popular logistics

Exxon is going to build a natural-gas processing facility in a large”boatlike structure” 20 miles off the Jersey coast. According to Times reporter Jad Mouawad, this is “a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns aboutproximity to populated areas. [photopress:2007_exxon_offshore_NJ_map.jpg,full,alignleft]

Perceptions aside, which is more likely (probability of occurrence) to occur, or a leak/accident/fire n on-shore facility? What’s to preclude a system failure which causes failure both in populated areas and in the Atlantic. From Mouawad’s piece about the pipeline, which will be connectedto the Buckeye NY/NJ pipes. Exxon wants to:

build a $1 billion floating terminal for liquefied natural gas about 20 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns about proximity to populated areas.

The company plans to anchor a boatlike structure in the Atlantic Ocean to process natural gas imported by cargo ships from faraway suppliers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

The terminal, if approved, would connect through an underwater pipeline to an existing network that feeds New York and New Jersey, two of the top consumer markets in North America.

Exxon’s project is the latest of several dozen gas terminals that have been proposed in recent years in the United States. Energy specialists say more natural gas supplies will be needed to meet the growth in consumption and to make up for an expected drop in imports from Canada.

In many cases, energy companies have faced stiff opposition in finding sites for large new terminals. This has become one of the thorniest energy issues, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, raised security concerns about cargo ships carrying liquefied gas near big cities.

Still, companies are slowly moving forward with their plans. Since 2002, federal and state authorities have approved 18 new liquefied gas terminals around the country, including 4 offshore, though most analysts do not expect all of them to be built.

While most of the projects are planned along the Gulf Coast, the northeastern corner of the country is attracting attention because of its reliance on natural gas and its large populations. Two terminals to be built off Massachusetts gained approval last year. For Exxon, going so far offshore is an effort to duck the vociferous opposition that has dogged projects on both coasts. Its project, called BlueOcean Energy, would be able to supply 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, about 2 percent of the nation’s gas consumption — and enough to meet the needs of five million residential customers.

Exxon’s project is the third offshore terminal proposed for the greater New York region in recent years.

One proposal, to build a gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound, has aroused concern since its announcement in 2004 because of the impact it might have on fishing and boating; it is strongly opposed by shore communities and politicians.

That opposition could intensify in coming months as the project, which is known as Broadwater and is a joint venture by Royal Dutch Shell and TransCanada, is expected to receive notice about federal and state permits.

Another company, the Atlantic Sea Island Group, plans to build a terminal for liquefied natural gas on an artificial island about 14 miles south of Long Island, a project called Safe Harbor Energy.

Opponents of natural gas terminals have cited the potential for leaks, fires, explosions or terrorist bombings. The industry has generally argued that the terminals are secure and accidents are rare, but it has also started looking for ways to build them as far as possible from population centers.

Jad Mouawad, “Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic, The New York Times,December 12, 2007. Archive of Mouawad’s pieces - he’s one of the Times’ in-house experts, I think.

By  Ian Austen  in the Times on November 9th, “Study Find Carcinogens in Water Near Alberta Oil Sands Project,” more evidence of one of the myriad costs and risks that come with the use of fossil fuels:

OTTAWA, Nov. 7 — High levels of carcinogens and toxic substances have been found in fish, water and sediment downstream from Alberta’s huge oil sands projects, according to a new study.

The 75-page report, written by Kevin P. Timoney, an ecologist with Treeline Environmental Research, was commissioned by the local health authority of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, where many residents say they believe the oil sands developments to the south are damaging their health.

Oil sands developments are generally vast open-pit mines that recover a form of tar mixed with sand. That tar, which is formally known as bitumen, is later separated and processed to produce oil. Most of the oil from the Alberta developments is sent to the United States.

Earlier studies by the province of Alberta had dismissed health concerns. And Dr. Timoney’s report, while highly critical of the government, does not make a specific link between the toxic substances and the oil sands. But many Fort Chipewyan residents did on Thursday.

“For years the community has believed that there’s lots of cancer,” said Donna Cyprien, health director of the Nunee Health Authority. “When they drank from the water, there was an oily scum around the cup. We now know there is something wrong.”

Mrs. Cyprien said that the local health board hired Dr. Timoney largely because it had lost faith in Alberta’s provincial health department.

