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."

 

[SwinnyGG]

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

Because pipelines are expensive and they don't get built unless the money to fund them is sitting there waiting to be claimed.

Colonial's line has not one but two mains- the second main is 40" in diameter and is usually used for jet fuel, heating oil, and other distillates. Supposedly they are now using parts of it to transfer gasoline around the leak site.

 

[zdas04]

Spartan5
Clever, ever see a photograph of the ocean at say 1,000 ft of depth? Kind of absolute darkness. Much like the inside of a cave. Fauna that evolved there cannot live in sunlight and they spend their entire lives at depth. Gotta be food there doesn't there? Darn good thing that Mother Nature stored some sunlight over the last 300 million years as crude oil or those ecosystems would not be sustainable since current sunlight is not really an option. Maybe you should have listened closer in high school biology?

JNeiman,
I just re-read my post to you and completely miss how I was rude. When you make a statement like I quoted (which was pure hyperbole by the way) and then accuse me of hyperbole for responding with a question on your definition of "natural". I guess "rude" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm fine with you not having "any further discussion" with me.

[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]

A well maintained product pipeline is highly reliable. Enough so that it is typical to have only one per region. Low rates and high costs won't usually support the construction of more, although in this case Plantation Pipeline also serves the same general areas. I would suppose that it is busy with its usual customers and can't devote any time to make up the shortfall. It is also not easy to change the scheduled movements of products to delivery points as the tank availability and shippment schedules are made up a month or more in advance. Much of existing capacity is dedicated for a year or more, at least the season, to various shippers and contracts are already signed, sealed, so any deviation would cost the pipelines even more if they failed to deliver to those existing clients. Excess pipeline capacity is rarer than hobby horse shi###, since nobody has been able to build a new liquid pipeline there for probably 50 years or more .... for painfully obvious reasons.

 

[BigInch]

Uh yes zdas, surprisingly enough, I do prefer to keep it inside the pipe, at least until it arrives at its destination. I always thought it was one of the implied points of my contract requirements to sustain my continued gainfull employment.

 

[Spartan5]

Clever, ever see a photograph of the ocean at say 1,000 ft of depth? Kind of absolute darkness. Much like the inside of a cave. Fauna that evolved there cannot live in sunlight and they spend their entire lives at depth. Gotta be food there doesn't there? Darn good thing that Mother Nature stored some sunlight over the last 300 million years as crude oil or those ecosystems would not be sustainable since current sunlight is not really an option. Maybe you should have listened closer in high school biology?

This magical world you speak of in the ocean deeps over which there is a roof preventing foodstuffs from settling, and around which there are walls keeping food laden currents from penetrating must be quite the wonder to behold!

Yes, there is some minute population of bacteria which subsist on dilute seeps of oil dispersed through the vast seas. Hell, there are even some real oddball chemoautotrophs down there chewing away on inorganic compounds. But that is orders of magnitude different than the asinine statement that petroleum is the base of the oceanic food chain.

At best, your need to rely on hyperbole speaks volumes about the inadequacy of support you have for the point you are trying to make.

 

[SwinnyGG]

Clever, ever see a photograph of the ocean at say 1,000 ft of depth? Kind of absolute darkness. Much like the inside of a cave. Fauna that evolved there cannot live in sunlight and they spend their entire lives at depth. Gotta be food there doesn't there? Darn good thing that Mother Nature stored some sunlight over the last 300 million years as crude oil or those ecosystems would not be sustainable since current sunlight is not really an option. Maybe you should have listened closer in high school biology?

Luckily for all that fauna at 1,000 feet, there's a biomass laden ocean above them, teeming with creatures that constantly die and sink to the bottom for them to sustain themselves on. Those dead creatures all grew up eating algae or plankton or krill, all of which trace their energy source back to the sun. Cold seep (which are usually methane gas or hydrogen sulfide, not crude oil or anything similar) and hydrothermal vent systems are a very, very, very, very, very minuscule percentage of overall ocean biomass.

Seriously, your argument has jumped the shark.

 

[BigInch]

"petroleum is the base of the oceanic food chain" Yes it is. Macondo made it so. Now we have to keep on feeding all those newcomer shrimp with the stuff. If we fail to do this now, all the Gulf shrimpers will be out of work and we'll have to pay their unemployment and damages to their businesses again, close down all those shrimp restaurants... and ... you can see where that takes us. Spill more oil, the heavier the better, gasoline, diesel, must keep helping the environment. God, don't keep it in the pipe just to burn it later. Some people just don't get it.

 

[Compositepro]

Come on guys, let us not get into personal attacks. I did not perceive of anything that David said as rude. His reference to enviro-wackos was not directed at anyone here.

The organic matter that drops to the bottom of the ocean is where petroleum comes from, so petroleum comes from solar energy and from once living things, and it will get metabolized in time when released into the ocean. That is a valid perspective. If you want to debate certain points please keep it civil. You are agueing about black versus white in a world of grays.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Also note that it has been suggested that the production of "petroleum" and other so-called "fossil fuels" was how nature (and for many, that would also imply God) went about 'sequestering carbon'. If you accept that, and it seems to be a reasonable supposition when all things are considered, how is it then in our and the world's best interest, to be so intent on getting all that carbon out of the ground and back into the environment? I mean it has the feel of undoing what took untold millennia to accomplish in the first place. Just a thought...

