Chapter 10 Chapter 10 Petrochemical Processing Zone

After humans leave, the most direct beneficiaries will be mosquitoes.Although we always hold the anthropocentric view that our blood is essential for the survival of mosquitoes, we overestimate ourselves. In fact, they are broad-loving foodies. Most warm-blooded mammals The veins of dogs, cold-blooded reptiles, and even birds are where they drink their blood.When we're gone, wild life in abundance will fill our void, setting up camp in the spaces we've left behind.No longer limited by fatal traffic accidents, their numbers would multiply, and the void created by the disappearance of humans would soon be filled.The famous biologist EO Wilson estimated that the entire human population would not be able to fill the Grand Canyon of the United States.

At the same time, the mosquitoes, unable to feed on human blood because of our departure, will take some comfort in our two legacies.First, we can no longer eliminate them.Humans have been fighting mosquitoes long before pesticides were invented: oiling the surfaces of ponds, estuaries and waterholes where they breed.The oil has a larval-killing effect, and it deprives the mosquito larvae of oxygen, a method that is still widely used today.Of course, all manner of chemical insecticides are also used, from hormones that prevent larvae from developing into adults, to aerial sprays of DDT—this is especially common in malaria-infested tropical regions, although only a few countries in the world strictly prohibit their use. kind of pesticides.Countless mosquitoes that would otherwise have died are now surviving.The second biggest beneficiaries will be the many freshwater fish, which feed on mosquito eggs and larvae in this food chain.Other beneficiaries are flowers of all kinds: When mosquitoes aren't feeding on blood, they suck on dew—a staple food for male mosquitoes, though blood-sucking females sometimes drink it too.This allows mosquitoes to inadvertently take on the task of pollinating, so a world without us would be a whole new landscape of flowers.

Another legacy of mosquitoes is the return of their breeding homes—in this case, the waters they inhabit.In the United States alone, mosquitoes have lost habitat—wetlands—an area twice the size of California since the founding of the country in 1776.You can better understand this by imagining such a large area as a swamp. (Mosquito population growth has to keep pace with mosquito-eating fish, toads, and frogs—though, with the latter two, humans may have given insects a big chance: The International of Buying and Selling Lab Frogs We don't know how many amphibians survive the trade accidental release of a fungus called "chytrid fungus." As temperatures rise, it has caused tens of thousands of deaths worldwide. Extinction of thousands of species.)

Habitat or not, whether it's remote Connecticut or a slum in Nairobi, that former wetland swamp that's been drained and developed, and anyone knows mosquitos can survive in it - they'll figure it out .Even a dewy plastic bottle cap can be a breeding ground for them.Wait until tarmac and sidewalks rot and disintegrate, and the swamps reclaim their claim to the land, and the mosquitos will once again make their home in the puddles and sewers.They can rest assured that their favorite artificial nursery will be intact for at least the next hundred years, and its uneven surface will not change for a long time after that-it is the rubber of the car. Scrap tires.

Rubber is a type of polymer known as an elastomer.Naturally occurring rubber, such as the milky sap extracted from the para tree in the Amazon, is theoretically biodegradable.Its properties of melting at high temperatures and hardening and cracking at low temperatures limited its usefulness until a Massachusetts hardware salesman mixed natural gum with sulfur in 1839.When Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped some of the mixture on the stove and it didn't melt, the salesman realized he had invented something that nature had never tried before. Until today, nature has not produced microorganisms that can degrade rubber.The process Goodyear does is called vulcanization—linking the long polymer chains of rubber to short chains of sulfur atoms, in effect combining them into a single giant molecule.Once rubber is vulcanized (heated, sulfur added, and poured into a mold—say, a truck tire mold)—the resulting macromolecules retain that shape forever.

Because it is a single molecule, the tire will neither melt nor transform into other substances.Unless it is torn to shreds, or friction wears it down after 60,000 miles of driving—both of which require a lot of energy, it will always stay round.Tires are a headache for landfill workers because even when buried, the donut-shaped air pockets in them always want to return to the surface.Most dumps reject tires, but in the next few hundred years, worn-out tires will surely return to the ground in forgotten landfills, filled with rainwater and once again a breeding ground for mosquitoes. In the United States, the average citizen discards one old tire per year, which adds up to more than 300 million tires per year.Of course, this does not count other countries outside the United States.At present, we have 700 million cars in use, and countless abandoned cars. Our used tires have not exceeded one trillion, but they must have reached tens or hundreds of billions.How long will they exist?It depends on the length and intensity of the sun exposure.Until then, unless a microbe evolves to prefer hydrocarbons mixed with sulfur, only the corrosive oxidation of ground-level ozone (that pollutant that makes your nose tingle) or penetrate the stratosphere Ultraviolet rays from the ozone layer are able to break sulfur bonds.Therefore, car tires contain UV inhibitors and antiozonants, and of course other additives such as carbon black fillers to strengthen and color the tires.

