about what would happen if a LNG tanker leaked and then blew in NY harbor. It was devastating - IIRC the five boroughs were consumed by the nature of the diffusion of the gas and the resulting explosion.

I'm no friend to the hydrocarbon industry but stupid, scaremongering stories like this deserve to be crushed.

To have LNG to explode you need 3 things - diffusion, ignition and oxidation. Let's say you are a terrorist and you want to blow one of these ships up. Firstly a simple suicide bombing will not do it you have to make sure to breach a tank then you have to ensure your explosive does not ignite the fuel exiting the tank then you have to have a separate bomb to ignite the fuel-air mix but only once it reaches the critical value.

OK, I hear you say so terrorists will set fire to the ship and wait for the tank to explode once the the LNG starts to boil. 135,000 m³ of LNG has a huge heat capacity and it will take hours or days to boil sufficient gas and weaken the tanks enough for that to happen. Standard operating procedure for a serious fire like that is for either the ship to be scuttled where she sits or to be towed out to sea and sunk. What is more there are other safety features (CO₂ injectors and sea water flood valves) within the tanks.

What you are proposing is the plot of a Hollywood movie.

58 seconds into it... an LP tanker explosion.

Learn some chemistry then get back to me

My point was to show the impact of what an explosion on a ship in port could do. The Texas City explosion was filmed.


LP & LNG are extremely explosive, if you've bothered to read the link about the one threat of terror at one location.


The video above shows what a train tanker car can do. If one of the tanks on an LNG ship were to catch fire... the remaining tanks would explode in a similar and highly volitile manner. Playing Dr. Chemistry by posting wikis does not mitigate the seriousness of this risk.


Darwinists seem to condescend, porting themselves as somehow 'superior' in intellect.

You provided the false parallel of ammonium nitrate

The Texas City explosion was an explosives carrier

You understand neither chemistry nor scale.

While you think it's a false parallel, even though I admit it was a munitions ship in the beginning, your ability to read past your preconceived beliefs and address the matter I am raising is breathtaking.

Prove a massive ship would not explode, instead of hypothesizing that it could not because of the lack of oxygen, meanwhile a tiny LP tanker car, by comparison, would be a far greater explosive fore to destroy a canal lock and all of the workers within hundreds of feet of it.

You talk about not knowing scale, yet you seem baffled by the scale between a small tanker car and a supertanker multitudes larger.

Keep trying, perhaps you'll succeed in making a point, instead of deflecting and obfuscating.

Those accidents and explosions were horrible. One measured over 3. on the Richter scale, vaporizing a nearby building.

Who wants to be anywhere near these fires waiting minutes or an hour for a big blast?

Because mitigation for that possibility was indeed one of the issues at the plant in Ensenada.

I guess SEMARNAT are a bunch of idiots... it has to be that...

the same plant was not allowed anywhere on the US West Coast.

And there is a fine game of Corrupt Practices Act that the Mexican Congress accused the parent American company off in 2009. My calendar reads 2014...

Was that a Mexican firm?

the one in Ensenada is owned by Sempra

http://nadinabbottblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/sempra-energy-the-dark-side-of-energy-policy-in-mexico/

Smart money says the proposed LNG facility in Warrenton, Oregon will be up and running before Sempra's turd finds a ready source of natural gas to export.

Not after the big gas deal they signed with Russia. The one that doesn't involve dollars.