Mar 22 2009
Liquified Gas Could be a Target
The billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens likes to claim that his natural gas scheme will get us off our dependency on “foreign” oil and make us safer. He’s wrong about a lot of things, but he’s especially wrong about natural gas. He’s usually talking about liquified natural gas to run big semi-trucks when he discusses natural gas. Liquified natural gas, or LNG, is natural gas that has been cooled down to minus 260 degrees F, which condenses it into liquid, and then it can be shipped and stored in refrigerated tanks. It takes a lot of energy to convert LNG to it’s liquid form and then more energy to transport it in a cooled state so that it stays liquid, and in its liquid form it’s basically nearly entirely methane. And despite the insinuations of Pickens, no natural gas is a renewable, and it’s also not an alternative fuel in the usually understood sense. It’s a polluting fossil fuel that will run out someday, but for now, there is a huge boom in natural gas as more and more people use it for heating their homes. Expanding the use of it to burn in big trucks is an especially bad idea.
Besides the fossil fuel part of natural gas, we have to consider whether or not it’s safe, and this takes us back to the foreign oil and terrorism connection. Many countries that allow us to buy their oil and gas are currently not countries that the US has made a point of becoming equal partners or friends with. The US has, in its recent history, even started wars for fake reasons, for the purpose of taking whatever fossil fuel resources a country has, or for controlling its pipeline accesses, etc. Obviously, starting wars does not make friends, and it has definitely decreased our “safety” where these countries are concerned.
Now it’s being pointed out that the natural gas is also a potential safety concern. LNG is usually safe to transport, and stable, but since it’s 90% methane, it’s highly combustible, which is another way of saying “explosive”. There have been explosions involving LNG; though so far, not very many.
Any LNG that is spilled in an accident will form a vapor cloud which would be highly explosive. A LNG cloud will rise and dissipate quite quickly if it’s a windy day, but if it’s not, a vapor cloud could potentially ignite and explode. If a spill happened on board a transport ship, or in a large populated area, the results could be catastrophic. If you have heard that fire won’t melt steel — it’s not true. A hot enough fire will melt steel, and a LNG fire would be hot enough to melt steel, so an ignited spill on a tanker ship would probably caused a lot of casualties and maybe even sink the ship. James Fay, a professor at MIT, also says that there is no way to put out an LNG fire. It has to burn out. That makes it incredibly dangerous just for it’s potential combustibility alone. (An explosion disaster like this has already happened in Ohio, in 1944, when 128 people were killed and 225 were injured).
A new concern has been brought up recently and that is LNG being used by terrorists for it’s explosiveness. A ship carrying it (see diagram above) is obviously vulnerable to attack from a bomb or missile, and as the USS Cole disaster showed us, this is very possible. “Fay expects the size of LNG tankers to double in the coming years, which could make an attack even more catastrophic.”
I don’t like where this is going. We have plenty of non-fossil fuel types of energy to use in place of fossil fuels, so I don’t know why we keep using them besides that 1) there is so much money to be made in buying and selling fossil fuels and 2) power companies have not yet figured out how to get rich from wind and solar power and 3) we have a lot of fossil fuels left in the U.S., though not as much as they would have you believe. It will run out some day and what then? It would be better to switch to truly renewable types of energy now and skip the disasters and wars that could occur in the meantime by continuing to use fossil fuels. If our government is really concerned with our safety, why would it be pushing the use of more fossil fuels?
When the U.S. has developed a dependency on yet another fossil fuel, really “needs” natural gas and then runs out, we’ll have to ship it from Europe and other countries overseas. Then we’ll have even more reason to consider the potential for terrorism, and piracy too. According to the BBC, in January a large gas tanker was hijacked by Somali pirates.
There seems to be too much vulnerability l in the use of non-renewable fossil fuels and if we want to be safe, we’d stick with the many types of real renewable energy that we can get within our own country.
