[HN Gopher] A Louisiana gas plant sea wall shows challenges of f...
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A Louisiana gas plant sea wall shows challenges of flooding, energy
demand
Author : howard941
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-07-05 15:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| tda wrote:
| Concrete seawalls are almost always inferior to well engineered
| earth structures. Only when space is at a premium it may be
| better to use concrete, but in roughly all other cases a concrete
| structure is more expensive and more likely to fail
| catastrophically. But somehow a lot of people have the "something
| substantial needs to be done" mindset and just don't think moving
| earth is substantial enough. Or at least that is my tale when I
| see the pictures. Maybe someone knowledgeable on the local
| situation can chime in on why concrete was chosen?
| pjot wrote:
| New Orleanian here - the areas in the article are generally on
| top of swampland and structures sink/erode quite substantially.
| They're also outside of the levee protection zone which are
| primarily earthen levees. When following the road all the way
| to the end[0] roughly halfway it's a real trip when you pass
| the massive concrete structure with a flood gate and suddenly
| see water bordering each side of the road. It's also quite
| dystopian the amount of giant oil facilities that you pass by.
|
| There are non-earthen levees in the city as well. For instance
| in the 9th ward. These are the levees that failed during
| Katrina. It's the Army Corps of Engineers that constructs these
| levees and have become more complex (better?) over time;
| imagine an upside-down "T" structure buried in the ground.
|
| If I had to guess, I suppose the reason may be that it's
| because they're outside the protection zone, and so, when it
| floods (not if) their infrastructure would be surrounded
| regardless. Also, a concrete structure surrounding only their
| plant I assume is orders of magnitude cheaper than moving the
| amount of earth it would take to build 100+ miles of earthen
| levees.
|
| [0]:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venice,_Southernmost...
| metaphor wrote:
| https://archive.is/16ugr
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| A reminder that the federal government _still_ showers the fossil
| fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost
| every form imaginable.
|
| * Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs
|
| * Superfund-cleanup-excise-tax exemptions for crude extracted
| from certain kinds of fields
|
| * A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it was
| 35%)
|
| * Explicit subsidies
|
| * Underpricing the environmental, health, and economic
| damage/expenses/losses caused by fossil fuel burning (versus
| renewable energy)
|
| * Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them
| falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing
| evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing
| costs from their continued use
|
| In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone
| _half a billion dollars_ in "R&D" funding.
|
| Meanwhile there's a myth that we need all this for "energy
| independence." We've gone well beyond "energy independence" to
| "fourth largest exporter of oil" and "#1 in oil extraction in the
| world." We extract twice as much oil as the Saudis.
|
| One of the reasons "green" tech was so expensive for so long: the
| massive handouts being given to the fossil fuel industry. The
| next time you're filling up your gas tank and grumbling about
| high gas prices, think about how they receive at least twenty
| billion dollars a year from the feds - not counting state and
| local stuff.
|
| Only in the last 2-3 years has funding for renewable energy
| technology started to approach that being given the (heavily
| established, dominating) fossil fuel industry.
|
| What's wild is that despite those huge handouts for fossil fuel
| industries, solar and wind dropped below fossil fuel costs (per
| GWhr) well before the funding increase, and have continued to
| drop.
|
| Don't even get me started on the handouts the nuclear (fission)
| industry gets, including free training for thousands of nuclear
| plant techs thanks to the navy...while the cost of nuclear power
| has only gone up despite being only a decade or two shy of a
| century worth of development.
| gruez wrote:
| >* Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs
|
| >* Explicit subsidies
|
| >In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone
| half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding.
|
| source?
|
| >* Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in
| them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite
| growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious
| growing costs from their continued use
|
| Given that there's no sales taxes at the federal level, and
| there's an excise tax specifically for fuels, it's a bit
| baffling to say that's "favorable tax regulations". It might
| not be indexed to inflation, but it's still less favorable tax
| treatment than for most other goods.
| asah wrote:
| fwiw, I tried to find a source and couldn't... also, R&D
| funding gets messy since the definition can be blurred by
| what's considered R&D, if and how much energy or other R&D
| goes to coal, etc... finally, it's unclear if $500M is a lot
| or a little - wind/solar get billions in many forms of
| support...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > * A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it
| was 35%)
|
| That's... the standard corporate tax rate? It really undercuts
| your argument when you're outraged over them _not_ being
| treated specially.
| crote wrote:
| > While Venture Global declined to make officials available for
| interviews, it has insisted its steel wall is designed to
| withstand a once-in-500 years storm.
|
| The problem with those "once-in-500 years" figures is that they
| are based on historical data - and climate change is rapidly
| invalidating that data. Climate change doesn't mean it's 1.5degC
| warmer year-round, or the sea level is 20cm higher worldwide: it
| means weather becomes more more extreme. What was a "once-in-500"
| event a few decades ago might turn into a "once-in-25" event a
| few years from now. We are already noticing those changes in day-
| to-day life!
| pjot wrote:
| And considering weather in the US has been recorded for only
| about 250 years it's hard to say what a 500-year storm even
| looks like.
| nwiswell wrote:
| This is like saying that if you've only seen 250 people in
| your life, it's hard to imagine someone who is at the 99.8th
| percentile of height.
| brutusborn wrote:
| It's not really a problem, you just adjust the size of your
| assumed storm. We have lots of climate models and data to
| adjust predicted sizes.
|
| Climate change effects are already being included when
| calculating wind and wave loading in many codes.
|
| The real issue is that engineering codes use frequentist
| methods which make it hard to consider uncertainty, which often
| makes it unclear what the real safety factors are. This issue
| is being solved by using probabilistic engineering techniques,
| and in future, more sophisticated causal inference.
| skybrian wrote:
| It seems the question is whether a 26-foot-high steel wall is
| enough. I would have liked more engineering detail.
|
| It's quoting experts instead of describing what studies that have
| been done.
| trhway wrote:
| Judging by the freely trafficked drone footage there is no
| "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act" style protection for the fossil
| fuel industry in LA. Seems like the industry's lobbyists are just
| a waste of money :) One can also wonder whether it is a pure sea
| wall or a security measure against protesters or say people
| seeking refuge when displaced by some future flooding, etc. I
| mean it looks like a setting from some cataclismic movie.
| cbb330 wrote:
| > How far will the fossil fuel industry go to protect itself from
| climate impacts it helped cause?
|
| As far as their customers take them :)
|
| - sent from my iPhone which was delivered to me via fossil fuels
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