Pigs (the ones you send through pipelines for maintenance and inspection purposes) may not be capable of finding the sorts of cracks that led to a 5,000 barrel spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in March. “Smart pigs are the linchpin of the industry’s efforts to monitor pipes, but they aren’t reliable for finding all serious flaws.” [Wall Street Journal]
Some of our readers really aren’t going to like this…a piece by Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, about why a War on Coal is necessary. “To develop new coal projects is unethical, and to invest in them is to be complicit in this unethical activity.” [Project Syndicate]
Unrest in Egypt may be upping the geopolitical risk premium component of crude prices, but chances of serious disruption to traffic through the Suez Canal are slim. “The Suez is just too important to Egypt’s economy for the military government—or any other that may come to power—to allow it to close.” [Quartz]