Oil Rigs should not cause pollution

[ppalynchuk]

As someone who lives in a rural farming area with a massive oil drilling industry, I can tell you that actual oil rigs don't cause pollution in real life. In fact they are surrounded by active producing farmland. Oil rigs and pumps actually use electricity for the most of the time when they are up and only cause pollution if they have a generator to run the pump if there is no power nearby. It would be nice if we could have oil pumps next to farmland without it killing the farmland. Oil processing plants cause some pollution but oil pumps rarely do, except in the case of a catastrophic equipment failure which is cleaned up immediately. In some cases, oil extraction in my country actually improves the environment, because the oil just seeped into the streams and forests naturally before people started extraction in the area.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Everything in this game is generalized according to common stereotypes and extrapolated 100x times, for the sake of gameplay - like, for another example, too much noise making people sick?

Anyway, there are mods that allow you to remove all pollution from your cities. Not an ideal solution if you still want to deal with the problem in other ways, but it is there.

[ppalynchuk]

i see your point. It just makes it harder to make things realistic and wastes land. But it its a game, not life.

[SievertChaser]

Oil and gas rigs output a rather considerable amount of contaminated water and salty brine from deep underground. Radioactive water and brine, particularly in the Appalachians.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/

[ppalynchuk]

Interesting. In Canada they just reinject the water back down into the well so there isn’t a problem with trying to store it.

[Kaivian]

"But it its a game, not life."

Yes, a thousand times this.

"I I can tell you that actual oil rigs don't cause pollution in real life."

There's a lot of factors here. I have the opposite experience. The oil companies keep spilling fracking fluid while transporting it through town, causing mini-ecological disasters. The area also has high amounts of natural gas and mercury. When they frack, it creates vents/openings that allow this stuff into aquifers and or to seep out of the ground. Natural gas probably doesn't harm crops (or may even help since plants generally like the things that are bad for people, like phosphorous, sulfur, nitrates, and raw carbon). But this game is much more of a "generalization" of pollution. If it bothers plants *or* humans, it's all grouped together into "pollution."