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About us

Maxwell Archibald

Major: Applied Math

I love Running in the Mountains

Ellis Chalker

Major: Geography & Geographic Information Sciences

I love hiking, camping, and backpacking

Natalia Cyriac

Major: Earth & Environmental Sciences

I love being outside, with family, pets, and friends, and doing ballet

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Table of Contents

Slide 4: The Problem

Slide 19: Where It Could Work

Slide 7: Our Solution

Slide 29: Citations

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Prompt

Municipal Water Supply: Climate change can pose many challenges for municipal water systems. Climate-driven weather events are making water more scarce, more unpredictable, more polluted and harder to manage. Infrastructure damage, water contamination, reduced access, wastewater overflow and poorly managed water resources across sectors are just a few challenges facing the public water landscape. Teams who select this focal area will develop water management solutions that will build the resilience of societies and ecosystems as well as mitigating the long term impacts of climate change.

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The Problem

“There isn’t enough water in our city!”

As climate change progresses, certain areas’ water resources disproportionately impacted. Even with water saving methods there will be certain areas with high population, farming demands, droughts, and simply not enough water.

Meanwhile there are some places which experience water uncertainty to a lesser extent, and may even experience increased precipitation in the face of climate change, but building the infrastructure to connect areas of surplus to areas of need would be costly and time consuming

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Our Solution: Repurpose Oil Pipelines for Water Sharing

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Overview

Water management will always involve transporting large quantities of water from areas of surplus to areas of drought. Cheap, high capacity, and effective water transportation is the key to this aspect of water management

As the United States moves away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy there will be an increase in the number of oil and petroleum pipelines decommissioned

We propose re-using existing infrastructure, specifically decommissioned oil and petroleum pipelines, to supplement existing infrastructure

These pipelines are pre-existing, high capacity, and are already required to be flushed of dangerous chemicals after decommissioning, making their modification for use with water minimal

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Advantages

Abandoned pipes still have to be maintained according to strict environmental standards, so using them for water transport will not require as much additional maintenance

This financially incentivizes oil companies to either sell the pipeline or invest in the water repurposed pipes and to support some environmentally conscious efforts

This financial incentive may ease the cost burden of decommissioning pipelines, potentially smoothing the transition from fossil fuel energy infrastructure to renewable energy infrastructure

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Existing Pipelines & the Decommissioning Process

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Existing Pipelines

Unfortunately, data on already decommissioned oil and petroleum pipelines was not available, but active oil and petroleum pipelines sometimes run along similar routes, and will inevitably be decommissioned eventually

Using existing oil and petroleum pipelines as a framework we can see where this idea may prove useful

The following map shows major crude oil and petroleum pipelines, setting our study area

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Existing Pipeline Map

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Pipeline Decommissioning

Oil and petroleum pipelines may be decommissioned for a number of reasons, such as economic unviability or the exhaustion of an oil well. As we reduce our reliability on oil and petroleum products many of these lines will become obsolete.

When pipelines are decommissioned they already need to be thoroughly cleaned to avoid environmental contamination, which makes cleaning them for water safety much more straightforward

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Pipeline Cleaning

After the pipelines are decommissioned, they must be scrubbed

This is called “Pigging”

Device used to scrape sides of the pipe
Pushed through the pipe by pressure flow

There are different types of pigging: ice, gel, brush

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Environmental Considerations

Building pipes for water transport is often proposed as a solution to small scale water issues, but building these is often costly and require more land development and thus in turn environmental damage

Using existing pipes not only cuts this cost, but takes advantage of already built pipes to transport water, reducing the additional environmental impact of construction

Pigging removes pollutants from the pipes
Can be flushed as well
Slurry is caught and stored or processed, not dumped in water.

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Water Testing

The EPA has water quality standards that must be met in order to be used by humans

Outline 128 pollutant levels with their maximum levels
After the pipes are flushed and pigged, the water would have to be tested to make sure standards are met

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New Infrastructure Required: Connecting Pipelines to Water Systems

Small scale oil and petroleum pipelines usually connect remote drilling sites to industrial areas for refinement or redirection, and these would not be very useful

Larger pipelines are often designed to connect industrial centers, which are frequently near cities, and are often already major users of municipal or other water, meaning that these pipelines would already be close to available water in surplus areas, and near water need in deficit areas

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Cost Considerations

New infrastructure will need to be built linking municipal water systems to the pipelines. This will vary based on distance between existing water and oil systems, as well as the existing flow-control systems

Pipeline cleaning and testing must be much more thorough than in normal pipeline decommissioning to ensure preservation of water quality, which will increase cost

Acquiring land and resources from oil companies may be variably costly depending on land-lease details and how useful the pipelines are before implementation

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Where This Could Work

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Implementation Criteria

Not all potential decommissioned pipelines would be useful, a few general considerations to follow are:

The pipeline should begin and ends in areas of high and low precipitation, respectively
Continuous pipelines are preferable, as this reduces additional infrastructure for the switch to water
The pipeline should be near existing water infrastructure on both ends
The capacity of the pipeline should be a meaningful amount of water for the areas involved

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Example Pipeline: The Seminole Red Pipeline, Texas

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Source Location: Houston

Houston is the fourth-most populous city in the United States. It is known for its diverse food and restaurant culture, as well as overall diversity, with about 1.1 million residents who were born outside the country

One of the largest drivers of economic growth in the city is the oil and gas industry, with ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, Occidental Petroleum and Halliburton all having their headquarters in the area

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Why We Chose This Place

Near Houston there are several sources of fresh water which supply the city with very consistent water resources

These include Lake Livingston, Lake Conroe, and Lake Houston

Houston also gets three times the annual precipitation of Seminole on average, and is rarely in drought conditions

This means that Houston would be able to donate significant amounts of water without jeopardizing their own water resources

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Supplied Location: Seminole

Seminole is a small city in the West of Texas with a population of about 6,400

Like much of small-town America, it’s surrounded by farms and other agricultural developments

This means that while the city uses relatively little water, the surrounding has much more water needs, which in times of drought may lead to environmentally harmful groundwater depetion

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Why We Chose This Place

Seminole, Texas is significantly drier than Houston, and is prone to drought

Seminole is predicted to, generally, be in severe drought (D2) over the next 5 years

The entire city of Seminole Texas consumes only around 1.9 million gallons a day on average, so the proposed water pipeline would be extremely valuable in times of drought, potentially even supplying surplus water for agriculture in the area

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Estimated Impact

How much water is transferred?

The Seminole Red Pipeline has a capacity of 210,000 barrels a day, or 8.82 million gallons a day

This is significantly more than what Seminole typically uses in a day, so in a drought local water sharing infrastructure could allow the pipeline to provide aid not only to the city, but also to surrounding farms and towns

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Considerations and Potential Setbacks

Even after pigging, there is a chance not all the chemicals will be completely washed out–at least to EPA standards

Worth noting that this is not being proposed as the solution to dealing with lessened precipitation and streamflow, but as an additional, high capacity, low impact supplementary solution to water redirection

It is possible that many pipelines are not designed to resist water corrosion from the inside, creating a need to retrofit these pipelines for our purposes

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Summary

Water resources are becoming increasingly unreliable
To address climate change, we must stop using petroleum and oil for fuel, which will render many oil and petroleum pipelines obsolete
Decommissioned pipelines can be repurposed to transport water, thereby addressing the issue with mostly existing infrastructure
Extensive cleaning and testing ensures that water quality is preserved
An example of where this could be used is along the Seminole Red Pipeline, moving water from the Houston area in Eastern Texas to Seminole in Western Texas