Damage Report: LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History (inhabitat.com) 240
MikeChino writes: A week after the ruptured natural gas well in Aliso Canyon was finally declared sealed, we have a full account of the damage — and it doesn't look good. In total, 97,100 metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere over the course of 112 days — the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
It used to happen all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
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And still happening now (Score:2)
1000x more (Score:2)
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Or maybe we should have been paying more attention and hyping it up when it "used to happen all the time" to avoid all the new leaks that have happened since then. The problem here is that SoCalGas had all that information on potential leaks but this happened anyway. At some point someone needs to be held accountable to stop lax safety measures, hence the hype is very useful.
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Burning methane like that [wikipedia.org] is actually much better for the environment (or at least the greenhouse gases) [wikipedia.org] than releasing it as methane.
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...but possibly not as good as capturing it and burning it in something that does mechanical (or thermal) work, and certainly not as good as shutting down the entire well and leaving it in the ground in the first place.
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"one of the worst" (Score:2)
Is that a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
Is half a million cars a lot in a nation that has over 230 million cars on the road? LA County alone has over 7 million cars and trucks registered.
Having more cars than licensed drivers in the USA sounds like more of an environmental disaster... and worse yet, China already has more drivers than the entire population of the USA, and the numbers are still climbing.
The late Everett Dirksen (Score:2)
who said, (channeling a deep Southern-Illinois accent) "A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and pretty soon it runs into real money."
Yeah, a gas leak in L.A., one in New Jersey, a couple in New Orleans, and pretty soon you have some serious environmental impact.
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It's a question of cost vs. benefit. 7 million individual drivers are getting some value from driving and emitting greenhouse gasses. This well is just spewing the stuff into the atmosphere with no benefit to anyone at all.
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Yes but this isn't even a disaster, even in purely environmental terms, much less one of the greatest in US history.
It's like a ship tearing up a few hundred yards of coral reef. Actually even that overstates it considerably.
No one died. There is no noticable difference in the environment except temporarily and locally, as a hazard.
From an environmentalist's point of view, this is just boy who cried wolf hyperbole that makes a real disaster less likely to be cared about.
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Having more cars than licensed drivers sounds good for the environment - it means some aren't being driven...
That's only "good" if no resources are needed to build a car. Depending on how far down the chain you track resources, building a car has a higher carbon footprint than driving it:
http://www.theguardian.com/env... [theguardian.com]
Anyhow, that "fact" isn't true [wikipedia.org], at least as of the given dates.
Try "licensed drivers".
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Worst disasters in US history? Bull Shit.
How many died? How much property damage?
This doesn't even rank in the top thousand by any objective measure.
Every last bit of that methane was due to be burned. It was at the last step before retail use. You only get to count the extra from being unburned and if this was really such a fucking disaster it could have been flared.
Your slip is showing... (Score:4)
Worst disasters in history? Bollocks (Score:2)
Please see here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Even discounting the deathtoll component the rebuilding costs in environmental terms would far exceed the environmental impact of this methane leak. Stupid.
Surprised the company didn't care much (Score:4, Insightful)
Then the media picked up on it, and suddenly the company decided "uh oh, this is really bad PR for us we better fix it".
Kinda eye-opening how they didn't really give a shit until the media picked it up. That's a lot of lost gas, and a lot of affected people, and a ton of bad PR.
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I do not think this particular disaster is that bad. Worse is the fact that there are huge amount of similar "we don't give a shit" disasters waiting to happen in every industry. It will continue as long as there are no persons responsible to fix those - company can always pay a fine.
Re:Surprised the company didn't care much (Score:5, Informative)
But this did take action. They started draining the reservoir straight away. This reduced the loss rate and the pressure behind the leak which then gave them the ability to cap it. It really isn't that easy to do. As for the size of the leak the total loss is equivalent to around 5 Billion cubic feet (that is the normal measurement not tonnes), this compares to a US production rate of around 2,400 billion cubic feet per month.
It is still the worst methane leak in american history but it is far from as bad as some are making out.
Have a read of this - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru... [pbs.org]
Re:Surprised the company didn't care much (Score:4, Informative)
The only sure way to fix it is to drill a relief well which intercepts the leaking well (straw) deep underground (a challenging engineering feat in itself), and cap it from below by injecting concrete. The concrete gets carried up by the outflowing fluid, but the weight of the concrete column (plug) extending up to the surface is what counteracts the pressure. Eventually there's enough pressure from the concrete column that the escaping fluid is at atmospheric pressure at the top, and the outflow ceases. You've plugged the leak. The problem being drilling a relief well takes time, more than drilling a normal well since you need to stop every so often, pull everything out, send instruments down, and take measurements to make sure you're still on track to intercept the leaking well. And you want to drill several relief wells so if the first one misses you're not starting over from scratch.
