Well, EIA figures say that refinery averages for a 42 gallon barrel of oil are 12 gallons of distillate fuels, 4 of jet fuel, and 19 of gasoline. The H1 is supposed to take diesel; but for the sake of handwaving and round numbers; we’ll assume that it’ll burn some mixture of those. So call it 35 gallons of fuel per barrel.
176000/42= ~4,200, so very ballpark figure of 145,000-ish gallons of fuel. H1 fuel economy figures seem to hover around 10mpg, so I’ll call it 14,500 miles. How long that takes you is between you and local traffic enforcement.
Crude oil is not regular oil like you put in your car. It is, for the most part, a lot heavier and thicker, and contains oils of a wide mixture of C-chain length. For the most part the longer the chain length the higher the viscosity. Asphalts have dozens of carbons and are thick, octane has eight and is thinner than water. Follow?
So, in the very cold, in a frozen creek, which can be assumed to be running between 32 and 40 degrees, heavy oil not only does not mix (because it’s oil), it can get pretty retarded. The stuff they wanted to send down from the tar sands was so thick it has to be heated for transport. So I assume this oil -will- travel downstream and stick to things, and that plume of slow moving goo balls can be intercepted. Or not.
176,000 gallons of oil sounds like a lot. It’s a lot to drop in one place to be sure.
For perspective an average American uses about 30K gallons in a lifetime.
True Cos has a history of oil field-related spills in North Dakota and Montana, including a January 2015 pipeline break into the Yellowstone River. The 32,000-gallon spill temporarily shut down water supplies in the downstream community of Glendive, Montana, after oil was detected in the city’s water treatment system.
The six-inch steel Belle Fourche pipeline is mostly underground but was built above ground where it crosses Ash Coulee creek, Suess said.
Owen said the pipeline was built in the 1980s and is used to gather oil from nearby oil wells to a collection point.
Not new, but hardly an ancient one. However if their leak detection system dates from then, it could use a modern Linux SOC to monitor the monitor.
It was a 30 year old 6 inch feeder pipe, which was only buried shallowly in places. In this case, erosion on a hillside displaced a section of underground pipe that broke, and caused the spill.
