Post-Colonial Era
Pipelines are unfair game, but game just the same
Like other rich nations, the U.S. has more than one grid-type system. Critical energy supply involves the movement of crude oil, refined fuels, and natural gas, just as it does electrons. You, or someone you know, may hate pipelines and wish them gone, turned to scrap or reused for hydrogen. Such is an ethic of the climate warrior. But it doesn’t alter the fact that these pipes are national assets and, for now, essential.
Pipelines, along with transmission lines, are the spinal cords of a modern society. For now, pipelines supply all manner of transport fuel and, via natural gas, over 40% of US electricity. Shut them down and welcome chaos. After hoarding (example below) quickly consumes all stocks, there will be no economy, no military, too little electricity for any city of any size. That family houseboat glide on Lake Powell will have to wait.
A week ago, this scenario was a fiction, useful for warnings of Apocalypse. Now, after a hack attack on the largest fuel pipeline in the country, the “what if” aspect has advanced to the “oh shit” stage. Make no mistake—intended or not, the attack on the Colonial Pipeline is the most serious offensive on America’s energy system to date. Will it be the last ? It’s hard to think so.
We’re now in the Post-Colonial Era. The hack represents an assault by a foreign group on US soil, one involving the US economy and national security, nothing less.
But wait—didn’t the Darkside, as the attackers called themselves, kind of apologize?"Gee,” they said, “we didn’t mean to cause problems to society.” These Sith, it seems, aren’t such a bad bunch after all. They only wanted cash (who doesn’t?). They even seem to have shut down in shame.
Except, of course, that all this might well be a fib. It turns out that such groups may fake their own death only to walk the earth once more with a new handle (“Death Star”?). These particular Sith, however, have a digital tattoo: they never victimize an entity using a language of the former Soviet Union: Russian, Kazakh, Belarusian, Turkmen, Azeri, Uzbeki, etc. With one exception—Ukrainian. How does this harmonize with their claim to be “apolitical”?
They also want us to accept that they had no idea the Colonial Pipeline might be big fish, given that it carries nearly half of all fuel for the eastern U.S. Given that a 3-second google search and 5-minute read would find this out, it is hard to imagine they remained wholly (dare I say?) in the dark. A gaggle of pimply 14 year-olds out of school in the pandemic?
Knowledgeable people (no names) say Mr. Putin’s government allows the Sith and other such species to operate within Russia on condition they don’t target Russian and (it seems) former Soviet entities. Also believed is that if these groups attacks countries Mr. Putin doesn’t like, they may wake up and find a ruble under their pillow, or something to that effect.
Ideal Targets
We can openly thank the Darkside for one clarification. America may have the world’s more powerful and advanced military in history, but it is feeble help to protect the energy system it relies on nearly as much as the nation it has sworn to defend. Nukes and NATO may keep Russian troops at bay, but not the cyber marauders.
Why is this one pipeline so long and important? The simplest answer is the most accurate: there are no large refineries between the Gulf Coast and Philadelphia, thus no fuel-making capability The Colonial line supplies many 10s of millions of cars, buses, delivery vehicles, and trucks, airports large and small, and military bases as well.
For ransomware gangs or state-sponsored attacks, energy facilities are ideal targets. They are always-on, always critical, irreplaceable in the short-term, and run via online systems whose security is solid as Swiss cheese. For the criminal, you can get maximum effect. Part of this effect is panic by the public, in the form of panic buying.
The Colonial episode, too, highlights how easily people can go off the rails. Social media are a big help, of course. Consider, for example, what this gentleman is trying to tell us:
Many SUVs and pickups went to bed hungry because of this guy. But then, he may have heard online that gasoline would go to $15/gal.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on the same day this picture was taken, “We know we have gasoline, we just have to get it to the right places.” She was correct. US gasoline stocks are commonly around 240 million barrels—that’s 10 billion gallons, enough for the gentleman in the photo and (I hazard to guess) his extended family.
Meantime, energy facilities have been hit in the U.S., Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iran, South Korea, the UK, all western European countries. The most extensive assaults have been those by Russia on the grid in Ukraine. During 2015 and 2016, hundreds of attacks left over 200k people without power and a large portion of Kiev black at night. In examining these attacks, cybersecurity people have concluded they were likely the result of the Russians trying out their capabilities. Ukraine was therefore a test bed for other, bigger plans.
Then, in 2017, there was NotPetya. This was a new malware, created by Mr. Putin’s military intelligence cybertroops meant to bring down a large number of daily operations and institutions in Ukraine. This it did, in spades, but it didn’t stop there. In a Frankenstein turn, it went far beyond its creator’s control, spreading to companies, governments, healthcare centers, and more from the US to Ghana to Russia itself. For the computer systems it entered, NotPetya was like Novichok in the water supply.
A Few Facts
Colonial delivers gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, fuel oil, and dozens of other products from refineries in south Texas and Lake Charles area of Louisiana, delivering them to 17 states. There are actually two adjacent pipelines, one 40 inches in diameter that carries mainly gasoline, the other, 36-inches, that moves the rest. These are “large diameter” pipes.
