I'm not at all sure if this question is too asinine or not, but I wanted to ask /sci/ about the relative pro's or cons of transport by pipeline as opposed to transport by rail or road or other vehicle.
Whenever a resource is available as a fluid, it's generally transported through pipes. We rarely see companies extract oil from the ground and then truck it from place to place. Similarly with water, it's delivered via pipe, as it's cheaper.
So I'm wondering, say we fluidised the worlds largest traded solid resources, i.e., convert iron, aluminium, copper into a sulfate or nitrate salt, and then dissolved it in water to be piped from place to place, how much on transport costs alone could be saved? Similarly with polymers, let's say we converted plastics into simple hydrophobic monomers that could be dissolved in crude oil and transported along with existing oil pipelines, to be reconstituted at local refineries into plastics, how much, if any, could be saved? This taking into account predominately local manufacture; instead of shipping a car from Japan, the component parts of said car are fluidised wherever possible, piped to a local factory, where a the vehicle is manufactured and then sold.
If 3D printing technology takes off (an admittedly doubtful state of affairs) and every village has the equivalent of a large multipurpose factory in its backyard, wouldn't economics eventually require an end to the transport of large capital goods like cars in favour of basic resources, with capital goods being produced locally? (Note that this point is an aside, this thread is not meant to be about 3D printing, it's about roads and rail vs pipeline).
I've tried googling and came up with nothing, not even information about the most transported goods, but came up with zip. Hoping /sci/ could help.
>>8101083
The biggest (of many) problems with this approach is that melting say, iron takes a fuckton of energy. And you have to heat the entire length of the pipe enough to _keep_ the iron liquid, or else it's just going to solidify a mile down the pipeline.
>>8101087
The post mentioned that resources like iron would be fluidised by conversion to an aqueous salt like a sulfate or nitrate, and then transported by being dissolved in water. No molten metal needed; I'm thinking more of an add on to existing water distribution networks with a system of refining out the bulk goods before the waters use for drinking or agricultural purposes. Perhaps I should have been clearer on this point.
>>8101083
>how would a theoretical, untested and unproven method of transportation for goods, which doesn't even yield results in google, fare against the established methods of transportation of goods, for which actual data exists
if you want a clear answer:
how the hell are we supposed to know
if you want an uneducated, speculative answer based on nothing but vague assumptions:
maybe
>>8101189
You never know mate. There is as uprising amount of expertise on sci. For all I know I could have run into a a pipeline engineer by the luck of the draw tonight. You'll never know if you don't ask.
>>8101201
I doubt a pipeline engineer can tell you the cost associated with "liquifying" metal
>>8101083
>convert iron, aluminium, copper into a sulfate or nitrate salt, and then dissolved it in water to be piped from place to place
The cost of transporting these metals, even in solid form, is negligible to the cost of reducing and refining them. If you insisted on transporting aluminum this way, for example, instead of having a few aluminum plant in places with cheap electricity to gain from the economies of scale, for every single destination of the liquidized aluminum, like those villages, you'd need to have an aluminum electrolysis cell, as well as some way of dehydrating the supply.
>>8101218
Well, no, probably not, but considering that is simply the cost of reacting it with a mineral acid like sulfuric acid or a chelating agent like EDTA, I'm going to right ahead and assume that cost would be very small in relation to the cost of transporting the resultant aqueous solution.
Again, to make this clear, I'm asking about transportation of aqueous solutions of bulk materials, not molten bulk materials, the latter of which I agree would be ridiculous.
>>8101256
Thanks for the first serious answer. I was completely unaware that the costs of refining ore was that high. I would have thought the cost of transport would be much higher. Why does it cost so much to get an iron or aluminium bearing rock to pure metal or an aqueous salt?
>>8101273
I guess that depends on how much it costs to reduce the aqueous, say, iron back to metal form.
This also assumes you'd be working with pure, say, iron and not some specialized steel which I doubt you could bring back out of solution in it's original molecular composition effectively.
Couldn't a metal powder be transported in some kind of non-corroding goop, then just sifted out at the destination place? If people have DMLS machines in their community center to make car parts and microchips, why would you need EITHER a giant 400 pound pig OR an aquaeous salt? Can't we just use the raw material itself (metal powder) and aforementioned goop to preserve the pipe so it lasts a long time?
>>8101317
Tbh, that's just a matter of casting differently, so you make pigs for the mega-industry, but powder for consumers. I don't see that this would be more labour or energy intensive than it is today.
>>8101298
>I guess that depends on how much it costs to reduce the aqueous, say, iron back to metal form.
Yeah. As the other poster noted, the economic facts are that the costs of converting the ore to an aqueous solution and then converting the aqueous solution back to metal at the consumers end have to be less than the savings made by transporting by pipeline rather than rail or truck for it to make sense. When I made the thread, I thought that the major issue is that manufacturing capacity is not evenly distributed, hence it makes sense to ship solid metal and plastic to a few major industrial centres as opposed to piping it around more efficiently. But the posts ITT indicate that the hidden costs of piping raw materials with water or crude oil outweigh the benefits incurred by pipeline transport. I'll wait for other anons to chime in.
