Questions Remain About Visakhapatnam Gas Leak

Here's what we know so far.  In the early morning hours of Thursday, May 7, workers at a petrochemical plant in the southeastern India coastal city of Visakhapatnam were trying to restart the plant, which had been shut down earlier due to lockdown restrictions imposed in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.  Around 3:30 AM, a gas leak occurred and spread rapidly throughout the densely-populated area surrounding the plant.  At least 200 people wound up hospitalized, and as of May 8, 13 had died from the effects of the leak. 

The plant is presently owned by the South Korean firm LG Chem, but was founded in 1961 and has passed through several changes of ownership since then.  Its main output is polystyrene plastic, and to make polystyrene requires styrene, a benzene-like molecule that is liquid at room temperature.  About 2,000 metric tons of the monomer were stored onsite in tanks.

A Chevron safety sheet on the styrene "monomer" (what the molecule is called before it is polymerized into a chain) emphasizes the main danger from storing it:  runaway polymerization.  Most polymers have to be forced into polymerizing, but evidently styrene is an exception:  it will polymerize if given half a chance, and especially at temperatures above about 68 F (20 C).  When it polymerizes, it gives off heat, which makes it polymerize faster, and the resultant heat and pressure buildup can cause an explosion.

This is why storage tanks of styrene are normally refrigerated to keep them cooler than 20 C, so that spontaneous polymerization doesn't happen.  While the exact sequence of events is not yet clear, it appears that a computer glitch or other problem interfered with the refrigeration of the styrene tanks.  Once the temperature rose much above 20 C, polymerization in the tanks would have raised the temperature and pressure, and eventually a safety valve somewhere must have opened, or else a rupture in the tank or piping occurred.

At any rate, a large amount of styrene monomer escaped the limits of the plant and must have traveled hundreds of meters, affecting several villages that have sprung up around the plant in the sixty or so years since its founding.  Styrene, being heavier than air, sticks to the ground, and in sufficient density it will suffocate you.  But lower concentrations than that will still cause intense respiratory problems and death, as it did for 13 people that night.  Eventually, authorities evacuated a 3-km-radius area around the plant, but by that time most of the damage had been done.

While this accident pales in comparison to the well-known Bhopal tragedy of 1984 in which about half a million people were exposed to a toxic chemical and thousands died, even one death of a resident near a chemical plant is unnecessary.  What lessons can be learned so far from the LG Chem plant accident?

A common thread that shows up in many chemical-plant accidents is that they tend to occur when a plant is being started up after a shutdown.  There are several reasons why starting up is a dangerous time.  Conditions in the system have to be brought from a low-pressure, low-temperature state to operating pressures and temperatures without straying into combinations that can be dangerous to equipment or personnel.  This requires more than typical vigilance from operating personnel, who may not have experienced that many shutdowns and restarts in their careers.  The procedures for starting up a plant can be much more complex than those required to keep it running, and more mistakes can be made in a complicated, time-sensitive process than simply one in which your job is to make sure everything stays the way it is and runs smoothly.  Last but not necessarily least, it seems that a favorite time for doing a startup is after the beginning of the midnight shift.  Whether the implied secrecy of early morning is appealing in case anything goes wrong, or whether it is simply a more convenient time with regard to plant schedules, I don't know.  But from the viewpoint of sounding an alarm to the general public if anything goes wrong, the period from late evening to early morning is the worst possible time to do something that might cause problems to people outside the plant, who will all be asleep and hard to evacuate in an emergency.

Another factor in this accident is the presence of densely-populated villages just outside the plant boundaries.  According to one news report, in 1961 the region where the plant was erected was rural, but with the subsequent population growth of cities such as Visakhapatnam, that changed.  The permit status of the plant is reportedly in a legal gray area, which might result from the fact that if the plant were to be built from scratch today in the same location, it might not be allowed at all, or at a minimum a large buffer zone would be required between the active plant and the surrounding populated areas.  As is true in most parts of the world, the land surrounding chemical plants is where you find some of the lowest-priced housing, and the kind of people who live in low-priced housing are generally poor people.  While they are not happy to be taking an unknown risk of sudden death or long-term illness by living within the sights, sounds, and smells of a chemical plant, they may not have much of a choice.

At last report, an investigative team from LG Chem's South Korean headquarters was onsite trying to determine the accident's cause.  But that is little comfort for those who lost loved ones or the hundreds who were injured in this accident. 

Absolute safety in industrial processes is virtually impossible without exiling plants to an uninhabited island operated entirely by robots.  And in any case, such an operation would be undercut in cost by operations such as LG Chem that runs with human beings and in proximity to people who may not know they are taking a chance every day of their lives just by living close by.  In a sovereign nation, the only force that can generally make sure powerful manufacturing interests don't hurt or kill too many people is the various branches of government, with perhaps private insurance companies coming in a distant second.  I hope that this accident teaches all concerned—corporations operating in India, the government officials responsible for regulation, and the Indian people—how to do things better next time, and to make it a long time before the next such accident occurs.

Sources:  I relied on the Wikipedia article " Visakhapatnam gas leak," as well as reports on the website thehindu.com at https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/visakhapatnam-gas-leak-lg-chem-dispatches-technical-team-from-seoul-for-investigation-rehabilitation-works/article31573936.ece and https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/visakhapatnam-lg-polimers-chemical-plant-gas-leak-updates-may-7-2020/article31523178.ece?homepage=true.  I also referred to a Chevron safety sheet on styrene at http://www.cpchem.com/bl/aromatics/en-us/Documents/Safe_Handling_and_Storage_of_Styrene_Monomer.pdf.

