Liquid Natural Flatulence

[R. A. Hettinga]

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Robert Hettinga
The Geodesic Economy

Liquid Natural Flatulence

Boston, Massachusetts
March 27, 2004


After more than a decade of thankfully irrelevant silence, the usual
mathematical-reductionist ex-nihilo nonsense is again being emetted
from the "(whatever) minutes to midnight" idiots at the Chicago-based
Bulletin of the Atomic "Scientists".

This time it was amplified to pain-threshold decibels this morning in
the echo chamber on the Boston Globe's editorial page ("Boston's
Ground Zero", The Boston Globe, Sunday, March 27, 2004
<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/article
s/2004/03/27/bostons_ground_zero?mode=PF> ). Precipitated,
apparently, by the amplified feedback of a distant Home-Alone-horrors
double-face-slap by Dick "Hey, Sumner, where's my advance check?"
Clark, in a hearing-room somewhere on Capital Hill this week.


This time, though, the usual horrors and foot-stomping Hyde Park
hissy-fit is about about Boston's liquid natural gas (LNG) port, over
in Everett.

Personally, I love their mathematical reasoning, in the same way that
I love hysterical paradoxes, contradictions and tautologies of all
kinds. It turns out that, go figure, there is a stupendous amount of
explosive energy in a very large tank of Liquid Natural Gas.
Especially, experts say -- and, what would we do without experts --
if it were released all at once. Using the same logic, of course, if
every Chinaman gave me a buck, I'd be a billionaire. Gosh.


As a point of my own personal reference, I used to walk by the
aforementioned "Scientists'" ridiculous "minutes to midnight" clock
sign every day on the way to class in Chicago during the entire M-X
missile, "nuclear freeze", "nuclear winter", "Testament",
Reagan's-President-and-We're-All-Gonna-Die garbage in the early to
mid-1980's. Every time the Democrats won a vote in Congress, the
clock would go backwards. Every time the Republicans won, it would go
forwards, counting down to nuclear oblivion. Gee. What a coincidence.
Isn't "science" amazing, that it could make a calculation with such
mathematical precision based on how *Congress* voted...


In hindsight, of course, if they'd had their way, we'd all be quoting
Marx in Russian or Chinese by now, and we'd be doing it everywhere in
the US, not just in Hyde Park, Cambridge or Berkeley, places where
they still do it now, though in English, and only when they're sure
nobody can laugh at them. At the very least, we'd be living in the
same constant terror of another kind, that of the total nuclear
annihilation of every living thing down to, say, a slime mold.

These "Scientists" are living -- barely, by some of their ages --
proof that the only thing more comical than a physicist
"psychic-investigator" is a sanctimonious
physicist-cum-crypto-politician. Especially one whose every utterance
is literally sanctified by a leftist press and parroted there ad
nauseam, like we saw happening in the Boston Globe this morning.


So, let's add a few facts to the discussion, shall we? First, a
confession of extreme personal, if not exactly plutographic, interest
in this matter. For more than a decade now, on Wednesday nights
during the summer, I crew on a sailboat that races in Boston Harbor.
We sail right *by* this place. Twice, coming and going. Yup. The very
dock where they offload the LNG that has our "Scientists'" panties in
such a severe bunch. Hell, before 9/11, we've even had to duck the
tanker occasionally in the middle of the Inner Harbor on our way to
the next mark in the racecourse.

Anyway, about a decade ago, Distrigas, the company that owns the
facility in question, ran several *military* -- not law-enforcement
- -- anti-terrorism scenarios to see exactly what would be needed to
take the place out. What I've heard, albeit second-hand, is that in
order to get a useful amount of that halfway-to-absolute-zero natural
gas actually *flammable*, much less explosive, someone would have to
ring the whole tank with a *huge* amount of explosives themselves,
requiring, I'd bet, a whole *company*, if not a *battalion* of army
troops to secure it for the time allowed to rig it all up. A time
probably measured more in days, rather than hours, of uncontested
*military* control of a very large facility. Fat chance, even in the
Clinton Administration, who would probably be more likely to
"negotiate" than fight, since everyone just *knows* that terrorism is
a law-enforcement, and not a military, problem.

Even then, even if they blew that ring of very large charges around
the circumference of a very, very, large LNG tank, dumping its
contents into the Island End and Mystic Rivers, *all* they would have
is a very-fast, moving, *wave* of flammable *liquid*, giving you a
*fire*, and not an explosion. Roughly the same as if you dumped a
bunch of gasoline into the river and lit it.

A *cryogenic* liquid, mind you, meaning that you'd have to heat the
stuff up a lot, and very quickly, in order to set it ablaze, much
less blow it up. A liquid which is busily sublimating directly into
the gas that it is at room temperature, and diluting, accordingly,
with the vast amount of normal air around it in the process. More to
the point, as a gas, it's about half the weight of air itself, so it
*rises*, as it dissipates, straight up, again, very quickly. It
doesn't hang around, flowing down hill, and pooling like, say, C02
might, with the potential to asphyxiate people in the process.

A nasty event, but certainly not the End of Boston As We Know It.
Certainly not even on the order of, say, the Great Chicago Fire,
speaking of the, um, "Windy" City, and though very dangerous, only
for a short while. The gas that didn't dilute into inflammability
would burn off *very* quickly.

And, remember again, you have to *enclose* a burning gas to make it
explosive first place. For instance, it's thought that most of the
people who died in the Hindenburg, died from the fall, especially
jumping out, but not from what looked to the newsreel camera like a
catastrophic explosion of hydrogen, but what was, in fact, a very
fast fire. Very few people were even burned by hydrogen itself,
because it burns so quickly. Many more people were burned by rubber
coated fabrics used to hold the hydrogen than by the hydrogen itself.
The same thing would be said for natural gas in the open air. Wave
your hand, once -- quickly -- though a gas flame on the stove to see
what I'm talking about.


So, in order to instantaneously vaporize that much LNG in enough time
to cook it off in a fuel-air explosion that the aforementioned
"scientists" are so "concerned" about, I'd bet you'd probably need,
guess what, a *nuke*. A nuke, sunk somewhere deep inside the tank
itself. And, of course, if you were going to go nuclear, you might as
well just put a nuke on Franklin Street, at, say, Federal, and be
done with it. Put the yield where the people are, in other words,
instead of 5 miles, or whatever, away, in Everett and Chelsea.

You'd have to do the same thing with a tanker, of course, only you'd
have to do it much faster; minutes, seconds, even, and not in hours
or days. In front of the Coast Guard. Who's paying attention, these
days, with 50-calibers at the ready. Because the whole harbor comes
to a stop when the LNG tanker comes in now, it's not just a moving
feature of the Constitution Yacht Club racecourse anymore.

In short, you'd need local air superiority and a nuclear-tipped
bunker-buster bomb. Not just a jumbo-jet full of properly pacified
passengers, who, after 9/11, are getting very hard to come by these
days, anyway.


To be completely charitable here, the Boston Globe, at least, and,
apparently, the Professor of Chemical Engineering at, um, Arkansas --
Go Hawgs -- cited in the "Scientists" report, didn't go *that* far.
Even someone as partisan as the Globe couldn't do that without being
laughed off the page.

Notice, then, they only talk below about second-degree burns, the
blisters you get from a a very bad sunburn, or grabbing a hot skillet
and letting go, and an actual blast radius of about a quarter-mile,
which, oddly enough, is *exactly* the size of the no-man's land of
pipes and valves around the Distrigas facility in Everett, or, even,
the distance between an LNG tanker and the human-inhabited shoreline
throughout most of its trip through Boston Harbor.

But, make no mistake. The intent, in the Globe this morning, to
terrify their typical readership of Blame-Bush innumerate
technophobes, is very clear. So, I suppose one would say, what else
is new?

Well, it would be funny if it weren't so infuriating. What's really
hilarious about all this erst-cold-war handwringing hysteria, this
apparent re-animation of a whole fossil-strata of "scientists" who
apparently have read more Marx (both Karl, and, from my
side-splitting laughter, Groucho) than Newton in their day, is that
if their fellow co-socialists, the various NIMBY green-is-really-red
tree-hugger "coalitions" (and other children's play-date groups), had
let the gas industry run a *pipeline* up here to New England like
they have in the *rest* of the country decades ago, not only would
our heating bills be significantly lower -- and, not coincidentally,
Joe Kennedy's (speaking of "charity") heating-oil-for-publicity scam
be out of business -- but they wouldn't be tearing their hair and
rending their Solon's robes about how scary and ee-vil all this LNG
technology is. Why? Because it wouldn't *be* here.

That's right. And that's what's infuriating. They're idiots because,
well, they're idiots, apparently.


Hell, if they'd get out of the way of running just a *gas* pipeline
down from the North Slope instead of *burning* *it* *off*, like we
have to do now -- much less drilling a postage-stamp piece of ANWR
and sending some *oil* down this way, too (just to compound their
idiocy a little further) -- the price of heat in the east, and fuel
at the gas-pump everywhere in the US, would fall through the floor.


Ultimately, of course, the only answer to all of this is to figure
out how to wrest government's hands from the necks of markets in
general, and of people like you and me in particular.


Only then will the dreck spewed from every orifice by
press-sanctified idiots like the Bulletin of the Atomic "Scientists"
stop being quoted with a straight face in our newspapers -- those of
"record", and otherwise.

In the meantime, we deal with a sort of inverse of progress, where
instead of the solutions of our problems causing new, if you will,
better, problems, like cancer or heart disease, where we actually get
to live long enough to get them, we have a situation where our
ignorant refusal to solve problems at all in turn, creates problems
that are, patently, worse than the ones we ignore.

Because, mark my words, instead of building a gas pipeline somewhere,
or piping gas and oil down from Alaska, or whatever, we're going to,
in all probability, do exactly what the Globe is agitating for below.
Some expensive, wasteful, boondoggle of an LNG pipeline out to
Stellwagon Bank somewhere -- to a cacophony of red-is-green NIMBYs
anyway -- and prices of gas and oil will *continue* to rise, or at
least be much more expensive relative to the rest of the country.

And, yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, more people *will*
freeze than would otherwise. The "poor" *will*, in fact, be poorer.

For what is, for lack of a better word -- because it sure isn't
*science* -- a religion: Marxist universal-statism, disguised as
environmentalism, disguised as homeland security, or whatever.

And, like any religion, it's full of self-referential logic,
irrational syllogisms, and just plain nonsense. And, like theocracies
everywhere, they have their priests.

They'll call them "Scientists", of course, though they are no such
thing.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'