We mentioned before that when companies come into an area to do business or build a project, they work with local officials, residents, and stakeholders to get feedback, answer questions, share ideas and provide information on how the project will impact and partner with the community.
A key focus area when a project is being planned, and while it’s underway, includes assessing the environmental impacts near a pipeline. While complex regulations like Environmental Impact Statements are a big part of this, there are additional steps that pipeline operators and companies use to put the environment first.
Role and Advancement of Technology
Crude oil is vital to making the petroleum products we use in our daily lives. It fuels airplanes, cars, and trucks. It’s also used to heat homes and to make products such as medicines, advanced materials used in personal protective equipment, and outdoor equipment. Energy also touches nearly every aspect of our lives by powering our homes and businesses with electricity, fueling many of our municipal transportation fleets and the trucks that deliver goods to market and serves as the raw material needed to manufacture the goods we consume like laundry detergent and cleaning supplies. With roughly 330 million people in the U.S. and over 6,000 products made from petroleum products, that is a lot of manufacturing and product use.
To see a sample list of the more than 6,000 item list, click here.
To fulfill the demand for these and so many other items, significant strides have been made with technology to improve the efficiency of getting energy to the people who rely on it, while protecting the environment where people live and work.
For example, advanced technologies like satellites, global positioning systems, remote sensing devices, and 3-D and 4-D seismic technologies make it possible to discover energy reserves while drilling fewer wells.
Just as technological advances in exploration and production have revolutionized energy development, the transportation of oil and enforcement of safety and environmental laws and regulations have also made significant strides in helping to avoid and reduce these effects.
Year-Over-Year Safety and Environmental Improvements
A common misconception is that the fossil fuel infrastructure we use is not safe, and the methods we use to get them to companies for production are not environmentally safe. However, that’s not true.
Since federal data confirms pipelines are still the most efficient and safest way to deliver the energy we need, the necessity to maintain and update our current system while avoiding future environmental disruption is top of mind for operators and project developers.
That’s because any time oil or natural gas escapes from a pipeline it is classified as a “release.” The safety of a pipeline is measured through the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) using these metrics to determine safety: percent spilled, volume shipped per incident, and human consequences. Due to all of the technology used to monitor pipelines from gauges to sensors and alert systems, crude oil shipped that’s been spilled is less than 0.0050% compared to rail, which is “driven by high-impact” incidents, according to PHMSA.
Still, pipeline releases that impact people or the environment decreased 38% over the last five years and total pipeline incidents declined 21%, based on the most recent government pipeline safety data.
Again, that is because critical energy infrastructure is monitored 24 hours per day, seven days a week with state-of-the-art IT systems. Projects like BWTX will also employ automatic shutoff valves and employ dedicated emergency response personnel and special marine management plans to protect species and the coastal environment.
Another important factor to consider is that new, modernized oil infrastructure concepts like the BWTX deep-water platform will also make a significant reduction in harmful air emissions for the region’s air quality. This happens by reducing vessel traffic needed to load fuel tankers and eliminate the need for double-handling of fuel. All those additional support vessels under traditional fuel-loading methods requiring burning significant amounts of fuel just to load a tanker.
BWTX is estimated to drive an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from traditional loading and servicing practices for large crude vessels. This more efficient process will also result in substantial air quality improvements by reducing approximately five times fewer emissions of criteria air pollutants regulated by EPA like NOx, CO, SO2, and particulate matter.
