Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

112Disasters Waiting to Happencontinued, for three reasons. First, dissolved natural gas liquids can causetransmission problems, and if not extracted, can remain in gas delivered tofinal users: “[T]he sudden onrush of ‘gasoline’ out of gas burners could bevery dangerous.” 110 Second, unextracted water could “freeze and cause considerabledamage at low spots in the line,” 111 and makes traces of hydrogen sulfideor carbon dioxide highly corrosive to pipelines. 112 Third, unprocessed gasis more hazardous: it often contains highly toxic hydrogen sulfide, and thepresence of even small amounts of higher hydrocarbons having low flashpointswill vastly extend the flammable and explosive limits of gas-air mixtures.Some common impurities are so flammable that the mixture can beignited by a “static spark or one made by imbedded sand in a person’s shoesole stroking the rungs of a steel ladder.” 113 Gas processing, then, cannot beomitted for long without grave occupational public risks.Yet gas processing plants are at least as vulnerable as refineries, take a yearand a half to rebuild “assuming normal delivery of equipment and materials,”114 and are often centralized. A single plant in Louisiana, the world’slargest, provides eleven hundred eighty-five million cubic feet per day to theEast Coast. This is the equivalent of the output of more than twenty hugepower stations, 115 or about three and a half percent of America’s total naturalgas use (which is in turn a fourth of total energy use). And the gas processingplants are as concentrated geographically as is the gas. Louisiana is toAmerican natural gas as the Persian Gulf is to world oil. An alarming eightyfourpercent of all interstate gas either is from Louisiana wells (fifty-three percent)or flows from Texas, mostly via Louisiana (thirty-one percent). 116Oil pipelinesOil pipelines within the United States move about three-fourths of thecrude oil used by U.S. refineries and about one-third of the refined productssent from refineries to consumers. These pipelines “are highly vulnerable todisruptions caused by human error, sabotage, or nature. Damage to key facilitieson just a few pipeline systems could greatly reduce domestic shipments,causing an energy shortage exceeding that of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.” 117Cutting just the Trans-Alaska, Colonial, and Capline pipeline systems wouldbe equivalent in oil volume to losing•about the total 1982 level of net U.S. petroleum imports; or•over one and a half times the maximum U.S. import shortfall during the1973 oil embargo; or•about eight times the U.S. imports from Iran when those were stopped in 1978. 118