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This kind of things is what I think of when people complain about "hidden external costs of electric cars".
Yes, recycling batteries is an issue. Conditions in rare earth mines are an issue.
But when you want to "consider hidden costs" of EVs you should do the same for ICE cars. And there are lots of these, including building, maintaining and recycling supertankers, refineries, pipelines, oil wells on land and in the sea, causing oil spill every decade, keeping oil tyrannies in charge, fueling resource wars in 3rd world countries.
But it's status quo so it doesn't count.
The hard truth is that both are unsustainable and extremely inefficient in the end.
Transporting 70kg of meat in a 2 tons metal box, which is sitting unused 95% of its life, using 10 sq meters of public space. ~25% of the materials used on a car aren't recyclable and end up in a landfill. With an average lifespan of 12 years and 1.4 billion vehicles on earth that's a lot of waste.
And that's not even talking about the current trend of ditching nuclear for intermittent energy sources while at the same time increasing our reliance on electricity
You left off all the toxic and environment-degrading crap that the combustion (including combustion further up the supply chain) dumps into the air. Which at least has the "virtue" of spreading enough to also affect the well-to-do - not just those stuck living near the infrastructure, in the petro-kleptocracies, & such.
(My biggest issue with the electric vehicle enthusiasts I have known is that they seem to assume that EV's have zero hidden external costs. It's as if all the extra electricity needed was going to come from magic elves at the North Pole, via wires in hyperspace that no NIMBY could see or object to. (Let alone fail at scale, say, after a hurricane.) And Santa was going to bring EV's for all the human who aren't well-to-do home owners like them. Plus practical charging options, etc. for those folks - including the "living in their car" homeless working poor.)
I’m thinking about getting a plug in hybrid Jeep. There are tons of forum posts bashing them and complaining about lithium mining or what your electricity providers are using for power generation. They also complain that the diesel gets similar mileage as the 4xe. It’s missing the point entirely. Dino fuel production is a dirty dirty industry. My next car will be a hybrid and after that I expect they will be full EVs.
Aren’t most power grids still powered mostly by fossil fuels. You have to pay for the fuel one way or another - i.e. if it’s not gasoline, it’s coal or natural gas; unless you charge only at peak solar/wind power generation and there is excess power generated, your charging will increase fossil fuel usage.
Also the source of electricity to power the refineries. I found some figure on how much electricity is required for every litre of petrol and it wasn't insignificant - not as much as an electric car but uses but certainly not an order of magnitude less.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I found that information.
It's crude oil, so this topic is a bit of a tanget. EVs will reduce consumption, but not make it zero.
The problem is over consumption, and shiny, new, must-have electric cars just encourage more of it. The majority of a cars carbon footprint comes from its manufacturing, so it's actually more carbon friendly to run your old ICE car for as long as possible, rather than trade it in for a new EV.
Oil is also a hidden cost of EV's, from energy to plastics, it's still a required component
Very misleading title on the submission. The New Yorker's title is no better, but their subtitle is half-decent:
"Stranded in Yemen’s war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If—or when—it explodes or sinks, thousands may die."
Summary - The unmaintained, rusting tanker is at the entrance to the Red Sea (and thus the Suez Canal). The side in the Yemeni civil war which controls it is enjoying considerable benefits from the ongoing threat of a huge oil spill. Diplomatic efforts at a resolution have gone nowhere.
Note - In the context (derelict tanker, crude oil), the term "explode" refers only to the explosion of some flammable vapors at the top of the oil tanks. That would (very likely) still be enough to start breaking up the ship, thus spilling ~all the crude oil.
I’m still reading it but with every paragraph it gets worse and worse and worse. How did this go unnoticed and unreported for so long?
EDIT: I’ve finished it (long article). All I can take away from that is that the current situation and short and long term outlooks are all extremely bleak.
Because there's a civil war in that country, indirectly supported by the US through its Saudi Arabia proxy. It's a nasty, dirty conflict full of human rights violations, and reporting on it would bring to the public's attention many occasions in which the US and its proxy weren't exactly being paragons of virtue. So it's just not reported on instead.
> How did this go unnoticed and unreported for so long?
It didn't? As the article describes, people have been aware of the problem for years already.
It was also discussed here last year
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486995
Here is another report from 2018
https://ceobs.org/is-an-ageing-oil-tanker-threatening-an-env...
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. The issue has been covered in mainstream US news media for over a year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/decaying-yemen-oil-tanker-at-ri...
My initial feeling around these kinds of things is always ‘Well, park an aircraft carrier there and force them to clean up their act.’ But then I realize that shit like that is exactly what led to the current problems in the first place.
The Yemeni civil war has been going on for like a decade. It's been reported on plenty. The situation with the boat has been reported on plenty too, although people were pretty tired of hearing about the war in Yemen by the time is became a known issue.
> How did this go unnoticed and unreported for so long?
It’s been reported on for a while, I first noticed article about it last year.
Someone deleted their comment with the google maps link, but it's conveniently located next to the "Yemen Company For Flour Mills And Silos" aka "big pile of explosive and flammable powders that's a critical food source for the region".
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yemen+Company+For+Flour+Mi...
I'm also reminded of the SS Richard Montgomery, which is another "if we leave this for a generation maybe it will go away" situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
There's no chance the ship poses a risk of burning those grain silos. If it explodes, it won't go up like the port of Beirut, it'll just kill people on the ship and quite possibly spill large quantities of oil into the sea. The risk to the flour mill is shipping through that port would be stopped for quite some time and if there was a large burning oil slick the surrounding area could be evacuated.
Explosion would require a degree of air fuel mixture so that the reaction can go quickly. The vapor from evaporation of the oil could explode but not a million barrels of oil itself. So the number may have been used to conjure up a misleading picture if the intention is to emphasize the magnitude of a possible explosion. That being said, oil spill and uncontrolable fire are all very real risks, just not as exciting as explosions.
The cargo tanks would normally have a vapour space made of exhaust gas (inert gas) from the boiler which is less than 5% oxygen. However, this ship's inert gas system broke down years ago so it probably has a flammable atmosphere in its cargo tanks.
Potentially the crude has weathered off so much over the years that it's no longer degassing, and less scientifically I think if the tank vapours haven't found an ignition source yet, they probably won't.
However corrosion never sleeps. The cargo tanks don't leak straight into the sea; you have ballast tanks too. If I had to guess, the next threat might be a leak into the pump room resulting in fire.
But ships have a periodic inspection regime under that they call "class rules" - this ship hasn't been in class for 5 years.
That is an insane period of time to be carrying hydrocarbon while being out of class.
There are hundreds of threats to this tanker and it is difficult to predict how it could fail, including complete loss of the vessel.
The primary explosion risk is from fuel vapours (from the stored oil) however the ensuing heat and shockwave forces should the fuel vapour detonate has several potential knock on effects.
The initial primary explosion could cause significant enough destruction to the ship that it acts like the “scatter charge” in a thermobaric weapon, spreading the undetonated oil sufficiently into the air that a larger percentage of the onboard oil is detonated as part of a “single event”…
However the more likely and no less disastrous outcome is the primary explosion of the fuel vapour damages the ship without sinking it (the explosion will be centred on the upper portion of the storage tanks) most likely blowing the top off of one (or more) of the storage tanks and potentially damaging the structural integrity of the ship without sinking it. An extremely likely outcome from this will be ignition of whatever remains of the oil in a burst storage tank, (which even if not “burst open” will likely have been structurally damaged so that fresh air can get in) leading to a fire onboard and due to the established lack of maintenance, that fire has a high likelihood of spreading through much of the ship (possibly aided by any oil movement induced by the primary explosion) which will heat up any undamaged storage vessels and turn them into (depending on the state of the pressure relief valve maintenance) potential pressure cookers full of fuel or sources of further burning fuel vapour…
So I don’t think they were trying to necessarily mislead as much as simplify the scenario for the audience. Most people don’t find it interesting to dissect cascading failures and map out the energetic potential effects. Most people would be fine saying “it blew up” even if it was technically two or three individual explosions interspersed between hours of being on fire before one final still in tact hot tank of oil went off like a pressure cooker turning into a fuel air explosion that shredded the ship into shrapnel.
