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Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over. LNG tankers are freaking scary though,

Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over. LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.

cwal37 9y ago
For some reason people have this idea that LNG tankers are a big bomb waiting to go up, but that's not really true. Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know. Mostly it seems the vapors that hit the right mix of oxygen and such would burn pretty rapidly, while the warmer gas began to rise. It would certainly be a large fire for a while, but shouldn't have the lasting impact of an oil spill. Here's a paper[1]. [1] http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  The scary bit for LNG is a BLEVE (Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion). Even non-flammable liquids undergoing a BLEVE can be incredibly destructive, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdfgxLApL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdfgxLApL4 So it's nothing to do with vapor cloud detonation, that's pretty much irrelevant compared to the destruction of the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas.
  - chongli 9y ago
    I think a tanker ship is pretty safe from a BLEVE. Those explosions usually result from a tank being heated continuously by a very hot fire underneath it. I'm not sure where you would find one of those at sea unless the tanker wrecked on top of an erupting volcano.
    - bigiain 9y ago
      And there's my entry for Bruce Schneier's next movie-plot threat contest...
    - honestoHeminway 9y ago
      As safe as nuclear power!
      - GhostVII 9y ago
        Nuclear is incredibly safe
        urethrafranklin 9y ago
        Of course it is! It comprises two of the safest things in the world, radioactive materials and fission! That's never been a recipe for disaster!
        GhostVII 9y ago
        If you are suggesting that a nuclear power plant can detonate like a nuclear bomb, you are wrong, they are a completely different design. Sure they can melt down in rare cases, but that's hardly anything on the scale of a nuke. I would suggest you look at some of the stats for death rates of different power sources. Nuclear is near the bottom, coal kills thousands every year through air pollution. If you want to find a truly dangerous power source, look at hydroelectric, when a dam collapses it is more damaging than a power plant meltdown in some cases.
        urethrafranklin 9y ago
        Safer than some of the alternatives != safe.
        _Tev 9y ago
        So why aren't you panicking over dangerousness of wind turbines? This is pretty bad argument.
        honestoHeminway 9y ago
        If only it were not for those meddling humans, he would have got away with it!
    - dwighttk 9y ago
      How many tankers would you need to noticeably change the explosion power of an average sized volcano eruption?
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        How about an LNG bunkering facility in Naples, near the Campi Flegrei volcano? Maybe you start with a minor eruption/earthquake, and the LNG disaster breaches a larger magma chamber to cause a larger eruption? Then you can blanket Europe in ash and start up the typical disaster movie plot, where you follow the Chicken Little and their family as they try to escape the disaster radius.
    - panarky 9y ago
      Is an LNG tanker safe from a bad guy on a fishing boat? https://youtu.be/C3p96VNXSNQ?t=22 https://youtu.be/C3p96VNXSNQ?t=22
- worlddeployer 9y ago
  > never documented as far as I know It happened in Brenham, Texas, in the 90s. http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-explosion-years-later/article_cab6128c-019b-11e2-8e7e-0019bb2963f4.html http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-expl...
  - cat199 9y ago
    That was a salt dome holding area, and not a tanker, to be fair.. but yes, it exploded. People in houston (~45m-1h drive away) felt the rumble and thought it was an earthquake..
    - worlddeployer 9y ago
      From your original post: > Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know This is an example of a vapor cloud detonation. I'm just pointing out that it's happened, so I'm not sure why you're saying it's never been documented. Unless you just meant in the context of a tanker, but that's not how you phrased it. As it happened, I lived in the area at the time (about 40 miles away on the back side of Cypress, Texas). I didn't think so much about it being an earthquake, but instead thought a large airplane had crashed nearby. I ran out into the street expecting to see fire and explosions and whatnot within a block or few of my house ... only for there to be _nothing._
      - stevehb 9y ago
        Not the same person...
- justin66 9y ago
  I wonder how thoroughly the various failure scenarios have been modeled and reported on. Something merely of the magnitude of the East Ohio Gas Fire [1] in a crowded port or canal would be awful, and I'm pretty sure a supertanker carries a lot more gas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explos... The industry has every incentive to do a careful job with the safety features of these ships and the terminals they unload into, but the trouble with ships is that things sometimes run into them... sometimes really big things. It's a pretty awesome way to carry around a lot of portable energy, though.
- douche 9y ago
  They made fun of this, I believe, in 21 Jump Street (the remake).
