Nah, that's exaggeration. Tar sands are extremely polluting and the 'many people' are those that are employed in an industry that didn't even exist a decade ago, it's mostly boom towns specifically constructed around getting this oil out of the ground.
I find it quite interesting that we would impose environmental constraints on the third world - where people really need to fight to make ends meet - and yet allow something as bad as this because 'many people might land in poverty', when in fact they have alternatives, just not as lucrative.
(The other current method of transporting bitumen is to dilute it with naptha, which has to be sent back to the extraction site in order to be used with the next lot of bitumen)
Crackers (in oil refineries) take as input a heavier fraction and then break apart and sort the molecules by length giving various different outputs which can then be used in different applications.
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-...
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.
*Cheaper, safer, more efficient, requiring less maintenance, etc...
Is it?
For liquids, at all times you need a sealed container that doesn't leak. For solids, it's enough for the holes to be no larger than the individual solid object. This makes containers cheaper and requiring much less maintenance.
As for this specific case, the article makes at least two points:
- transporting solids can reuse existing infrastructure (rail + coal wagons), giving you flexibility - as opposed to requiring you to ship from only where the pipeline ends (or to build new pipelines);
- with "one weird trick" (injecting some extra gas into the bubble) they can make each pellet buoyant, and it seems they also don't dissolve easily - the result is something that's potentially much easier to collect if you happened to spill it into an ocean.
damn that would definitely help on spill cleanings!
It's a pretty simple question to answer if you know all of the parameters of the environment.
I cannot really understand how this is better than carrying oil directly.
Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?
And more this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEekXRNztVI
?
- How solid are those pebbles? I assume they're not like soft blobs that can easily split and merge together? But then how much abuse they can take? E.g. if they crack easily, you can't really stack them together very high.
- The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable?
As much as coal, if not more.
Oh, interesting title...
>I don't think it will replace pipelines
Ah, nevermind.
