The BBC newsite is having problems in reporting figures again:
Quote from BBC Story:
The Langeled project – which at some stage consumed 30% of the world’s entire carbon steel production, and which has come in on time and well under budget – is indeed impressive, and can act as a showcase that may put the Norwegians at the front of the race to construct pipelines for the Russians.
Quote from ‘In Pictures’ section:
Producing the 42-inch pipe sections has consumed about a million tonnes of steel, contributing to global steel shortages and pushing prices higher.
World steel production is of the order of 1 gigatonne (one thousand million tonnes) per annum.
1 million / 1000 million = 1/1000 th
= 0.1 %
Which is still a lot of steel, however it’s 300 times less than the BBC reported. Perhaps it can be 30 % of pipeline for ‘some unit of time’ if the time was short enough.
Lets check if the other numbers make sense…
1 million tonnes of steel were used, each pipe section weighs 25 tonnes, which means 40,000 sections. The pipe is 555 kilometres, so each section should be: 13.875 m in length, which seems about right from the photographs on BBC.
The pipeline will supply 20 % of the UK’s natural gas.
Thanks to H.K.D.H.B. for this story.
Filed under: Steel | 2 Comments »
