I am not sure that’s right. Despite popular memes, the goal of the oil industry isn’t to destroy the planet. I have a friend who works in that industry. I did not understand just how difficult the work is until he got this job and shared what he learned.
We are very much removed from this reality. We pump gasoline at the station and buy plastic spoons and forks without a sense of what it took to get there.
Pipelines are no different from any other engineering endeavor. They are difficult to design and build and, no, we can’t make them perfect any more than you can make a hammer or a screwdriver indestructible. I don’t think it is about the US being incompetent or careless. I also don’t think it is about nefarious intent on the part of corporations. I could not imagine a nastier industry to navigate, from a political and regulatory perspective.
This, I think, is the problem. The deep political divisions in the US create a situation where energy policy is, at best, disjointed, disorganized and likely misplaced.
I think shutting down modern pipelines is ridiculous. Not because I love oil. No. I think it is because I try hard to be realistic about not just energy, but also the massive and deep chain of products and services that depend on oil derivatives. Simple example: Tens to hundreds of millions of people world wide would have died from COVID if we did not have oil and it’s derivatives to support what we had to do to protect ourselves, fight it and find a cure.
The specifics of transporting oil are foreign to me, and my guesses about differences and magnitudes of cost are sourced primarily from [0].
Having said that, it seems that the enormous savings to be had by using pipelines should be channeled back into more sensors, robustness, and/or monitoring. The article I linked cites $50B of annual savings on oil transported by Keystone XL. Great! Maybe let's put 10-20% of that back into more sensors, hiring more people for monitoring/inspections, or better.
When I look at the Wikipedia page of oil spills, I want oil pipelines if the US can be like Canada, where spills often release <1000 barrels (still a lot, but representing very fast response), not a place where it's hundreds of thousands of barrels, and not detected by the companies themselves most of the time.
I think one of the bigger issues in general with the US is that our infrastructure is older. This is a natural effect of being first movers on a range of technologies.
For example, I remember travelling to Europe and South America and having better mobile phone services and features than the US. The reason at the time is that we were stuck with a massive investment that was made in the early days of cell phones. Other parts of the world, where deployment was what I might call phase 2, had the ability to take advantage of next generation ideas and technology.
I would imagine the same is true of oil pipeline technology. I don't know any more about oil transportation than you do. Yet, I think I might be correct in making the assumption that older (50+ years?) pipelines exist in the US and it it these that might lead to the conclusion that we don't build them well. The facts, however, could be precisely the opposite to this conclusion: We built them very well. They survived 50+ years without issues. And now they are starting to show their age and need extensive repairs or replacement.
This is where I think politics might get in the way. I think you actually want brand new, high tech pipelines. They are likely far better for the environment across a range of criteria.
By turning oil and energy into a political mess we can't make the right decisions, which might very well be to build new high-tech pipelines and replace the old ones.
The oil economy isn't going away for a long time, 100+ years. Transportation fuel is only one variable in the vast array of benefits we derive from fuel. Look around your house, everything you own depends of oil. It would be hard to identify items in modern life that would be possible without oil and oil derivatives.
Here's the fallacy committed by those equating oil with bad things for humanity or the planet. We would literally have to go back to pre-industrial revolution humanity in order to be able to truly get to a post-oil society. Now imagine the damage eight billion people would do to the environment if we could not rely on oil and derivatives. We would burn down every forest on the planet. We would deplete every single farmable patch of soil of nutrients. We would destroy ecosystems at an unimaginable rate. A post-oil society cannot support eight billion people on this planet without doing unimaginable damage all ecosystems we touch.
We need to do all we can to make cleaner use of oil and derivatives. It isn't going away. And having a war against the very infrastructure that makes it safer is truly not intelligent.
We are very much removed from this reality. We pump gasoline at the station and buy plastic spoons and forks without a sense of what it took to get there.
Pipelines are no different from any other engineering endeavor. They are difficult to design and build and, no, we can’t make them perfect any more than you can make a hammer or a screwdriver indestructible. I don’t think it is about the US being incompetent or careless. I also don’t think it is about nefarious intent on the part of corporations. I could not imagine a nastier industry to navigate, from a political and regulatory perspective.
This, I think, is the problem. The deep political divisions in the US create a situation where energy policy is, at best, disjointed, disorganized and likely misplaced.
I think shutting down modern pipelines is ridiculous. Not because I love oil. No. I think it is because I try hard to be realistic about not just energy, but also the massive and deep chain of products and services that depend on oil derivatives. Simple example: Tens to hundreds of millions of people world wide would have died from COVID if we did not have oil and it’s derivatives to support what we had to do to protect ourselves, fight it and find a cure.
Perspective is important.