Tar Sands Oil

Tar sands is a petroleum product that is collected off sands in Alberta and other places up North.

The fields are described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Canadian_Sedimentary_Basin#Oil_sands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Lake_oil_sands

It resembles the bitumen that is used to make asphalt, a very low-quality petroleum product. Extraction is complicated process that uses at least five times as much energy as conventional oil. It is made to flow in early part of production with steam or a solvent. It tends to solidify in equipment, or at least becomes so thick that it does not flow. To transport it in tank cars, a solvent such as pentane is added. The mixture is then very flammable. A train derailed and six cars burned up in one incident. The disaster left 42 people dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster

The desired transport of these low-quality oils is a pipe line, simply because it does not make much money. Some years the price is almost the cost of getting it and transporting it to the refinery. It does make a very low-grade diesel fuel eventually, only used in very large diesel engines. The companies want to transport it by pipe because this is the cheapest way.

The business of heavy crude and its costs is explained here. The Nebraska pipe line was not approved across the Ogallala aquifer. It is to go through the Eastern part of Nebraska.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Keystone-XL-Is-Far-From-Certain.html

Why make such bad oil product? Well, it just fills in the bottom end of oil supply, and more oil is available for making diesel to run trucks (from normal sources of crude oil). And technically, the tar sands oil can be refined. You can "pull" hydrogen from other sources of fossil fuel (natural gas etc.) and add that to tar sands oil. That is not cheap, and you are wasting hydrogen from the natural gas. The website Narwhal explains:

Also from their website: "In the US, 59 of the 134 refineries are equipped with coker units. Approximately 30% of the US's bitumen refining capacity is in the nine Gulf of Mexico refineries TransCanada seeks to supply through its controversial Keystone XL pipeline. "

The pipes are some 18-42 inches in diameter and made by welding the pieces together. There is also a seam along the length when the pipe itself was manufactured. The pipe is unlike the 6 inch pipe used to transport conventional oil that flows much more easily. The most famous disaster is a rip in the 30 inch pipe that went near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Political deals made the pipe exempt from a tax that is normally collected to take care of possible spills. If the product is diluted with an organic solvent, that quickly evaporates and the heavy bitumen sinks, usually polluting the water table underneath. Details of the spill are found here.

http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2012/05/Irrational-exemption_FINAL_14May12.pdf

Why is an 18 inch or 36 inch pipe more likely to break? The pipes are relatively thin metal compared to their diameter:

Pumping stations pose some risk, but as they are manned, a leak there would be quickly shut down. A Youtube video describes a pump station. Link below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HQIK_OUDzY

We are getting into chemical engineering here, and I do not have access to the journals, but bits of science are found on the Internet free. The summary is that there are two spills so far, Arkansas and Kalamazoo, about 4 times the incidence of conventional oil spill, per mile of piping. The tar sands bitumen contains dilute sulfuric acid (corrosive). This and the higher temperature and pressure in the pipes contributes to corrosion.  Some studies dispute the corrosion at anywhere below 100C (boiling point of water), but companies have nevertheless added epoxy coatings to prevent corrosion.

Whatever the cause of spills, they continue in these pipes. Fourteen more minor incidents are catlogues in this document.

http://blog.nwf.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/11/files/2011/06/320115006H_CAO_06032011.pdf

My guess on the study of future ruptures is that the higher pressure used will be the main culprit. The risks and each pipeline plan needs community input. Do you need the jobs that badly that you want the pipeline? States, the US government and Canadian companies should not overrule the local interests. After a spill, your land is worthless.

Libertarians, Dystopia, Young Men and Big Corporations

What do these have in common? The young men part is easy. They are dependent on their family till working age or at least teens. They value the family, personal effort, rewards from work. Then they get a job and they have to pay tax. They have no idea what the government does, other than at the city and county level where the results are plain to see, roads and police and fire protection. But in general, government is just restrictions on life and supporting people who are not able to make a living.

Then they go to college or perhaps just pick up a book, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Rand was a Russian émigré who knew all the evils of socialism. She painted a dystopian future of a strictly controlled planet. From this pretty much all modern dystopian fiction comes out. The comic book or Hollywood version, or even the lyrics to the album 2112 by the band Rush. Paul Ryan read the book as a college student. He still acts based on it, as pretty much all government is evil. He is on a mission to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as these are all part of the unnecessary and evil things that the libertarian teachings of Rand introduced.

I have to pause here to explain how they would like to run things. You pay a small tax, say 5%, or maybe even 10% if you need snow plows. This takes care of government at all levels. You stash away money that you will later use in place of Medicare or Social Security, which they have done away with. Works fine if you have a boring life and nothing happens to you before you turn 60.

Corporations figure into the thing in a sort of convoluted way. They cannot completely dismiss government, as they depend on it to make near monopolies in any one field. The lobbying efforts have led to many industries having only three or four players. Food is grown by many farmers, but the processing and bringing to market is in the hands of a few giants. Even seed production for the farming is in the hands of a corporate giant.

So we are essentially at the point where any kind of welfare or government control of any production is disappearing. The corporations use the state to their ends. By supporting “capitalism” we are essentially doing the opposite of what we intended, we make ourselves slaves to consumer products instead of the socialist state the Rand feared.

The industries dictate the bills that control their industry. The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 made sure that only the biggest farms and ranches made money for mass produced foods. Smaller farmers then started things that have different labeling, such as organic foods. These require more manpower and cannot always be grown with big machines.

Much of the farm end of things is explained in the book What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) by Thomas Frank.

Politics have entered what he calls Culture Wars. We don’t understand material benefits anymore so we concentrate on other politics, and people in the middle of the country have become Republicans simply because of values, religion etc.

As we move toward monopolies, the dystopian nature of corporations is becoming clear. Just recently, the move away from Net Neutrality allows the service providers to push some information and even block pages it does not want you to see. But they probably only want to control our consumer behavior.