If you follow this blog you know that I spent that last two weeks in class at work, learning the care and feeding of large natural gas fueled engines that we use to move gas up the pipeline from down here where it’s produced to points east and north where it is needed. The subject matter was an interesting change from my normal scope of duties and the instructor was an expert on the subject and one darned good teacher.
One of the things I learned was that when these engines were designed, the EPA was some sort of bad dream only found in the diseased minds of abusers of heavy drugs. That was then. This is now. Students of engine operations know there is a certain proportion of fuel to air that produces maximum power. We can’t run many of our engines there. Why? Because we’re not interested in maximum power any more. We’re interested in minimum pollution, and that ‘maximum power’ thing give a higher level of oxides of nitrogen.
That’s okay, though. We learned how to operate there, and we tested our engines regularly to see that they met the goal, and if one was acting up and emissions went up, we dutifully took it off line and fixed it. Life loped along. So they changed the rules. Where we could hit a “twenty” on the spotted owl-killing scale, they dropped the number to five. Okay, you guys on the pipeline, tighten up your acts. So the engineers twiddled and tightened things even more. And goals were met. But the baby seals were still crying from their big, soulful eyes, so the number was changed again.
You know, it’s getting VERY hard to meet the numbers. And our people tell the rulemakers. And the rulemakers say “Meet the numbers or face fines.” And our people say, “We can’t meet these numbers. We’ll have to shut down horsepower.” And the rulemakers say “Meet the numbers.” And that’s where we’re heading.
The policy-makers apparently think that we’ll keep lights on and homes heated by means of windmills and unicorn farts. I’m telling you that we folk who work in a real world have real and immutable laws to work with, things like Ohm’s Law and Boyles’ Law, and these laws and others like them say that you can’t move gas from the well to the end user without horsepower. ”’there are other laws too, and those laws, despite the attitude of the current administration, say that when it gets to the point that it costs more to do a thing, then you stop doing it, and that’s where a lot of industries, mine included, are headed.
Right now the daily fine for operating outside the emissions numbers is $27,500 a day for each violating unit, for each day you can’t prove you were IN compliance. You can’t make money like that. We do our level best, but the industry sees what is coming down the line for us. All we have to do is LOOK at Kalifornica, and we know that Kalifornica basically exists ONLY because people in the states abutting the borders DON”T have the same rules as Kalifornica. And the present administration wants us ALL to be like Kalifornica.
I can tell you about measuring parts per BILLION components in engine exhaust for chemicals like formaldehyde, and the only cure for THAT right now it to put a catalytic converter in the exhaust. And these things cost MORE than the engine they’re installed on and are as big a a small house AND they don’t last forever. And who’s gonna pay for this? You. The government makes rules, and we ALL pay. It’s a hidden tax. They don’t call it a tax, but they make a rule and YOU pay.
And folks, my industry is just a little slice of the pie that is modern America. Somewhere along the line, we’re going to recognize that the caresses we feel on our shoulders are really a hand reaching for our throats.
What happens then may be terrible to behold.
Comrade, here is the five year plan. Meet the goals…or else.
MC it is like this in every industry. The rule makers and enforcers of said govt agencies dont understand the basic concepts, of the industry they are watching. I think everyone here could give an example the idiocy of what ever govt agency they have to deal with. I think its time to dust of the Declaration of Independce read it and write a new one for our era. Trying really hard to not go off the deep end, every day is a fight to stave off ODS.
You’re missing the obvious. They won’t let you use your gas powered pumps, or replace them by electric pumps. Think GREEN! Employ lots of people to work static bicycles to pump the gas.
Result: less unemployment and D.C. stays warm in the winter.
Gummint medal for achieving some target or other.
Wastewater is the same way. Lots of little government bureaucrats wanting to keep justifying their jobs, so they tighten existing standards and throw new ones on your pile. Both the State and the Feds do it to us.
