Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil

People are missing a couple of details in this: the Canadian "oil" in question is not a liquid from a well to start with, it's tar sands that have been dug up. The first step of processing is melting it to filter out the sand. This leaves you with viscous bitumen that cannot be pumped efficiently down a pipeline. So normally it's processed again to make "dilbit", diluted bitumen, in order to ship it to an oil refinery for cracking to produce actually useful petrol.

As a rule, it is far easier* to transport&#x2F;handle liquids in large quantity than solids. Even ignoring the effort to convert&#x2F;deconvert the oil at each end, I&#x27;m not seeing this as a step forward that will improve the bulk of crude-oil transport -- baring a more detailed analysis than what reads to me as &#x27;pipelines bad.&#x27;<p>*Cheaper, safer, more efficient, requiring less maintenance, etc...

This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?

Nice, although I&#x27;m wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of &quot;wasted&quot; space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least.<p>Maybe the economic incentive of balls just &quot;rolling away&quot; (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline&#x2F;tanker&#x2F;carriage leak could balance this?

We can now make huge rube goldberg machines to transport those balls.

This is funny reversal in history: Rockefeller first built pipelines to cut out the rail industry from distribution.

Canadian tar sands should not be turned into oil at all -- there&#x27;s no clean way to do so and the whole endeavor is based on continued government subsidies for it to be cost effective. Canada has a rep for being progressive and environmentally friendly but this is anything but.

Two questions I&#x27;m wondering about:<p>- How solid are those pebbles? I assume they&#x27;re not like soft blobs that can easily split and merge together? But then how much abuse they can take? E.g. if they crack easily, you can&#x27;t really stack them together very high.<p>- The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable?

The article mentions using rail cars to transport the bitumen balls -- but given the nature of the material, would they not stick together into clumps &#x2F; semi-solid layers at the bottoms of rail cars? Coal is solid &#x2F; brittle, almost slippery. These things seem to be the opposite.

so, you make pellets. Then you have to mix them with some &quot;light&quot; oil produced during the production of pellets. So you still have to transport them together.<p>I cannot really understand how this is better than carrying oil directly.

Could the oil not be put in containers and transported by rail in its original form anyway? I&#x27;m not sure if converting to pellets really makes the problem easier to solve...

Slurries (mixture of particles and liquids) are reasonably easy to pump. Australia pumps a coal&#x2F;water slurry over its north-south axis.

&gt;could be a pipeline-free way to transport oil<p>Oh, interesting title...<p>&gt;I don&#x27;t think it will replace pipelines<p>Ah, nevermind.

Anything that facilitates increased use of tar sands hydrocarbons is terrible news for the environment. We should ban this miserable trade.

Does anyone see the irony in this? &quot;We admit this is utterly dangerous for the environment so instead of sending it out in liquid form we&#x27;re now going to send it out in small pellets so they can then be transformed and it can pollute the world exactly where we want it to pollute.&quot;