>>8101317
The obvious goop to use would be crude oil, which is already transported in gigantic quantities, and remove the iron magnetically. The system you describe precludes the transport of other important, non ferric materials, like aluminium and copper.
>>8101339
>magnetically
why not mechanically? Also, if this system is to be designed, it involves new infrastructure at any rate, so why limit yourself to one pipe with a flurry of materials, if you can have six or seven smaller pipes with different metals?
>>8101350
>if this system is to be designed, it involves new infrastructure at any rate
This thread is mainly my own thought experiment, as I am currently at work near an active oil pipeline and high pressure pump which can empty an oil tanker in a few hours. So I'm staying away from questions of specialised pipelines built. If we wanted to start transporting structural materials via pipeline tomorrow, within existing water and crude oil transport networks, would any economic gains be possible? I'm literally watching a tankers waterline fall as we speak because its cargo empties so fast by pipeline, whilst the grain ship in the next dock over will have to be moored for many times longer to be emptied, and the container ship at the next port facility will take longer still. So I made the thread wondering why we don't try and transport more of our goods by pipeline, and also because watching petrol flow through pipe for hours is boring as hell.
>>8101375
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07qbiUMFcQs
bulk carriers also unload via pipe, albeit not a liquid solution but air pressure.
This is how fish farms are supplied with feed from the bunker tanks of feed carriers.
>source: dad works on said carrier.
The solubility of iron salts. you need shit loads of water to make this happen
waste of water
waste of infrastructure
theoretically possible, but unlikely that you'd manage to get anything reasonable accomplished by doing so
Cross contamination would be a bitch, unless you built separate pipelines for each and every material you were sending.
Taking the metals out of salts doesn't allow for the carefully crafted alloys we use in modern manufacturing, unless the factory is also a sate of the art foundry.
Any leaks would be environmental catastrophes.
Although now I'm entertaining the idea of conveyors in pipes, but I think liquid would be incredibly difficult to deal with.
>>8101401
From Wikipedia, the solubility of ferrous sulfate is 29.51 g/100 mL at room temperature. The great man made river pipeline in Libya supplies 6 500 000 cubic meters of water per day. As far as I can tell, that comes out at about 2 million tonnes of iron a day;
0.3 (iron solubility per mil) * 1000000 (ml in cubic meter) * 6 5000 000'
Or 730 million tonne a year. Wiki states that world production is 3, 320 000 000 a year. Ergo, a single pipeline could transport a significant fraction of the worlds current iron.
Note- someone check my math, it's late and I'm tired.
>>8101273
>simply the cost of reacting it with a mineral acid like sulfuric acid or a chelating agent like EDTA
ah, yes...
it's SIMPLY a matter of buying tons and tons of acid
to put solid metal into an aqueous solution
to transport this solution over pipelines, instead of the solid which is already perfectly transportable over conventional railroad networks
and all of this sounds to you like it has the potential to be cost efficient?
are you out of your mind?
>>8101083
Your thread would have been better posted to 1chan but the site's down due to CP spam.
Anyway, oil by rail is more expensive and less safe than by pipeline or boat. This isn't to say that it *isn't* safe, just less safe comparatively speaking. This is so because (a) railroads host other forms of traffic other than oil cargos (b) oil is being stored into discrete units which are more mechanically complicated and thus more prone to failure and (c) in the event of a catastrophic failure, there's a greater chance of ignition due to the aforementioned reasons.
As a result road transport is the least (comparatively) safe, since all the above factors are multiplied times 100 since vehicles are travelling faster (65 mph trucks vs 40 mph trains) on right-of-ways that have more variables (more vehicles -> more drivers -> greater statistical chance for someone screwing up).
>>8101980
I bring that up because railroads illustrate this problem more obviously as railroads compete against oil pipelines.
Even if factories/production are localized not every town and city is going to require a profitable carload of raw material a day. In fact, even today many midsize factories only require carloads to be delivered once a month. As a result, the lines that service them aren't as fancy. Their rails might be a bit sunk into the ground, or perhaps a bit uneven. Electronic signals usually aren't needed, either. This isn't a problem since trains are very flexiable and train tracks very durable, however pipelines are not since pipelines are far more mechanically complicated (they have to maintain a seal, and pumps to move material inside through them). Then there is the issue with loading and unloading: trains only need a forklift but stations can vary in quality and style depending on output. However, pipelines require the exact same complicated loading/unloading process at each terminal.
And back to the main point: given all these constraints, the pipeline is not a good investment if it isn't operating constantly. Every day there is a set maintenance cost, enough material must move through to justify that cost or else the pipeline is not operating efficiently. This is especially true if turning the system on and off entirely damages it or causes higher maintenance costs.
