Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Below the Gulf's Surface 483
An anonymous reader sends in a NY Times article about the spread of oil from the BP gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Quoting:
"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given. ... The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. ... [Scientists on the Pelican mission] suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly. ... Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes."
We should call BP big polluter now! (Score:5, Funny)
We should call BP big polluter now!
Re:We should call BP big polluter now! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We should call BP big polluter now! (Score:5, Insightful)
He also was the prime recipient of millions of dollars from BP. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html [politico.com] The pattern is more than a bit disturbing.
By millions you mean $71,051. Frankly, the 3.5 million dollars over 20 years BP has spend is peanuts, and only make it to 106 on the Heavy Hitters List [opensecrets.org]. But it is unusual that he appears on the top of the list of recipients of BP as well as #2 of the Exxon list, when both companies favour Republicans. But then, even combined they wouldn't be among Obama's Top Contributors [opensecrets.org]
Re:We should call BP big polluter now! (Score:4, Insightful)
But it is unusual that he appears on the top of the list of recipients of BP as well as #2 of the Exxon list, when both companies favour Republicans. But then, even combined they wouldn't be among Obama's Top Contributors [opensecrets.org]
I disagree, the large companies tend to back whomever is favored to win when they don't have a "preferred" (someone they have a relationship with) candidate. That should tell you something about the similarities of the politics between both major parties, as perceived by companies who can/do spend tens of millions analyzing politicians.
Re:Man! (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of the occasional mulishly idealistic college student, most people don't take long to stop caring much about things over which they have absolutely no power.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mobilization has begun. There are already crews attempting to stop the leak, and crews attempting clean up.
Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.
Re:Man! (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.
The Red Cross is doing just fine [charitynavigator.org]..
Net Assets $2,559,637,123
We have determined that this charity has a privacy policy which requires you to tell the charity to remove your name and contact information from mailing lists it sells, trades or shares.
They sell my blood [slate.com] for $200 a pint and then sell my name and address as a blood donor.
Re:Man! (Score:4, Insightful)
Lemme guess. You're still in school - or at least you're very recently graduated. I'm not apathetic, myself, but at age 54, I'm getting there. No matter how bad the news, how dire the warnings, or how hopeless the situation, EVERYONE AROUND ME is an apathetic jackass. Phht. There is no "mobilization". We'll just continue to swirl around and around, until we finally get sucked down the toilet, and find ourselves in the septic tank.
Even then - MOST PEOPLE JUST WON'T FUCKING CARE!
Re:Man! (Score:5, Insightful)
I find curious how apathetic people are these days.
It's like a toon character:
"Hey! Look! The Earth is being destroyed!"
"Yo, man! That sucks!"
Earth may be doomed, but is there hope for us?
We are basically bombarded with completely irrelevant bad news 24/7.
Turn on the TV or radio, fire up a web browser, pick up a newspaper... You'll read about some random person who got kidnapped on the other side of the planet. Or a nasty plane crash somewhere. Or a tsunami.
Yeah, it's sad that somebody is suffering somewhere... But it's really got absolutely no bearing on my life.
And then we're bombarded with big stuff that is relevant, but we can't do anything about it.
Things like the volcano in Iceland, or the oil spill in the gulf. Yeah, it affects me... But there's really nothing I can personally do about it. Maybe throw some money at it in the form of a donation or two... Which might help... But there's absolutely no immediate feedback that I'm doing something to alleviate the problem.
And then we're bombarded with random scary stuff that doesn't even necessarily have a basis in reality.
Somebody, somewhere said that they wanted to kill the President - so now we're at threat level plaid, be afraid! There's some random bowl game coming up and terrorists would love to blow it up, be afraid! Mashed potatoes cause Alzheimers, be afraid! Obamacare is going to destroy Social Security, be afraid!
Is it any wonder that we've learned to tune all that out and just keep chugging along in our day-to-day lives?
It's either that, or stop functioning entirely.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
executives get in trouble for failing to meet fiduciary responsibility if they don't do everything in their power to increase value for shareholders.
I hear this a lot in rants about capitalism, but do you have any examples of this actually happening? I'm familiar with fiduciary duty. I just want to see some example(s) of this occurring in a public company. thanks.
Re:you can do something (Score:5, Insightful)
But we can make BP wish they'd never been so reckless, and give pause to any company still cutting corners on the safety.
Can we really do that?
Stop driving gas guzzlers. Don't fill up at BP gas stations.
