BP has 2nd pipe break at Alaska facility

[donsu]

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8H1U1CO2.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db

British oil giant BP PLC said Monday that a second pipeline ruptured at its Alaskan facility, a month after the company reported its largest-ever spill at an oilfield on Alaska's Northern Slope.

The break occurred on a three-inch wide natural gas line on April 6 near a production building at the Prudhoe Bay oilfield, BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said Monday.

The break resulted in an estimated leak of 12,000 cubic feet of natural gas, well below regulatory standards for reporting, Beaudo said.

"Someone apparently heard the rupture, so it was a fairly quick response," he said, adding that external corrosion was the likely cause of the leak.
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however, the surrounding countryside is pristine

[Ezlivin]

1. That'll be dead easy to clean up

Just light a match....

[spag68]

2. Alaska oil

And yet they keep telling us that they can drill and ship oil and never hurt the environment, contrary to all recent events.

[Bandit]

3. Is natural gas a liquid or gas?

I know Propane is liquid but natural gas I am not sure about..

[spag68]

4. nat gas

can be either depending on temp. and pressure. Thus the LNG designation.

[yella_dawg]

5. Natural Gas is a gas

in any environment found on the earth's surface. The pressures / temperatures necessary to liquify it are pretty extreme.

[spag68]

6. Nat gas

The terminal in Long island sound is for LNG ships. that's how they transport it.

[Igel]

7. Propane is also a gas at normal temperatures and pressures.

If you pressurize it, you can have it liquid at room temperatures. If you suddenly depressurized your propane tank, it would cool down very quickly as the liquid evaporated.

Methane's harder to keep liquid: it needs to be cold and pressurized. I assume it's piped as a liquid (in this case); a hole in the pipe would squirt a liquid out that would boil at once (since it needs to be pressurized to stay liquid). It would make everything very, very, very cold--colder than the temp the gas was cooled to for transportation.

[Bridget Burke]

8. How many have seen the BP commercials?

Oil Slicks; BP's new eco-friendly ad campaign makes no sense.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2002, at 6:02 PM ET

Most advertising campaigns are superficially dishonest. There's no empirical evidence that Avis really tries harder or that Quizno's subs are superior to those of Subway. British Petroleum's flashy new campaign—in which its initials are made to signify Beyond Petroleum—is dishonest in that way. But it's also dishonest in the cosmic business strategy sense.

The high-profile print and TV ads run by BP—such is its newfound aversion to the product it has depended on for more than a century that it no longer even calls itself British Petroleum—trumpet the company's investments in solar energy. TV ads feature man- and woman-in-the-street interviews with consumers who muse about the virtues of a world in which fossil fuels are bit players. It's a little like McDonald's running ads in which Eric Schlosser, author of the exposé Fast Food Nation, discusses the horrors of ground beef.

www.slate.com/id/2072470/

You know--the commercials with actresses portraying soccer moms, expressing their eco-friendly hopes in a halting manner meant to convince you they are real-live-consumers?

BP also runs a huge refinery down in Texas City with a dreadful safety record.

Early last year, BP officials circulated a planning document for 2005 that lamented safety shortfalls and identified the following "key risk" for the year: "TCS (Texas City site) kills someone in the next 12-18 months."

Less than three weeks later, at 1:20 p.m. March 23, a massive explosion killed 15 people and injured scores more in the worst U.S. refinery accident in more than a decade.

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/05/blast/3742346.html

Scumbags.... (Oh, James Baker III was hired to lead an "investigation" of the disaster. Of course, his law firm also represents BP.)