>>8102022
As a final note: it's worth mentioning that coal pipelines are possible too. But, despite this technology existing for at least two centuries, it was almost never used to transport coal directly to users. Rail lines were built, even under cities (specifically Chicago's underground network) for the purpose of coal delivery. This is because rail cars are just boxes with trap doors, they are mechanically simple. Coal pipelines are not. Hence why the only people that ever used them were coal power plants.
Compare the volume of material that goes through utility services (water, power, sewage) vs the volume of material that goes through a candy machine, or the volume of material that goes through pic related.
this might interest you:
http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/coal-slurry-idea-came-and-went
tl;dr the more complicated a mode of transport is, the larger volume required to offset maintenance costs increases.
>>8101866
Sulfuric acid is a very valuable bulk transported good. It wouldn't be in the pipelines to dissolve the metal, it's in there so it also may get transported to its end market. The fact that it solubilises iron is a happy coincidence.
>>8101866
Also, what difference is there between buying tonnes of chelation agent/anion to transport the material, vs buying tonnes of truck or rail car to transport the material. A solubilising agent is no different to a transport vehicle, a reusable carrier that aids in carrying the bulk material around. I really do fail to see the problem here.
It would require a lot of energy to keep metals in a liquid state flowing over the distance from the mine to the refinery. It's more than likely not cost effective.
As for the monomers, it's a good idea but monomers that form polymers and materials tend to do just that. You don't want masses of material buildup in your pipes everywhere where the monomers happened to polymerize. That's a lot of maintenance and just not viable. To make that a reality, you must dissolve the monomers in a substance that prevents polymerization or find some condition which prevents the polymerization. I don't know what that would be, and more than likely varies between monomers you are piping.
>>8101290
Because the processes of chemically separating it, removing impurities, and then melting and shaping it into useful stock require both a lot of energy and a lot of equipment. Not to mention, the properties of metal depend dramatically on the crystal structure, which depends on heating, cooling, forging, etc; so even once you'd gotten iron to iron powder you'd need to have even more equipment to turn it into material with the properties you needed, and of course you'd then need to shape it into useful shapes (since most of the world's metal industry isn't just unshaped ingots, it's usefully shaped stock.)
Essentially, you need to build an entire metal refinery at every destination point, for every kind of material you want to process. This is ludicrously wasteful.
A quick illustration:
To take 1 kg of already-pure iron from room temperature to molten requires about a megajoule.
According to Wikipedia's numbers on the energy efficiency of freight rail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation#Freight), this is enough to move that same kg of iron 5300 km by freight rail.
>>8102047
Nice article, so the reason we don't have more pipelines is... rail road jews blocking it because they don't want competition.
>>8103607
>It would require a lot of energy to keep metals in a liquid state flowing over the distance from the mine to the refinery. It's more than likely not cost effective
Read the post. Nowhere is it suggested that the metal should be transported molten.
>>8103575
>Also, what difference is there between buying tonnes of chelation agent/anion to transport the material, vs buying tonnes of truck or rail car to transport the material.
gee, I don't know, maybe the whole pipeline which still needs to be build?
>>8103833
I am going to ask you a question. It deserves to be on pol but I have the rest of 4chan.org blocked. America is anti communist.. but has the most agressive unions in the world? Right?
>>8103531
>The fact that it solubilises iron is a happy coincidence.
so not only do you have to initiate and then reverse this asinine process of liquifying your metal in acid
you're also forced to sell [x] tons of sulfuric acid for every [y] ton of metal, just so you don't waste half of your pipeline volume on goods that you can't actually sell
jesus christ
>it's in there so it also may get transported to its end market
>implying you know jackshit about these end markets
>implying you're not just spouting fallacious napkin math, which omits costs and processes at every corner to make your retarded and vastly inefficient idea appear viable
just stop it already
I thought at first that you atleast know the rough basics, but you're just like any other layman offloading his inane train of thought on /sci/
the other anons have posted a wide variety of reasons why this concept is flawed from beginning to end, but you choose to ignore it regardless and continue to ramble
this thread is a waste of bandwith
sage
>>8104007
>>8104007
I think you've missed the point of this thread. This isn't advocacy. I don't necessarily think the idea would work. I don't necessarily think it's a good idea. I'm not wedded to it. It was simply a case of being at the tanker the other day, noticing the sheer volume of petroleum that is unloaded via pipeline, and then wondering why we don't transport more goods that way. Several anons have posted reasons why it doesn't work, and they are fair, such as the fact that the cost of refining metal is vastly greater than transport. For posters that post objections which I don't think are as valid I reply. Hence, when that poster replied that the cost of sulfuric acid needed to solubilise the iron/copper/whatever would be prohibitive, I pointed out that sulfuric acid is also a valuable productive that needs to be transported. In fact, sulfuric acid is the most traded chemical in the world, and is used in pesticides, plastics, and a range of other synthetic products. It also has the advantage that it allows the iron to be reclaimed in an electrolytic cell. You're right, the objections that other anons have raised seem to be fairly damning to the concept, but I don't think it's particularly fair to take me to task because I don't think your particular objection is valid.
>>8101087
Ken M pls go.
