By JIM LIEDELL
July 30, 2010and CHARLES KLEEKAMP
Dan Webb, then vice president of Webb Research Corp. in Falmouth, began his interest in wind power in 2004 when he started attending seminars on wind turbines. An energy-expert friend heightened Webb's interest by suggesting a utility-scale turbine of at least 1-megawatt capacity for the site of his family's high-tech business in the Falmouth Technology Park. This windy, industrial location is one-third of a mile from the nearest residence and 180 feet above sea level.
Webb hired a consultant, Boreal Renewable Energy Development of Arlington. In 2005 a detailed feasibility study was completed, supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust. The study included turbine sizes from 100 kilowatts to more than 1 megawatt. By 2006 Webb applied for and received a substantial design and construction grant from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust Large On-Site Renewables program.
Webb investigated running underground electrical cables to other nearby businesses within the Falmouth Technology Park. While well-intentioned, this approach was found to be too costly and impractical because of legal constraints on cable placement.
In 2007 new state legislation for virtual net metering, introduced by Rep. Matt Patrick of Falmouth, would resolve this problem and facilitate renewable energy projects statewide. The Green Communities Act, signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick in 2008, included the net metering provisions increasing the maximum allowed capacity of wind and solar systems from 60,000 watts (60 kilowatts) to 2 million watts (2 megawatts). Excess electricity not consumed on-site is paid for by the electric utility, or credits can be transferred to other electricity users.
The arduous process of seeking permits began. Webb recalled: "Navigating the maze of local, state and federal permits became sort of an obsession to reach the next milestone." It took three more years of grueling effort for Webb to obtain approvals from numerous entities.
Then in 2007 Webb obtained a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the project by then required more of his time and the company's money, Webb realized he needed to form a separate legal entity for the venture, and Notus Clean Energy LLC was born. The name Notus comes from the Greek god of southwest wind, the prevailing summer wind on Cape Cod.
Larger expenditures were soon required for detailed site surveys, engineering consultants, road and foundation designs, photo simulations and other necessary tasks. For example, a detailed noise study by Epsilon Associates determined the turbine sound level at nearest residences, under worst-case conditions, would be less than 2 decibels, barely perceptible to the human ear.
The Massachusetts Noise Control Regulation allows a noise level of up to 10 decibels above ambient (background) level, measured at the property line.
By 2008 all permits were in place and Notus began preparing a request for construction proposals.
Then in 2009 it was time to shop for a wind turbine in the 1.5-megawatt range. Utility-scale wind turbines are typically sold in large numbers and are difficult to purchase in small quantities. Wind energy development was growing rapidly in the United States in 2009 and established turbine manufacturers would not consider selling just one turbine. The only willing vendors had unproven designs or had never worked in the U.S. market, risks Webb was unwilling to take.
By summer 2009 negotiations began for the purchase of a new Vestas 1.65-megawatt wind turbine that had been in storage. This turbine had previously been purchased by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust for the discontinued Orleans municipal project. (An identical turbine was purchased by the town of Falmouth and installed at its wastewater treatment plant.) Vestas is the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 made Notus eligible for a 30 percent cost grant, in lieu of the previously legislated Production Tax Credit for wind energy. Notus can apply for these funds when the turbine is operational.
On April 1, general contractor Delaney Group Inc. broke ground. Construction was an impressive sight, and went smoothly. The foundation contains 26 tons of steel reinforcing bars and required 32 cement-mixer truckloads. The giant construction crane, assembled on site, weighs 500 tons and requires its own permit from the FAA.
Interestingly, construction was the fastest phase of the project. Turbine installation was completed on May 18, and "going live" awaits only connection to NStar's electrical grid. The Notus wind turbine will generate enough electricity to power about 500 homes, eliminating more than 1,000 tons annually of carbon dioxide emissions.
Jim Liedell and Charles Kleekamp are retired engineers and past directors of Clean Power Now.
