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Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
- cperciva 9y agoThis is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?
- eltoozero 9y agoBecause it uses existing infrastructure rather than requiring the construction of pipelines. Plus I don't see why pipelines wouldn't work; assuming you could just carry the balls along with water and use a diverter of some sort to separate the balls from water at the pumping stages.
- Joe-Z 9y agoThe article mentions that it's more environmentally friendly. The balls float on water and apparently can't be poaked easily. That's a plus in my book.
- Boothroid 9y agoI think we are in lipstick on a pig territory here. Tar sands are horrific in environmental terms, one of the most carbon intensive fossil fuels in their production and the cause of devastation of huge areas of wilderness. By the time the stuff is made into balls or whatever the vast majority of possible damage has already been done.
- Joe-Z 9y agoWell, I wasn't advocating tar sands here, I just repeated the info I got from the article. However, it is a reality that this industry exists, so sure it might be better to not extract tar sands at all, but as long as it's happening anyway why not make it as clen as possible?
- Boothroid 9y agoBecause making it as clean as possible still leaves it as something we shouldn't be doing at all! I truly believe this will be viewed as one of humanity's worst ideas once global warning properly kicks in.
- calgaryeng 9y agoYou should be aware that there are a number of oil sources that are far more carbon-intensive than the Canadian Oil Sands. Many of which ship direct to the United States. One is even produced IN the United States (Bakersfield, CA). On a wells-to-wheels basis, Canadian oil sands are only 6-8% more carbon-intensive than typical light crude (e.g. Saudi), and it comes from a politically-friendly country that supports female rights, human rights in general, and is not bombing their neighbours. What you say regarding disruption of large areas of wilderness is true when it comes to tailings ponds, but you should also be aware that the vast majority of recent development (and probably most go-forward) is via in-situ extraction that does not require those tailings ponds. Source: I am a chemical engineer and work directly in this industry.
- Boothroid 9y agoAlternative opinion: 'Strip-mining the boreal to extract the tar sands and processing the oil makes the sands much more damaging to the climate than conventional oil. “I believe the carbon intensity of extraction and processing for the oil sands is about double that of conventional oil,” Homer-Dixon said.' http://grist.org/article/this-could-be-the-end-of-canadian-tar-sands/amp/ http://grist.org/article/this-could-be-the-end-of-canadian-t... I guess this is an inconvenient truth based on the downvoting.
- ajarmst 9y agoThankfully, neither petroleum extraction nor climate science need be faith-based, so Homer-Dixon's personal beliefs aren't all that relevant. There are multiple studies (not funded by petroleum companies) that document why he's wrong (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/014005/meta http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/0140... is a good metastudy). Grist.org is hardly a neutral source on the issue. By all means, advocate for wide-scale reduction and elimination of the use of petroleum products. Demand that your representatives fight for carbon-neutral energy production. But pretending that boycotting Canadian products and instead consuming more coal, fracked shale oil and tanker-shipped crude from corrupt autocratic regimes is somehow an important part of solving the problem just makes you look like you're not paying attention. As does supporting corrupt officials and corporate misbehavior in places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela over supporting an allied liberal democracy with a strong (at least in comparison) record of environmental stewardship and oversight on corporate activity.
- ghshephard 9y agoWell the obvious is you need a pipeline, to transport via pipeline - and that can take decades to put in place, and sometime is politically challenging as we've seen with Keystone XL. There are already railways that go everywhere. Next - right now, you need special tanker cards to transport oil via rail - and latency on those can be on the order of years if you want to scale up. What's neat about this invention, is that it can transport oil in a form that, if I read correctly, isn't as catastrophic when spilled as an oil tanker would be, and, also importantly, can use rail cars that were designed for something else (the author cites Coal) - so no need to wait a few years (and spend $$$) for special tanker cars - there are a zillion idle coal cars right now. This article captures part of the significant economic incentive as well: http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/demand-for-tank-cars-to-ship-crude-oil-by-rail-rises-at-breakneck-speed http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/demand-...