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  x2. Explosives that used ambient oxygen to burn the fuel need to be finely tuned. Blowing up a propane tank (regardless of size) gets you a big fireball. I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.
london888 9y ago
UK Readers may find this page interesting giving info on our energy sources. I didn't realise we use less energy now than we did in 1998. http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-where-from/ http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-wh...
- alex8022 9y ago
  Another interesting site shows current uk grid demand and generation from different types of power: http://gridwatch.co.uk http://gridwatch.co.uk
  - ccozan 9y ago
    Also interesting to watch the Romanian grid live: http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/harta_WAR_SENOperareHartaportlet http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart... hmm, wind is quite slow today, normally blows about 1.5gw. biomass is a nice surprise.
  - zeristor 9y ago
    This site has been completely revamped, the graphs look a lot clearer. I guess this is down to the inclusion of solar power which was cursory a few years back. Do they now aggregate all of the roof top solar and add that in? Snooping around Glastonbury and my great Aunt's old town I've noticed a number of Solar farms in the countryside: http://www.wessexsolarenergy.co.uk http://www.wessexsolarenergy.co.uk
- Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago
  Live power generation info for Finland: http://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/Pages/default.aspx http://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/Pag...
sorenjan 9y ago
Russia is building a new pipeline (Nord Stream 2) to Germany. It's under construction.
slang800 9y ago
"Mini-nuke" isn't a very accurate comparison. In the event of a leak, the liquid fuel would need to flow out of the tank and turn into vapor before it could catch fire and burn. As a liquid or highly concentrated vapor it's not flammable. It needs to mix with air first. The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, crater-making release of energy that a thermonuclear device produces.
- bigiain 9y ago
  That's assuming an accidental leak. I wonder what the risks of "bad guys" with, say, shoulder fired rockets taking the top of the tanks off look like?
  - caf 9y ago
    If you suddenly removed the top of a large container of LNG, it wouldn't all instantly vaporise. It would start to boil, rapidly cooling its surroundings due to the latent heat of vaporisation. Large amounts of ice would form on the outside of the container, and pretty soon the boiling rate would drop off substantially as the rate of heat transfer from the now frigid surroundings reduced. If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).
    - bigiain 9y ago
      I _so_ want to get MythBusters onto this - we'll need three or four full LNG transport ships, and a _big_ patch of empty ocean...
      - marssaxman 9y ago
        You can demonstrate this yourself pretty easily using an ordinary 20-lb barbecue tank, a "high pressure" aka 20 psi regulator ($20 on amazon), and a high-pressure burner head (also $20 on amazon). Turn it all the way up - you'll get a great big hot flame at first, but you'll quickly see a shell of ice forming on the outside of the tank, because the process of evaporation drains heat out of the propane very quickly, and it gets cold enough to condense water out of the atmosphere into ice. Within half an hour, that big hot flame will have died down to something very gentle: the tank is still full of propane, but it's now so cold it'll no longer evaporate quickly enough to keep the pressure up. You'll have to turn it off and let it thaw for a few hours before it'll really get going again.
tajen 9y ago
> 1 megaton equivalent For those interested, Hiroshima was ~20Kt. Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. I'm more worried about the glasshouse effect of so much LNG.
- jabl 9y ago
  > Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt. The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    I thought Tsar Bomba was designed to have 100Mt yield, but they dialed it back (by using less fissile material I think) because there was no reason to set on of that large and because of safetey. It was my understanding that the nearby towns wouldn't be threatened by a 50Mt bomb and but a 100Mt was expected to break windows and stuff. Also the time for the pilots to get away was improved.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. IIRC, the biggest the US ever deployed operationally was 9Mt, and those have since been retired. The common strategic warheads now deployed are, IIRC, 100-350kt range.
hx87 9y ago
1 megaton? Even the largest LNG tankers can hold only 67 kilotons, so even if you had a perfect stoichiometric mixture somehow and detonated all of it at one you'd get maybe a 130 kiloton explosion.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  The "megaton" of nuclear weapons fame equals 4.18 * 10^15 joules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent 1000 kg of natural gas has a lower heating value of 47.1 gigajoules, much greater than the 4.18 gigajoules per 1000 kg TNT equivalent. The lower heating value of 67,000,000 kg of natural gas is 3.16 * 10^15 joules: http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-values-fuels http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-value... So more like 750 kilotons TNT equivalent. There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density: - TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air - TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation - TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas

cwal37 9y ago

For some reason people have this idea that LNG tankers are a big bomb waiting to go up, but that's not really true. Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know. Mostly it seems the vapors that hit the right mix of oxygen and such would burn pretty rapidly, while the warmer gas began to rise. It would certainly be a large fire for a while, but shouldn't have the lasting impact of an oil spill. Here's a paper[1]. [1] http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
The scary bit for LNG is a BLEVE (Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion). Even non-flammable liquids undergoing a BLEVE can be incredibly destructive, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdfgxLApL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdfgxLApL4 So it's nothing to do with vapor cloud detonation, that's pretty much irrelevant compared to the destruction of the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas.
- chongli 9y ago
  I think a tanker ship is pretty safe from a BLEVE. Those explosions usually result from a tank being heated continuously by a very hot fire underneath it. I'm not sure where you would find one of those at sea unless the tanker wrecked on top of an erupting volcano.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    And there's my entry for Bruce Schneier's next movie-plot threat contest...
  - honestoHeminway 9y ago
    As safe as nuclear power!
    - GhostVII 9y ago
      Nuclear is incredibly safe
      - urethrafranklin 9y ago
        Of course it is! It comprises two of the safest things in the world, radioactive materials and fission! That's never been a recipe for disaster!
        GhostVII 9y ago
        If you are suggesting that a nuclear power plant can detonate like a nuclear bomb, you are wrong, they are a completely different design. Sure they can melt down in rare cases, but that's hardly anything on the scale of a nuke. I would suggest you look at some of the stats for death rates of different power sources. Nuclear is near the bottom, coal kills thousands every year through air pollution. If you want to find a truly dangerous power source, look at hydroelectric, when a dam collapses it is more damaging than a power plant meltdown in some cases.
        urethrafranklin 9y ago
        Safer than some of the alternatives != safe.
        _Tev 9y ago
        So why aren't you panicking over dangerousness of wind turbines? This is pretty bad argument.
      - honestoHeminway 9y ago
        If only it were not for those meddling humans, he would have got away with it!
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    How many tankers would you need to noticeably change the explosion power of an average sized volcano eruption?
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      How about an LNG bunkering facility in Naples, near the Campi Flegrei volcano? Maybe you start with a minor eruption/earthquake, and the LNG disaster breaches a larger magma chamber to cause a larger eruption? Then you can blanket Europe in ash and start up the typical disaster movie plot, where you follow the Chicken Little and their family as they try to escape the disaster radius.
  - panarky 9y ago
    Is an LNG tanker safe from a bad guy on a fishing boat? https://youtu.be/C3p96VNXSNQ?t=22 https://youtu.be/C3p96VNXSNQ?t=22
worlddeployer 9y ago
> never documented as far as I know It happened in Brenham, Texas, in the 90s. http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-explosion-years-later/article_cab6128c-019b-11e2-8e7e-0019bb2963f4.html http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-expl...
- cat199 9y ago
  That was a salt dome holding area, and not a tanker, to be fair.. but yes, it exploded. People in houston (~45m-1h drive away) felt the rumble and thought it was an earthquake..
  - worlddeployer 9y ago
    From your original post: > Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know This is an example of a vapor cloud detonation. I'm just pointing out that it's happened, so I'm not sure why you're saying it's never been documented. Unless you just meant in the context of a tanker, but that's not how you phrased it. As it happened, I lived in the area at the time (about 40 miles away on the back side of Cypress, Texas). I didn't think so much about it being an earthquake, but instead thought a large airplane had crashed nearby. I ran out into the street expecting to see fire and explosions and whatnot within a block or few of my house ... only for there to be _nothing._
    - stevehb 9y ago
      Not the same person...
justin66 9y ago
I wonder how thoroughly the various failure scenarios have been modeled and reported on. Something merely of the magnitude of the East Ohio Gas Fire [1] in a crowded port or canal would be awful, and I'm pretty sure a supertanker carries a lot more gas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explos... The industry has every incentive to do a careful job with the safety features of these ships and the terminals they unload into, but the trouble with ships is that things sometimes run into them... sometimes really big things. It's a pretty awesome way to carry around a lot of portable energy, though.
douche 9y ago
They made fun of this, I believe, in 21 Jump Street (the remake).
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
x2. Explosives that used ambient oxygen to burn the fuel need to be finely tuned. Blowing up a propane tank (regardless of size) gets you a big fireball. I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.

