like that fine
to be higher, 20 times the value of the spilled product seems low.

Forgive a paragraph where I read about the Alaskan Pipeline, it's Saturday,
the official day of HN meanderings:

I wanted to put a number about what percent of the Trans Alaskan pipeline oil
leaks out, but I'm not finding a catalog of spills. From 1977 to 2010 it moved
16 billion barrels of oil, but I'm not finding the other half. There is a list
at wikipedia, but it misses the 2006 BP spill, so I don't trust it to be
complete. In 1978 someone blew a hole in the pipeline and leaked 16000
barrels, in 2001 some drunken numbnut with a rifle shot a hole in a weld and
leaked 6000 barrels. He got 16 years in jail and was sentenced to pay $17M for
the cleanup. I'm guessing he's still working that off. Unless they find more
oil, or figure out how to make the pipeline work at lower than designed flow
rates, the company that owns it has to remove all traces of the pipeline.
Current projections suggest 2032 as the year for that decision.

Back on topic:

• Keep leaks to a minimum, but don't panic.

• Oil seeps are natural phenomena. The planet has survived millions of years
with them.

• A pipeline leak screws up the local environment, but can be cleaned, and
make sure to fine the pipeline folk enough that they don't want it to happen.

• Trucking the oil instead of using pipelines would be worse for the
environment (I boldly propose without bothering to check the data).

• You know that car owners and farmers used to use their used motor oil as
weed killer, right? Kept the weeds in the ditch down by dumping the oil in the
drainage ditch. We have survived that, which was probably several times more
oil per year than pipeline leaks. Heck I drove a Ford that leaked oil faster
than my share of global pipeline leaks.

On barely related good news: The local gas company is _finally_ addressing the
methane leak they've had going in my yard for two years. It got big enough to
attract their attention.

~~~
pico303
A couple of problems. You didn't really address any of these issues.
Apparently to you dumping a little oil in a ditch or some tar in a bog is
equivalent to dumping millions of galleons into lakes, rivers, and oceans. Did
you know that with all those beautiful stories of Exxon and others cleaning up
oil spills, washing off baby ducks and sea lions, that most of them die? A
1996 study by UC Davis found that in the years following an oil spill in 1990,
only 10% of pelicans that were "saved" from the spill survived beyond two
years (while nearly 100% of a control group were still alive)?

Furthermore, You probably need a dictionary for Christmas. I didn't even
suggest you were something as harsh as irresposible. My use of the word
"criminal" in no way implicates you as a criminal, nor implies an illegal act.
"Criminal" in this context is a synonym for shameful or disgraceful. So cool
your jets.

I'm not sure what you're arguing beyond that. Somehow a couple of anecdotes
makes for proof that we're hard on oil companies? We nowhere near make it
painful on the oil industry. A company reporting billions in pure profit
doesn't feel anything from a $20m fine. And how does that $20m compare to the
$10-50 billion the oil industry got in subsidies alone that year? Looks more
and more like a slap on the wrist to me. Some poor schlub got 16 years for
leaking 6000 barrels, but no one at BP or Haliburton--knowingly installing bad
blowout valves and other cost-cutting measures--did any jail time for loosing
almost 5 million barrels into the Gulf? There's much more evidence for
leniency on our part than accountability.

I'm just so tired of no one wanting to do better in this country. Be it guns,
energy, education, poverty: it's everyone else's problem, it's just the way it
is, and there's nothing we can do about it. I guess we're the Not-So-Greatest
Generation.

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vosper
I find this a little odd - firstly, by far the largest volume of oil in the
chart is the theft of 60,000 barrels per day reported by Shell from their
pipeline in Nigeria. But theft != spill - presumably the oil was used for the
same kinds of things it's normally used for, and wasn't tipped on the ground.

Secondly, the volume of the Shell thefts alone is 2.5m gallons per day, so
either it wasn't actually added into the total (so why mention it?) or they
got their math wrong.

Finally, 1.2m gallons sure seems like a lot, until you read that it's 2
Olympic swimming pools. Given the amount of oil processed around the world in
a month I'm surprised we don't spill more of it.

BTW, Google never ceases to amaze me - I never expected it to understand
"1185000 gallons in barrels of oil".

~~~
shabble
The actual quote was _"after suffering a reported theft of 60,000 barrels of
oil per day from its Nembe Creek Trunkline pipeline, Shell Nigeria shuts off
the pipe for 9 days to repair damage."_

which to me sounds like damage caused by the thefts is causing (some undefined
amount) of leakage/wastage, that they're trying to fix.

If they're including the full 60k barrel as 'spillage' in their graphs then
it's definitely somewhat disingenuous, as you say.

~~~
vosper
That's a good point. I did a little Googling for news on the matter, and it
seems like the thefts were made by drilling holes in the pipeline [1], and the
amount stolen accounts for almost half of the 150,000 barrels-per-day capacity
of the pipeline. Shell shut the pipeline down both due to the leaks and to the
monetary losses ($100m in a week) incurred.

So, I'm not sure - it seems pretty clear that the 60,000 barrels a day was
theft, and not a spill, but presumably there's leakage after clandestinely
drilling holes in high pressure oil lines. I don't know if pipeline theft
should be included in a list of oil industry screw-ups, unless you want to
expand the term to include thieves and black-marketeers (not that Shell are
saints in the Niger Delta, there's almost certainly blood on their hands [2])

[1] [http://www.voanews.com/content/shell-to-shut-down-major-
pipe...](http://www.voanews.com/content/shell-to-shut-down-major-pipeline-in-
nigeria/1631767.html)

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro-Wiwa>

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owenfi
Add another one: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvbcQHbgPwE>

~~~
TheCapn
And another:
[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2013/04/11/...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2013/04/11/sk-
truck-crash.html)

Seems this is more frequent then people are aware.

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uvdiv
_13 Spills. 30 Days. Nearly 1.2 Million Toxic Gallons_

And $300 billion in economic wealth.

