I struggle to understand why there isn't a manual override in place for the gas pipeline.

[Pobeka]

Last edited Tue May 11, 2021, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)

To those who have answered my OP from a few hours ago, thanks for helping me to understand it really is a pretty complex system, and not amenable to easy manual control.
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Here's my OP:
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Surely, there are multiple pumps, and pressure meters to monitor and keep things withing tolerance, but if you were the oil companies, and suddenly your daily revenues could drop, wouldn't it be prudent to have a few hundred trained folks around who could manually operate the system until the software could be fixed?
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Another example of how private companies are royally screwed up, even at their own peril, cutting cost is king. Being prepared for the future that may not happen is a cost to be eliminated.

-- Just like the Texas fiasco.

But the ignorant do not want the "gubment" interfering with private companies, raising prices infinitesimally by forcing companies to protect against disasters.

I use the word ignorant purposely...

[RobinA]

1. It's Kind Of Obvious

at this point that being prepared for the future is a thing of the past. Being "too big to fail" doesn't seem to mean taking precautions so you don't fail, it just means you will get bailed out if you do while millions have their lives completely disrupted.

[Turbineguy]

2. They'd have to pay somebody to operate it.

That comes right out of the CEO's pay.

Much better to get hacked.

[MineralMan]

3. Well, if I understand it correctly,

that pipeline doesn't just transport a single petroleum product. Instead, it transports a number of different products. Now, i don't know exactly how it does that, but I suppose it sends specific quantities of product, separated by barriers of some kind that travel through the pipeline as well. What that would produce would be a timing nightmare, I'd think. I don't know whether manual control would even be possible if that is the case.

Here's a link that offers some explanation of this complicated process:

https://www.hydraulic-analysis.com/oil-gas-petrochemicals/long-distance-multi-product-pipelines/

[Pobeka]

5. That's interesting. I doubt if it eliminates manual control though.

I wonder how it could transport different materials and not have cross contamination. Pipelines are made specifically for fluids. Pumps can't work on anything else...

[MineralMan]

7. I did some additional searching.

Apparently, there are no barriers. The products are shipped serially. A mixed interface between two products is created, which must be handled separately. For example, 93 octane gasoline might be shipped behind 87 octane gasoline. Between the two, there is an area or volume of fluid where they intermix during transit. At the receiving terminal, the mixed material is shunted off for reprocessing. The two types of gasoline are shunted off for storage separately.

Add diesel, jet fuel, and heating oil for shipment and each will have a mixed interface area that travels through the pipeline, which must be separated at the terminal. Timing will be very important, and automated testing will be needed to detect such interface areas and shunt them out of the stream, leaving only the desired product to be shunted into appropriate storage.

A lot of that can be automated, but doing it manually would be quite difficult and take far more time than automated testing to detect such liquid interfaces.

This is a very interesting thing to think about and explore. I don't have time right now to look into it in depth. It's a very complicated system, really.

[Pobeka]

15. Thanks for researching that. I appreciate that info!

[Towlie]

21. There ARE barriers, called "pigs".

 
←

Pipline Pigging

(Wikipedia says "Not to be confused with Pegging."

[IowaGuy]

8. fluid hammer-harmonics set up by the pumping operation themselves...

is a very complicated and serious problem, hard to manually control. If you ever heard your water pipes knocking in the basement, you got an idea of what I am talking about. These harmonics can induce incredible stresses along a pipe system, you will soon easily find out the weak spots by all the oil spilling out onto the ground. But hey, what's a few environmental disasters as long as we can get cheap gas?
In this case, I believe the company is acting responsibly and in the best interests for both the sake of the general public and their investors, a rare time where both interests are aligned.
The computer controls for this harmonic situation by slowly rolling on a compressor (pump) in coordination with other computer controlled compressors (pumps). Sensors are setup along the length of the pipeline to monitor the harmonics and minute adjustments are continually being made to the speed of the compressors to adjust and control the harmonic problem.

[MineralMan]

9. Thanks for that info.

I think people, including myself, have no idea about how complex such long range pipeline operations are.

[soothsayer]

12. Definitely!

[Pobeka]

16. Wow, that makes total sense. Thank you. I'm seeing more and more of the problem now.

[fescuerescue]

4. There absolutely is

All these pumps can be operated manually.

However, training and hiring a few hundred people on how to do it safely is impossible to do in a day or two.

Plus they have to get these newly hired and trained people out to all the locations along the hundreds of miles of pipeline and stay there 24x7.

And if one of these newly hired/trained makes a mistake and spills millions of gallons of gasoline, can you imagine how angry you would be?

This CAN be ran manually. But the logistics to set it up takes weeks or months and comes with a huge risk.

[Pobeka]

6. I meant to say that those people would be trained ahead of time. It would not be their normal duty.

Just like I had some emergency kinds of training at my job, it wasn't my day to day, but once a year I got a refresher on some alternate tasks.

[Zeitghost]

10. Every complex problem

Every complex problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. No, you can not transport millions of gallons of fuel and oil products via pipeline hundreds of miles without a computer controlled network. The safety issues alone would be a nightmare.

[Chainfire]

11. It is a case of you reengineering your cell phone after you ran over it.

Everything is set up to run at peak efficiency with the fewest number of employees. The pipeline operators would have to snatch someone off the streets, give them a wrench, tell them to drive 22 miles down a dirt right-of-way to open the red valve, and for God's sakes don't open the orange one.

[mackdaddy]

13. EVERYTHING is computer controlled these days. Computers are an integral part of the system.

For example if the computer module in your car dies, your car is a lawn ornament.

Have your seen the photos of thousands of brand new ford pickups and other vehicles just sitting in lots because they do not have the chips needed for the computers?

A pipeline thousands of miles long is way more complicated with sensors and control elements like valves and regulators and flow sensors that are all tied into computers.

My guess is that although the valves can be shut down manually for safety reasons that the system can not operate without all of the computerized monitoring.

I designed and installed industrial control electronics and computers for about 20 years of my career.

[Disaffected]

17. In struggle to understand why

these computerized pipeline control systems are not isolated from the internet (which is the means by which these hackers access the control systems).

[Pobeka]

18. I was pretty heavily involved in network security for a while in the 90' and early 2000's

We used to call the best security an "air gap".

Given the thousands of miles these pipelines run, they have to have a network infrastructure that runs that length. And I would think it needs redundant capabilities too. I have no idea if they were even running a VPN to connect nodes or just counting on typical password challenged login controls.

You can bet someone is fretting over those details right now.

[Disaffected]

19. Ah yes,

the air gap - used to be a pretty good firewall but with wifi and other wireless means so prevalent now, who knows?

I believe the problem is, a lot of these systems use the internet for process control communication (rather than a private network with tightly controlled access which would be a lot more costly).

IIRC there was discussion of setting up a kind of parallel internet that would be used exclusively by critical industrial/military/etc apps (and with stringent access limitations). It would not have been perfect I imagine but a lot better than the WWW as it stands now.

[GoCubsGo]

23. The same goes for our electrical grid.

And, numerous other infrastructure systems. It's lunacy.

[Disaffected]

24. So it would seem.

Some random dude in some random department opens an email attachment or plugs in a USB memory stick he brought from home and boom.

[Klaralven]

20. Humans are too imprecise and unreliable to operate complex systems.

Pipelines aren't the only ones.

[panader0]

22. I'm old and can remember cash registers and counting out change.

Long before computers took over everything--jobs that people did once. Now, at the store, if the
computer goes down, you can't even buy things. There are many great things a computer can do,
but when they fuck up or get hacked, people get screwed. Some things need to have human
supervision, or as you said, manual overrides.