36 inch Colonial gasoline pipe across the south breaks: Spills 336,000 galloons - No fire, no gas. 22

[racookpe1978]

From AL.com, | 9-18-2016 | by Dennis Pillion
On the morning of Sept. 9, an inspector with the Alabama Surface Mining Commission was performing a routine monthly check of an old coal mine in Shelby County when he noticed "a strong odor of gasoline" as well as a sheen on the surface of one of the retention ponds.

The gasoline he was smelling came from Colonial Pipeline's Line 1, an underground pipeline three feet in diameter that normally pushes 1.3 million barrels of gasoline per day from refineries in Houston to distribution centers across the Southeast and along the eastern seaboard.

That 36-inch line, built in 1963, has been estimated to supply the east coast of the United States with up to 40 percent of its gasoline supply. Colonial Pipeline initiated a shutdown of Line 1 within 20 minutes of receiving the report about a potential leak.

That section of pipeline remains closed. Eight days later, official estimates climbed to 336,000 gallons of lost gasoline. More than 700 people were working around the clock to dig up the pipe, plug the leak, clean up the old mining property south of Birmingham and restore supply.

With the flow of gasoline interrupted, the governors of six states have declared a state of emergency to allow truck drivers to work longer shifts to head off shortages at the pumps.

Gasoline is now being shipped by alternate routes throughout the southeast. Alternate pipelines are being used, and gasoline is even being shipped by tanker ship from Houston to New York.

Colonial announced Saturday the company will construct a temporary pipeline to bypass the spill site in hopes of restoring gasoline flows more quickly. No timetable was given for completing the bypass line."

 

[racookpe1978]

Now 8 days with no gasoline deliveries, more than 800 working to fix it.

Gives you an idea of how troubling a deliberate explosion would be.

 

[itsmoked]

Definitely. Thanks for the 'disaster'.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[BigInch]

Wonder why it was that Colonial did not discover the leak themselves?

 

[zdas04]

I find it interesting that the governors declaring the state of emergency do so to suspend supply and demand while also dropping driver-safety regulations. The government action is about "how do we ensure that the gasoline pumps don't run dry?" while the media accounts I've seen have spun it to be an environmental "disaster" (starting to hate that word). I can understand taking steps to ensure a supply of a critical product. I have a harder time with the flogging that the industry is taking from the media, federal government, and e-NGO's. The supply of energy is crucial to modern life, disruptions in energy supply are a real threat to modern life. When this spill is done and the clean-up complete, the owners of the pipeline will pay tens of millions of dollars in fines for a response to a pipeline failure that looks to an outsider like it was competent, responsive, and very much in the interests of the impacted citizens. It makes me sad that none of that will matter.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[LittleInch]

BI - kind of depends on what sort of leak detection system they've got doesn't it. for that vintage of line I doubt they can be much better than 2-3% of flowrate - this site has some good pics of the stopling equipment it looks like they're going to use to create the "bypass"

http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/09/colonial_pipeline_to_bypass_le.html

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[JNieman]

@zdas04,

Sorry, but if you created an incident that spilled a whole lot of material that can contaminate soil, water tables, rivers and streams, you deserve negative consequences. You make it sound like we should be thanking them for being so nice as to clean up after themselves.

Leaking 250,000-336,000 gallons of gasoline into a Wildlife Management Area is not a victimless fact of life in the oil/gas industry. IMO there is no acceptable damage to natural resources.

 

[SLTA]

It's been pretty interesting around here this weekend. Every gas station is out. Luckily we have enough to make it through, we hope, though we will skip running errands until some fuel gets in. We also have one diesel car and that seems to still be available. It's almost like someone said the word "snow" and all the milk and bread miraculously disappeared from the stores.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[BigInch]

Regardless of what automated leak detection system they've got, or not got, at least one of the HUMAN operators probably should have noticed what was going on before someone just happened to CALL it in. (After all a loss of some 20 backyard swimming pools of gasoline should have dropped pressure pretty severely somewhere).

With my latest experiences dialing up a certain bank and waiting for hours to get through, I can also imagine how many times the automated answering system said it did not understand (the word "leak") and to please repeat, or stay on the line for another 30min waiting for a human service representative to respond. But ... I'm getting too far ahead of where this is right now. Has anybody tried to call in a pipeline emergency lately? How did that go?

 

[zdas04]

Littleinch,
I make the volume of that line about 500,000,000 gallons and moves 1.7 million gallons/day. 336,000 is about 20% of daily flow, but there is no way to know how many days it took to get to that number. If it was more than about 20 days, then the leak rate would have been less than the measurement uncertainty.

JNeiman,
That line carries 1.7 million gallons of gasoline to the eastern seaboard every day. Nearly 40% of the gasoline used in the region it serves. It has done this for 50 years. Shipping that quantity by truck or rail would not be possible with the installed infrastructure, so that pipeline was an important factor in allowing the people who prefer to live in the Eastern half of the U.S. to be able to do that. I don't know the maintenance record on that line and neither do you. I don't know the cause of the discharge, and neither do you. You are jumping to blame when it is possible that some entrepreneur in Alabama might have tapped into the line to steal gasoline and the failure could have been on his sub-standard piping. It has happened many times. We won't know until we know. Conjecture at this time is pointless and harmful.