Friday, 30 July 2010
Tidal energy wish granted by Government's £250,000 grant
Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 07:00
A BRISTOL company that specialises in developing the latest technology for harvesting tidal energy has won a grant for £250,000.
Marine Current Turbines is planning to use the funding to pay for research into the next generation of tidal power turbines.
The firm will be working alongside the Queen's University Belfast, Mojo Maritime and Edinburgh University on the project. The grant has come from the Government's Technology Strategy Board and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and will be used to develop a fully submerged version of the SeaGen tidal turbine. The company will lead the project, which will build on the success of its SeaGen tidal system that has been generating electricity for the National Grid for more than two years.
MCT's new technology will use similar turbines, power trains and control systems to those already proven with SeaGen.
The next-generation SeaGen will be able to be maintained above the surface of the water but will also have internal air-filled space to carry the equipment essential to connect the device to the National Grid.
Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, said: "Wave and tidal stream technologies, such as SeaGen, have the potential to supply millions of homes with low carbon energy – reducing our dependency on foreign energy imports and cutting dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
"SeaGen is an excellent example of the UK's world-class engineering and offshore expertise and skills."
Martin Wright, managing director of the firm, said: "The experience that we have gained with SeaGen's deployment and commercial operation is a huge asset in taking forward the development of the next-generation technology, and we greatly welcome the support given to us and our partners by the Technology Strategy Board, the EPSRC and the UK Government."
Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board, said: "By 2050 we are going to have very different energy needs than we have today and we will be getting our energy from different sources.
"The UK is well placed to exploit wave and tidal stream energy resources with all of the coast line that we have, and it is expected this kind of technology will be an important part of the renewable energy mix needed in the future."
A BRISTOL company that specialises in developing the latest technology for harvesting tidal energy has won a grant for £250,000.
Marine Current Turbines is planning to use the funding to pay for research into the next generation of tidal power turbines.
The firm will be working alongside the Queen's University Belfast, Mojo Maritime and Edinburgh University on the project. The grant has come from the Government's Technology Strategy Board and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and will be used to develop a fully submerged version of the SeaGen tidal turbine. The company will lead the project, which will build on the success of its SeaGen tidal system that has been generating electricity for the National Grid for more than two years.
MCT's new technology will use similar turbines, power trains and control systems to those already proven with SeaGen.
The next-generation SeaGen will be able to be maintained above the surface of the water but will also have internal air-filled space to carry the equipment essential to connect the device to the National Grid.
Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, said: "Wave and tidal stream technologies, such as SeaGen, have the potential to supply millions of homes with low carbon energy – reducing our dependency on foreign energy imports and cutting dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
"SeaGen is an excellent example of the UK's world-class engineering and offshore expertise and skills."
Martin Wright, managing director of the firm, said: "The experience that we have gained with SeaGen's deployment and commercial operation is a huge asset in taking forward the development of the next-generation technology, and we greatly welcome the support given to us and our partners by the Technology Strategy Board, the EPSRC and the UK Government."
Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board, said: "By 2050 we are going to have very different energy needs than we have today and we will be getting our energy from different sources.
"The UK is well placed to exploit wave and tidal stream energy resources with all of the coast line that we have, and it is expected this kind of technology will be an important part of the renewable energy mix needed in the future."
Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future
Biofuels can be a part of our energy future, but are not a solution and they will never play a dominant role. That one of the big ideas I took away from a talk on biofuels at the Wilson Center, called Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future. The reason we use fossil fuels is that they are so wonderfully concentrated. Coal, gas or oil represent millions of years of concentrated power of the sun captured by photosynthesis.
Any crop we grow captures only one season of energy or maybe a couple decades in the case of trees. This is a fundamental limit even if we can figure out how to efficiently capture the energy stored in corn, sugar, wood, palm oil or switchgrass.