Like Dr. Timoney, scientists who have reviewed his report say further studies are necessary to determine the cause and extent of the problem. But they also expressed concern about what his research had already found. “This could actually be worse, in some respects, than the Exxon Valdez,” said Jeffrey W. Short, a research scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center who has studied the tanker accident that spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Most disturbing, said Dr. Short, was the finding that from 2001 to 2005, concentrations in sediments of a group of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons rose.

“These are substantial increases over and above the natural levels,” said Dr. Short, adding that the hydrocarbons “are notorious carcinogens,” found in tar and tarlike materials. In some cases, they were more than four times recommended limits in the United States. (Canada has no guidelines.)

Dr. Timoney concluded that the town’s treated drinking water was safe, but found high levels of arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in fish, which many people in Fort Chipewyan, especially members of its Native community, rely on for a substantial portion of their diet.

In an e-mail message, Howard May, a spokesman for Alberta’s Department of Health and Wellness, said that the government could not specifically comment on the report because it had not received a copy.

“There is nothing really new in these allegations, we have been looking into them for some two years now,” Mr. May wrote, adding that the government investigation has found “no higher incidence of cancer in Fort Chipewyan than the rest of the province, and we stand by that analysis unless and until we are provided with further evidence.”

Oil, then -unless it’s being used at the well head - after extraction, it needs to be moved somewhere for refining - a process which carries its own risks - stored - and then transported down the supply chain towards end users.  And in each stage of this process, there are risks: in production (the article above provides an illustration). And in each mode of transportation, risks - of trucks overturning, pipelines accidentally or intentionally being ruptured, boats spilling their loads.

We don’t mean to make an argument against  any and all use of petroleum - but that one of the many benefits of reduced consumption (reduced greenhouse gases, reduced cost, reduced air pollution), is a reduction in risks and costs connected to production.

Via Pruned: At the University of California San Diego, (UCSD) the NEES program (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation ) has built a very large “shake table.” From NEES/UCSD:

The UCSD LHP Outdoor Shake Table is being developed at the Field Station at Camp Elliott, a site located 15km away from the main UCSD campus. The shake table, acting in combination with equipment and facilities separately funded by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which include a large laminar soil shear box and two refillable soil pits, will result in a one-of-a-kind worldwide seismic testing facility.

Here’s a 2005 piece from Building Blog called “London Topological.” Not to quibble - bu t perhaps more correctly London Infralogical - or Infra-Topo-logical? We recommend it for the following reasons:

1. Every piece on  Building Blog perhaps more properly, BLDG BLOG - is worth reading, whether or not you think that you care about architecture.
2. Read a couple of pieces, and you’ll realize that of course you care about architecture.
3. This particular piece has implications for anyone who thinks about (relatively) modern history
4. and even more so for people who care about emergency planning. Although the author, Geoff Manaugh, doesn’t address those issues directly.

We’ll try to directly address the implications of underground system for emergency planners in upcoming posts.

According to a press release from Cygnus Business Media, which arranges the conference,

With the support and confidence of leading industry organizations, the highly regarded Damage Prevention Conference & Expo will celebrate its 10th anniversary this December 5 & 6 at the Las Vegas Hilton. The conference and exhibit floor responds to the demand for innovative products, services and training related to preventing damage to the nation’s underground infrastructure and serves professionals from municipalities; oil & gas facilities; telecom, CATV, and power companies; One-Call centers; excavation companies; utility contractors; and SUE firms. This year, show organizers are especially pleased to announce exclusive package pricing developed to offer the most productive and economical options available for companies sending teams of damage prevention professionals.

For those of you who aren’t following this - what you need to know is that the “one-call centers,” which are mandated by federal law, are

Last Sunday’s Times, Metro section,  Sunday September 16, 2007, page 21, column 1, headlined: “Pipeline Accident Kills Worker.”  No dateline, no byline. Not showing up in the Times’ archive search on its website. From that piece, which reports that Mr. McCaffrey was killed on Saturday:

The worker, identified as Pat McCaffrey, 67, of Lebanon, N.J. , was operating a crane-like machine called a side boom.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” said Michael Armiak, a spokesman for Millenium Pipeline Company, which is overseeing the building of the pipeline. He said Mr. McCaffrey worked for a contractor, Precision Pipeline, based in Wisconsin.

The pipeline, scheduled to be completed by November 2008, is to stretch across the Southern Tier and Lower Hudson Valley.

Kris Alexander at Danger Room has a short report and incisive analysis of these attacks, which PEMEX (Mexico’s oil exporting entity) claims will require hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. PEMEX also claims - in my view, not plausibly - that it won’t cause disruptions in exports (and to United States imports).

Photo by Pablo Spencer of the Associated Press.

Flames were visible at least six miles away. Thousands of people were evacuated; two women died of heart attacks.

Mexican authorities told the Associated Press that a note from a leftist group was found next to at least one unexploded device.

From Kris Alexander’s piece in Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Mexico supplies much of US oil and gas imports. Are higher gas prices on the way? Pemex, Mexico’s state-run oil company, claims that the attacks haven’t disrupted export supplies, but will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. With the U.S. economy already on shaky ground because of the sub-prime loan crisis, another such attack that did actually disrupt export oil supplies could have a direct economic impact on the U.S.

Counter-terrorism expert John Robb sees both attacks as a particularily good systempunkt — a point where a series of attacks on key nodes will cause the collapse of the entire system, essentially effects-based operations on the cheap. A few hundred dollars spent on explosives causes millions in damage.

It’s not clear from the underlying Associated Press report, published on MSNBC, whether or not the pipelines are underground or aboveground. Our concern about that detail is that we’re still working up the learning curve in trying to understand the risk of petroleum pipelines. (The “editorial offices” of Popular Logistics are in a roughly .75 square mile area which contain four underground petroleum lines, about which we presently know far too little).

 Scrap metal prices - particularly for copper - have led to thieves stealing phone lines, plaques from public memorials, and all manner of farming infrastructure.

From Jennifer Steinhauer’s excellent piece in today’s Times  :

The rampant thefts have left farmers without functioning water pumps for days and weeks at a time, creating financial loss and occasional crop devastation in a region still smarting from a spectacular freeze last winter.

Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.

Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.

But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as California farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement.

- snip -
Some sheriff’s departments in agricultural counties have rural crime units that investigate metal crimes almost exclusively these days, setting up sting operations in recycling shops and tagging copper bait with electronic tracking devices.

Metal theft from California farmers rose 400 percent in 2006 over the previous year, according to the Agricultural Crime Technology Information and Operations Network, a regional law enforcement group headed by Mr. Yoshimoto [Bill Yoshimoto, an assistant district attorney in Tulare County]. The numbers this year are equally high. Through the end of June, there were nearly 1,000 incidents of scrap metal theft on farms, causing more than $2 billion in losses, the group’s figures show.

Here in Kern County, there were 213 incidents of copper theft, the greatest number in the state.

“They go out and take a farm pump in the middle of nowhere,” said Sgt. Walt Reed, head of [the] county’s rural crime task force. “And they can pull the copper wire strands from the electrical wire box and get 60 feet of wire, remove the insulation and take it to the scrap yard for $2 to $3 a pound.”

Alan Scroggs, an almond farm manager in Wasco, knows the story only too well. Over the course of three months this spring, his irrigation system was raided five times by copper thieves; his well was hit twice, and the booster system that helps pump the water underground to irrigate the almond trees three times.

Copper thieves cut the wires in the conduit that runs to the power source, tie the wires to the back of a pickup truck and drive away, pulling the wire behind them and generally making off with roughly 75 pounds of scrap metal.

“When the sheriff’s department came out here for the third time,” Mr. Scroggs said, “they said, ‘I can’t believe I am here again.’ ”

Over the last 18 months, copper prices have hovered over $3.50 a pound, hitting $4 at one point, the highest price the metal has reached in recent memory, said Patrick Chidley, a mining and metals analyst at Barnard Jacobs Mellet in Stamford, Conn. By comparison, copper fetched 65 cents a pound in 2001.

“It is really the law of supply and demand,” Mr. Chidley said. “You have a lot of demand in China, where there is a big infrastructure build-out. Every building, every car, every motor, every wind turbine needs copper, and there are not enough mines out there to keep up.”

