Monday, January 02, 2017

Tanker, pipeline, tanker, etc.


I didn’t know until today that a major crude oil pipeline crosses Panama from the Pacific to the Carribean just south of where I’m writing this. Reading about the pipeline reminded me that a cross- mountain pipeline development (Kinder-Morgan) has been approved to increase capacity for transporting oil from Alberta to tidewater at Vancouver. When the pipeline here was completed in 1982, a road was built connecting the two oceans, a road we traveled a year ago to visit a friend in Bocas del Toro. I noticed then a large, white pipe exposed where it crossed ravines and rivers and buried—I presumed—where it didn’t. I took it to be an aquaduct.


Originally, the pipeline facilitated the transportation of crude from Valdez, Alaska to the Gulf Coast refineries in the USA. Up to 20 tankers a day carried the oil to the terminal on the Pacific side of Panama from where it was pumped across the isthmus and reloaded onto tankers at Bocas del Toro on the Carribean side. It makes for a mind-boggling potential for spills.


The Panama Canal has affected the practicality of the tanker/pipeline/tanker sequence for moving crude, but the pipeline has been adapted for forward/reverse shipment and still moves oil between the USA and Ecuador as well as from Venezuela to the Pacific


Back in 1982, scant attention was paid to environmental impact, and “PTP [Petroterminal de Panama S.A.] has applied little restraint in construction and operations of the pipeline with consideration to the environment. The pipeline project "was approved and completed in 1981–1982 before submission of an environmental impact assessment". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Panama_pipeline) The pipeline crosses the Panamanian Cordillera and both as a result of it and the road construction required to facilitate its construction and servicing, there’s been a marked disruption to delicate ecosystems, soil erosion, etc.


You can take a visual tour of the pipeline courtesy of Petroterminal de Panama S.A. by clicking here.

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