Remember this? The reason that pipeline blew was 1960s haste coupled with 21st Century management cheating on maintenance and inspection costs. It happens.
Having built large processing equipment and installed it in multiple factories, I have a healthy respect for Murphy but even more for management cutting corners. That said, the reason I asked is that I take the prospect of terrorism against pipelines seriously and so should you.
Unlike ANY of your peers, I've taken on a project reversing over two hundred years of mismanagement in a grassland with a sandy soil (220 years, and three months to be precise :-). It took me twenty years to get as far as we have (an unprecedented restoration) and I'm still not done. We perturbed it with nitrogen this year to activate the weed seed bank to see if it had been purged and we're still not there. When you damage a native system, it is particularly susceptible to expensive long term weed problems. When chemistries in the ppb range can screw up a biological process, and having respect for the decay rate it would take to remove a heavy-bodied blob by erosive and photochemical processes, how far surfactants might go in sand, and how dependent this nation is on its largest aquifer, one screw-up or an act of terrorism can take a long time and be very expensive to fix on an actuarial basis. An attack against a pipeline would not be small. one has to ask about the cost of the consequences and reach a rational means of mitigating that set of risks.
No plan is without risk. It is when one assesses competing risks that the optimal choice becomes clear. The job is obviously to reach a cost-effective minimum. The problem in any business is that when the risk is "somebody else's fault" an "Act of God" or whatever, that risk gets discounted and you know it. I am not a fan of socializing risks because SOMEBODY HAS TO PAY FOR THEM, so expecting Uncle Sugar to pony up if there is a problem is a non-starter with me.
Assess all the risks, compare the costs, and make a decision. I'm not arguing against the pipeline, I'm asking about an optimal choice, all risks taken properly under consideration, including terrorism. There's a war on you know.
I'm not claiming that pipelines never have a failure. They have, and multiple times.
But they have a better history than any of the other methods of transportation comparing volumes/distance transported versus spill.
And we have had spills, and the aquifers have not be trashed.