Tar Sands Pipeline Research: Quick Survey (with prize) (Portland, Brunswick: 2013, university)

[Coaster]

Originally Posted by Northern Maine Land Man

We are importing corn for the first time ever because of requirements that we process corn to ethanol. Putting 10% ethanol into our cars cut 10 % of oil out of the fuel stream. That's why the lower margin refineries go down.

Not my first day.

Nor mine.

We are not importing corn for "the first time ever." The U.S. has imported corn regularly for decades, an average of 16 million bushels a year in the last ten years. Imports last year increased significantly because the drought in the Midwest lowered production and prices in Brazil hit new lows. Nonetheless, the U.S. is still the largest exporter of corn in the world.

BTW, it takes 1.5 gallons of ethanol to equal the energy content of 1 gallon of gasoline.

Nice of you to admit that refineries are closing because of lack of need, rather than environmental regulations limiting the construction of new (unneeded) ones. That's a significant evolution on your part.

[Northern Maine Land Man]

I know. The the comparison I used was volumetric, not energy. It actually takes the equivalent of 1.6 gallons of Diesel to produce one gallon of ethanol. It's a loser all the way around.

The corn coming into Wilmington comes from Brazil. Brazil uses sugar cane to produce their ethanol. Politics won't let us do that here. We are required by law to use corn so we import corn. It is a colossal failure.

Brazil ships us corn at exorbitant prices because Congress requires us to use corn and we had a poor corn crop last year due to drought.

[Coaster]

Actually, corn was imported from Brazil last year because the price was lower than the price for U.S. corn, even with the transportation charges. Sort of like Irving importing oil by train from the Bakken fields to St. John because even with the transportation costs the oil is cheaper per barrel than oil from Venezuela and the North Sea. We exported more than 28 million metric tons of corn in the first ten months of 2012, with Japan, Mexico, and China being the top three destinations.

BTW, the ethanol industry in the U.S. is now trying to block ethanol imports (from sugar cane) from Brazil because it's undercutting the U.S.-made stuff. Ironic, huh?

Couldn't agree more on the idiocy behind the diesel required to make ethanol. The idea that corn ethanol makes economic or EROEI sense just boggles the mind. Again, sorry I can't rep you for that, but the board software won't let me.

[RMoore007]

I just found this article that Trains carry millions of gallons of oil across Maine | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

From the article:

Because of limited pipeline capacity in the Bakken region, oil producers are using railroads to transport much of the oil to refineries on the East, Gulf and West coasts, as well as inland, according to the Association of American Railroads. The same is true at other shale oil fields that use hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to extract oil, the association said.

Five years ago, U.S. trains transported just 9,500 carloads of oil, the association said. The number grew to 65,751 carloads in 2011 before jumping 256 percent last year, to 233,811 carloads.

The mile-long trains bound for the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, travel two routes through Maine, typically pulling 80 to 85 tank cars....

Railroad and state officials said they’re aware of only shale oil being transported across Maine and don’t know of any so-called tar sands oil coming through.

Environmentalists in the U.S. and Canada have been raising the alarm about the possibility of sands oil from western Canada – which critics call the dirtiest oil on earth – being transported through an oil pipeline that runs through northern New England....

“The capacity isn’t there among pipelines for what we need,” she said. “Rather than building new pipelines, we’re using something we already have.”....

[Coaster]

The whole tar sands thing is pipeline-oriented to get the oil to Portland harbor so it can be shipped to refineries elsewhere. The Bakken oil that the Irving refinery in St. John is taking is a completely different beast from tar sands oil, much lighter. (I've heard it described as low octane gasoline.) Refineries have to be "tuned" to handle different grades of crude oil, and it's not an easy or quick process to change to another, much dissimilar grade. So it's unlikely that Irving would be interested in tar sands oil as long as it's using Bakken crude or something similar.

One thing that sort of mystifies me is why Canada would want to ship tar sands oil all the way to the East Coast when it has West Coast ports that are much closer and able to ship oil to the Far East relatively easily.