From Hawaii, where an accused copper thief is about to go on trial for felony theft charges, to Maryland, where a 41-year-old man was electrocuted recently after trying to cut through a high-voltage line in an abandoned discount store, stolen metals have filled a market void. This summer in Oakland, Calif., a memorial to 25 people who were killed nearly 16 years ago in a fire was stripped of stainless steel memorial plaques, and metal scavengers were suspected.

Let’s leave aside  the specious claim [2nd quoted graf above] that it’s all because of drugs and drug use - and please bear in mind that Steinhauer reported it as a claim - rather than endorsing the truth of the claim. Steinhauer has painted a very clear picture of how market forces drive illicit as well as licit markets. And she’s suggested - reasonably, I think - that at current record high prices - thieves are willing to undertake relatively low-risk larcenies and burglaries: unattended farm equipment.

Unattended infrastructure, of course, includes pipelines, water mains, power lines and lots of other things that we’d prefer to have where they are.

But what if prices go even higher? Is there a price at which it makes sense for thieves to start stealing copper from occupied buildings? Of course there is. Let’s just hope the market doesn’t supply it.

From “Church Sues Con Ed Over Damage to Pipe Organ,” The New York Times, June 13, 2007 (Associated Press Dispatch).

 A historic church has sued Consolidated Edison for $1 million, claiming that its 89-year-old pipe organ, one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, was damaged by steam escaping from beneath the adjacent street and sidewalk.

In court papers filed Monday in State Supreme Court, the church, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, says that it told the utility on June 30, 2004, about an “extraordinary amount of steam” coming from Park Avenue into the church. But, the papers say, the utility did not take any action until five weeks later, when it repaired components that were causing steam to enter the church, which is on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets.

The church’s lawsuit claims that soon after the initial complaint, the pipe organ, an Aeolian-Skinner, began to malfunction. The problems were caused by moisture being drawn into the organ’s pipe system through its blowers and pumps in the church basement, the court papers say.

“The moist, humid and damp air,” the papers say, caused “a general, overall breakdown of the organ system.”

A Con Ed spokesman, Chris Olert, said yesterday that the utility would not comment on pending litigation.

The church’s pipe organ, as described on its Web site, was built in 1918 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company of Boston, has 12,422 pipes and uses temperature-controlled air pressure.

It was once played by Leopold Stokowski, who came from England in 1905 to be St. Bartholomew’s organist and choirmaster and later became a world-renowned conductor.

What can we learn from this?

1. At least some of Con Edison’s steam pipes fail some of the time.

2. Even if it’s damaging a well-connected landmark church (you don’t need to be Episcopalian in New York to know where St. Bart’s is - or to have visited - it’s a stunning building, and they have had (and may still have) wonderful music programs,  Con Edison is either

(A) unconcerned about powerful institutions and bad publicity

(B) So overwhelmed with even more serious repairs and problems that it couldn’t get to this for five weeks

Or so badly managed they didn’t promptly route the information internally and make a decision.

via Gothamist.  

Popular Logistics thanks everyone for their words of praise about our predictions - on line and in the neighborhood - about trouble with New York’s petroleum fuel pipelines. Which run, incidentally, more or less directly underneath our editorial offices (and bedroom). Those messages were occasioned by news reports of arrests in a terrorist plot to blow up Kennedy Airport (JFK), its fuel depots, and the Buckeye Pipelines.

In any case, our concern is that we don’t need terrorists for these pipelines to be an alarming risk. Negligence and accident will do just fine.

Plus there’s  the question of what appears to be an alarming incidence of premenopausal breast cancer cases along the pipeline. More as we learn it.

(See below for 5/24 update)  

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration - The New York State Public Service Commission.

According to their New York Pipeline Safety “Fact Sheet” - it’s the P.S.C.

But the P.S.C. may not know that. Or not think it important for anyone else to know it. One wants to be careful - when observing facts - to not carelessly draw inferences about intentions.

However, if you go to the Public Service Commission website - and look hard - you’ll not find any obvious link - I couldn’t find any, obvious or other - to that body’s regulatory responsibility for pipelines. Must not be looking hard enough. It’s clear from the headings 0n the front page - Electric/Steam, Natural Gas, Telecommunications, and Water - that the PSC has some responsibility for underground infrastructure.

Popular Logistics - please pardon the pun - has been of late digging into local pipeline issues - and, to quote Consolidated Edison - “we’re on it.”

5/24 update after the fold