I am off to go on a ship that calls regularly into australia and since there is new betas over the horizon i need someone to be kind enough to burn it onto a CD and then post it to the shipping agent. When the next beta pops up

Help would be most appreciated

No probs. what port(s) do you dock at? I'd be happy to help.
oh, and speaking of burning CDs, Smu if you're reading this the CD you requested is on its way as soon as I get the originals back from a friend

I am also happy to help.

Rod.

Do you ever make it to New Zealand as well or only to Australia?
And if so, what Port(s) do you expect to visit - if you ever come to Auckland I'm sure we can meet up - I'd love to see your big engines [and of course, your Empeg installation onboard].

And I guess we can compare your empeg installs with mine :-))

excellent thanks alot don't know which port we will be docking at but it is LNG so it will be completely in sticksville miles from any where.

I should have e-mail onboard but no internet and no file attachments allowed as it is a sat connection so a copy of emplode would cost about the same as an empeg.

In reply to:

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excellent thanks alot don't know which port we will be docking at but it is LNG so it will be completely in sticksville miles from any where.

I should have e-mail onboard but no internet and no file attachments allowed as it is a sat connection so a copy of emplode would cost about the same as an empeg.

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What do you mean by LNG? An abbreviation/code for a Port you will be visiting or a acronym for something else?

re: email - drop me a email to number6@farsight.co.nz if and when you are coming near NZ.

I also have access to a CD burner so I can burn you the latest Beta(s) whatever they are (and/or the latest Mlord kernel(s)) if needed.

What do you mean by LNG?

Liquid Natural Gas

So dangerously explosive (Hiroshima grade) that usually they do not allow a LNG tanker into a port in a large city. They prefer to offload it in a place where if the worst does happen, instead of wiping out 50 square blocks of downtown business district, they heat up a square mile of desert and maybe broil a few kangaroos.

The LNG is stored aboard the ship at tremendous pressure. Should a pressure vessel leak and catch fire, there is no easy way of extinguishing it. Should it then rupture... well, anyplace else would be a better place to be.

This is not to say that LNG ships are ticking time bombs waiting to destroy civilization as we know it. (Thinfourth would never risk his empeg if that were the case!) In fact, I do not know if any LNG ship has ever exploded, the safety precautions are pretty strict.

tanstaafl.

Ah that makes sense, yes I know what LNG is (we call it LPG - Liquified Petroleum Gas down this way). And we run [some of] our vehicles on it along with our Barbecues, reticulated gas supplies (instead of 'Town Gas' from Coal).

I am not sure about the 'miles from anywhere' applying everywhere it goes as while some of our oil & gas storage depots are not near major civilisations, there is a large tank farm near in Auckland within about 200 metres of the main central business area.

And I know it has the Oil tanks there full of petrol & other explosive petroluem products, and I would suspect it also stores the LNG whenever it arrives by sea tanker before it gets moved to wherever its needed.

Your comments about the explosive nature of the stuff is well taken - we have a pipeline that goes right through most of Auckland which carries the stuff under pressure to/from the Gas fields offshore to the west of the North Island and places further north.

So, yep, we have a timebomb on our doorstep already.

If you want to know what a LNG refinery fire is like - ask someone who lives in Melbourne - they had one such incident nearly 2 years ago now that nearly melted the place down.

LNG and LPG are actually different things LPG is carried at 9 bar and -30 centigrade with a insulated tank and a reliquification plant for boil off. LNG is carried at -186 centgrade and atmospheric pressure in a super insulated tank with no reliquification lant and the boil off used to produce steam and power the ship with a steam turbine.

LNG is fun in two ways 1 cubic meter of liquid makes about 600 cubic meters of gas and 1 cubic meter of gas makes about 600 cubic meters of explosive gas and we carry about 100,000 cubic meters of liquid so you have a huge potential for a bang.

the other fun factor is that if you spill liquid cargo on the hull the steel freezes and the hull shatters terminator 2 style.

All this talk about LNG reminds me of when I was on a major project for a gas pipeline company. They have massive turbines that are powered by the very material they're pushing down the pipe. There are also valves that are designed to "blow down" and release the gas on purpose if there are problems.

Other cool stuff to know, is different refinements of petroleum are sent down the same tubes. For example, a hundred thousand barrels of gasoline can go down the pipe, followed by an amount of diesel, followed by crude. (not a likely combination, but can happen). The two liquids don't mix much at the buffer points. When the receiving station receives the LNG or LPG, it chops off the buffer and dumps it into a "slop" tank. The slop tank has really, really strange mixtures and grades all put together. I have no idea what the technical term of the "slop" tank is, but it's field slang for the nasty gunk that comes about by mixing. :-D

Also of interest, are storage facilities for refined petroleum liquids, hydrocarbons, etc. You might think they're stored in metal containers above the ground, that's true but only for temporary storage, and those are small beans compared to the underground caverns. In parts of the US, there are *HUGE* salt stratifications underground. (Of nearly pure sodium chloride).

The petroleum field engineers in building this underground tanks sets up a solution drilling well -- drills a hole to the salt layer, and sends steam down there, which causes the salt to dissolve. Then a pump brings the brine back up for removal into a pit. This eventually carves out a huge hole "down there." The ones I was in touch with were in excess of a million barrels of volume -- i don't even know what the biggest ones are, but they are *huge*. The US uses caverns of this type to store strategic oil reserves of billion barrels or more.

Once they are built, you have an immense cavern, and an immense above ground pit of brine. The oil pipelines dump the hydrocarbons into this pit. To get the stuff back out, they pump the brine back in, and since water, oil, and salt doesn't not mix, the oil is pushed back out on its own (floated out). Every time you pump brine in and get oil out, the cavern of course, gets bigger. Kind of an interesting thought, oil tanks that grow... made out of salt...

Calvin

I have been to the big salt cavern place it is called LOOP (louisiana offshore oil platform) and we put about 300,000 tons of crude ashore

You could probably float your boat inside one of those caverns. I don't think anyone has ever been inside one to comment.

The government has considered dropping nuclear waste into those caverns as well, as the salt is inert.

Calvin