Incidentally, SoCal Gas petitioned to light the methane on fire. Burning methane (CH4) produces CO2 and 2 H2O. But each molecule of methane is about 30x more potent as a greenhouse gas than each molecule of CO2, so you're actually reducing the environmental damage considerably by burning the methane. Oil wells and refineries regularly burn off the methane that percolates out because until a few years ago when oil (energy) prices skyrocketed to $100/bbl, it wasn't worth the cost to capture it. California state regulators denied their request, worried the fire could get out of control.
Please understand, I'm not trying to give SoCal Gas a free pass here. They removed the surface safety valve on the well because it was leaking, and didn't bother replacing it because it wasn't near anything important. Best guess right now is the casing or a valve further down failed due to age. So the cause is probably failure to maintain the well and equipment.
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And what a spectacle that would be!
It's been said [slashdot.org] that the hole is leaking 2,500M BTU/hr.
In 1886, a burning gas well in Findlay, Ohio was said to be working at a rate of about 200M BTU/hr. Here is what was said of this relatively "small" fire at the time: [pbase.com]
It is difficult to imagine the magnificent effect of this burning well at night. The noise of the escaping gas which, at the rate of forty million cubic feet per day, is like the roar of Niaga
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Not trying to be a smart ass, really but: how exactly is this "surprising"?
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The real question is why did someone think using a drilled out oil well as a natural gas storage facility was a good idea?
Let's do some quick math:
97100 metric tons CH4 = 1.4 x 10^11 standard liters CH4. If the gas is compressed to 2000 psi (136 atm), that requires 1 x 10^9 L of storage space. A billion liters. Find an above ground billion-liter, high pressure storage tank that can serve LA's natural gas needs, and I'm sure the gas company will jump on it. In the meantime, gas companies use drilled-out
Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
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I know, right?! When similar things happen naturally, human fuckups should obviously be ignored and dismissed!
Nobody died, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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a drunk dying of monoxide gas in his garage is worse pollution emissions tragedy than this "disaster",
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THIS Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] is what an actual disaster looks like. Not environmental enough? Try Flint_water_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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One of the worst? Maybe (Score:2)
But things are always bigger in Texas [texasobserver.org]. The L.A. leak gets more attention for its location
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Well, that and it depends on how quiet the company responsible can keep the local government and media. Given how subservient Texas tends to be towards petrochemical companies, I'm not surprised they've managed to keep it on the down low.
How Many VW TDi' is this ? (Score:2)
let's hope... (Score:2)
Where's the beef? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd suspect there is more methane released by the cattle on the ranches of the US West in a month than was released by this background noise blip of a "disaster".
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Would you dare try to substantiate your suspicions? Or is this just an idle dismissal?
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Why not use google and a calculator yourself? Anyway,
see here for counts: http://www.cattlerange.com/cat... [cattlerange.com]
Biggest cow states: Texas and Nebraska.
Cattle in Texas plus cattle in Nebraska: 11,700,000 + 6,250,000 = 17,950,000
Methane output per year per cow per Google: about 95 kg per year, or 8 kg per month
Therefore, Texas plus Nebraska cattle make about 143,600,000 kg = 143,000 metric tons of methane per month. And there are a lot more cattle in other Western states.
The spill was of 98,000 tons, or 98,000,00
I checked that math (Score:2)
Worst disaster? (Score:2)
Worse than, say, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, in which over 6000 died? Worse than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in which over 3000 died? Worse than the 2001 NY Trade Center in which 3000 died? Or the dozen other disasters in which 1000 or more died? How many people died because of this?
Re:Worst disaster? (Score:4, Interesting)
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This incident's contribution to climate change was meager. Even if climate change proves everything we fear (and I do believe in climate change, although I believe the full impact is still uncertain), this still isn't much of disaster. Proponents of climate change do themselves no favors with this sort of idiocy.
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That's 0.04% of the methane produced by cows (Score:4, Informative)
A setback not a disaster (Score:2)
So it's a 1.5% increase in methane emissions from leaks this year. This amount have been decreased by 15% in the last decade so we basically lost a few months of progress. sucks but not even close to a disaster.
Really? (Score:2)
I thought it was this one:
http://politicalhumor.about.co... [about.com]
Comparison (Score:2)
Transportation is a small contributor to methane emissions. A better perspective is total anthropogenic methane emissions in the US... for 2014, this was about 28.3 million metric tons (MMT). So this leak was about 0.3% of that. For another comparison, manure management contributes about 2.4 MMT annually, and agriculture overall accounts for 10MMT.