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[itsmoked]

If that much fuel can leak without the operator knowing it one could hot-tap it and run their gas station for decades without ever buying a pint. Hmmmmmm


At the company I worked at we used simple pressure transducers every 10 miles or so and WWV time. We detected the shock-wave caused by s leak initiating and using the time calculate to within a few feet where the leak was located. Seems they should have something like that installed on such a large mess-maker.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[Compositepro]

Terms like 'huge, large, small, tiny' are misleading used by themselves. Compared to what? This leak is pretty small compared to the pipeline capacity. It is large compared to a swimming pool. I'm not going to take the time to do the simple calculation, which several others have already done and made some errors in the process. A shock wave would only be created if the whole pipeline bust open.

 

[zdas04]

Itsmoked,
I've never worked in oil transport, but in gas that kind of thing happens frequently. A pipeline welder gets a bright idea and in the dark of night drops a hot tap on a line that is not visible from well traveled roads and then uses that gas to run a greenhouse (usually growing something that isn't legal) in a remote location. Some pretty big operations have been busted in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Alabama. They were big by stealing-gas standards, but didn't show up in the system balance. I would be really shocked if the same thing hadn't happened to gasoline pipelines. People with questionable morals can be sneaky.

As to the rest of it, I give up. This 336,000 gallon spill that is nearly enough gasoline to fill 20 backyard swimming pools is the ecological disaster of the millennia and the worst thing that has happened to the planet since the flood. The Santa Barbara seep and the millions of other places where crude leaks into the ocean or into a tar pit (la Brea anyone?) were all a conspiracy of big oil. I'm not sure what Big Oil gets from putting millions of barrels/day of crude oil into the oceans and land surfaces, but those guys are subtle.

[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

 

[cranky108]

We are not trying to take captured carbon and put it back into the air. We are trying to make use of the captured energy.

Just a fact that people want some sort of lifestyle, energy, water, food, entertainment, transportation.
If you try to take it from them, they will complain.

I don't understand the natural gas, or oil industries, but in the electric-world we are told we must have extra capacity in-case of lines out of service. We must have extra power plants to supply the peak demand.

 

[itsmoked]

A shock wave would only be created if the whole pipeline bust open.

That is not at all true.

The tiniest pin hole creates a shock wave. What do you think I was detecting on the Alyeska Pipeline, the CalNev pipeline, and the fuel line runs to the island Kansai International Airport? That shock wave moves at the speed of sound down the pipe in both directions. If it is a small leak then it is a small shock wave. The limit of the tech is in how much noise the line normally has. The tradeoff is closer sensors or bigger leak detections.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[BigInch]

Many pipelines do not have any leak detection, especially ultrasonic (sonic shock wave) leak detectors. But pressure loss is the second effect and that can be very fast in a liquid line. A little bit of volume lost will reduce pressures substantially and almost immediately, unless it is temporarily disguised by topographic effects as the line bleeds down a long elevation change, but even then, some astute operator should have caught it (generally) within a few hours maximum. It has seen been before in a few cases, upon seeing decreasing pressures, an operator makes the wrong decision and might even bring another pump online to raise the pressure back up, or certainly not close a valve until he is sure it isn't "instrument error", at least until somebody notices that a certain tank is no longer getting filled. But we'll have to wait for the dust to settle before we start knowing more about that. If this line doesn't have an ultrasonic monitor on it, it certianly should have had one. IMO there would be only a very poor, totally unacceptable excuse not to have one on such a pipeline as this.

 

[Compositepro]

Sorry, I have never heard an ultrasonic leak detector called a shock wave detector before.

 

[itsmoked]

Me nether.

In my experience ultrasonic is used to find gas leaks. There's a large market for handheld guns that help linemen and such hunt down gas leaks especially in pole mounted phone cables since the leaks squeal ultrasonically.

I've also seen transverse ultrasonic flow meters, Alyeska has them.

What I was detecting was the shock wave caused by the breaking/holing/opening incident. It looks precisely like a negative pressure spike when monitoring the bulk line pressure. It's very transient and lasts perhaps a millisecond before the pressure returns to the average seen before and after the break. The actual pressure in the line has likely dropped but often too small an amount to ever discover on casual inspection, or is buried in the noise as a 1/10th PSI in perhaps a 1000PSI line.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[itsmoked]

Yeah I see that. Really is a shame. In this Colonial line think of the savings an investment in a break detect system would've provided in this case. It's a bit sad.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[BigInch]

Had to update that post with some recent years legislation. It appears to be required now on at least some pipelines. CFR 49 Part 195.452 - part of integrity management requirements, which being pretty much only an operating concern, I have tended to overlook during recent years. Leak detection which can be comprised of ultrasonic detection and other methods seems to be reqired only in "high consequence areas". There may be some wiggle room on the specifics, depending on when the pipeline was constructed. In any case, these systems are not probhibitingly expensive and there would be little excuse IMO for not implementing them on the entire length of any important pipeline, which has been the general international practice since many years now.

So, if this pipeline had coverage in that area, we need to see why it didn't activate. Too early to speculate much.

 

[LittleInch]

Leaving aside the do bugs and other organisms eat hydrocarbons debate, the key points coming out from here are whether this was or should be detectable.

The rather precise figure of 336,000 gallons is actually a nice round 8,000 bbls - in other words a complete guess. Colonials own website indicates a normal flowrate of 1.3 million barrels a day, hence even if this was over one day ( seems unlikely) this is 0.6% of the flow. There aren't many (any?)detection systems that would pick that up but if this was a minute pin hole corrosion leak which then gradually got a bit bigger then I can't see any of the normal techniques picking this up.

I recall there was much delight in the UK when reporting of leak volumes went from gallons to cubic metres. Made any loss of containment sound much smaller.... Same thing with the barrels / gallons.

Gasoline is probably the best of all the refined oils to leak out as the majority just evaporates, providing no one sets it on fire.



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