All energy sources have economic & ecological costs
We noticed the BP oil spill because it is quick and compelling, but scientists have long known about the Gulf dead zone a more persistently serious problem. This is a vast area of the sea near the mouth of the Mississippi where fertilizer runoff (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) have caused extravagant growth of algae. When the algae die back and decompose, it sucks the oxygen out of the water, making life hard for fish. Much of this fertilizer runs off of corn fields. To the extent we turn more corn into ethanol, we make the problem worse. We tend to notice fast developing problems like the BP spill while the slow motions ones, like the dead zones, escape notice.
One of the dangers of something like the BP spill is that people panic and politicians and special interests take advantage. You can see this already in the calls for more biofuels and other alternatives. Remember the cause of the dead zone in the paragraph above. But it gets worse. The nitrogen fertilizer for the corn is often derived in part from natural gas and we have to account for the fossil fuels that go into planting, moving and refining the 1/3 of the American corn crop that becomes ethanol.
Panicking people & pandering politicians make poor policy
W/o massive government intervention, there would still be an ethanol industry. It would just be a lot smaller. Ethanol has a good use as an oxygenator added to gasoline. It makes gasoline burn more effectively & cleaner. In the early 2000s it replaced MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which had itself replaced lead as an octane enhancer a generation ago. But a little ethanol is good; a lot is less useful. Gasoline packs a lot more energy per gallon than ethanol. As you add ethanol beyond a small amount, it begins to decrease mileage. There are also other problems related to corrosion and evaporation, but I will let anybody who cares learn about that elsewhere.
Suffice to say that the push to use more ethanol as transport fuel moved it from being a high end additive to extend gasoline mileage to a low end commodity. Since it is less efficient & more expensive than gas, it raised the prices. Yet the push for more ethanol continues because it is driven by politics, not by economics or common sense.
Moonshinning
Let’s digress a little. You can make alcohol from almost anything that grows on earth. You can see that from the vast array of alcoholic beverages available worldwide, made from potatoes, corn, cactus, grapes, apples and even watermelon. But it is easier to make ethanol from some things than it is from others. It is relatively easy to make ethanol from sugar cane. That is why Brazil has an ethanol advantage. It is significantly less efficient to make it from corn and so far prohibitively expensive to make it from cellulous (i.e. switchgrass, wood chips etc).
We lose corn's comparative advantages when we make it into ethanol
The U.S. does not have a competitive advantage in making ethanol. For one thing, corn is not a great feedstock and to make that worse we (the U.S.) has a relative advantage growing corn as food for man and beast, but when we make it into ethanol, we manage to negate our natural advantages, converting a product we do well into a product that we do merely okay. Beyond that, corn ethanol tends to be produced near where corn grows, i.e. in the middle of the country. Much of the demand for liquid fuel is on the coasts. Ethanol cannot be transported via gasoline pipelines because it is corrosive and tends to create evaporation problems.Transporting ethanol by road and rail is relatively expensive. On the other hand, ethanol from Brazil is cheaper and closer – in terms of transport – because it is produced near ports in Sao Paulo state and can be easily sent via sea transport to places like Norfolk. That is why we have to subsidize ethanol production in the U.S. by $0.45 a gallon AND put a tariff of $0.54 on ethanol from Brazil.
In other words, public policy is pushing us toward one of the most expensive energy alternatives made even more expensive by public policy.
What about cellulosic ethanol? This can be made from materials that now go to waste, such as forestry waste or stalks and sticks from crops. We can also easily grow some crops, such as hybrid poplars or switchgrass, specifically for energy. The biggest problem is that we still cannot do it efficiently. Nature has been evolving for millions of years to prevent wood from easily being converted (i.e. fermented or rotted). There are better alternatives. The more you have to process something, the more costs you add. Wood chips, for example, CAN be turned into ethanol. But it is a lot easier to make them into pellets or burn them directly to make heat or electricity.
Gasoline is a great liquid transport fuel
The problem is liquid fuel. Gasoline makes great liquid fuel and alternatives cannot compete. Direct government attempts (such as subsidies and mandates) to change this equation don’t work well for that reason. Beyond that, alternatives and gasoline are locked in a feedback loop. If alternatives, such as biofuels displace a lot of gasoline, the price of gasoline drops relative to the biofuels in question, making them less competitive.
Government has a role, but it is supportive and indirect. Government should not try to pick particular technologies. The ethanol debacle should have taught us that. It can help with infrastructure and basic research. Real, sustainable gains come from increasing productivity that lowers costs or costs of doing business, rather than tries to pay them down with taxpayer money.
We have passed peak gasoline in the U.S.
A final interesting concept they talked about at the seminar was “peak gasoline.” People talk about peak oil. Peak oil is the theoretical spot where we have used up half of the petroleum available on earth. It is a slippery concept that is meaningless w/o specifying a price. At $5 a barrel, we reached peak oil years ago. We may never reach peak oil at $500 a barrel. Peak gasoline is an easier concept. Given the changing nature of our society, our driving habits and mileage efficiency, we probably reached the maximum amount of gasoline we will ever use. We cannot expect consumption to rise forever. Consumption is already dropping. Of course, we have not and may never reach “peak energy.”
We can live with the energy problem but never solve it
There will be no magic solution to the energy problem. We choose our energy portfolio based on cost, convenience, availability and mere preference. This is how it will always be. It is an ongoing situation, not a problem that can be solved. No matter what elegant and wonderful solutions we devise (and we will come up with some) we will still be talking about the same sorts of things fifty years from now. It is good to remember – despite the current pessimism – that our energy situation is better than that of our ancestors in terms of the amount of work we need to perform for each unit of energy. But as energy gets easier to get, we want more of it.
Any crop we grow captures only one season of energy or maybe a couple decades in the case of trees. This is a fundamental limit even if we can figure out how to efficiently capture the energy stored in corn, sugar, wood, palm oil or switchgrass.
All energy sources have economic & ecological costs
We noticed the BP oil spill because it is quick and compelling, but scientists have long known about the Gulf dead zone a more persistently serious problem. This is a vast area of the sea near the mouth of the Mississippi where fertilizer runoff (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) have caused extravagant growth of algae. When the algae die back and decompose, it sucks the oxygen out of the water, making life hard for fish. Much of this fertilizer runs off of corn fields. To the extent we turn more corn into ethanol, we make the problem worse. We tend to notice fast developing problems like the BP spill while the slow motions ones, like the dead zones, escape notice.
One of the dangers of something like the BP spill is that people panic and politicians and special interests take advantage. You can see this already in the calls for more biofuels and other alternatives. Remember the cause of the dead zone in the paragraph above. But it gets worse. The nitrogen fertilizer for the corn is often derived in part from natural gas and we have to account for the fossil fuels that go into planting, moving and refining the 1/3 of the American corn crop that becomes ethanol.
Panicking people & pandering politicians make poor policy
W/o massive government intervention, there would still be an ethanol industry. It would just be a lot smaller. Ethanol has a good use as an oxygenator added to gasoline. It makes gasoline burn more effectively & cleaner. In the early 2000s it replaced MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which had itself replaced lead as an octane enhancer a generation ago. But a little ethanol is good; a lot is less useful. Gasoline packs a lot more energy per gallon than ethanol. As you add ethanol beyond a small amount, it begins to decrease mileage. There are also other problems related to corrosion and evaporation, but I will let anybody who cares learn about that elsewhere.
Suffice to say that the push to use more ethanol as transport fuel moved it from being a high end additive to extend gasoline mileage to a low end commodity. Since it is less efficient & more expensive than gas, it raised the prices. Yet the push for more ethanol continues because it is driven by politics, not by economics or common sense.
Moonshinning
Let’s digress a little. You can make alcohol from almost anything that grows on earth. You can see that from the vast array of alcoholic beverages available worldwide, made from potatoes, corn, cactus, grapes, apples and even watermelon. But it is easier to make ethanol from some things than it is from others. It is relatively easy to make ethanol from sugar cane. That is why Brazil has an ethanol advantage. It is significantly less efficient to make it from corn and so far prohibitively expensive to make it from cellulous (i.e. switchgrass, wood chips etc).
