Building the World

Pipelines: Trans-Alaska and Beyond

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What do you think of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline? Image courtesy of senate.gov

When the Trans-Alaska Pipeline opened in 1977, 20,000 people had contributed to the project. Results were mixed: revenue benefit brought $900 million to Alaska’s economy but exploitation of the large petroleum deposits discovered in 1968 at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska’s North Slope were scene to the largest oil spill in United States history at that time: the Exxon Valdez released a flood of pollution with long-lasting effects. But Yoshihiro Kyotani, Japanese engineer and innovator, proposed that pipelines need not be filled with just oil. Why not float transoceanic pipelines as transport tubes for container shipping or vactrains? Along with the Channel Tunnel‘s Frank P. Davidson, Yoshihiro Kyotani designed tubetrains that may be the original version of Elon Musk’s 2013 Hyperloop. For more on Kyotani, please see: http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Yoshihiro_Kyotani. But today all eyes are on a pipeline in the news: Keystone XL. It’s a complex issue; for more, visit http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/16/130916fa_fact_lizza?mbid=social_retweet. Then please return to our blog and let your voice be heard regarding pipelines transporting energy, or perhaps floating as a vactrain from Boston to Cadiz.

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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