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andanother
climber
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Jul 19, 2008 - 02:29pm PT
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Rokjox,
you need to remember that those guys can only see the SHORT-term. There hasn't been a significant attack in, like, a few hours. Forget about what happened yesterday. Forget about what might happen tomorrow. When you think that way, then the areas are stable.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Jul 19, 2008 - 02:33pm PT
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Seamus, I'd watch yer ass, you could already be on a watch list after outing the 'bookie' like that.
Yer so screwed.
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seamus mcshane
climber
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Jul 19, 2008 - 02:51pm PT
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Bluering, I'd watch my ass too if it weren't for that dreaded mirror I'd have to haul around.
Besides, I love screwing.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Jul 19, 2008 - 02:57pm PT
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Seamus, I know what you mean, that's why I'm voting McCain probably.
Obama's brownshirts are gonna be trackin' down outspoken, politically incorrect conservatives like Injuns on buffalo.
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seamus mcshane
climber
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Jul 19, 2008 - 03:12pm PT
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Sorry to hear that bluering, however a vote for "none of the above" would actually show some intolerance for an inherently weak, mostly centrist two-party system. This is certainly something which the framers of our Constitution would have abhorred.
A system where neither apples nor oranges are anything but fruits of failure.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Jul 19, 2008 - 03:17pm PT
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Wow, rok, you're really optimistic today, huh?
You really think people are going to tolerate going back to a Taliban sharia rule? They've tasted freedom, and it always tastes good. So much so that once beaten-down people will stand up and fight against a theocracy and authoritarians.
Have faith, my brother, it's just begun.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Jul 19, 2008 - 03:20pm PT
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Seamus, we're stuck with 2 parties for now. The third party has to emerge well before elections, it has to start small (as it has) and grow into an overwhelming movement that appeals to ALL people. A party of the common man (not communism).
It's too late for this election, vote your mind in this one. We need to start a quasi-libertarian party that puts the interests of the common working-man first.
How do we start that? Doug Buchanan?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 19, 2008 - 06:42pm PT
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I just love reading this kind of stuff while drinking my coffee:
"In the end what little oil/gas reserves in A.N.W.R. will be obtained from horizontal drilling from a site on the border of the area."
The current world record for extended reach/horizontal drilling is 25,758 feet. That is five miles. So if you take 2000 acres that they are asking for(only 2000 acres!!!) over by the border on the Canning, you will pretty much be able to cover a radius of five miles, in the best of all perfect worlds, which it isn't. You won't be out there setting records. The 1002 area is 70 miles long, and about 30 or 40 miles wide at its widest point. I have walked across it a couple of times. It is pretty big.
I just came off of a horizontal well. At some point drag will increase to the point where you can no longer put weight on the bit. There are ways to tweak this with drag reducing goodies, but the numbers above give you an idea. 25,000 feet is pretty darn far. In no way typical.
What people do with this "only 2000 acres" argument is blow smoke. Even the USGS report says that there will be no Prudhoe Bay sized fileds in the 1002 area, but a number of smaller ones. So you will have a bunch of much smaller drilling pads (almost certainly with an airstrip to handle a C-130).
The Barrow Arch, which Prudhoe Bay sits on, stops right around the west end of the 1002 area. So there will have to be different types of hydrocarbon traps. Just order the CD's from the USGS.
I like to use this analogy. Let's say that you have a house that is 2000 square feet. I say, "Hey, I will only use up 20 square feet! The size of a closet!" Then I go all over your house and drop a lot of turds everywhere. But hey, they total less than 20 square feet, the size of a closet.
Then you have pipelines connecting each production platform.
And the caribou at Prudhoe Bay are from the central Arctic herd. They don't migrate. In the refuge, the Porcupine herd DOES migrate. They only come up there in the early summer to calve and chow down. And bears? Go google up what they do to trash addicted problem bears. While you are at it, do a little on polar bear hazing, keeping bears from denning near your drilling operation...which would shut you down.
I have spent a lot of time in the refuge. I have never seen anything like it. The coastal plain is indeed a plain, but the wildlife sure do use it.
There is just so much crap floating out there. It doesn't take much money to hire a smart person to keep a tight grip on the short hairs of the public imagination (I stole that line).
It is just an unreal wild area that will be industrialized.
As for NPRA, the USGS doesn't give it very high reserve numbers. Still, companies are crossing the line over to the west of the state land and drilling in there now. There is some sort of gas play starting around Umiat on the Colville. There would (and should) be a gas line soon. There is a huge amount of stranded gas in those fields, and I don't object to them building one next to the oil pipeline, and then following the Al-Can highway. Oh, and the pipeline has a max capacity of 2.2 million barrels per day. It has around 900,000 going through it right now. It was only full for a few years when Prudhoe Bay first came on. Now, we use 22 million barrels per day. Tell me how a million barrels per day (IF it is found) will save us. It will be much easier to go back to what we were using in the nineties and conserve TWO Arctic Refuges. Go poke around eia.gov some time. It will do you good.
This just goes on, and on, and on. You need a bulldozer to dig beneath the sh#t and find what really goes on.
edit:
Does anyone know when the original Refuge came into existence? Including the coastal plain? The Eisenhower administration.
Don't even get me started on why the Alaskans and the Eskimos on the north slope are for drilling.....
And why don't we drill off of Florida? You can drill there year round, and it is a lot closer to market.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 19, 2008 - 07:05pm PT
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"All oilmen (persons?) know that oil IN the ground is far more valuable than oil being pumped out.
It's a game to them, and we're the pawns."
Please explain to me how this works. Now, when it was ten bucks a barrel, I can see shutting in fields, because you are giving it away at a loss, but at 130 bucks? Everyone is going balls out.
The only exception might be the big state owned oil companies...you know, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq?, Kuwait, Venezuela, Mexico...
All of the major oil companies aren't a fly on the ass of the state owned companies. That is where the spigot is turned.
Dude, you are way off on who wags the dog. It is the huge gullet that we all have. People demand it just like air.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Jul 19, 2008 - 08:10pm PT
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If you don't want to drill, then PROVE your commitment to the environment...stop jetting/driving all over the country/world to pursue your "passion"...
Part of the problem is the way that our leaders have set things up,
it's difficult to "ditch the car and go green." Our leaders have
seen to it that no resources are spent on mass transit or
alternate ways of travel, besides individual autos.
Our leaders have to take the difficult steps towards implementing
'sustainable' methods. It is not something individuals can
control on a massive scale.
Look at the auto industry, irresponsible greed landed them in a place
where they are a step behind in fuel-efficient cars. Out Gov't
LEADERS could have helped, in some way, guide our use of our natural
resources, but instead they are part of the greed machine.
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Jeremy Handren
climber
NV
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Jul 19, 2008 - 08:32pm PT
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"If you don't want to drill, then PROVE your commitment to the environment...stop jetting/driving all over the country/world to pursue your "passion"... "
I'm amazed that people don't see what an idiotic argument the above represents. Should fiscal conservatives refuse medicare and social security?, should non-union employees in Union dominated industries refuse pay raises?
I see no problem with taking full advantage of the system that exists, while at the same time trying to change that system.
Why not do something far more useful for the Environment and vote for politicians who show a serious commitment to reducing our dependency on oil.
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Jeremy Handren
climber
NV
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Jul 19, 2008 - 08:51pm PT
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Bluering said
"It's still a fact, Andy"
It would seem that last weeks large drop in oil prices could have been from a variety of factors...the possibility of a small expansion of our oil extraction acivities is probably not more than a tiny part of that drop....my guess would be no part at all.
"It's still a fact, Andy." thats a bit of a stretch Bluering (although I've no doubt that that was Fox's explanation)
From The Houston Chronicle
"Mounting concerns about the risks inflation poses to the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, helped spark the declines. Analysts also attributed the sell-off to Thursday's expiration of options contracts, which tend to increase volatility, and to computers programed to automatically sell once prices reach certain thresholds."
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Jul 19, 2008 - 09:52pm PT
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Pretty much every single thing I've seen or heard about this week's drop in oil prices, including an interview with a guy from a petroleum producing organization, has said that the drop was due to demand-side issues. Specifically the US economy being in the tank.
The amount of oil the US has in proven reserves is not enough to make any long-term difference in the world prices.
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Doug Buchanan
Mountain climber
Fairbanks Alaska
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Jul 20, 2008 - 12:53am PT
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Blue Ring my friend and colleagues.....
In answer to your question....
Start by not voting for a failed and soon-to-collapse political party, the DemocanRepublicrat Regime.
Your vote means THEY REPRESENT YOU. ALL of what they do represents you if you vote for them. You do not give any partial votes. There is no reason to attach your name to their failure.
Think about 20 years into the future. Start acting now for that goal. 20 years from now will be here very soon.
Vote Libertarian, or nobody, each election. You do not care how other people represent themselves.
The Libertarian Party is fundamentally flawed. Their stated principles are accurate, but they seek power, not advanced reasoning ability. They are the interval device to better illuminate the saturated corruption of the DemocanRepublicrats, before the Libertarians get power and become equally corrupt in about 50 years, then fail.
The DemocanRepublicrat War Regime will cause the misery that popularizes the Libertarians, on schedule.
Learn THE CONCEPTS of the old money families. They created wealth the hard way, then kept building wealth the wise way, with advancing knowledge. They make decisions for goals 20 to 60 years in the future.
They are not the Republicans, although they may often vote Republican.
Their previous projects are what you are currently enjoying.
If you learn those concepts, and learn from what you do, you will become noticeably wise among the wise, and noticeably denigrated among those who will therefore offer you much amusement.
In the future, relatively soon, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, three sections of the US west and two sections of the US east will be separate nations. They will each be under the equivalent of the US Constitution. The people will be free. Trade will be more effective than now. Only the US East will cling to the power process and stagnate themselves. The other nations will be based on the reasoning process, and advance rapidly. The Park Service will be a classic grade school lesson on how to NOT manage public land.
The population will be slightly lower. Energy will be diversified. Its processes will be highly refined.
McCain and Obama are immaterial. Both will cause more misery and fail on schedule regardless of their jobs.
And climbers will be higher than those other guys down there, of course.
DougBuchanan.com
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couchmaster
climber
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Jul 20, 2008 - 10:21am PT
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DING DING DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER FOLKS -SHOWS OVER:
The first intelligent post nothing further to be said, please re-read this one:
BASE104 said 3 or 4 posts up:
"
I just love reading this kind of stuff while drinking my coffee:
"In the end what little oil/gas reserves in A.N.W.R. will be obtained from horizontal drilling from a site on the border of the area."
The current world record for extended reach/horizontal drilling is 25,758 feet. That is five miles. So if you take 2000 acres that they are asking for(only 2000 acres!!!) over by the border on the Canning, you will pretty much be able to cover a radius of five miles, in the best of all perfect worlds, which it isn't. You won't be out there setting records. The 1002 area is 70 miles long, and about 30 or 40 miles wide at its widest point. I have walked across it a couple of times. It is pretty big.
I just came off of a horizontal well. At some point drag will increase to the point where you can no longer put weight on the bit. There are ways to tweak this with drag reducing goodies, but the numbers above give you an idea. 25,000 feet is pretty darn far. In no way typical.
What people do with this "only 2000 acres" argument is blow smoke. Even the USGS report says that there will be no Prudhoe Bay sized fileds in the 1002 area, but a number of smaller ones. So you will have a bunch of much smaller drilling pads (almost certainly with an airstrip to handle a C-130).
The Barrow Arch, which Prudhoe Bay sits on, stops right around the west end of the 1002 area. So there will have to be different types of hydrocarbon traps. Just order the CD's from the USGS.
I like to use this analogy. Let's say that you have a house that is 2000 square feet. I say, "Hey, I will only use up 20 square feet! The size of a closet!" Then I go all over your house and drop a lot of turds everywhere. But hey, they total less than 20 square feet, the size of a closet.
Then you have pipelines connecting each production platform.
And the caribou at Prudhoe Bay are from the central Arctic herd. They don't migrate. In the refuge, the Porcupine herd DOES migrate. They only come up there in the early summer to calve and chow down. And bears? Go google up what they do to trash addicted problem bears. While you are at it, do a little on polar bear hazing, keeping bears from denning near your drilling operation...which would shut you down.
I have spent a lot of time in the refuge. I have never seen anything like it. The coastal plain is indeed a plain, but the wildlife sure do use it.
There is just so much crap floating out there. It doesn't take much money to hire a smart person to keep a tight grip on the short hairs of the public imagination (I stole that line).
It is just an unreal wild area that will be industrialized.
As for NPRA, the USGS doesn't give it very high reserve numbers. Still, companies are crossing the line over to the west of the state land and drilling in there now. There is some sort of gas play starting around Umiat on the Colville. There would (and should) be a gas line soon. There is a huge amount of stranded gas in those fields, and I don't object to them building one next to the oil pipeline, and then following the Al-Can highway. Oh, and the pipeline has a max capacity of 2.2 million barrels per day. It has around 900,000 going through it right now. It was only full for a few years when Prudhoe Bay first came on. Now, we use 22 million barrels per day. Tell me how a million barrels per day (IF it is found) will save us. It will be much easier to go back to what we were using in the nineties and conserve TWO Arctic Refuges. Go poke around eia.gov some time. It will do you good.
This just goes on, and on, and on. You need a bulldozer to dig beneath the sh#t and find what really goes on.
edit:
Does anyone know when the original Refuge came into existence? Including the coastal plain? The Eisenhower administration.
Don't even get me started on why the Alaskans and the Eskimos on the north slope are for drilling.....
And why don't we drill off of Florida? You can drill there year round, and it is a lot closer to market.
Frikkan A awesome stuff Base 104, now I'm off to start shitting at various places around my home by shitting in the corner of my living room to see if my wife notices it to test your hypotheses, but I suspect you are correct.
And for the record: my viewpoint is this, our country needs to get our f*ing sh#t together and put together a wholeistic, realistic, national energy policy. The stakes are incredibly high.
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seamus mcshane
climber
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Jul 20, 2008 - 10:21am PT
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"Gopher, Everett?"
None of the above is your best bet.
Doug, you're right on.
Nowhere did the framers ever mention "parties", let alone a dysfunctional bipolar system, which leaves you black and white options.
Our world requires objectivity more akin to seeing the grey area or penumbra for what it is, neither black nor white but somewhere in between.
If you can't think on your feet, be willing to change and adapt to reality (neither black nor white), then you'll never be willing to see the world as it is, perpetual flux.
We will be imprisoned by black and white, which are really no different anyway.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 20, 2008 - 11:41am PT
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Now people should understand oil and gasoline prices. This is an example of getting your butt reamed, and not admitting that you are reaming it yourself.
Oil prices are set on an international market. That part is pretty simple. We can't just say, "OK, let's make it 10 dollars/bbl." Nobody would sell to us, of course, and it would kill the domestic industry to boot.
Now let's say that we ARE able to increase our consumption by 1 or 2 million bbls/day. That would be nice only because we aren't burning the other country's oil, but if world demand rises by THREE million bbls/day, there will be a net DECREASE of 1 million bbls/day of production, and prices will go up. See, the world demand goes up by three, and we only increase our production by two. So there is a shortfall of one.
Is that simple enough? I am not trying to be a smartass.
Now here is a very simple spreadsheat from the DOE showing world oil consumption. Just hit the link to the spreadsheet at the top of the page:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/oilconsumption.html
Now scroll down and look at the world total consumption and note that it has increased by 9 million bbls/day since 1999. Which is a whopping 9% increase. And it wasn't by us, by and large.
Also, people need to know that the US is the third highest oil producing nation on earth:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/index.cfm
I hope that you can see that increasing our production will not greatly affect oil prices. However, since we consume a quarter of the world's oil production, we can have a large impact on prices if we conserve, whether by choice or due to a recession, ergo market forces.
I am not saying that 130 dollar oil is good for the country. It is terrible for the country. The next president will inherit the same problem that Carter did, will be blamed for it, while it is totally out of his control. Meaning inflation. Pretty much everything is either made from oil or transported by oil. The only thing good that will come of this is that we will be FORCED to use less. Or go broke.