Haven't you heard? BP is now Beyond Petroleum. They, as well as pretty much all the big oil companies, are diversifying. They're now energy companies. If we don't buy their gasoline we'll be buying their electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever else.
Use other means of transport or propulsion.
Where I live, there's no public transportation.
Assuming there was public transportation... It'd still be running off some sort of energy, which would likely wind up lining some irresponsible corporation's pockets.
Fire off angry letters to Congress.
Except that this isn't just a national problem. These are international companies acting irresponsibly all over the world.
It may not sound like much, but enough people doing these things will hit them where they live.
Except that it probably won't.
These guys are hired to make the company money - nothing more. Nobody cares what kind of collateral damage there is. As long as the stockholders make money, they're happy.
And even if somebody actually gets fired over this... They've probably got plenty of money to tide themselves over until they get another job with another giant corporation that'll do exactly the same thing.
Hell... Absolute worst-case scenario they just re-brand themselves and pretend like the old corporation is dead while continuing to do business-as-usual under a new name.
Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been reading a little about oil dispersants. I understand that basically they help to break down oil so that microorganisms can do their thing and use the oil as food. Maybe an oversimplification, but that is what I got out of it.
So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know the exact composition of the dispersants. But in all likelihood, they are just tensids - they do not "break down" the oil, they just help with forming an emulsion of tiny droplets rather than an oil slick on the surface. Out of sight, out of mind...
If that is indeed the main mechanism, I fail to see how they would help with bacterial breakdown of the oil. Sure, the emulsion presents a larger surface, but that surface is not actually oil, but a monolayer of the dispersant molecules encapsulating the oil droplets. If the bacterial breakdown still works, the consequences depend on the nature of the bacteria at question. If they are aerobic, i.e. oxygen breathing, your scenario might actually be a problem - eutrophy, oxygen depletion, formation of death zones. The gulf has enough of those already anyway fed by the runoff of the Mississippi.
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are saying is correct, it is truly an 'out of sight out of mind' situation with dispersant solution being used at that depth and at that volume of flow, the BP should NOT have used it but let the oil come up instead where it could have been collected easier (there are machines that can collect it, like this one [wikipedia.org], but for BP at least it is all about making it look better, well, less worse than it really is.
If people are mad right now, thinking it is 5000 barrels a day, wait until the truth actually comes out. That's why BP was spewing pure nonsense that it is not important to know the actual volume of the flow and did not allow the scientists with measuring equipment to approach the area.
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:5, Interesting)
On a related note, why exactly does BP have a say in who gets to do what at the spill site? Why do we let them control this?
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:4, Interesting)
NPR got some experts to use various techniques to analyze the flow. They came up with numbers around a factor of 10 higher than the 5000 bpd estimate.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525 [npr.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do we let them control this?
Because if we don't they can blame any further failures on somebody else.
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:5, Informative)
That would put it on par with Ixtoc I, which went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf.
That would put it well ahead of Ixtoc 1, which at its worst had only half the current best estimate of 50,000 barrels a day for Deep Horizon. Ixtoc 1 in the end released 3 million barrels over 9 months, the largest accidental oil spill in history. Deep Horizon should only take 60 days to break that record, and we are now on day 30.
It should be remembered that Ixtoc 1 was just off the southern Gulf coast of Mexico, hundreds of miles from U.S. waters. Before dismissing the effect of Ixtoc 1, examining studies of what happened in Mexican (not Texan) waters would be in order.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think it's purely to make it look better. Dispersants are usually used in large spills, on the theory that a lot of the damage we most want to avoid (and that costs most to clean up) is large oil slicks washing up on shores, and dispersing the oil is one way of preventing that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They are quite good for keeping the oil where it won't show up on satellite/aircraft photos, and possibly off the beaches where the press would otherwise have a field day taking pictures of oil-soaked baby animals; but they aren't something you do because you care about the marine eco
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
microbes also eat the dispersant chemicals. And yes the massive increase in accessible oil causes the ones that eat oil to go nuts and use up all the oxygen.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
It's like an algae bloom, but with oil-eating bacteria.
Might as well nuke the gulf, because a mid-ocean bloom is the organic equivalent.
I think the problem is not so much that they used oil dispersants, but that they'd never really injected it 5,000 feet down and consequently didn't know what the oil would do.
In any future deepwater disaster, I imagine they won't be injected oil dispersants right next to the well head.
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:4, Informative)
The wee beasties consume oxygen while metabolizing the oil. It's called respiration.