Total flow is about 2.5 million barrels (1.5 million bbls of gasoline), or 105 million gallons, per day. The liquids move at about 4-5 miles per hour (fairly standard), requiring 14-18 days to go from Houston to the end point at Linden, New Jersey (just across from Staten Island and within easy eyesight of NYC). Interestingly, less time is needed for a tanker to reach New York Harbor from Rotterdam.
A major fuel pipeline feeds a huge number of demands: various grades of gasoline for winter and summer driving; different grades of diesel for trucks (all sizes), commercial and delivery vehicles, and heavy trucks; fuel for airports and military bases; heating oil for buildings, schools, homes; plus dozens of other refined products, including specialty fuels, for smaller uses.
The pipeline dates from 1962-63. By the 1990s, it began to have regular ruptures, with spills every 1-2 years. Some were serious, like the 1996 rupture of the 36-inch line releasing nearly a million gallons of fuel oil into the Reedy River, South Carolina. There have been more spills in the 2010s, mainly from the 40-inch gasoline line, including one in 2020 of more than 1.2 million gallons near Huntersville, North Carolina.
As pipelines age, they are subject to physical and chemical degradation. Soils compact and shift, ground water saturation changes, esp. with storms (which can also wash soil away and expose pipes); there can be freezing and thawing. Anything with iron in it that gets wet in the presence of air (oxygen) corrodes into rust. Insufficient maintenance can have the impact of a smaller hack attack, plus physical pollution. This suggests that a post on pipelines is in order, and you may expect one fairly soon.
Some Words from Your Government
Thus, a change in tone here. Ransomware gangs are not nice people. They are extortionists, potentially harmful and even murderous. They attack not only businesses and energy facilities but schools, hospitals, clinics, and other health-related facilities. This was very much the case with NotPetya, a military weapon disguised as a kind of ransomware. But, as a new task force report underlines ransomware aimed at certain targets itself operates as a weapon.
When a computer system goes down in a hospital or clinic, critically ill people must be taken out of bed, put in a vehicle, and moved to another center where they can get the treatment they need to continue living.
Those who attack these places for money and the sense of power over others are sociopaths. That they hire themselves out as mercenaries to gangs without technical skills and to governments with an agenda against other nations simply makes the same point. When a military does this to another state, it is an act of war and savagery. Again, for the desire to create mayhem on a mass scale, there is nothing better than to bring down a large part of a country’s energy system for an extended period—this would embrace all of the mentioned evils and many more besides.
Mr. Biden and his advisors understand this. He quickly put out an executive order that noted:
The United States faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy…the Federal Government needs to make bold changes and significant investments in order to defend the vital institutions that underpin the American way of life…
Energy systems are far too critical for personal, communal, institutional, and national security and welfare to be left to each individual entity. Imagine the Colonial Pipeline shut down by a bomb. If the spill were contained, the panic would not be. As Ukraine was forced to realize, cyberassaults can be bombs too. The attack on Colonial is the business of the US government.
It is therefore extremely helpful that Republican representatives like August Pfluger from Texas take the opportunity, in the public’s best interest, to criticize President Biden and firmly remind of these truths. Rep. Pfluger, after all, knows them first-hand, from the complete collapse of Texas’ energy system this February due to the lack of state government requirements for upgrading pipelines and power plants.
A Brief and Relevant Aside – Pipeline Violence
Meantime, in the explosion of recent violence between Israel and the Palestinians, Hamas has been firing rockets at oil pipelines in southern Israel. For their part, the Israelis have closed a major gateway to Gaza, the Kerem Shalom Crossing, after an attack by Palestinians on a fuel line supplying diesel to the enclave’s only power plant.
Gaza, in fact, is in a constant power crisis (rolling blackouts), with 8-12 hours of electricity on a good day (pre-violence). This is partly due to the poor condition of its 140 MW capacity plant, with portions destroyed by Israeli warplanes in 2006 and 2014 and only partially rebuilt. Most electricity is imported from Israel via its power grid, with a small amount from Egypt and Jordan.
With its condition reflective not only of the repeated violence but of infighting between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority over payment for fuel, the plant reflects the recent history of this embattled and embittered place.
You might guess from the image above that the Gaza power plant represents a somewhat earlier stage of technology. But if it runs on diesel now, it could be changed over, rather easily, to a better fuel. In fact, Qatar and the EU have pledged a total $65 million for a gas pipeline from Israel—from its new offshore Leviathan Field—to cure the Gaza electricity crisis. Israel has offered this possibility as well.
This would be a major advance by any metric. Yet we can only wonder at the future of this potential lifeline now. If built together with upgrades on the plant, it would greatly lower air pollution and emissions (many in Gaza use diesel generators to fill the power gaps), while increasing capacity and power production.
Comparing this situation to the Colonial Pipeline is not a stretch, not when it comes to security. As for ongoing battles against pipelines in the U.S., this situation in Gaza reveals from another vantage how complex the global Energy Transition really is and will be.