london888 9y ago

UK Readers may find this page interesting giving info on our energy sources. I didn't realise we use less energy now than we did in 1998. http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-where-from/ http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-wh...

alex8022 9y ago
Another interesting site shows current uk grid demand and generation from different types of power: http://gridwatch.co.uk http://gridwatch.co.uk
- ccozan 9y ago
  Also interesting to watch the Romanian grid live: http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/harta_WAR_SENOperareHartaportlet http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart... hmm, wind is quite slow today, normally blows about 1.5gw. biomass is a nice surprise.
- zeristor 9y ago
  This site has been completely revamped, the graphs look a lot clearer. I guess this is down to the inclusion of solar power which was cursory a few years back. Do they now aggregate all of the roof top solar and add that in? Snooping around Glastonbury and my great Aunt's old town I've noticed a number of Solar farms in the countryside: http://www.wessexsolarenergy.co.uk http://www.wessexsolarenergy.co.uk
Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago
Live power generation info for Finland: http://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/Pages/default.aspx http://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/Pag...

sorenjan 9y ago

Russia is building a new pipeline (Nord Stream 2) to Germany. It's under construction.

slang800 9y ago

"Mini-nuke" isn't a very accurate comparison. In the event of a leak, the liquid fuel would need to flow out of the tank and turn into vapor before it could catch fire and burn. As a liquid or highly concentrated vapor it's not flammable. It needs to mix with air first. The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, crater-making release of energy that a thermonuclear device produces.

bigiain 9y ago
That's assuming an accidental leak. I wonder what the risks of "bad guys" with, say, shoulder fired rockets taking the top of the tanks off look like?
- caf 9y ago
  If you suddenly removed the top of a large container of LNG, it wouldn't all instantly vaporise. It would start to boil, rapidly cooling its surroundings due to the latent heat of vaporisation. Large amounts of ice would form on the outside of the container, and pretty soon the boiling rate would drop off substantially as the rate of heat transfer from the now frigid surroundings reduced. If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).
  - bigiain 9y ago
    I _so_ want to get MythBusters onto this - we'll need three or four full LNG transport ships, and a _big_ patch of empty ocean...
    - marssaxman 9y ago
      You can demonstrate this yourself pretty easily using an ordinary 20-lb barbecue tank, a "high pressure" aka 20 psi regulator ($20 on amazon), and a high-pressure burner head (also $20 on amazon). Turn it all the way up - you'll get a great big hot flame at first, but you'll quickly see a shell of ice forming on the outside of the tank, because the process of evaporation drains heat out of the propane very quickly, and it gets cold enough to condense water out of the atmosphere into ice. Within half an hour, that big hot flame will have died down to something very gentle: the tank is still full of propane, but it's now so cold it'll no longer evaporate quickly enough to keep the pressure up. You'll have to turn it off and let it thaw for a few hours before it'll really get going again.

tajen 9y ago

> 1 megaton equivalent For those interested, Hiroshima was ~20Kt. Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. I'm more worried about the glasshouse effect of so much LNG.

jabl 9y ago
> Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt. The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I thought Tsar Bomba was designed to have 100Mt yield, but they dialed it back (by using less fissile material I think) because there was no reason to set on of that large and because of safetey. It was my understanding that the nearby towns wouldn't be threatened by a 50Mt bomb and but a 100Mt was expected to break windows and stuff. Also the time for the pilots to get away was improved.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. IIRC, the biggest the US ever deployed operationally was 9Mt, and those have since been retired. The common strategic warheads now deployed are, IIRC, 100-350kt range.

hx87 9y ago

1 megaton? Even the largest LNG tankers can hold only 67 kilotons, so even if you had a perfect stoichiometric mixture somehow and detonated all of it at one you'd get maybe a 130 kiloton explosion.

philipkglass 9y ago
The "megaton" of nuclear weapons fame equals 4.18 * 10^15 joules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent 1000 kg of natural gas has a lower heating value of 47.1 gigajoules, much greater than the 4.18 gigajoules per 1000 kg TNT equivalent. The lower heating value of 67,000,000 kg of natural gas is 3.16 * 10^15 joules: http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-values-fuels http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-value... So more like 750 kilotons TNT equivalent. There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density: - TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air - TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation - TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas