Standing Rock vs Dakota pipeline

[decay]

So again I define disaster by how many people are both directly and indirectly affected

i stand firm on the point that that's not a good reason to reroute the pipeline through treaty-protected native land. we agreed they were a sovereign nation- so we need their permission, and we don't have it. it really is that simple. do you get that i consider this a patriotic thing? i'm holding america to its word.

Yes this outfit does not have a good current safety record, I agree and needs to be addressed.

but we found some common ground there.

[mrsleeve]

Look, is it a bad thing YES of course it is... and when you say 180,000 of anything it sounds scary and big and lots of it blah blah blah. I am not arguing that this is like dumping over you drain bucket in the driveway by accident after you change your oil in your car.

What I am saying is lets put this into perspective and into the scope of reality here. Dumping 4300 barrels of oil in front of your house is a MUCH bigger deal than dumping that same 4300 Barrels in front of my house (do I want 4300 barrels of oil in front of my house NO of course not just making the heavy urban vs very rural situation). Its a big deal in both cases and needs to be cleaned up to the standards of both state and federal oversight agencies if not over and above. In front of your house its going to effect many many many 1000's of people who live/work/commute with in close proximity, vs a couple dozen around my house at most. Its actually going to be much harder to clean up where you live as the access to where it goes is going to much harder to get to (leaky storm sewer), and its going to cause havoc with traffic and daily life for MONTHS. Vs just a few vac trucks out sucking up the sludge and a couple dozers and excavators piling up contaminated soils and brush and loading it into trucks hauling it off near my house.

Where this current issue is going on it took a number of days to even find it, I would say thats a bit more rural than where even I live. It will be very easy to clean up once they get it contained by comparison to on your doorstep. So again I define disaster by how many people are both directly and indirectly affected, how much shit gets fucked up, and the ability to get it cleaned up effectively. This gathering break is not going affect that many people in general day to day life, its not going to sully much of anything in the way of "unique" ecco-system (Price William Sound,/ other major water body / or geographically unique feature) or destroy that much in the way of productive real estate in this part of the ND, and it can be cleaned up effectively in a good and timely manner. Hell given the frozen ground it will likely help keep it from soaking in too far past upper most few inches.

Yup I dont remember the specifics of that other failure other than it was a thin wall 12" that was older than the dirt it was buried in. Also iirc the local drinking water samples were pulled from an area that draws its potable water from the Yellowstone river not too far down stream of the failure. Yes this outfit does not have a good current safety record, I agree and needs to be addressed. You have to remember like I keep saying, you cant directly compare gathering line and transmission, its akin to saying a lion and tiger are the same animal. Both are big cats, both are similar in appearance and do similar things and are closely related but at the same time are 2 totally different animals. Even the old shit in the ground for the last 30 years on up to 80, thats WAY past design life, transmission has far more regulatory requirements for not just day to day operations and integrity requirements but construction standards than do most gathering systems.

Look at the enbridge 6B line rupture in Marshal MI in 2010. That was 26k Barrels (1.1m Gal) and over the course of the last 5 years and about 800m spent on clean up costs, it was effectively cleaned up, and enbridge has invested about a Billion in dig up and relay of the line that was installed in 60's. They are getting geared up for a full relay, in the coming years, as well as costing them 180ish m in fines penalties and new regulatory mandated safety measures on the rest of their system. Still a drop in the bucket compared to what naturally seeps into the Gulf of Mexico alone from natural fishers that total 2-4m barrels a year

[decay]

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505658553/pipeline-spill-adds-to-concerns-about-dakota-access-pipeline

The Belle Fourche pipeline leak is the largest in North Dakota since 2013. But the same company that owns and runs the pipeline was involved in another oil spill in Montana in 2015 that leaked 30,000 gallons of crude into the river. At one point, tests showed traces of oil in the local drinking water.

sleeve- not baiting you here man, but we definitely have a difference of opinion on whether or not this fits the definition of "disaster".

180,000 gallons.

[decay]

Do we say the same thing when Black Lives Matter decide to riot?

I think so. That would be the reason the veterans' op-order repeated 3 different times, beginning, middle, and end:

No drugs. No alcohol. No weapons.

I can only be responsible for what I am participating in. But it's my expectation that everyone still out with me will contribute and watch out for each other (and among vets, that includes the occasional "hey dumbass, knock that shit off").

[marshallnoise]

hey be careful, there's a baby in that bathwater

Do we say the same thing when Black Lives Matter decide to riot?

[decay]

Kind of makes the whole thing a little hollow.

hey be careful, there's a baby in that bathwater

[marshallnoise]

I love the irony of that

Kind of makes the whole thing a little hollow.

[mrsleeve]

I love the irony of that

[Wschnitz]

Gotta clean up after the people who are just there for the image.

[decay]

yeah, you WOULD fucking hope that, given that we're all out there as hippie earth protectors, but sometimes you have to police up after your own.

[naplesE30]

Dude, why would you need to do trash cleanup from a bunch of environmentalists and Indians? That is like the 2 groups who you would think would have left the place better than they found it.

I appluad you for doing that and being dedicated to your cause. Clearly some are more dedicated than others.

[decay]

100% legal my fucking ass. you didn't get the comms from the ACE?

edit: also, some of your concerns are correct... unfortunately, some of my mission out there will be http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...=Police%20Call

[mrsleeve]

Why should you be happy the feds abandoned Law Enforcment for doing their jobs and keeping the peace from a bunch of trespassing property destroying demonstrators, and construction crews building a 100% legal project on federal land that has/had the approval of the feds them selves........ the being on federal land part means its partially their responsibility to police the actions on it, and several 1000 people squatting on it and destroying shit is within that realm......

[decay]

LOL at all the pontificating on things we know even less about than I know about what granola goes best with what wheatgerm rye grass smoothie.

As to environmental disaster.... A small gathering line break in the waste lands of ND hardly qualifies as a disaster, a, mess yes, a matter of great importance for the affected land owners, it might equate to them as a disaster.

ok dude- yeah, we can agree there, it probably does seem like a disaster to the *people directly affected*.

and i'm sorry, but working in the petro industry doesn't mean you're the only one entitled to an opinion.

also, this article gave me great joy.

http://m.bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/n-d-law-enforcement-officials-completely-and-utterly-abandoned-by/article_c3ca5f55-2e3e-5eae-aaa7-ce6561ef73a8.html

guess we better mobilize some waambulances.

sorry the veterans' community completely overwhelmed you fucks, but that was the idea.

[mrsleeve]

LOL at all the pontificating on things we know even less about than I know about what granola goes best with what wheatgerm rye grass smoothie.

As to environmental disaster.... A small gathering line break in the waste lands of ND hardly qualifies as a disaster, a, mess yes, a matter of great importance for the affected land owners, it might equate to them as a disaster. But the operating company will compensate them highly for their troubles. This is very very small potatoes when you compare it to an actual disaster, like a B.O.P. failure on a high formation pressure wild cat well 2200 feet below the ocean surface near where 10s of millions of people live. Or when a drunk tanker pilot crashes his boat with with a 1/4 million barrels of oil on board into a rock and rips a big hole in the bottom. Or when the Iraqi army lit on fire and turned the valves on and let about 6 million barrels burn and dump into the Persian gulf and into the desert.... THOSE ARE just a couple of the ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS that come to mind off the bat....... You have to put it into some kinda of perspective.

Now this was a gathering line likely only seeing 2-300psi tops, likely less than 150psi (though with out seeing it and what not I can not say for sure). Oil is only pumped when there is enough oil to pump due to the intermittent nature of conventional oil wells are left to rest for a while after pumping for a given time. Since this has been in since the 1980s that's the type of well.... Since its a gathering line of low pressure requirements ( most likely ) and its a gathering line built in the 80's in ND, the regulatory requirements are/were not the same as they are for even new gathering line let alone high pressure transmission. With out knowing ND regs, I cant say with any certainty, but I am going to toss our a educated WAG on this.

Assuming this is a low pressure application, it was built in the 80's (fact) and knowing that ND has very open regs on the energy biz, and was likely non existent in the early 80s.... this is likely a welded steel line with a thin wall thickness likely .180, they went over a creek (cheap), likely there was little in the way of inspection and oversight during construction and NDE was more than likely 10% if required at all. All that said to meet state state regs at the time given its likely a low pressure system, I bet it only had to pass the hydro test, which is little more than what your home water system goes though.

Now a-days, due to the environmental hot button issues construction 3rd party inspection on even gathering lines is substantial, NDE is now 100% (at least on everything guys I know have been building up there) and the stakes for a fuck up are far higher than they used to be. Most gathering systems I have built are built to 95% of the same oversight standards that a major high profile multi state transmission system is built with.

Saying my industry needs to clean our shit up........ thats a statement that comes out of the mouth of people that read news stories from the Huff-po or look at maps put together by biased envrio activist web sites (that just take data and plot it) with out putting any context to it. A company might have barrel of 30wt motor oil for their pumps spill and that would have to be reported even though it never left the shop, or a when some maintenance was going on and a gauge was being swapped out and the drain bucket got kicked over inside the containment berm and had to be reported. Most of the biggest issues I can think of from recent years have been some outside contractor (or even gas company hires) working on or near a loaded line and poking a hole in it... Out and out, out of the blue failures are not as common as braves maps attempt to make you think.

When they fail they fail no doubt about that, but you green types only see the possibility of an issue. To move the same amount of oil that this little 6 inch moved every day (about a 1000 barrels from an article I have read) with a small pump house burning small amount of fuel a day, compared to the 3-5 Big tanker trucks that would have to be dispatched out every day to get it. Thats a lot more diesel burnt and associated pollution, and truck consumables used just to move oil from the pump to the tank farm. 1 connection use for years and years Vs connecting trucks to tanks, over and over every day on both ends of the journey. Not to mention the risk of every shipment involved in wreck on the road. 3-5 trucks a day for 30 years + about 44,000 shipments via truck, and 100k or so hose connections every one of which is a potential spill for Braves map...... To move the same amount of oil the DAPL will move by truck you would need about 8333 trucks dispatching out of the terminal every day. So a 24 hour trip, 12 hour driving time per driver, would mean at minimum you would have 33,333 trucks on the road at any given time to move all this product. This same argument applies to train shipments as well.

Its like being sacred of flying, because the plane might crash Vs driving your shit box across the country every other week....


As buddy pointed out new infrastructure is needed to replace existing ageing infrastructure, but also if there is not a line that runs from where the resources is, to where it needs to go, then one needs to be built with the correct start and end points..... As to waste water injection wells, they have their uses, and have been used for a long time to aid in production of conventional oil fields to maximize their longevity. What is going in OK afaik is its just being disposed of in old formations and I dont know if its a good or bad. There is some validity to lubing up fault lines with water deep underground, so I dont necessary agree with this disposal practice and think more geologic study might be nice

As to the DAPL crossing point, that line has to cross the Missouri river someplace going further upstream is not going to help anything, IF and highly stress IF there were to be an issue.

I am going to bed