India's Energy Future and Climate Change

In an article that appeared in May's Scientific American, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Varun Sivaram shows that India's path of energy development could have a large impact on future greenhouse-gas emissions.  Unlike China, which currently pumps out about twice as much carbon into the air as the U. S., India's infrastructure is largely yet to be built.  And in that fact lies both a challenge and an opportunity.

It will help to get things in proportion if we compare greenhouse emissions and populations for China, the U. S., and India.  According to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2014 the world leader of global carbon dioxide emissions was China, contributing about 30% of the total.  Next in line was the U. S., with 15%, and third was India, with 7%.  The much-ballyhooed Paris accords of 2015 committed India to an apparently almost meaningless limit, because Sivaram says "its overall commitment to curb emissions was underwhelming.  If the government just sat on its hands, emissions would rise rapidly yet stay within the sky-high limits the country set for itself in Paris."

By many measures, most citizens of India are still living in the same energy environment their ancestors occupied:  using dried cow dung, straw, charcoal, and firewood for domestic heating and cooking.  The lucky third or so who have access to more advanced fuel sources use either coal or oil.  The nation's electric grid is somewhat of a joke by Western standards, reaching less than a fourth of the population.  And those who get electricity can't count on it:  outages (both planned and accidental) are common, and government-inspired policies to keep rates low has resulted in chronic underinvestment that has further contributed to the grid's rickety status.

Unlike China, India has something approaching a democratic government, although with a heavy dose of socialist-style traditions left over from the Nehru years of the 1950s and 60s.  While the economy has improved greatly under more recent governments since the 1990s that have favored private enterprise and privatization of formerly government-owned enterprises, Sivaram points out that investment money is hard to come by.

Examining the two extremes of how things go from here, suppose that India follows the easier path trod already by China, exploiting readily-accessible fossil fuels and building coal-fired power plants to supply its increasing population of about 1.4 billion, which is due to outstrip China's population in a few years.  If that happens, the U. S. will no longer be the world's No. 2 carbon-dioxide emitter—India will be, and might even surpass China to become No. 1. 

Of course, this is a competition that no government wants to win.  But zooming down to the micro view of individual citizens, the meaning of drastic global-warming restrictions on future fossil-fuel use becomes more problematic.  Most Indian citizens do not drive cars, and the vast majority of motorized vehicles sold even today are motorbikes or three-wheel jitneys.  Mobility is something everyone wants, and as more Indians get better jobs and are able to save money to buy larger items, the market for automobiles could grow tremendously.  But that development would only exacerbate carbon-dioxide emissions.  The same people who want to drive would like to have plentiful, reliable electricity both for domestic uses and for things like agriculture and manufacturing.  But if power is generated with coal or oil, there goes more CO2.

In his article, Sivaram holds out an alternative energy future that could become reality, given enough willingness on the part of national and state governments and citizens generally.  Solar energy is abundant in the countryside, and the government is already deploying solar panels to power irrigation pumps, but on a small scale.  Given enough investment, the desperately-needed expansion of the electric grid could include the latest smart-grid technologies that would enable it to take advantage of wind and solar power, which otherwise would not fit easily into an old-fashioned grid designed for 24-hour-a day power sources.  And the nice thing is that little retrofitting will be required, because most of the needed grid does not yet exist today.

While coal and oil will be a large part of India's energy mix in the near future, another hope Sivaram has is that conservation measures will limit the increase in demand to less than it would be otherwise.  Rapid deployment of electric vehicles powered by renewable energy sources could help here, as well as an emphasis on energy-efficient appliances and buildings. 

The fly in this sweet-smelling ointment of the future, Sivaram admits, is the crying need for investment money.  And here is where things get murky.  In common with many other countries in Asia, India's regulatory environment is marred by complexity, delays, and corruption.  Even major infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams and grid improvements have been torpedoed by high interest rates, permit delays, and poor fiscal planning, resulting in abandoned projects and even bankruptcies.  These are not engineering problems.  These are social and government-policy problems, and it will take political courage and intelligence to make much progress in these areas.

With India halfway around the world, it's easy to ignore internal problems like these, but this academic semester just ending, I taught a graduate class for the first time in many years, and most of the students in it were from the Indian subcontinent.  Thirty years ago, most of them would have been from China, but there are plenty of Chinese universities that are as good or better than your average state school in the U. S. now, and so the new-graduate-student pool for middle-ranked U. S. universities has shifted south over the years.

If these students are like most foreign grad students, many of them will try to stay in the U. S.  But some will return to their native lands.  I hope that what they learn here about the social and political structure of the U. S. will help them realize that in many ways, India has a chance to avoid mistakes others have made before them.  Whatever your views on global warming, I think we can agree that it's a hard problem both to allow millions of people in India to enjoy some of the benefits of advanced technology that we in the U. S. have enjoyed for three generations, while avoiding preventable harm to the planet we all live on.  I hope the citizens of India can take advantage of their opportunities to work out this problem in the best way possible.

Sources:  The article "The Global Warming Wild Card" by Varun Sivaram appeared on pp. 48-53 of the May 2017 issue of Scientific American.  The EPA website from which I obtained 2014 data on carbon-dioxide emissions is at https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the demographies of China and India and the history of the Indian republic.