Try healthcare…Try getting surveyed by the state or by Joint Commission…That’s as fun as an enema. People who have no contact with patients coming in and telling you that by not having food labeled in your refridgerator is making your hospital a bad hospital…Amazing!!
Friend,
What say if you turned Italian? When they say “Do it this a-way” hyoui cntinue to do it “That a-way” When they come back to check it out… you put a bulet into theior neuralrepsonsive regions and feed to the aligators. When someone coles along to ax what happened to them, yo8u shrug an’ say: Who ‘R ‘yall talkin’ ’bout…Never heardxc of heem afore?
This begins the revolution.
Few people realize that all those green “improvements” to your pumping stations end up getting rolled into the rate base, increasing the cost of natural gas for all.
Peripatetic Engineer sez:
Which is followed by howls from the press of gouging by the greedy oil companies and, eventually, government price controls.
“Let the yankee bastards freeze in the dark”
Bumper sticker, Houston, TX., ca.1982.
Regards,
Rabbit.
“Oh, you’ll think of something!” cried James Taggart.
The business of hanging politicians and bureaucrats has not yet been regulated.
An excellent essay. And it has the added advantage of being true!
Some very good points in this post. I work as an industrial instrument mechanic in northeastern British Columbia, Canada, in oil and gas production. The compressors around here, up until now, have been pretty much unmolested. But sooner or later, we’ll get the same things imposed on us, too. Right now, the price of gas is low enough, that if additional costs are imposed on my company’s customers, it wouldn’t take much for them to start shutting-in wells and mothballing compressor sites. Then it’s the soup-line for me and my co-workers.
It occurs to me that it is time we asked one very simple question of the bureaucrats, politicians, and the liberal arts educated-bunny-hugging effete urban pole-smokers to whom they pander:
“Who run Bartertown?”
Our fingers should be poised on all the ESD buttons, awaiting their answer.
Last summer I worked assisting the painter at our local elementary school district in California. Oil based Paint, you understand, is likewise a source of irritation for our beloved and delicate gaia. So only the latest reformulated, non polluting, earth friendly paint-like compounds are permitted for use in the golden state. We prepped walls, but TSP isn’t gaia frindly anymore, so we used a greener cleaner subsitute. We sanded walls to rough up the surface for the paint. Six months later the paint-like covering hangs off the walls in bubbles, flaps, and non polluting sheets. Looks like crap. Penguins and polar bears are grateful.
JWM
I once saw a commentator on C-Span who stated that regulatory agencies were often “captured” by the industries they regulated because the people running them had ties to the industry because those types were the only ones who knew enough to about the industry to publish regulations that made sense. His solution seemed to be that government should find bureaucrats who knew enough to regulate those industries effectively but not so much they had close ties to them. He didn’t stop to question his premise, and consider that we might be grossly over regulated already.
I’ve stood in a .gov IT office and tried to explain that adding bandwidth to a circuit with ~10% utilization wouldn’t make it “faster.” I might as well have been trying to explain String Theory to a 3-toed sloth.
He spent literally millions (of taxpayer dollars) to hook up a GIGABIT connection from DC to TX, with exactly the results I’d predicted.
Then he screamed at us to “FIX IT!!” I told him we’d need to dig up Einstein and see if we could get him to change the universal speed limit, then realized ol’ Al hadn’t made the rule, but simply discovered it.
That didn’t go over well – not long thereafter I was reassigned, but the servers still eventually made their way back to DC.
That’s the .gov mentality. “Make it work” – even if there’s no way in hell it ever could. Waste money to prove the high-$$ consultants you already wasted money to hire “wrong” then complain when you fail to do so and prove only that they were right all along.
G0d help us…
DD
I heard a story about the last space shuttle that failed to make it to landing in a single piece. The fatal hole was gouged out by an errant piece of foam from the main tank. The foam came loose because it was of a different formula than previously used. The new formula was mandated because it was more environmentally friendly.
Today’s John Galt didn’t walk off the job, he was forced out because the company laid him off when they closed due to being unable to meet government regulations.