May 16, 2014
By Saul Elbein
...“Can we put [those cows] (click here) on trucks and send them to Canada?” suggested Max Nelson, a stooped retired rancher who raised his hand every 10 minutes to pose other hypothetical disasters: a spill polluting the water supply of West Omaha, say, or compromising the hydroelectric dams on the Platte River....
Hypothetical? You mean it has never happened?
May 15, 2014
By Steven Gorman and Selam Gebrekidan
(Reuters) - A faulty valve at a petroleum pipeline pump station ruptured (click here) early on Thursday in an industrial corner of Los Angeles, spewing crude oil 40 feet into the air, onto the roof of a strip club next door, and leaving four people sick from the fumes.
An estimated 10,000 gallons of oil gushed from the pipeline before it was shut down and the spill was halted, soaking an area about a half-block long, Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Jaime Moore said.
The company that runs the pipeline, Plains All American Pipeline LP, a unit of Plains Pipeline LP, put the volume of the spill at "less than 450 barrels (18,900 gallons)" based on current field inspections....
Well, that was an interesting hypothetical. The great thing about hypotheticals is that no one gets sick, there is no risk of cancer and it doesn't cost homeland security or insurance companies any money.
How much surface area is covered by one gallon of spilled oil?
How thick is an oil spill? From top to bottom, what is the depth of an oil spill on land? One millimeter? Two? A quarter of an inch?
A standard-size barrel filled with the most common oils (petroleum oil, crude oil or diesel fuel oils) weighs between 125 and 140 pounds. However, the weight of a barrel of oil varies based on the type of oil in the barrel and the size of the barrel.
The bitumen mixture with naphtha would not weigh anything similar to oil. Bitumen weighs 156.5 kilograms or 345 pounds per barrel. But, in order to travel through a pipeline without rupturing it, there needs to be a 50/50 mixture with naphtha.
A standard-size barrel holds 42 U.S. gallons. If one fills a standard-size barrel with petroleum oil that has a density of 881 kg/m3, then that barrel weighs about 140 kilograms. If one fills the same barrel with crude oil with a density of 790 kg/m3, that barrel weighs about 125 kg. In order to get a metric tonne of oil, one would need about 7.33 barrels of oil.
Taking one barrel of bitumen (345.6 pounds) and one barrel of naphtha (252 pounds = 42 US gallons X 6 US pounds) and mixing them creates two barrels. The two barrels would weigh 597.6 pounds total or 298.8 pounds each.
To the left is what a metric ton of CO2 looks like. A metric ton is the 'cubed' size of the weight of the substance. So, in the case of CO2 this is what a metric ton looks like.
Visualizing a Metric Ton of Carbon Dioxide
A cube of CO2 would be nearly 30 feet tall and weigh over 2,000 pounds. As a point of reference, the average height for Americans age 20 and over is about 5' 8" for males and 5' 3" for females, according to a 2008 source.
There is one other illustration that will help put it into perspective. Now, the standard for a ton is 2000 pounds. A metric ton is actually a little bigger than a standard ton. A metric ton is 1.102 tons. That is 2204 pounds. But, for demonstration purposes it is best not to confuse the issue and I'll use 2000 pounds for metric ton.Any cubic measurement is always ^3. So a meter cubed is 1 meter ^3. That is what the illustrations seek to portray. They are a measurement cubed or ^3. Six sided with three dimensions. So, it takes a weight measurement and turns it into a three dimensional object of length X width X depth.
So, we want to know the surface area a gallon of spilled oil, actually bitumen mixture.
I have already determined a barrel of the mixture weighs 298.8 pounds. And we know a barrel is 42 gallons. So, the weight of the bitumen mixture per gallon is 7.09 pounds. We know that a metric ton is 2000 pounds which means there are 282 gallons per metric ton of the bitumen mixture.
But, to keep it simple what is the surface area of one gallon of spilled bitumen mixture? Basically, meter^3 per gallon.
The legal measurement of a US gallon is 231 cubic inches (231 in^3).
One (1) cubic inch = 16,387 cubic millimeters
231 cubic inches is equal to 3,785,397 millimeters cubed (mm^3) or one gallon or 7.09 pounds of bitumen.
One meter cubed is one meter (1000 millimeters (mm) wide by one meter high (1000 millimeters (mm) by one meter (1000 millimeters (mm) thick. If a bitumen oil spill is 10 millimeters thick how large is the spill of one gallon of the bitumen mixture?
1000 mm X 1000 mm = 1,000,000 mm^2 (one million millimeters squared)
1,000,000 mm^2 X 1000 mm = 1,000,000,000 mm^3 (one billion millimeters cubed)
1 inch by 1 inch = 1 inch ^2 (one inch squared)
1 inch = 25.4 millimeters
25.4 mm X 25.4 mm = 645.16 mm^2
3,785,397 mm^3 = 10 mm x 378,539.7 mm^2
The square root of 378,539.7 mm^2 = 615.255 or 615.26 mm
Therefore, a gallon of oil spilled with a thickness of 10 mm is 615.26 mm by 615.26 mm.
1 mm = 0.0393701 inch or 0.0394 inch
To convert 615.26 mm to inches it is multiplied by 0.0394 and results in a product of 24.24 inches.
So, one gallon of spilled oil is 24.24 inch by 24.24 inches by 0.4 inch.
Surface area is expressed in a cubed measurement, but, to look down at one gallon of spilled oil, it would cover over 2 feet by 2 feet of area.
In the spill yesterday in Los Angeles was 18,900 gallons. Get the picture?
2 feet X 2 feet is 4 square feet (ft^2).
4 ft.^2 X 18,900 gallons is 75,600 square feet, but with a depth of 4/10 inches (0.03 foot) the width and length would be slightly less.
Not cubic feet, but, square feet. Length and width.
The oil spill in Los Angeles yesterday would have covered the footprint of this elementary school.
Now take this elementary school and put it on the Kleeb farm and realize the entirely unusable land a ruptured oil pipe could deliver. How many of those ruptures could the Kleebs occur before they would have no agricultural land? How are the Kleebs going to eat when the lawsuit to the oil company is paid, but, there is still no land to grow food?
Below is a laughing baby supervised by the person taking the picture. The toddler takes a three dimensional glass of water (pipeline) and turns it into a two dimensional spill.