- yborg 9y agoWhat they mine out of tar sands/shales is bitumen. You can't pump asphalt, so they actually have to add a solvent to make it pumpable, usually naptha, which they then have to ship to the head end - meaning you end up with 2 pipelines. This idea makes the petroleum product more like coal, which has an extensive and cost-effective rail infrastructure for transport.
- vkou 9y agoOne problem with pipelines is that once you've sunk billions of dollars into building them, you have an enormous vested interest in continuing to use them.
- simlevesque 9y agoWhy would I run a pipeline on my land to provide you with customers while I don't get paid ? If something breaks (which occurs every year) I have no recourse and my land is in bad shape.
- Boothroid 9y agoAnything that facilitates increased use of tar sands hydrocarbons is terrible news for the environment. We should ban this miserable trade.
- tiku 9y agoI guess it's reusable after the oil is extracted, so it can be send back?
- pjc50 9y agoIt is the oil. The bitumen is cracked into lighter fractions like gasoline. (The other current method of transporting bitumen is to dilute it with naptha, which has to be sent back to the extraction site in order to be used with the next lot of bitumen)
- jacquesm 9y agoOil comes in many 'fractions', the heavier fractions are the ones like what this article is about (bitumen), the lighter ones are crude, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and gas forms. Crackers (in oil refineries) take as input a heavier fraction and then break apart and sort the molecules by length giving various different outputs which can then be used in different applications.
- andriesm 9y agoThis misreable trade is all that stands between many people and poverty. Green energy alternatives have years to decades before completely making hydrocaebons irrelevant. Electric cars certainly a big step, but only in beginning stages of market penetration.
- jacquesm 9y ago> This misreable trade is all that stands between many people and poverty. Nah, that's exaggeration. Tar sands are extremely polluting and the 'many people' are those that are employed in an industry that didn't even exist a decade ago, it's mostly boom towns specifically constructed around getting this oil out of the ground. I find it quite interesting that we would impose environmental constraints on the third world - where people really need to fight to make ends meet - and yet allow something as bad as this because 'many people might land in poverty', when in fact they have alternatives, just not as lucrative.
- gattilorenz 9y agoNice, although I'm wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of "wasted" space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least. Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?
- geon 9y agoThey should be squishy, so I imagine they pack efficiently.
- Joe-Z 9y agoThey are not only trading it for environmental saftey. As mentioned in another comment, using these balls you don't have to rely on specialized rail waggons anymore. So, while you may lose some space due to inefficient packing, you could easily make that up by using lots more of (assumedly) cheaper general-purpose/coal waggons.
- PeterisP 9y agoSpecialized rail wagons aren't expensive compared to other parts of the transportation costs - if you have the option of 5 specialized wagons or 6 "cheap" wagons, then using 5 wagons is cheaper.
- thereisnospork 9y agoAs a rule, it is far easier* to transport/handle liquids in large quantity than solids. Even ignoring the effort to convert/deconvert the oil at each end, I'm not seeing this as a step forward that will improve the bulk of crude-oil transport -- baring a more detailed analysis than what reads to me as 'pipelines bad.' *Cheaper, safer, more efficient, requiring less maintenance, etc...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> As a rule, it is far easier to transport/handle liquids in large quantity than solids.* Is it? For liquids, at all times you need a sealed container that doesn't leak. For solids, it's enough for the holes to be no larger than the individual solid object. This makes containers cheaper and requiring much less maintenance. As for this specific case, the article makes at least two points: - transporting solids can reuse existing infrastructure (rail + coal wagons), giving you flexibility - as opposed to requiring you to ship from only where the pipeline ends (or to build new pipelines); - with "one weird trick" (injecting some extra gas into the bubble) they can make each pellet buoyant, and it seems they also don't dissolve easily - the result is something that's potentially much easier to collect if you happened to spill it into an ocean.