(http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/ghgemissions/US-GHG-Inventory-2016-Main-Text.pdf, Table 2-12, Sum of CH4 emissions in CO2 eq. divided by 25.)
I mea
chicken little (Score:2)
Nothing compared to the hot air from DC (Score:2)
The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force of government.
Need new nuclear reactors (Score:2)
It is sad that the GOP refuse to do their jobs.
Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:5, Informative)
From reading TFA, they say its the equivalent of a half million cars for a whole year.
Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:5, Informative)
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
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There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
But if you say "half a million cars" without providing context, it seems like more than it is, which I believe was the intention.
"People hit by falling pianos up 100% this year."
By eating cereal, I am not saving the planet? (Score:3)
I eat a brand of breakfast cereal that claims "Since 2006" their factory used enough wind energy to account for "taking nearly 6,200 cars of the road!" Note the exclamation point in what I am quoting, you cannot advocate for a cause or advertise a commercial product or write a fake ransom note ("Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals representing a small foreign faction" ) without one.
The alternative is eating a competing brand that requires me to exercise by serious swimming, bike riding, or
Depends on your methane release (Score:2)
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That calculation could be misleading because the time period is not taken into account.
The equivalent of 500000 car emissions for a year, when adjusted for the number of days of the leak, would be 1.63 million cars over the 112 day period for which the leak had not been sealed. Under the assumption that there are 253 million cars on the road in the US, the correct percentage would be 0.64%. Now, this doesn't seem like much, and I grant you that. 0.64% represents the proportion of pollution caused by the
Wouldn't it be (Score:2)
Their car analogy was stupid, but don't let that distract you from the enormity of the disaster.
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Their car analogy was stupid
Clearly they were tailoring their writing style for the slashdot audience. We're suckers for stupid car analogies.
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Yep, I'd say Deepwater Horizon qualifies as at least a little worse than that.
Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:4, Insightful)
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graph [arizona.edu]
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
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Gee, it shows a clear trend upwards, what a surprise.
Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:5, Informative)
... link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close.
The Guardian addresses several of your errors interpreting this graph in this article [theguardian.com]. Perhaps the biggest error is the implication that the models predict specific temperature rises over time. In reality, the projections all included error bounds which, if included, would have show a very different picture.
I will note that those error bounds were pretty broad back in 1990. And that newer models are narrowing those bounds.
Last, a quotation from the article: "The 1990–2012 data have been shown to be consistent with the [1990 IPCC report] projections, and not consistent with zero trend from 1990"
Roy Spencer fan, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Roy Spencer [wikipedia.org] is indeed a "climate scientist" and a specialist in creating misleading graphs and statements about that particular set of sattelite data (UAH lower troposhpere temps). He is well known as a religiously motivated climate denier and is quite likely the author of the red-herring you just posted. I have used scare quotes on the phrase "climate scientist" because IMO someone who signs the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming [skepticalscience.com] just doesn't have the skill set that Science requires.
Broken link (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Broken link (Score:2)
You must be new here...
Re: Roy Spencer fan, right? (Score:3)
Change opinion based on evidence? You must be new here
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graph [arizona.edu]
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements.
Oh, cute, an unsourced graph that stops in 2012 and uses dodgy frequently "adjusted" UAH satellite data.
Why not try it with actual temperature data and include recent measurements? Oh, because it doesn't tell the same story.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/compare_1997-2015.jpg [realclimate.org]
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Meanwhile, My February, which should be in the 60s, is in the 90s.
IN THE FUCKING COLORADO DESERT, where it should in reality be in the 50s this time of year, and wet.
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And that has never happened before in the entire history of the world. But wait - aren't they blaming that on el mino or something?
Trump will fix this for you. He will build a wall and deport that mino Mexican guy.
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I'm actually a huge defender of climate science and the argument that global warming has it's origins in mankind.
With that said, this argument is indefensible and doing harm to my cause. There is no scientific way to tie a 0.5 degree increase in temperature to a single weather anomaly.
I realize you were responding to a moron, but please don't drop to that level.
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Re: Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time perio (Score:3, Funny)
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There is nothing funny about man boobs.
Potentially disturbing if encountered out of context though...
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Just because there are glaciers in the world remaining does not mean that many glaciers in the world have already been lost.
Sure, but when you tell politicians that you predict that a particular glacier is very likely to melt, and then it doesn't do what you said... this failed prediction is a data point that goes into the column keeping track of the veracity of your predictions, and within this column the distribution of errors better turn out to be normally distributed
If all the science is rigorously peer reviewed then of course the prediction errors will be normally distributed, but peer reviewed science isnt what backed
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you link to article about glacier that is still there. anyway that glacier and some of those others in that article may well have formed or bulkied up in the "little ice age (not a true ice age admittedly) from 16-19 centuries. Get me alarmed about glaciers NOT in the n. hemisphere just because of that LLA thing.
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This is all good.
The enviro-left is burning through what credibility it has left like tripping hippies.
So you are saying all of the wasted gas that wasn't sold and not servicing the stockholders is a good thing?
That's their money just escaping into thin air. You a commie or something?
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If they are so concerned about losing money then perhaps they should have spent a bit more to prevent the well from rupturing in the first place rather than sit around for 3 months claiming it would take many more months to plug the leak.
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Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:4, Informative)
Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476 [dot.gov], so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles,
Looking at it another way, the EIA [eia.gov] says the US consumed, "In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons..." So, that leak was equivalent to less than 0.22% of US gasoline consumption. That seems to be a more honest indication of the scale.
Re:Equivalent to 500000 cars over what time period (Score:4, Insightful)
That math seems reasonable but, it doesn't change the fact that a company released an enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere for no other reason than incompetence. It's a small percentage of the overall pollution produced by the US but, generally, that pollution at least has some purpose other than, "Ooops". Ignoring or dismissing this as a minor incident just tips the risk/reward scale for corporations further towards "Fuck it. Who cares if it leaks".
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"Fuck it. Who cares if it leaks".
Not sure what the going rate for methane is but if they accidentally burned 300 million gallons of gasoline the bean counters who have to account for $300M of product might care a little.
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Not if they saved more than $300M by storing this stuff in questionable ways.
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This is Southern California we're talking about. Anyone driving in heavy traffic is going to have considerably worse fuel economy numbers than someone driving open roads. When I was still driving 30,000 miles a year (about 31 miles each way daily just getting to and from work), I averaged somewhat less than 18 mpg. With the same car and a trip cut to 18 miles each way, I averaged better than 20 mpg. It wasn't just the distance, it was the fact that traffic between San Pedro and Santa Monica was nastier than
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You're dividing 112 days of methane leak by one year's-worth of automobile consumption. So now we're at 0.7%.
That still seems smallish, and when talking about greenhouse emissions it's a global problem. One has to take into account global greenhouse gas production, but also global carbon sinks. I wonder what percentage of unabsorbed greenhouse gasses this contributed to over that period of time?
Maybe another way of digesting the impact is in terms of money. That, we can relate to. So maybe here's the questi
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cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average
So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Only as dishonest as you make them seem.
That's what I was thinking. Pulls some numbers out of his ass then claims "dishonesty".
OTOH, maybe Poe. If so, kudos to GP.
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Contrast that to the article, which simply claims a completely unsupported figure as fact. That's dishonest.
OR... (Score:2)
1 day in the life of a large industrial plant of almost any heavy industry.
Not to let them off to easily but private cars are dwarfed in the production of 'bad' gasses when compared to fleets of diesel trucks, heavy transport equipment or industrial production facilities.
Headline is not substantiated (Score:2)
The article (and summary headline) is not justified by the article.
The summary headline says "One of the worst disasters in U.S. history". The first paragraph of the article says "one of the largest environmental disasters in US history." Big difference.
But even that is not ever discussed in the text of the article; the article never discusses the environmental consequences or whether they are "a disaster." It does give a number, 97,100 metric tons of methane emitted--- but that's trivial. World metha
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I care about the environment. I just think hysterical headlines like this one tend to do more harm than good by damaging credibility.
A serious issue, and one that needs investigation? Yes, absolutely. One of the worst disasters - even environmental disasters - in US history? Please. Not even close. Notice how this topic was completely derailed by reactions to the ridiculous hyperbole? In this case, yes, I absolutely am blaming the messenger.
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MikeChino writes:
Timothy very rarely if ever writes submissions, users write submissions, Timothy approves submissions from the firehose and sometimes adds commentary.
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So basically equivalent to the number of cars on the 405 in LA everyday -
Re:Can we please stop? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"This is the first I've heard of it" really paints you as an outlier, not qualified to comment on how its absence from your self selected news aggregators indicates its severity.
I avoid current news actively, barring things like leaving a room or business to accomplish avoidance. And I've heard as much as the summary has to offer, at least.
You're a dolt. Any of the posts with comparison or context far surpasses your profession of ignorance. I invite you to indulge your bent towards autosexual nymphomania. P
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