Of course. There are always trade-offs in energy supplies.
Asimov also put similar moving walkways into the Robot series starting with Caves of Steel.
The other technology you mention is from Clarke:
In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars ) the Megacity of Diaspar is interwoven with “moving ways” which, unlike Heinlein’s conveyor belts, are solid floors that can mysteriously move as a fluid. On pages 11–13 of the novel, Clarke writes,
An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand how a solid roadway could be fixed at both ends while its centre travelled at a hundred miles an hour… The corridor still inclined upwards, and in a few hundred feet had curved through a complete right-angle. But only logic knew this: to the senses it was now as if one were being hurried along an absolutely level corridor. The fact that he was in reality travelling up a vertical shaft thousands of feet deep gave Alvin no sense of insecurity, for a failure of the polarizing field was unthinkable.
You folks are amazing.
That Clarke cite is exactly it. I have had that phrase “An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand … blah something blah …” about unmoving moving sidewalks rattling around in my head for no-kidding 50 years.
Thank you!
Every time we have a thread about bringing semi-modern tech back a hundred or 500 years I think of that phrase. And the well-known corollary that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While not quite literally true IMO, it’s close.
Looks the like the existing Keystone system has a capacity of about half a million bpd. The XL extension would have doubled this.
When completed, the expansion will increase the commercial design of the Keystone Pipeline system from 590,000 barrels per day to approximately 1.1 million barrels per day
Regarding where that oil goes now:
According to TransCanada, KXL will increase the price of heavy crude oil in the Midwest by
almost $2 to $4 billion annually, and escalating for several years.72 It will do this by diverting
major volumes of Tar Sands oil now supplying the Midwest refineries, so it can be sold at
higher prices to the Gulf Coast and export markets. As a result, consumers in the Midwest
could be paying 10 to 20 cents more per gallon for gasoline and diesel fuel, adding up to
$5 billion to the annual US fuel bill.73 Further, the KXL pipeline will do nothing to insulate
the US from oil price volatility.74
I’ve not examined the footnotes.
https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/file/glikeystonexlreportpdfpdf
Those Midwest and Gulf refineries are optimized for heavy oils, which we produce less of. I don’t know if it’s still true but those Gulf refineries were supplied from Venezuela recently. So there are political implications that I’m not going to get into here.
For now, maybe. But ultimately the only good way to have energy independence is to move to green energy, rather than energy with dwindling supplies where it’s generally cheaper to go global—hence the reason for the pipeline in the first place.
Agreed, we do need to aggressively go green on energy generation. We also need to look to improve efficiency at a faster pace. An oil pipeline shouldn’t have been such a big deal to start with, it was counter productive to slowing climate change if anything.