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