Tires contain carbon, so they are flammable.When tires burn, they release enormous amounts of energy that are difficult to extinguish, along with a staggering amount of soot, some of the nastiest ingredients we hastily invented during World War II.After Japan invaded Southeast Asia, it almost controlled the world's rubber supply.Germans and Americans realized that their country's war machines would not last long on leather grommets and wooden wheels, and their most sophisticated industries began to look for rubber substitutes. The largest plant producing synthetic rubber in the world today is located in Texas.It belongs to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and was built in 1942, when scientists were just figuring out how to produce synthetic rubber.Instead of living tropical trees, they used dead marine plants: plankton that died and sank to the ocean floor 30,000 to 350 million years ago.The process of change is difficult to understand, and the theory itself is sometimes questioned, but anyway, the top of the plankton is covered with several layers of sediment, and the huge squeezing force turns it into a viscous liquid .Scientists already know how to extract several useful hydrocarbons from crude oil.Two of them: styrene, the raw material for Styrofoam, and butadiene, an explosive, highly carcinogenic liquid hydrocarbon that provides the raw material for the synthesis of artificial rubber.

Sixty years later, Goodyear's rubber factory is still operating in the same place, with the same equipment churning out everything from everyday life, from NASCAR racing tires to chewing gum.Despite its size, the factory was surrounded by something: the most monumental structure that man had forced upon the face of the earth.The long stretch of industrial complexes begins east of Houston and stretches fifty miles to the Gulf of Mexico.Here are the largest concentration of petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies and petroleum storage depots in the world. The main road leading to Goodyear is a sharp shrinking wire, and behind the wire is an oil storage station: here are clusters of cylindrical crude oil storage towers, each with a diameter as large as a football field. Length, because of their sheer number, they appear to be crouching on the ground.A plethora of oil pipelines connected them to the positioning system, as well as up and down: white, blue, yellow, green pipes, the thickest nearly four feet.For a large plant like Goodyear, the oil pipelines form an archway large enough for trucks to pass underneath.

These are just visible conduits.A satellite-mounted CT scanner can photograph the vast, complex, carbon-steel circulatory system three feet below the surface of Houston.Here, as in all developed country towns, tiny pipes run through the center of every street and under every house: these are natural gas lines.It is a miracle that so many steel pipes did not make the compass point directly at the ground.In Houston, however, the use of natural gas pipelines is still in its infancy.Oil pipelines from refineries surrounded the city as tight as a woven basket.They sent the lighter stuff—cracked crude oil, obtained by distillation or catalytic means—to chemical plants in Houston, such as the petrochemical plant behind Goodyear in Texas.Goodyear supplied it with butadiene and formulated a substance that made the plastic jacket stick tightly.It also produces butane, the raw material for polyethylene and polypropylene plastic pellets.

Hundreds of other pipelines filled with refined petroleum, heating oil, diesel and jet fuel lead to the "father of pipelines": a 5,519-mile-long, 30-inch-thick main road.It was also buried during the colonial period, starting in the Pasadena area on the outskirts of Houston.It stretches across Louisiana, the Mississippi River, and Alabama toward the East Coast, sometimes outcropping and sometimes buried.This large colonial-era pipeline filled with different fuels, pumped at about 4 mph, terminates in Lyndon, New Jersey, near New York Harbor.Not counting the shutdown days and the impact of the hurricane, it will take twenty days for the pipeline fuel to reach the terminal.