- sgt 9y agoThey wouldn't build pipelines in the first place if it didn't make business sense to do so. These pipes will be in place for a very long time (relatively speaking). I would also think that railroad or road for transporting a solid liquid is also less environmentally friendly than sending via pipelines. Of course, if you are assuming that the pipeline will burst, then it may not be, but one has to ensure that the pipeline is a safe option. Government oversight is needed in those cases.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI understand the argument from the article is about flexibility - a pipeline will be in place for a very long time, but it's not easy to move it around as the economical landscape changes. Meanwhile, rail will let you move the stuff to wherever it's currently better to have it.
- tiku 9y agoWe can now make huge rube goldberg machines to transport those balls.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's called "rail". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport
- TeMPOraL 9y agoTwo questions I'm wondering about: - How solid are those pebbles? I assume they're not like soft blobs that can easily split and merge together? But then how much abuse they can take? E.g. if they crack easily, you can't really stack them together very high. - The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable?
- userbinator 9y ago- The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable? As much as coal, if not more.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoI wonder if they burn better or worse than wood pellets.
- pjc50 9y agoPeople are missing a couple of details in this: the Canadian "oil" in question is not a liquid from a well to start with, it's tar sands that have been dug up. The first step of processing is melting it to filter out the sand. This leaves you with viscous bitumen that cannot be pumped efficiently down a pipeline. So normally it's processed again to make "dilbit", diluted bitumen, in order to ship it to an oil refinery for cracking to produce actually useful petrol.
- dade_ 9y agoDilbit is diluted with chemicals that need to be imported from the US or Middle East. These liquids also need to be transported and can result in their own spills. This looks like an important development.
- osrec 9y agoCould the oil not be put in containers and transported by rail in its original form anyway? I'm not sure if converting to pellets really makes the problem easier to solve...
- dbcooper 9y agoSlurries (mixture of particles and liquids) are reasonably easy to pump. Australia pumps a coal/water slurry over its north-south axis.
- micah_chatt 9y agoThis is funny reversal in history: Rockefeller first built pipelines to cut out the rail industry from distribution.
- riffraff 9y agoso, you make pellets. Then you have to mix them with some "light" oil produced during the production of pellets. So you still have to transport them together. I cannot really understand how this is better than carrying oil directly.
- refurb 9y agoIt's in the article. Easier to clean up a spill if it happens.
- riffraff 9y agonot really, the bit where it mentions that you also need the oil byproduct to reconstitute the heavy oil is at the end of the article, while the mention of "easy to clean" is at the beginning, and (seems to?) only pertains to the pellets.
- deltawave 9y agoThey mention using the byproduct oil to reconstitute the pellets, but that oil could come from another source. I would picture a system where the pellets are shipped from alberta to houston etc., and the light oil produced by the process is used as fuel within alberta or transported to local refineries by smaller pipeline or train/truck. The balls would be reconstituted using oil available at the houston refinery, or using oil produced at that refinery in the oil upgrading process.
- btbuildem 9y agoDid you read the article? The pellets _are_ the oil -- the outer shell is hardened bitumen, the inside is liquid.
- xutopia 9y agoDoes anyone see the irony in this? "We admit this is utterly dangerous for the environment so instead of sending it out in liquid form we're now going to send it out in small pellets so they can then be transformed and it can pollute the world exactly where we want it to pollute."
- shawnz 9y agoWhat's ironic about that? It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It's dangerous, so we should take steps to minimize the danger.
- btbuildem 9y agoThe article mentions using rail cars to transport the bitumen balls -- but given the nature of the material, would they not stick together into clumps / semi-solid layers at the bottoms of rail cars? Coal is solid / brittle, almost slippery. These things seem to be the opposite.
- SippinLean 9y ago>could be a pipeline-free way to transport oil Oh, interesting title... >I don't think it will replace pipelines Ah, nevermind.
- radicaldreamer 9y agoCanadian tar sands should not be turned into oil at all -- there's no clean way to do so and the whole endeavor is based on continued government subsidies for it to be cost effective. Canada has a rep for being progressive and environmentally friendly but this is anything but.