"Before inerting became a commonplace safety measure, in the nineteen-seventies, tankers blew up surprisingly often, and with lethal consequences: in December, 1969, three of them exploded within seventeen days, killing four men"
Can (presuambly) crude oil "explode" if it's not mixed with air? It's been many years since I did chemistry but I have a vague recollection about "rapid exothermic" reactions requiring certain conditions, and crude oil in its thick gloopy liquid state definitely doesn't have that no matter how much oxygen you throw at it. It will just burn.
> The vapor from evaporation of the oil could explode but not a million barrels of oil itself.
So that scene in "The Equalizer" when Denzel Washington blows up that oil tanker would in reality become a massive oil spill, or fire?
That would have been a strange plot twist, the equalizer himself being the cause of a massive environmental disaster :-)
I'm no expert but, reading other comments, there'd be an explosion from various vapors, but that would only represent a fraction; if the oil catches fire it'd be huge, and the rest would spill out causing a massive environmental disaster.
Yeah, the CNG ships seem a lot sketchier than an oil tanker.
A quick search suggests that the world uses close to 100M barrels a day, of which the largest user, the US, uses about 20M.
So this ship stores an amount that fuels about 1% of the world for a day.
How many such ships are there, and how many are in as bad a state as this one?
This ship is unfortunately not alone in the world. Here is another one:
In addition, it is also important to remember that the ship is itself rusting due to a lack of maintenance, and it is only a matter of time before the oil enters the sea.
> The Houthi leadership has obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its oil
For anyone else whose mind jumped to the same conclusion as mine.
Question: has there been any decent and uncorrupt Arab government? Everyone criticizes Western "imperialism", but it seems the lives of most people in the Middle East were much better when under British rule?
Has not been a supertanker since 1987. Since then it has been only a floating oil storage tank, without engines.
In this weeks episode of Mythbusters . . . .
Americans should worry less about oil tankers and more about their ageing and decrepit pipeline infrastructure.
If they have no diesel for generators, what about solar panels? Even the old used ones. They have enough of sun
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No thank you.
Really clicks are so important these days? This article proves nothing except that dangerous catastrophe can happen.
People don't even realize how potentially dangerous is gasoline station a few blocks away or fertilizers magazine just outside their town or department of chemistry on the nearby University.
For some reason those dangers are not (yet) that sexy to be described in the alarmistic article.
All Iran has to do is make it known that they want this fixed. They control that area. The IRGC must not want it fixed.
300 Kilotons of oil per supertanker
42 Terajoules per kiloton of oil * 300 = 12.6 Petajoules
12.6 Petajoules = 3 Megatons of TNT
Okay, positive attitude: We congeal the oil in situ in the tanks into plastic-blocks. It renders the ship unuseable but the ship is already unusable, but it at least reduces the hazard on final breaking apart.
PS: I lost my bet, i had a bet, that 5 months after we are out of Afghanistan, the warmongering would start again.
Damn it.
We embargoe a regime, its infrastructure is falling into disrepair, and now that disrepair is a reason to go in? Whats next?
Pothole repair jobs with bunker-busters in Iran? Infrastructure demolishion and rebuilding as a service via the Military Industrial Complex? A construction company called the MOAB-mob?
If the saudis mercenaries cant win and they don't get the genocide properly done, at least pay for better bad journalism to draw the US into another firefight/fist-aid mission.