We lose corn's comparative advantages when we make it into ethanol
The U.S. does not have a competitive advantage in making ethanol. For one thing, corn is not a great feedstock and to make that worse we (the U.S.) has a relative advantage growing corn as food for man and beast, but when we make it into ethanol, we manage to negate our natural advantages, converting a product we do well into a product that we do merely okay. Beyond that, corn ethanol tends to be produced near where corn grows, i.e. in the middle of the country. Much of the demand for liquid fuel is on the coasts. Ethanol cannot be transported via gasoline pipelines because it is corrosive and tends to create evaporation problems.Transporting ethanol by road and rail is relatively expensive. On the other hand, ethanol from Brazil is cheaper and closer – in terms of transport – because it is produced near ports in Sao Paulo state and can be easily sent via sea transport to places like Norfolk. That is why we have to subsidize ethanol production in the U.S. by $0.45 a gallon AND put a tariff of $0.54 on ethanol from Brazil.
In other words, public policy is pushing us toward one of the most expensive energy alternatives made even more expensive by public policy.
What about cellulosic ethanol? This can be made from materials that now go to waste, such as forestry waste or stalks and sticks from crops. We can also easily grow some crops, such as hybrid poplars or switchgrass, specifically for energy. The biggest problem is that we still cannot do it efficiently. Nature has been evolving for millions of years to prevent wood from easily being converted (i.e. fermented or rotted). There are better alternatives. The more you have to process something, the more costs you add. Wood chips, for example, CAN be turned into ethanol. But it is a lot easier to make them into pellets or burn them directly to make heat or electricity.
Gasoline is a great liquid transport fuel
The problem is liquid fuel. Gasoline makes great liquid fuel and alternatives cannot compete. Direct government attempts (such as subsidies and mandates) to change this equation don’t work well for that reason. Beyond that, alternatives and gasoline are locked in a feedback loop. If alternatives, such as biofuels displace a lot of gasoline, the price of gasoline drops relative to the biofuels in question, making them less competitive.
Government has a role, but it is supportive and indirect. Government should not try to pick particular technologies. The ethanol debacle should have taught us that. It can help with infrastructure and basic research. Real, sustainable gains come from increasing productivity that lowers costs or costs of doing business, rather than tries to pay them down with taxpayer money.
We have passed peak gasoline in the U.S.
A final interesting concept they talked about at the seminar was “peak gasoline.” People talk about peak oil. Peak oil is the theoretical spot where we have used up half of the petroleum available on earth. It is a slippery concept that is meaningless w/o specifying a price. At $5 a barrel, we reached peak oil years ago. We may never reach peak oil at $500 a barrel. Peak gasoline is an easier concept. Given the changing nature of our society, our driving habits and mileage efficiency, we probably reached the maximum amount of gasoline we will ever use. We cannot expect consumption to rise forever. Consumption is already dropping. Of course, we have not and may never reach “peak energy.”
We can live with the energy problem but never solve it
There will be no magic solution to the energy problem. We choose our energy portfolio based on cost, convenience, availability and mere preference. This is how it will always be. It is an ongoing situation, not a problem that can be solved. No matter what elegant and wonderful solutions we devise (and we will come up with some) we will still be talking about the same sorts of things fifty years from now. It is good to remember – despite the current pessimism – that our energy situation is better than that of our ancestors in terms of the amount of work we need to perform for each unit of energy. But as energy gets easier to get, we want more of it.
Oil industry safety record blown open
National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 July 2010 20.18 BST
The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published today.
None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.
"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."
In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.
Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.
In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.
The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.
The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.
In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.
The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.
"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.
At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.
Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed.
Among the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies.
Enbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records.
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 July 2010 20.18 BST
The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published today.
None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.
"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."
In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.
Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.
In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.
The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.
The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.
In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.
The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.
"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.
At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.
Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed.
Among the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies.
Enbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records.