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A Dangerous Move
Lisa Margonelli, New York Times
If you want to move four million gallons of gasoline from a refinery in New Jersey to gas stations in Baltimore, you’ll need a 400-foot-long double-hulled barge and a 5000-horsepower tugboat to push it. Then to pilot the load, you’ll need a crew of people willing to be away from their families for two weeks at a time while working six-hour shifts around the clock. And you’ll need about a billion dollars worth of liability coverage.
One morning this past April, I stood high up in the pilot house of the tug Java Sea as chief mate Jon Thomas prepared to move one such load of gasoline. Thomas works for K-Sea Transportation, one of the country’s largest coastal oil shippers, and he’s young and enthusiastic about the job of piloting fuel, which involves risks and responsibilities that would scare most of us.
Moving oil and gasoline is a dangerous business that most of us take for granted. Just how dangerous it is became clear to San Francisco Bay Area residents two weeks ago, when an 8,600-gallon gasoline tanker truck overturned, caught on fire and melted a whole section of the freeway, snarling traffic for weeks. Gasoline is such an ordinary part of our lives, it can seem benign. But the fact is, a single pound of gasoline mixed with air can release as much energy as 15 pounds of TNT.
…As America’s demand for gasoline rises by one to two percent a year, and imports of crude oil and gasoline increase, barges are doing more work. When pipelines are full to capacity, barges take up the slack. When terminals for oil tankers are full, barges are used to shift oil from tankers to land. And when oil prices are volatile, as they are now, and traders are working to move oil from places where it’s cheap to places where it’s expensive, barges are especially in demand. John Thomas expects to have plenty of work for years to come…
(13 May 2007)
Full article is behind a paywall. Lisa Margonelli (homepage) is the author of “Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.
Contributor Carl Etnier writes:
This is just a tiny slice of the complex society needed to fuel our industrial economy.
In passing, the author mentions that gasoline barges need a billion dollars in liability insurance. That’s a useful way to put nuclear power plants in perspective; the industry’s liability is capped at ten billion dollars by the Price-Anderson Act, and taxpayers pick up the rest. How much many times more damage than an exploding gasoline barge could a nuclear power plant cause?
Shell exec: Oil prices could continue to rise (text and video)
Mike Celizic, MSNBC
John Hofmeister says Congress needs to allow more U.S. offshore drilling
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Unless Congress allows expanded drilling on the outer continental shelf of the United Staes, fuel prices are going to continue to increase, the head of the Shell Oil Company told TODAY.
“If we don’t bring more oil and gas into the system we’re going to have to pay more and more and more,” Shell President John Hofmeister told TODAY host Meredith Vieira. “I’d hate to see prices double and triple what they are today because we failed to explore for more gas and oil.”
Hofmeister, who last visited TODAY a year ago, is in the midst of a 50-city “listening tour” he began a year ago to address the public’s anger with the high price of energy and the huge profits being reaped by oil companies. Public opinion polls have ranked oil companies last out of 21 industries with an approval rating of 10 to 15 percent.
…”Here’s the reality,” Hofmeister replied: “We have a 100-year infrastructure of oil and gas. We have to continue to feed that infrastructure to sustain our economic growth model, to sustain our lifestyle.”
(14 May 2007)