I'm not sure that anyone should be thanked here, but their efforts have been prompt and significant. That fact got lost in the Plains America spill, and it shouldn't have. The enviro-wacko's are so quick to vilify any industry that it is easy to lose the fact that these companies are made up of people who are likely your friends and neighbors and they are doing the best job they can in the face of a group that hates them and has the ear of the government and media.

You seem to lose the fact that this stuff is naturally-occurring and like all such materials Nature has evolved organisms that deal with it. Crude oil and NATURAL gas are actually a part of the food chain and the biggest environmental outcome of the Deepwater Horizon spill (for example) was a decade of depressed PRICES on shrimp because of the abundance of food (microbes that eat crude) led to a glut of shrimp. This will be similar. There is gasoline on the ground in that Wildlife Management Area, and it is messy and smelly. I will be messy and smelly for a few months and then people will notice an increase in the insect populations and then people will notice an increase in the bird populations (first the birds that eat insects, then the birds that eat birds), then a return to "normal" whatever that means until the next hurricane, flood, or fire causes that "normal" to be disrupted.

IMO there is no acceptable damage to natural resources.

Really? Mosquitoes are natural, do you swat them? How about ebola or zika, do you want them eradicated? They are natural. Oh I get you, there is no acceptable damage to pretty scenery and furry critters that look like you could pet them. Crude oil is just as "natural" as a harp seal pup or a Smoky Mountain vista. The hypocrisy of your position makes me ill.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Spartan5]

Kind of difficult to take someone's crocodile tears about vilification seriously when they use terms like "enviro-wackos" to disparage their opposition. Just sayin'.

That said, I should not have been surprised to see the Deepwater Horizon or the Duffy Street catastrophes associated with natural scenic vistas. "Carcinogens, fire, explosions, plutonium, dismemberment; all natural... what's the big deal?" It would be funny if you weren't serious.

 

[LittleInch]

Zdas04. Dave, please check your units. I think you mean 1.7 million gallons per hour?? The OP quotes 1.3 million barrels per day. As you day we have no data to speak of and the leak could have been over days. That sort of number is often a complete guess just to tell the regulator something. That is a big product line so it would take a big hole to be noticed by the system.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[BigInch]

zdas you seem to say that we would be better off if we started spreading all the petroleum and products out on the ground or into the Gulf then? I'd just as soon keep it out of all food chains. Last thing we need is an overabundance of shrimp, bugs and birds and whatever else hitches a ride in them when the petroleum percolates into their food chain, then ours. Why can't we just be satisfied with keeping the petroleum inside the pipe and the food chains outside the pipe ... you know .. like how it's supposed to be done... and leave it at that. Last thing I think we need here is making up some kinds of nonsensical advantages that effectively excuse another epic fail in our industry. If I am tired and embarrassed of continually seeing one pipeline leak after another, I can certainly understand how everybody but you wants to see all pipeline projects stopped.

 

[zdas04]

LittleInch,
Reporting seems to be all over the map on this. I've seen 1.7 million gallons/day, 1.3 million barrels/day both reported. The barrels/day seems more believable.

BigInch,
"keep the petroleum in the pipe"? Sorry, but it is already an important component of the food chain. The way that people knew there was such a thing as crude oil or natural gas was that it leaks out of the ground with no assistance from people at all. Millions of barrels leak into the oceans of the world every single day. It doesn't just float to the surface and coat the feathers of sea birds. It is consumed by microbes. Those microbes are consumed by krill and plankton. The krill (the largest source of atmospheric CO2 on the planet) and plankton feed the whales and billions of other sea creatures. Without hydrocarbons at the base, the oceanic food chain falls to pieces. The terrestrial food chain is a bit more complex, and without hydrocarbon seeps many areas would still have their food chain intact, but others would change dramatically.

That is why I say this "20 backyard sized swimming pool leak" (great phrase by the way) is really small beans to the environment, far from an environmental disaster, possibly a major economic disaster, but not an environmental one.



[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[BigInch]

1.3MM BPD is almost 40fps through that 36" diameter. Pretty fast velocity for a pipeline pipe. Keeping in mind that 10fps equates to around 350,000 BPD, I doubt flow could be more than half of that 1.3MM BBLS/day number 750,000 BPD and might be even less. If they are indeed talking about only one 36" pipe.

 

[zdas04]

I get 1.3 MM BBL/day in a 36 inch pipe to be 11.591 fps. The API critical velocity for gasoline is 14.7 fps. Colonial's web page says "Over 1 million bbl/day."

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Spartan5]

The krill (the largest source of atmospheric CO2 on the planet) and plankton feed the whales and billions of other sea creatures. Without hydrocarbons at the base, the oceanic food chain falls to pieces.

The oceanic (and terrestrial) food chain has sunshine at its base, not hydrocarbons. That is elementary school level biology. Where do you think all the petroleum came from?

This is not meant as a slight. But with such a limited grasp of the basics of nature, I'd stick to the mechanical engineering side of making pipelines that don't leak, and otherwise let the "enviro-wackos" continue to look out for your best interests.

 

[BigInch]

OK That (and only that) I can agree with. I droppped a PI somewhere.

You've got me believing that Challanger was just a successful way to find the true O-ring failure mechanism.

 

[JNieman]

@zdas40

Your response is simply rude. You're being completely dramatic and hyperbolic, playing to extremes and insulting those who disagree. I don't think any further discussion with you would be productive at all.

 

[cranky108]

A question might be, why is there only one pipeline serving most of the eastern states?

After all single points of failure identification is important in most business planning.