Suppose future archaeologists pass through these pipelines.How would they make sense of the thick old steel boilers and countless chimneys behind the petrochemical plants in Texas? (However, if humans lingered a few more years - at which point there are no computers to accurately calculate the capacity limit - all those old storage towers will be dismantled and sold to China. China is now buying a lot of scrap iron products in the United States, Some historians since World War II have expressed wariness and skepticism about the purpose of this move.) Had those future archaeologists traveled down the pipes a few hundred feet underground, they would have come across some of the most durable objects we've ever made.Below the coast of the Gulf of Texas, there are five hundred salt domes—formed when floating salt in salt beds five miles below rises through layers of sediment.Some are located just below Houston.They are shaped like warheads and stretch for as much as a mile.If we drill holes in it and pump water in, we can dissolve the interior of the salt dome and use it to store things. Some cities have salt storage holes 600 feet long and half a mile high, twice the capacity of the Houston Astronomical Observatory.Because the walls of salt crystals are impermeable, they are used to store gases, including flammable gases like ethylene.The gases are sent directly underground for storage in salt formations at 1,500 pounds of pressure, after which they are made into plastic.Because ethylene is extremely volatile, it decomposes quickly, bursting pipes as soon as it comes out of the ground.If so, then future archaeologists had better ignore those salt storage caves, lest the ancient legacy left by a long-lost civilization explode mercilessly in front of them.But how would they know this? Get back on the ground.The cylindrical white tanks and silver fractionation towers that store oil in Houston look a lot like the mosques and Islamic minarets on the shores of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, lining the waterway.The square tank containing the liquid fuel is grounded at normal temperature, so that the formed vapor will not cause an explosion in a thunderstorm.In a world without humans, no one to inspect and paint the inner and outer layers of the tank, and no one to replace the parts after twenty years of use, a "corrosion" of the tank bottom and the ground pipe began. Race"—is the bottom of the tank rotted first, and the liquid fuel is all scattered in the soil?Or is the grounding pipe aging first and the flakes peeling off?In either case, the remaining metal parts would have been more quickly on their way to destruction in the explosion. Some storage tanks have a free-moving top, and they cover the liquid fuel to prevent the ingress of vapors.These tanks may have a shorter lifespan as their "sliding doors" start to leak.If a leak occurs, the liquid inside evaporates, and the last bit of carbon extracted by humans escapes into the atmosphere.Highly flammable chemicals like compressed gases, phenol, etc. are stored in round tanks, and that's where their life ends because their casings are not grounded.Given that they are compressed gases, once their fire protection device rusted and peeled off, the explosion would undoubtedly be even more earth-shattering. What's underneath those metal cans?The last century of the development of the petrochemical industry is buried here. What are the chances that the world will recover from this explosion of metals and chemicals?Human beings watch the flames burning and the fuel rushing out. Should we abandon these landscapes that are most incompatible with nature?How is it possible for nature to dismantle (and let alone purify) such a vast petrochemical processing complex in Texas? * Houston covers 620 square miles and spans the junction of bluestem prairie, grand horsegrass prairie, and a wetland swamp.The prairie grass, which once grew as high as a horse's belly, and the swamps, lined with low pine trees, have always been and are part of the Brazos delta.The earth-red Brazos River rises a thousand miles away in the mountains of New Mexico, travels southeast through the hills of Texas, and finally empties into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the largest sediment deposit