Now, I have seen two oil shocks. The first one was artificial, created by OPEC, although everyone thought the world was running out of oil. Is this one real? I dunno. Time will tell whether demand has finally caught up with supply. In the immediate time frame, it doesn't really matter.
The only thing that we can really do in the NEAR TERM is to decrease our consumption, which is in effect a net increase in our production. That part is a hell of a lot easier than finding new reserves, although that is something that will have to be confronted at some point. The US passed its production peak in the seventies. And there isn't much we can do about that except slow the bleeding a little. Conservation is something that we will be forced to do, simply because it is cheaper to just USE less. And we can act today. We should have been conserving since the oil shock of the late seventies, but why do it when gas is cheap?
I hope that this isn't too complicated. I just get tired of seeing the same old slogans tossed around here. Blaming everyone but ourselves.
Now go talk about climbing....I have to finish up mapping a prospect trend by Friday. No rest right now.
edit: The NPRA (under various names) was created under the Harding administration.
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MisterE
Social climber
My Inner Nut
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Jul 20, 2008 - 12:04pm PT
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Just be sure and stay away, far away, from the KIK Test Well!
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 20, 2008 - 12:39pm PT
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Are you talking about the well on Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation (KIC) lands? Over on the Jago River? Actually Arctic Slope Regional Corp lands if you want to get technical, since the KIC trade with ASRC. Know something? I thought damn near nobody was privy to that info.
Alaska is in kind of a unique situation. Prudhoe Bay is the largest field in north america, and it is kind of on life support right now. It is also fortunate enough to lie on state owned land. Alaska, having no real means of support other than the royalties and taxes from what squirts down that pipeline, is unfortunate that they are hostage to that money which pretty much runs the state. So....they are rabid to drill in the Refuge. Same for the North Slope Borough. They would go belly up without the revenue. That PFD is pretty sweet for the citizens as well.
As for the coastal eskimos in the borough, they are pretty chilly when it comes to drilling offshore. The whaling is a huge part of their life.
They need to get that gas pipeline built. I don't know of anyone who objects to that.
I am really getting a kick reading ADN about that VECO scandal. It is like a soap opera with tentacles like an octopus.
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adatesman
Trad climber
philadelphia, pa
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Jul 20, 2008 - 03:39pm PT
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Hey Bookworm,
Got a question for you.... In your second post in this thread you directed a question to me: "are you old enough to remember the forecasts of disaster surrounding the alaska pipeline? how it would destroy the habitat? well... "
Have you ever bothered to actually look into this yourself? I'll save you the trouble of Googling and provide some links.....
This page has a good history of the Pipeline, including reported leaks and their sizes, direct from the company that manages it (although the chronology only goes up to 2003): http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/Pipelinefacts/Chronology.html
Plus two more leaks that occurred after that page was last updated:
March 6, 2006- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11696601/
Jan 9, 2007- http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-30375904_ITM
Totaling these up gives somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.4 million gallons (57,400 barrels) of oil spilled from the pipeline alone.
Plus in your first post in this thread, you said "the worst spills occur in the transportation of oil via ocean-going tankers...drill at home = minimize spills"
Let's not forget that _all_ of the oil from the pipeline ends up in tankers for shipment to other places, so one could justifiably include leaks from tankers since the tankers wouldn't have leaked had the pipeline not been there to fill them:
1989 (from first link above)
* Jan 3, Oil spill, Thompson Pass, 1,700 bbl., crack in hull.
* Mar 24, Oil spill, Exxon Valdez, 262,000 bbl., vessel ran aground at Bligh Reef.
Which brings our total to 13.5 million gallons (321,000 barrels) of oil spilled either directly or as a result of the Trans Alaska Pipeline.
In your second post you also said "again, adatesman, you missed my point...transporting oil off our own coasts significantly reduces the chance of a spill compared to transporting oil from the middle east."
Care to show your data supporting this? I ask because judging by the damage from Katrina and history of the Trans Alaska Pipeline it looks like transporting from our own coast isn't exactly a spill resistant a process.
Any thoughts, or are you just going to question my patriotism and ask why I hate America again? If the latter, I have a couple good yo-momma comebacks for you..... :P :)
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