Indiana Allows BP To Pollute Lake Michigan

An anonymous reader writes "Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs. The company will now be allowed to dump an average of 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge into Lake Michigan every day."

Comments

Why Dump Ammonia?

[rlp]

Ammonia is used as an industrial precursor. For instance it's used to make fertilizer. Why dump it in Lake Michigan rather than purifying and selling it?

Re:Is it worth it?

[dfenstrate]

A relevant part of the question is this: What is the flow rate/water turnover rate in lake michigan?

The lake is over 1,000 cubic miles of water, so even if the water was stagnant it would take a long time to raise the PPM of the discharge to a harmful level, assuming good mixing (yes, yes, assumptions make an ass out of you and me, blah blah blah).

If the flow rate through the lake is several million gallons a day then this discharge could be diluted to the point of irrelevance, and it probably is.

Now you'd want to take into account other man made discharges into the lake, but these are the questions you ask to determine if this actually causes any harm. What I described is pretty much what the state and national EPA does for these sorts of things.

The fact is that human activity has an impact on the environment. Given that, the pragmatic question is how much can mother nature "take for the team." The answer? some, definately, without causing any harm.

It's an old maxim- the dose makes the poison. You can put bad stuff into something you want to preserve without causing harm.
Now I will admit I don't know enough about ocean and freshwater chemistry to know where to even start figuring out the ultimate disposition of the dumped products. I am guessing, however, that somebody who works for the EPA and is involved in the permiting process has a decent idea of how that all works.

The power plant I work at frequently discharges water with various chemical adultrents into the atlantic ocean at up to 100 gallons per minute. That discharge, however, is diluted by 420,000 gpm of straight sea water used for cooling, and then mixed in well below the surface a mile offshore.

What could you safely drink if it was diluted to 1 part per 4,200 parts? sulfuric acid? Antifreeze? Drano? All of the above?

(pardon the shitty writing, I'm tired & about to go to bed)