in North America.During the glacial period, when the strong wind blowing over the ice meets the warm air of the upper bay, it will rain frontally. The sediment of the Brazos River is deposited, and a "dam" is gradually built in the river, so the river water Tossing and turning in the mouth of a triangular river miles wide.More recently, the river has passed through the southern part of town.Houston sits on a former tributary of the Brazos River, beneath 40,000 feet of dirt. In the 1830s, the magnolia-lined Buffalo Bay attracted entrepreneurs who discovered that Galveston Bay could sail directly to the prairies.At first, they relied on this inland waterway to transport cotton from the new town to the port of Galveston, then the largest city in Texas. After 1900, the most destructive hurricane in American history hit Galveston, killing more than 8,000 people. Buffalo Bay widened and deepened and became a waterway, so Houston became a port city.Today, Houston is the largest U.S. port in terms of cargo volume, with Cleveland, Baltimore, Boston, Pittsburgh, Denver, and Washington, D.C., also trailing Houston in total. The discovery of crude oil on the Texas Gulf Coast and the advent of the automobile added to Galveston's doom.It didn't take long for the longleaf pine forests, flatland delta hardwood forests and coastal prairies to be replaced by drilling rigs and dozens of refineries along the Houston Freight Channel.Then came the chemical factories, then the rubber factories during World War II, and finally the terrible plastic production industry after the war.Even though oil production in Texas plummeted after peaking in the 1970s, because of Houston's comprehensive infrastructure, the world's raw materials are still being sent here for refining. Tankers flying the flags of Middle Eastern countries, Mexico and Venezuela arrived at the cargo terminal in Texas City on the Galveston Bay.Texas City is a small town with a population of about 50,000. The area of ​​the oil refining and processing area here is comparable to that of residential areas and commercial areas.Texan City residents (most Black and Latino) bungalows are lost in the "geometric" territory of petrochemical enterprises: there are round, spherical and cylindrical ones, some are tall and thin, some are square and short, and some are square. Round and big. Those who are tall are more prone to accidents. Not all of them are, although they look alike.Some are wet gas scrubbers: scrubber towers that use water from the Brazos River to filter the outgassing, cooling overheated solids and creating a cloud of white vapor above the flue.Others are fractionating columns, which carry out distillation by heating crude oil from the bottom.The mixed hydrocarbons are all natural and unprocessed, including tar, gasoline, and natural gas, and they have different boiling points; above.As long as the expanding gases are vented, the pressure is released, or the temperature eventually drops, the distillation process is fairly safe. What is more difficult is the need to add chemicals in the process to convert the oil into new substances.In the refinery, the catalyst used to heat heavy hydrocarbons in the catalytic cracking tower is powdered aluminum silicate, which is heated to 1200oF.Theoretically, the process breaks their large polymer chains into smaller, lighter chains, such as propane or gasoline.Adding chlorine to the process yields jet fuel and diesel.All of these substances are especially explosive at high temperatures and with the addition of chlorine. The related isomerization, which uses platinum catalysts, requires more heat to rearrange atoms in hydrocarbon molecules to produce octane for fuel or the ingredients needed to make plastics.The isomerization process is very volatile.Isomerization units are combustion-supporting, and they are connected to cracking towers.If any step gets out of tune, or if the temperature gets too high, the combustion reduces the pressure.The purge valve sends any excess material up the flame stack and activates the control to ignite.Sometimes steam is also injected, and in this way, those substances that are not smoking are also ignited and do not pollute the environment. Once something goes wrong, the results can be dire. In 1998, hundreds of people were hospitalized after a spill of benzene isomers and hydrochloric acid fumes from the Sterling Chemical Company.This event comes just four years after the last ammonia spill: 9,000 people were injured when 3,000 pounds of ammonia leaked. In March 2005, liquid hydrocarbons spewed intermittently from one of BP's isomerization stacks.Fifteen people were killed in a fire caused by liquid hydrocarbons coming into contact with the air.That June, at the same plant, a hydrogen pipeline exploded; in August, a leak of rotten-egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide halted much of BP's operations for a while.Within days, flames were blazing 50 feet into the sky at a subsidiary of BP, which makes plastics, 15 miles south of Chocolate Bay.There is nothing we can do but wait for the flames to go out after the fuel has burned out.It burned like this for three days. The oldest refinery in Texas City was built in 1908 by a Virginia farmers cooperative to produce fuel for tractors.The plant is now owned by Valero Energy.Converted into a modern plant, it has the best safety reputation of any U.S. refinery, but what it does is convert raw natural resources into more explosive substances and derive energy from them.Valero's humming, labyrinthine valves, gauges, heat exchangers, pumps, absorbers, separators, furnaces, incinerators, stairwells with spiraling flanges and tanks, winding Surrounded by red, yellow, green, and silver metal pipes (silver pipes have an insulating wrapper, indicating that what's inside is hot and must stay hot).It's hard to feel the sheer power lurking in these installations.There are twenty fractionation towers and forty exhaust chimneys towering above the head.The coking shovel is actually a hanger unit with a bucket that swings back and forth to dump what looks like bitumen (the condensate left over from refining crude oil and left at the bottom of the fractionation tower) onto the conveyor , the unit is connected to a catalytic cracking unit from which another barrel of diesel can be squeezed. At the very top of all these installations are the chimneys of fire, which wedge their flames into the sky.If the resulting pressure exceeds the range that can be controlled by the adjustment gauge, then this part of the organic chemical is burned to achieve a certain equilibrium state.The right-angle joints of steel pipes are where hot, corrosive liquids meet and impinge, and some gauges can display the condition of these parts and predict when their life will end.Anything that contains a rapidly flowing hot liquid will develop stress cracks, especially if the liquid is heavy petroleum containing metals and sulfur that wear down the pipe walls. All of these devices are controlled by computers - and when something goes wrong, the computer can't do anything about it.The flame then enters the device.We can assume that the system is stressed beyond its maximum, or that no one noticed that the system was overloaded.Under normal circumstances, there will always be someone on duty 24 hours a day.However, what if humans suddenly disappeared while the factories were still operating? "Eventually some container fails," said Valero spokesman Fred Newhouse.He is short, mild-mannered, with light brown skin and gray hair. "There might be a fire." But at this point, Neuhaus went on, the control valves above and below the fail-safe device would automatically activate after an accident. "We measure pressure, flow and temperature on a regular basis. If anything changes abnormally, the unit is isolated so the flames don't spread to other units." But what if no one came to put out the fire?If no one was working on coal plants, gas plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric dams from California to Tennessee -- the lights in Texas City were powered by Houston's electricity -- all would be What if there is no power supply?What if the emergency generator is out of diesel and cannot send the signal to activate the shutoff valve? Newhouse hid in the shadow of the cracking tower and pondered the question.He spent 26 years at ExxonMobil before playing for Valero and really loved the job.He is very proud that the company has never had a safety accident, especially the British Petroleum Company across the road, which was named the largest polluter in the United States by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2006.He shudders at the thought that all this infrastructure could set itself on fire out of control. "Yes, everything is going to be engulfed in flames before the hydrocarbons in the system are exhausted. But," he insisted, "the chances of the flames spreading out of the petrochemical processing area are very small. With Texas The pipelines connected to the refinery have check valves, which can be isolated immediately in the event of a fire. Therefore, even if the factory explodes,” he said, pointing to the opposite equipment, “it will not harm the surrounding units. Fire, we also have fail-safes." Wilson was not so sure. “Even during a normal working day,” he said, “every second at a petrochemical plant is a ticking time bomb.” Interesting changes ahead of grade petrochemicals.When light-end chemicals such as ethylene or acrylonitrile (a highly flammable substance used to make acrylic acid, which can damage the human nervous system) are under high pressure, they can often pass through the pipes, travel to adjacent units, and even in the adjacent refinery. He said that if humans disappeared tomorrow, the fate of petrochemical refineries and chemical plants depended on whether anyone was happy to flip a switch before leaving. "Assuming we have enough time to shut down the plant normally. The high pressure drops to low pressure. The boilers are shut down so the temperature is not an issue. In the reaction tower, the heavy ends will form sticky lumpy solids. They will be A container encased in a steel liner, encased in Styrofoam or fiberglass insulation, and topped with a sheet metal shell. There are usually steel or copper pipes between the layers, filled with water , used to control the temperature. Therefore, the material contained in it will be stable until the soft water starts to corrode the surrounding devices." He rummaged in the drawer of the workbench, then closed it again. "If there wasn't a fire or explosion, the light end gases would go into the atmosphere. Any sulfur by-products around would eventually break down and cause acid rain. Have you ever seen a refinery in Mexico? Mountains of sulfur by-products. Yes The Americans dispose of them. Anyway, the large tanks in the refinery contain a lot of hydrogen. They are very volatile, and if they leak, they will float away unless the lightning first causes them to burn first." He ran his fingers through his curly, ash-brown hair and leaned back in his office chair. "And then a whole bunch of concrete facilities would just disappear." So, what if people don't have time to shut down the factory, say suddenly caught in the sky or some other galaxy, but everything is still working? He rocks forward. "Initially, the emergency power supplies come on. They're usually diesel engines. They can probably keep the plant running until they run out of fuel. Then there's the high pressure and high temperature. There's no one monitoring the regulators or the computers. system, then some of the reactions would get out of hand and get out of hand. Fires would start because there was no way to stop the fire from spreading and the domino effect would start. Even with the emergency motors, the sprinklers wouldn't start because no one came to turn them on The switch. Some safety valves will vent gas, but in a flame, the safety valve will also be mercilessly engulfed." Wilson spun around in his swivel chair.He runs long distances and wears jogging shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. "All the pipes will be a medium for the flame to spread. The gas will go from this area to that area. Normally, after an emergency, we will close the connectors, but this is not going to happen. The flame will go from this equipment. Burn down that unit. The fire could last for weeks, spewing harmful substances into the atmosphere." After one more turn, he then began to spin in a counterclockwise direction. "If factories all over the world were exposed to this kind of thing, imagine how much pollution there would be! Think about the war in Iraq. It's like the war has spread to every corner of the world." Many of those flames in Iraq were caused by Saddam Hussein burning gas wells, but such sabotage was unnecessary.The static electricity of a liquid flowing in a pipeline can ignite a natural gas well or an oil well that is pressurized with nitrogen -- the purpose of which is to get more oil.On the big screen in front of Wilson, one of the sequences was flashing, showing that an acrylonitrile plant in Chocolate Bay, Texas was the largest emitter of carcinogens in the United States in 2002. "Look: If everyone leaves, the fire won't go out until the gas in the well burns out. Usually, it's the wires or the pump that start the fire. If it's not them, there's still static and lightning after all. Oil wells The fire only burns above the surface because it needs air, but by then no one will be covering the gas wells to put out the fire. I'm afraid the huge amount of gas in the Gulf of Mexico or Kuwait will burn forever. The petrochemical plant will not burn for that long because Not that much fuel. Imagine a runaway situation, burning factories... clouds of hydrogen cyanide and the like rushing into the sky. Chemical fields in Texas and Louisiana would be flooded with toxic fumes .With the direction of the trade winds, we'll know what to expect." In his scenario, these particles in the atmosphere would trigger a mini-nuclear apocalypse. "They also release chlorides like dioxins and furans from the burning plastic. There is also lead, chromium and mercury mixed in with the soot. Europe and North America are bound to be the largest because of the concentration of the largest refineries and chemical plants. However, the cloud-like pollution will spread to the whole world. The next generation of plants and animals that survive may mutate, which will eventually affect evolution.” * On the north end of Texas City, an American International Specialties chemical plant shaded the afternoon sun for long periods of time.ExxonMobil's 2,000-acre complex is nestled in a tall prairie now taken over by The Nature Conservancy.Before the rise of the petrochemical industry, this coastal prairie once covered 6 million acres, and now the preserve is the only remaining fruit.There are now forty species of Atwater prairie chickens that we know of remaining, and the Texas City Prairie Sanctuary is home to twenty species.The Atwater prairie chicken was considered North America's most endangered bird until 2005, when a woodpecker with an ivory-colored beak -- thought to be now extinct -- was discovered in Arkansas. During courtship, male Atwater prairie chickens inflate a bright, balloon-shaped golden air sac on the side of their neck.Attracted female prairie chickens respond by laying eggs.However, it is doubtful whether this species could survive in a world without humans.It's not just petrochemical industry equipment that occupies their habitat.The meadows here once stretched straight into Louisiana, with few trees along the way, and the tallest feature on the horizon was a buffalo or two grazing. Around 1900, the ecology here changed, and the petrochemical industry and Chinese tallow tree took root here at the same time. In China, it was once a fairly hardy plant, its seeds protected from harsh winters by a thick layer of agricultural produce wax.When they were grown as crops in the warmer southern parts of the United States, it was realized that this was a mistake.Because they must evolve to adapt to changes in their environment, they no longer produce the wax that protects them from the cold, but instead devote more energy to producing more offspring. Now, as long as there are no chimneys of petrochemical plants on both sides of the waterway, Chinese tallow tree must be growing.Houston's longleaf pine is gone, and the invader tallow has taken over the land, their lozenge-shaped leaves turning crimson each fall and falling desolately, as if to warm up the cold living environment of their ancestors.The only way for The Nature Conservancy to prevent tallow tree canopies from shading the sun and crowding out bluestem and sunflowers on the prairie is to carefully burn some trees every year to make a place for prairie chickens to mate.If there were no longer humans to maintain this man-made wild environment, an inadvertent explosion of a petrochemical storage tank could have repelled these Asian plant invaders. If the Homo sapiens in the petrochemical age—we disappeared, the storage tanks and reaction towers in the petrochemical processing zone in Texas exploded at the same time with a loud bang, and when the oily smoke settled, the rest would be molten Streets, crooked pipes, crumpled decking and crumbling concrete.The incandescent light will cause metal fragments in the salt spray to start corroding, and the polymer chains in the hydrocarbon residue will also crack into shorter chains, which are easier to break down, speeding up the biodegradation process.Despite the toxic spill, the soil was enriched with charcoal, and a year's worth of rain spurred the growth of switchgrass.Some hardy wildflowers will also appear.Gradually, life will resume. Or if Valero Energy's Fred Newhouse is right in his belief in fail-safes, or if the last act of conscience when the oilman leaves is to depressurize the reactor tower and suppress the fire, then De The disappearance of Texas' world-class petrochemical processing facility will be slower to come.During the first few years, the anti-corrosion coating will flake off.Over the next two decades, all storage tanks will reach their end of life.Moisture in the soil, rain, salt and Texas winds will all break down their last defenses until they leak.At that point, any heavy oil will harden; nature cracks it open and ends up being dinner for bacteria and insects. Liquid fuel that has not yet evaporated will flow into the soil.After contacting groundwater, they float to the top because oil is lighter than water.Microbes will spot them, realize that they were once nothing more than plants, and adapt to a life of feeding on them.石化管道被土壤掩埋，逐渐腐烂，犰狳最终也会回来，在只剩残渣的干净土壤中打洞觅食。 无人照料的油桶、油泵、管道、反应塔、阀门和螺钉会从最薄弱的环节——接合处开始腐烂。“法兰片、铆钉，”佛莱德·纽豪斯说：“精炼厂里这样的东西多得很。”等它们都消失以后，金属墙会坍塌下来，已经习惯于在精炼厂反应塔上面筑巢的鸽子的粪便会加速碳钢的腐蚀，响尾蛇也会在下面空空的建筑结构里生活。海狸在流向加尔维斯敦海湾的河流上筑坝，因此有些地方会洪水泛滥。休斯顿气候温暖，没有结冰和融化的周期循环，但是随着雨天和晴天的交替，三角洲地区的粘质土会经历相当可怕的膨胀和收缩的周期循环。没有基础设施维修人员来修复开裂的部位，不用一百年的时间，市中心的建筑就会开始倾斜。 与此同时，货运航道又会自行恢复成以前泥沙淤积的布法罗海湾。在接下来的一千年里，它和布拉索斯河航道都将周期性地淤积、泛滥，逐渐侵蚀购物中心、汽车经销商和入口处的斜坡，一幢幢地摧毁高楼大厦，让休斯顿的轮廓越来越模糊。 至于布拉索斯河：从德克萨斯城的海岸往下二十英里，在加尔维斯敦岛下游、刚过巧克力湾含有污染物质空气的地方，今天的布拉索斯河（意为“上帝之臂”）环绕起两个国家沼泽野生动物保护区，留下岛屿般大小的淤泥，最终注入墨西哥湾。几千年以来，它一直与科罗拉多河和圣伯纳德河共享一个三角洲，有时分享的是入河口。它们的河道并非泾渭分明，而是相互交织，因此某个支流此时还属于这条河流，没过多久又属于那条河流了。 周围的大多数地区海拔都不到三英尺，是橡树、岑树、榆树和美洲山核桃树组成的甘蔗丛和古老的滩地森林，几年之前这里的甘蔗种植园留下这块地来给牛群提供荫庇。“古老”在这里指的不过是一两个世纪的时间，因为粘质土限制了植物根部的穿透力，所以成熟的树木一般都有些倾斜，直到后来的飓风将它们刮倒。这里的森林布满了野葡萄藤和寄生藤的簇毛，因此人迹罕至，人们害怕毒葛、黑蛇和跟手掌大小相当的金色圆蛛——它们在树干之间织出小型的蹦床那么大的粘稠的网。这里的蚊子数量惊人，即使哪天进化了的微生物真的降解了这个世界上堆积如山的废旧轮胎，这里蚊子的生存也不会受到威胁。 因此，这片被人遗忘的森林招来了杜鹃鸟、啄木鸟以及朱鹭、沙丘鹤和红色琵鹭之类的涉水鸟。棉尾兔和沼泽兔引来了谷仓猫头鹰和秃头鹰，每年春天，成千上万只回归的雀鸟横渡墨西哥湾之后在这里的森林中栖息，其中包括天生丽质的猩红丽唐纳雀和夏日唐纳雀。 布拉索斯河泛滥的时候，这片栖息地下面的粘土又恢复到了从前的样子——那时十几个大坝和娱乐设施都未建起，也没有把河水抽到加尔维斯敦和德克萨斯城的两根管道里。不过河水还是会泛滥的。没人照料的大坝很快就会被淤泥充塞。人类消失一百年，布拉索斯河将一个一个地冲垮它们。 或许根本用不了那么久。墨西哥湾的水温比海洋高些，它渐渐向陆地扩张，与此同时，在过去的一个世纪中，德克萨斯州的海岸也在不断下陷，沉入海湾之中。当人们从地下开采石油、天然气或地下水的时候，土地就在下陷。加尔维斯敦有些地方下沉了十英尺。德克萨斯城以北的贝敦有一片高消费阶层的特区，这里地面下沉的现象十分严重，在1983年艾丽西娅飓风的袭击中，这片区域完全淹没在水中，现在成了湿地自然保护区。墨西哥湾沿岸海拔超过三英尺的地方很少，休斯顿的部分地方甚至低于海平面。 陆地在下沉，海面在上升，加上三级强烈飓风“艾丽西娅”，河上的大坝还没腐蚀，布拉索斯河就已经重演八万年之前的一幕。和东面的密西西比河一样，它将淹没整个三角洲，与茫茫大草原连成一片。它也会淹没建立在石油之上的庞大城市，一直冲到海岸。布拉索斯河将吞没圣伯纳德河，与科罗拉多河的某些河段交叠在一起，在海岸线上铺开一层几百英里长的“水被”。加尔维斯敦岛十七英尺高的防波堤不会起什么作用。货运航道两侧的石油存储罐将被淹没；火焰塔、催化裂化设备和分馏装置将和休斯顿的高楼大厦一样，在含盐的洪水中只露出个尖，还未等到洪水退去，它们的地基便已经腐烂。 重新安排好这里的一切后，布拉索斯河会选择新的水道入海——更短的一条水道，因为这样的话离海洋更近些。新的滩地将会在海拔更高的地方形成，最终新的硬木林也会出现（中国乌桕的种子有防水功能，因而它们会是这里永远的殖民者，现在假设它们愿意与硬木分享河岸边的空间）。德克萨斯城将消失不见；淹没的石化厂中泄漏出来的碳氢化合物将会打着漩涡沉入水中，剩下一些重端的原油残渣会像脂肪球一样堆积在崭新的内陆海岸上，最终被微生物吞食。 在地下，加尔维斯敦的牡蛎们将附在氧化了的金属部件上。淤泥和牡蛎壳将缓缓地埋藏它们，也缓缓地被埋藏。几百万年的时间内，这里的沉积层将会有足够的压力把贝壳转变为石灰岩，其中也会夹杂着些古怪的铁锈条纹，还点缀着闪光的镍、钼、铌、铬。数百万年以后，具备一定的知识和工具的某人（或某物），会识别出这个原来是不锈钢。然而，没有什么痕迹能够证明这一点了：这些不锈钢曾经高高耸立在德克萨斯的上方，往天空中喷射火焰。 1 玛士撒拉：《圣经·创世记》中人物，据传享年965岁。后也用于指长寿的老者。 2 克拉科夫：波兰城市名。 3 布列斯特：苏联欧洲部分西部一城市，位于波兰边界附近的布格河畔。 4 斯普林：英文“Spring”，有泉水的意思。 5 约翰尼苹果种子的童话：美国开垦时代的农场童话。大约两百年前，主人公约翰尼走遍美国，开垦土地，播撒苹果种子，使得如今美国田园里，到处可见苹果树。 6 拉布拉多：加拿大纽芬兰的陆地部分，位于拉布拉多半岛的东北部。 7 马赛人：肯尼亚和坦桑尼亚的以游牧狩猎为主的民族。 8 图森市：美国亚利桑那州东南部城市。 9 安的列斯群岛：西印度群岛中除巴哈马群岛之外的岛屿，隔开了加勒比海和大西洋，分为北部的大安的列斯群岛和东部的小安的列斯群岛。 10 弗兰格尔岛：前苏联东北部岛屿。 11 内罗毕：肯尼亚的首都和最大城市。 12 DDT：一种无色的、经接触传递的杀虫药剂，当吞食或被表皮吸收时对人类和动物有毒。 13 萨赫勒荒漠草原：非洲中北部半干旱地区，位于撒哈拉沙漠以南。 14 阿卡普尔科：墨西哥南部的一旅游胜地。濒临太平洋，是悬崖和海岬围成的天然良港。 15 阿列颇：叙利亚西北部一城市，位于土耳其边界附近。 16 黎凡特：地中海东部自土耳其至埃及地区诸国。 17 耶利哥：巴勒斯坦古城，临近死海西北海岸。 18 希提人：公元前2000－1200年间居住在叙利亚北部及小亚细亚的古代部族。 19 安提克：古叙利亚首都，现为土耳其南部一城市，位于地中海附近的奥伦提斯河沿岸。 20 肯：芭比男友的名字。 21 湿气：含大量汽油蒸气的天然气体。