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

116Disasters Waiting to Happenpipelines and control stations and with destruction in mind could starve ourrefineries [for] crude.” 138 But would it actually take a few hundred people?Concentrations of pipeline capacityA nuclear targeting exercise found that the destruction of eight terminals,sixty-eight pump stations, twenty-seven combined terminal/pump stations,and twenty-three adjacent pipelines would disable all 1968–69 U.S. refinedproductdistribution pipelines down to and including six inches, isolating therefining areas from agricultural and industrial areas. 139 But in fact, immensemischief could be done by only a few people if they picked the right targetsfrom the copious literature available. For example, only ten hits could cut offsixty-three percent of the pipeline capacity (by barrel-miles) for deliveringrefined products within the United States. Only six hits could disrupt pipelineservice between the main extraction areas and the East and Midwest. Indeed,the concentration is even greater than these figures imply. The GeneralAccounting Office, for example, has pointed out that three pipelines—TheTrans-Alaska Pipeline (TAPS), the Colonial system, and Capline—representless than three percent of American pipeline mileage, but carry about eighteenpercent of 1979 U.S. crude oil consumption and twelve percent of refinedproducts. 140 The key role of these three lines merits closer examination.The Colonial system dominates the U.S. pipeline market for refined products,carrying about half of the total barrel-miles 141 in forty-six hundred milesof pipe spanning sixteen hundred miles. Its products supply more than halfthe refined product demand in seven states (Virginia, New Jersey, NorthCarolina, Maryland, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia), and between fifteenand fifty percent in five more (Alabama, District of Columbia,Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania). 142 “Other pipelines or transportationmodes cannot absorb enough” to replace this flow.Capline is a forty-inch, sixteen-pumping-station pipeline carrying crude oilsix hundred thirty-two miles from Louisiana to Illinois at a rate of twelve hundredthousand barrels per day. It provides a quarter of the input toMidwestern refineries and, like Colonial, is irreplaceable. It is the largest ofthree distribution conduits to be used by the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Thecrude oil supplied by Capline and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline totals twenty-fourhundred thousand barrels per day—about a fifth of all U.S. refinery runs.Colonial, Capline, and other U.S. pipelines have been and probably stillare startlingly vulnerable to sabotage. In findings reminiscent of the state ofnuclear plant physical security in the mid-1960s, the General AccountingOffice’s audit in 1979 found appalling laxity—and little managerial consciousnessof sabotage risks 143 —at many key pipeline facilities. The main Capline