Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#2This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#3This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?
Because it uses existing infrastructure rather than requiring the construction of pipelines.
Plus I don't see why pipelines wouldn't work; assuming you could just carry the balls along with water and use a diverter of some sort to separate the balls from water at the pumping stages.
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#4This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?
The article mentions that it's more environmentally friendly. The balls float on water and apparently can't be poaked easily. That's a plus in my book.
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#5Anything that facilitates increased use of tar sands hydrocarbons is terrible news for the environment. We should ban this miserable trade.
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#6This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?
Well the obvious is you need a pipeline, to transport via pipeline - and that can take decades to put in place, and sometime is politically challenging as we've seen with Keystone XL. There are already railways that go everywhere.
Next - right now, you need special tanker cards to transport oil via rail - and latency on those can be on the order of years if you want to scale up.
What's neat about this invention, is that it can transport oil in a form that, if I read correctly, isn't as catastrophic when spilled as an oil tanker would be, and, also importantly, can use rail cars that were designed for something else (the author cites Coal) - so no need to wait a few years (and spend $$$) for special tanker cars - there are a zillion idle coal cars right now.
This article captures part of the significant economic incentive as well:
http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/demand-...
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#7Nice, although I'm wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of "wasted" space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least.
Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#8Nice, although I'm wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of "wasted" space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least. Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?
They should be squishy, so I imagine they pack efficiently.
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#9Nice, although I'm wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of "wasted" space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least. Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?
They are not only trading it for environmental saftey. As mentioned in another comment, using these balls you don't have to rely on specialized rail waggons anymore. So, while you may lose some space due to inefficient packing, you could easily make that up by using lots more of (assumedly) cheaper general-purpose/coal waggons.
Re: Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil
#10As a rule, it is far easier* to transport/handle liquids in large quantity than solids. Even ignoring the effort to convert/deconvert the oil at each end, I'm not seeing this as a step forward that will improve the bulk of crude-oil transport -- baring a more detailed analysis than what reads to me as 'pipelines bad.'
*Cheaper, safer, more efficient, requiring less maintenance, etc...