[Maineah]

If it was really such a concern in Maine then why did they have to bus in protesters from Vermont and New Hampshire to make a showing at their anti-tar sands rally? I talked to a man who works for Clean Harbors the oil spill people who told me that pipeline has one of the best records in the country for not having any leaking problems. It has pressure sensors that shut the system down immediately if the pressure drops (indicating a leak) and has never had a leak that polluted anything. He said the have a million dollar "pig" they send through regularly that does ultra sound of the whole pipeline. If there is a weak spot they cut it out and replace the pipe. Also Tar Sands is a misnomer in itself as the stuff is almost all crude oil with just a tiny amount of sand mixed in. Envrio-types should find something else to wring their hands about . This one is not a problem.

[Northern Maine Land Man]

Coaster asks:
"One thing that sort of mystifies me is why Canada would want to ship tar sands oil all the way to the East Coast when it has West Coast ports that are much closer and able to ship oil to the Far East relatively easily."

Simple. It is very low in sulphur which makes it cheaper to refine and it makes very good Diesel and jet fuel. The light kerosene fraction is abundant also. It is a lot like West Texas Sweet Crude.

[Coaster]

Originally Posted by Northern Maine Land Man

Coaster asks:
"One thing that sort of mystifies me is why Canada would want to ship tar sands oil all the way to the East Coast when it has West Coast ports that are much closer and able to ship oil to the Far East relatively easily."

Simple. It is very low in sulphur which makes it cheaper to refine and it makes very good Diesel and jet fuel. The light kerosene fraction is abundant also. It is a lot like West Texas Sweet Crude.

Actually, tar sands oil contains up to ten times the sulfur of other oil. And refining tar sands oil is far more expensive and complicated than lighter oils.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...article600182/

Also:

Heavy crudes can’t be produced, transported, and refined by conventional methods because they have high concentrations of sulfur and several metals, particularly nickel and vanadium. Heavy crudes have density approaching or even exceeding that of water. Heavy crude oils are also known as “tar sands” because of their high bitumen content.

from Crude Oil Basics - Petroleum Classifications

[beltrams]

The big problem with tar sands oil isn't so much that the final product is so horrible compared to conventional crude oil, (though the former, being a heavier crude, is a bit tougher to refine.) It's that the process of digging up the tar sand and upgrading it to a flow-able crude oil uses wild amounts of water from the Canadian rivers in the production area as well as leaving entire lakes of polluted waste water as well as using lots of natural gas and some of the oil and tar sands itself to supply the hydrogen and heat required for the upgrading, all which makes tar sand oil production somewhat more CO2-intensive than ordinary crude oil production. It's more of a general environmental question and problem rather than a specific problem relating directly to the pipeline in Maine. It's for this reason that people of an environmental bent both in the US and Canada are against tar sands production and probably why some environmentalists traveled to Maine to protest. That is, people against tar sands production protest not so much in the remote places the oil is produced, but in the populated areas said oil is refined, shipped, or consumed in. Hence, they are in Maine as well and that's fine by me, frankly.

[Northern Maine Land Man]

"That is, people against tar sands production protest not so much in the remote places the oil is produced, but in the populated areas said oil is refined, shipped, or consumed in. Hence, they are in Maine as well and that's fine by me, frankly."

This is just like the clear cutting controversy generated by the environmental industry during the spruce budworm epidemic. Timber companies worked hard to salvage all the spruce they could. The salvage cuts prevented huge forest fires and reduced the economic loss to Maine. The environmental industry issued daily press releases about how terrible the corporations were and there was a photo on the front pages of the Boston Globe, Portland and Bangor papers.

The photo of a vast clear cut was taken in Siberia. Anybody who had ever been here would know it was not Maine. The photo was copied from a Russian forestry magazine. A person needs to study the background of these issues to understand them. It is possible that the Baaken oil fields go all the way down to Texas. We now know there is oil and natural gas in Colorado. They speculate that the whole formation could be connected. We do know that we have more oil and natural gas than Saudi Arabia right here in our own country. The tar sands is like the old tar baby nursery rhyme. It is a non-issue in our country except in the professional alarmist environmental industry. Keep your eye on their real goal.

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
Maurice Strong, Head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro

“Economic growth is not the cure, it is the disease.”
Maurice Strong

"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."
John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal