How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill? 913
Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.
Re:Bad, but please don't overreact (Score:5, Informative)
That's providing it stays contained. There seems to be a growing consensus that the Gulf Stream may pick some of this up, so anyone sitting on the Atlantic coast whistling with relief may not be happy in a few days.
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? (Score:5, Informative)
Already happened;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? (Score:3, Informative)
We could build Nuclear Reactors much safer back then, as well. The Russians simply chose to build a reactor based on an inherently unsafe design.
Re:Well the governator is capable of learning (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think Kathleen Blanco sponsored a bill that asked for a hurricane to hit Louisiana, while Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act.
He asked for it.
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oil Gusher (Score:5, Informative)
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I [wikipedia.org]
Re:Corporate Weaselspeak (Score:2, Informative)
Especially now that they're going around to the coastline land owners and trying to buy them off from suing with a $5k cheque. Well before the land owners see how bad the damage gets...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0315696620100503
They've said that was a misstep and it won't enforce those waivers now that it's gotten a lot of bad press, but they'll be rummaging through their arsenal to avoid paying up.
"We can build them much safer today" Riiiiight.... (Score:1, Informative)
unfortunate how most anti-nuclear arguments use Chernobyl as an example - we can build them so much safer today. Looks like the oil drilling technology hasn't come as far, while still capable of producing devastating effects for years to come.
Unfortunate how most pro-drilling advocates used the slogan "we can build them much safer today".1 [usatoday.com] 2 [pirillo.com] 3 [reefrelieffounders.com] 4 [latimes.com], etc etc.
These are the same old arguments businesses constantly give to get around regulation. Call the laws "outdated", "old", and talk about how progress has made them unnecessary.
We saw the same "mining is much safer today" from coal companies skirting regulations. And it's the same line of argument that was used to remove regulations from the financial industry. And it's used pretty much everywhere that "stifling" government regulation stands in the way of "economic progress and freedom".
At 5:00 in this video you can learn [msn.com] how the oil companies lobbied successfully to NOT have to use modern safety backup systems:
"BP didn't want to spend the money for a system- a fail-safe system... used all over the world... except the United States because we give them a free pass. ...it's called the "acoustic switch" system.. it's a relay system that... stops the oil exactly from the source... If BP has to do business in Norway, they have to use the switch. When they do it in the US, they don't have to use it... During the Bush deregulation years, you had the mineral management service that told companies like BP that "gee whiz we have a new policy- it's the closed-door Dick Cheney policy..." that allowed the industry to bypass safe systems like the acoustic switch, and there was no need to spend $500,000 with a company that was making $40 billion dollars. It was a complete bypass of safety."
Re:Corporate Weaselspeak (Score:1, Informative)
An NPR interview this morning with a BP executive asked two simple questions:
1. Are you responsible for the leak?
2. Will you pay for the results of the leak?
The response was along the lines of "We will cooperate with cleanup and containment efforts, and will pay any legitimate claims."
I think this will be a long (decades?), dirty fight to hold BP accountable.
Decades. Case in point: ExxonMobil has yet to pay for the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Transocean drilling contractor (Score:5, Informative)
With more than 150 replies so far, only one poster mentions the Transocean drilling contractor.
Drilling contractors drill wells for oil companies like a house building contractor will build your house.
Mass media almost exclusively talk about BP but the drilling contractor is the real specialist is oil well drilling. So, it is just like the media were mentioning exclusively yourself because the house you had a contractor building blew up and killed people.
Of course the client (BP) might very well have some part of responsibility, especially if they pressured the contractor to cut costs in a way impacting security. I wander how this thing will settle in courts, how the responsibilities will be split.
Anyway, I though that it was good to mention the above in contrast to the over simplistic view usually depicted in mass media.
Re:Don't worry BP ... (Score:3, Informative)
Being so fungible, it also means that if everyone switches to other suppliers, the prices goes up in general, as demand is the same but the number of suppliers fewer.
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Commodities... (Score:5, Informative)
Ever heard of OPEC? It's a legalized cartel controlling the prices .... more likely to oil company favor than anyone elses.
Time to do some reading up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC [wikipedia.org]
"According to its statutes, one of the principal goals is the determination of the best means for safeguarding the cartel's interests, individually and collectively. It also pursues ways and means of ensuring the stabilization of prices in international oil markets with a view to eliminating harmful and unnecessary fluctuations; giving due regard at all times to the interests of the producing nations and to the necessity of securing a steady income to the producing countries; an efficient and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations, and a fair return on their capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.[4]"
Fair return has always been maximal profit.
Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? (Score:3, Informative)
BP neither built, nor owned, nor ran the oil rig.
People seem to be missing that. BP is stepping up and taking care of another companies fuck up. Now, I have no idea -- perhaps they have a contractual obligation to do so... but BP and the people who work there are not the ones who deserve the blame here.
Re:Corporate Weaselspeak (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently there has been a run on fishing licenses in the gulf area since this accident so that more people have standing to sue BP. These are people who have never been within a 100 mile radius of the affected areas.
So when they say *legitimate* claims, they are covering their own asses against these ambulance chasing fools who come out of the woodwork.
I know that its usually corporations taking advantage of people, but the reverse does happen as well.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Natural oil seeps do occur, but they tend to be slow leaks. Earthquakes don't spontaneously release vast amounts of oil because if it was anywhere near enough the surface that vast quantities of oil could be released, it would have probably already been leaking at a lower rate for long enough that there wouldn't be enough built up in the reservoir to be released catastrophically.
Or to think of it in other terms, large accumulations of oil depend on structural traps to accumulate oil from a larger area and hold it beneath an impermeable layer so it won't leak away. By structural, we mean some three dimensional organization of the rock, such as a natural structural dome, or juxtaposition of rocks by faulting, etc. The shale, salt, or other impermeable rock layer needs to hold the oil in the trap, while permeable rocks below allow oil to flow in to the trap. Large accumulations of oil depend on large traps that can collect oil from a large area. Statistically speaking, they tend to occur at significant depth trapping oil from reasonably old rocks. In the stratigraphic record, older rocks tend (all else being equal) to be deeper, and plant material needs to be buried at reasonable depth to turn in to oil. Deeper sediment also means there are probably more individual layers above that sediment, one or more of which might form a nice trap for the oil.
So that's the trapping and oil formation part of the equation, but for a seep, you need a path for the oil to reach the surface. There are two practical ways to get oil to the surface of the Earth. The first is by drilling a well in to the trap. Even if a well is drilled in to a trap, that doesn't mean the oil will flow easily to the surface; you may (will probably) still need to pump or pressurize the well by injection. There can also be an earthquake fault that provides a structural path for oil to reach the surface. The permeability, however, of faults is variable, but compared to an oil well will usually be quite low. Consider what happens at depth in rock. Rock weighs quite a lot, so as you go deeper it is under higher pressure. That average pressure, what we call hydrostatic pressure because just like going deep under water it's the same in all directions, acts to resist opening cracks and actively works to close existing ones. This means that, except quite close to the surface, any cracks are likely quite small. At the surface an earthquake can rip gashes in the Earth, but those close very rapidly at depth. With that in mind, to get a gusher opening naturally would usually require a large reservoir of oil close to the surface, cut by an active fault, with the oil under enough pressure that it would come out without too much encouragement, but would still probably need a reasonably large earthquake to open a large enough continuous path from the reservoir to the surface...yet all those conditions would also imply the oil would have probably already leaked out at a much lower rate through the same fault in between giant earthquakes.
There are many places in the world where oil and asphalt leak to the surface. For example, in California at the La Brea Tarpits, oil does just what I described. A fault provides a path for oil to leak slowly from a fairly shallow oil field. Many other natural asphalt seeps are also probably fault-controlled, but I can't remember any names off the top of my head.
I don't know the geologic details of the leaking Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf, but I think it's a fairly deep well. It would be very unlikely to release significant oil by natural seepage in any short period of time even in the presence of a very large fault. It took a meticulously constructed high-tech bore hole to do that.
Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
A year?
It's been 20 years and the Exxon Valdez spill hasn't "concluded". The environmental damage continues.
Re:This has got to be the lamest guilt trip (Score:3, Informative)
I learned in geography class that "legal" opium comes primarily from Tazmania. Don't have a source to back it up, though.
Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? (Score:5, Informative)
Business doesn't like regulation, and
this is false because:
they often have more influence on lawmaking than "we" do.
It's called Regulatory capture [wikipedia.org]. You don't have the time to study every effect of every regulation proposed by someone who was appointed by someone who was elected within a district where you can vote. But business-paid lobbyists do have that time. So you demand that something must be done, and when a new thousand pages of laws and regulations are created you're appeased, because what voter has time to hunt through those laws for corporate giveaways like $75 million liability limits [yahoo.com]?
Yeah, businesses hate regulation. "We'll write a bunch of lawyerese that acts as a barrier to entry for would-be new competitors, and we'll promise to bail you out at the expense of your victims if your risk-taking backfires - but watch out if it does backfire, because then the furious voters will demand that we do the same thing again!"
Re:Admittedly ignorant question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't worry BP ... (Score:5, Informative)
Halliburton was responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole that evidently failed, triggering the explosion that toppled the huge offshore rig and unleashed the gusher.
from Gulf disaster spurs questions on drilling, Halliburton [peoplesworld.org]
also this more detailed article from the L.A. Times:
Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.
<here be snippage>
Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement."
from Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection [latimes.com]
So it does seem premature to lay this at the feet of British Petroleum. From what I've been reading, BP has done quite a bit of late to reduce their accident rates and otherwise improve their business model.
Re:Not quite Florida (Score:2, Informative)
You know that Obama put those clouds there, right?
Problems down at the wellhead (Score:5, Informative)
It's not clear that an acoustic data link to the blowout protector would have helped. The model installed was supposed to close if the connection to the surface was lost. If it didn't close on that, a secondary data link probably wouldn't help.
As for things that go wrong, here's a marlin with its spear caught in a blowout preventer. [youtube.com] An underwater ROV with robot arms is brought into position, grabs onto the tail of the marlin, pulls it out, and releases the tail. The marlin then charges forward, and jams itself into the same place. The ROV moves back into position, grabs the dumb fish, pulls it out again, and drags it a short distance away before releasing it. The fish again tries to attack the blowout preventer, but finally gives up.
Re:What job? What calculations (Score:5, Informative)
The big difference in this case is that the oil is concentrated to the point where it can gum up birds' feathers and kill off shellfish. With natural seeps, the oil is spread out where microbes can break it down before it adversely affects larger life forms. Over time the same microbes will deal with this spill. A lot of damage will happen before then, but they will deal with it. It happened before in 1979 [wikipedia.org] (estimated 10k-30k barrels/day for 10 months) and it didn't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf then. This one won't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf either. It will be bad for a time, but it's not the end of the Gulf as you seem to think it will be.
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:3, Informative)
Like it or not you are part of a community that you need. It has always been that way no matter tea party mongos say. It will always be that way too. It's just how humans operate so live with the fact people have an opinion on the US.
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:3, Informative)
The health-care thing has been bipartisan consensus for decades, just various fuck-ups kept keeping it from being enacted (mostly the Democrats holding out for something even better, a bluff they lost several times). Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, of all people, proposed an insurance-mandate scheme.
Re:Nine Year Naval Veteran... (Score:3, Informative)
I would imagine firefighting principles from naval vessels would be about5 as relevant as those from residential suburban firefighting.
From the perspective of putting the fire out, yes, you'd be quite correct. There is not WAY you're going to put THAT out with AFFF alone. You wouldn't be able to use explosives, either, since that only works on isolated well heads. You'd get an instant re-flash from the white-hot metal and burning debris after the detonation.
But from the perspective of keeping the rig afloat, the principles are exactly the same.
1. Establish fire boundaries.
1a. Place personnel at those boundaries to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent areas. Cooling bulkheads with short bursts of water to keep them from melting or breaching.
1b. Establish secondary fire boundaries and smoke boundaries. You need a buffer zone that's safe to send relief fire fighters, and also a place to fall back if the primary boundaries fail.
2. Establish flooding boundaries.
2a. Figure out where the water used to fight the fire OR maintain the boundaries is going, where it's going to collect, and how to get it out of there. If the space is small and low to the ship's center of gravity, filling it up won't jeopardize stability. If it's a big space, then you have to pump out the water you use to fight the fires.
2b. Maintain those flooding boundaries. Bring in more pumps, establish hose lines, get the eductors working and get all that water overboard asap. If you don't, the ship will list to one side and make things even more difficult, or possibly capsize the ship. Or even worse, if the water is trapped at the primary fire boundary, it'll start to boil and kill off the fire fighters.
From what I can see in the pictures, it looks like that procedure failed at #1a. There was nobody to fight the fire at all, everyone evacuated. And by the time any fire fighters might have arrived, the "primary boundary" was most likely the ocean itself.
So the theory and practice are exactly the same, it's just that there was nobody around to implement it. And even if there were, I don't know if they'd be able to. That was a HOT fire.
Poor logical assumptions (Score:3, Informative)
So, sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean as this is expected to dump per month.
148 oil tankers were sunk during WW2.
Your logic assumes that all of the oil tankers sunk in WWII were fully loaded. This is not true. The oil tankers that were sunk were in various states between being fully loaded and completely empty.
sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean
Another bad logic assumption. Most oil tankers had their cargo burnt when torpedoed. A number sank but remained intact - not releasing oil. As the steel has corroded over the last 60 years they have begun to leak the oil, which is a problem. Case in point: the USS Mississinewa [wikipedia.org] lay on the ocean floor for 57 years before being discovered, and was found to have 2 million gallons of recoverable oil still onboard. Only a smaller number of tankers would have released oil when under attack, not had this oil ignite and burn, and go on to be released into the ocean.
The claim that every WWII oil tanker was fully loaded at the time of being sunk, and upon being sunk immediately released all of that oil into the ocean, is clearly invalid.
Re:Don't worry BP ... (Score:4, Informative)
Some people in the US wanted to make acoustic triggers mandatory in the US.
A certain Mr Richard Bruce Cheney had a chat with some of his pals and that idea was abandoned.
Re:What about Natural Gas? (Score:2, Informative)
There are three basic problems with natural gas as an automotive fuel:
1. The energy density of the fuel is about 25% of the energy density of gasoline or diesel. Think a fuel tank four times as large, or a range between refueling only 25% as large.
2. The refueling infrastructure is not in place: what you see at Home Depot is LPG, which does work quite well as an automotive fuel, but it is an oil byproduct, and costs more than gasoline.
3. The conversion to natural gas costs $3000-$5000.
There's also the problem of long term supplies. While there is a current surplus of natural gas, at least in the U.S., it isn't enough to fuel widespread conversion of motor vehicles to natural gas. Also, drilling for natural gas is no more benign environmentally than drilling for oil.
Re:Not quite Florida (Score:3, Informative)
Several things here don't add up. The land area of Florida is about 50,000 sq miles. Multiply that by say, 1/16 inch, and you'd be looking at somewhere around 100 MILLION barrels of oil per day. That's more than the entire global consumption rate. There's just no way this one little hole in the ground could be doing that. The oil would have to be leaving the hole faster than 4000 miles per hour. Even if a sheen is visible at a tenth that, you're still looking at crazy high numbers.
On the other hand, the original estimate of 1,000 barrels per day simply doesn't add up with the size of the visible slick on the images you linked to. If it really is just 14kbbl spread over the 100 sq mi or so, the average film thickness would be less than 10 microns (.3 mils).
So just using some common sense estimation, I come up with somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 barrels per day. Any way you slice it, it's a terrible waste and a global tragedy. But we certainly don't need people inflating the truth just to get more hits on their blog.