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

Chapter Nine: Oil and Gas 113If crude oil imports to East Coast refineries were shut off, virtually the onlysupplies of fluid fuels to the Northeast would come through a single pipelinefor refined products—Colonial—and a few natural gas pipelines. All of thesecould be disabled by a handful of people.The complexity of modern pipelines is exemplified by the largest and probablythe most intricate system in the world—the Colonial Pipeline System fromTexas to New Jersey. 119 The largest of its three adjacent pipes is thirty-six inches indiameter. It is fed from ten source points and distributes to two hundred eightyonemarketing terminals. Thirty-one shippers dispatch one hundred twenty varietiesof refined products to fifty-six receiving companies. In 1973, after an investmentof more than half a billion dollars over eleven years, nearly two thousandmiles of main pipe and over one and a half thousand miles of lateral lines, containinga total of over a million tons of steel, were being operated by fewer thansix hundred employees. The pipeline takes twelve days to move a product batchfrom end to end. It is powered by eighty-four pumping stations (totalling overeight hundred thousand horsepower). The pumps use more than two millionkilowatt-hours per year—enough to run for a month in 1973 all the houses inLouisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Just supplying the valves forthis extraordinary engineering project took the resources of ten companies. 120An extensive study of American energy transportation stated:Pipelines carry huge quantities of energy...in continuous operations stretching overthousands of miles....[They] were constructed and are operated with almost noregard to their vulnerability to persons who might...desire to interfere with this vitalmovement of fuel. They are exposed and all but unguarded at innumerable points,and easily accessible even where not exposed over virtually their entireroutes....[T]his vulnerability of the most important energy transportation systemsof the Nation threatens the national security.......Although all forms of energy movement are vulnerable to some extent, pipelinesare perhaps uniquely vulnerable. No other energy transportation mode moves somuch energy, over such great distances, in a continuous stream whose continuity isso critical an aspect of its importance. 121While continuity is even more important in electrical transmission, this statementis certainly right to emphasize both the density and the distance of energyflow in pipelines.By 1975, the United States had installed enough oil pipelines (carrying crudeoil or refined products) to reach five times around the Equator. Principal gaspipelines would stretch seven and a half times around the globe. With so muchpipeline mileage around, pipeline sabotage is nothing new. Indeed, it is surprisinglyold. The first screw-coupling pipeline introduced into the Pennsylvania oilfieldsin 1865 was dismantled by night by competitive teamsters. 122 In recent years,