These "giant plumes" are total hyperbole. A few miles is NOTHING in the context of a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico.
Of course the press doesn't sell advertising by putting things into perspective, so we see this sort of nonsense. Which would you rather have? Biodegradation of the oil, or the oil lying around as a permanently available toxin?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Millions of gallons of oil leach into the Gulf every year through natural processes. There is a whole ecology of critters and flora down there that thrive on a certain amount of oil, which is a natural part of the ecosystem. This doesn't absolve BP at all for the huge volume of the leak they have created, but it also seldom gets mentioned by the 'any amount of oil is bad bad bad' crowd who seek to capitalize on the crisis. 'Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste' [youtube.com] after all.
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:5, Insightful)
What you fail to take into account is that natural seepage and massive release are on such opposite sides of the spectrum that "it happens naturally" is not going to make anyone but yourself feel better about this spill.
Happens naturally: a woman's period.
Massive release: getting shot.
Get the point now?
Re:Help me understand oil dispersants (Score:4, Insightful)
Millions of gallons of oil leach into the Gulf every year through natural processes.
Really? Does that happen all in one spot, just off the coast of Louisiana over a short period of time, or is it spread out over the entire Gulf of Mexico over an entire year?
but it also seldom gets mentioned by the 'any amount of oil is bad bad bad' crowd who seek to capitalize on the crisis.
Maybe it doesn't get mentioned because it's a really terrible comparison to what's actually happening? I'm really getting tired of this continuing trend among some people to merely assume everyone is as bad as everyone else, as if everyone in the world has some seedy angle. Child labor laws? That's just a product of people who want to "capitalize" on a less available labor such as Unions and the like. Public libraries? Pushed through by "big learning" and educational institutions so they can get people hooked on learning, and then will need higher education.
Not everything is a special interest. I object on a very basic level to your attempt to imagine some group of people and try to paint them as into a tiny, somehow relevant opinion. Who is this "any amount of oil is bad" crowd, and when did that one point become the over-riding opinion they hold? If they do indeed exist, do they really have any more relevance than the crazy guy down the street who worries about the government mind control rays?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the microorganisms use up oxygen to digest the oil the answer is yes and yes.
Some Good News (Score:5, Informative)
As reported by the WSJ [wsj.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, thank goodness. They found a method of containing the leak that actually allows them to continue collecting the oil.
I was very worried that all the precious oil might just go to waste.
... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
The government has "top men" working on this. Who? "Top men" [wikipedia.org].
Besides, it's silly to think there could be oil elsewhere than the surface.
Yes, there's no value (to us) in trying to determine exactly how badly we've screwed things... It's not like a better estimate would be useful in calculating a level of effort for the cleanup, possibly quantity of cleanup materials, or potential ocean chemistry changes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well I can tell you one thing - the oil flow rate is no where NEAR 80,000 bbl per day. Only 3% of the oil FIELDS in the world produce more than 100,000 bbl per day, and these fields have dozens to hundreds of wells. The average well in Saudi Arabia, with it's immense deposits of light oil produces 5,000 bbl per day. A new field with a productive capacity of 100,000 bbl per day would be very unusual, and this is only ONE well.
The estimate of 5,000 bbl per day actually sounds high to me. This well is a mile d
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, given that
1. BP used an inapplicable methodology for initial flow rate estimates
2. BP is injecting tons of dispersants at depth (so the oil will not reach the surface for years)
3. BP denied access to scientists wanting to do flow measurements,
I'm guessing BP knows they are closer to 50Kbbl/day than 5Kbbl/day.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder what the end effects of such quantites & potential creation of much more vast (than they already are) "death zones" might be; after all, the prevalence of (particular type) of life tends to influence a lot of things...
And for starters, this is an area where hurricanes get their last injection of energy. Or where Gulfstream largely originates.
Hopefully bacteria won't reminds us just yet who is the real ruler of this planet.
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Informative)
That video of the leaking pipe shows stuff coming out of it at a rate of about two pipe diameters per second, if you just watch how fast the moving stuff moves. Some simple math puts that flow rate, for the 20 inch diameter pipe that it's said to be, at 80,000 bbl/day.
The math: the pipe area is ~2 sq ft, the flow rate is ~3 ft/second, the volume per second is 6 cu ft, which is about 45 gallons or one barrel per second. That's ~80k bbl/day.
If my math is wrong, please show me how it's wrong. It's the same math that the univ professors are using.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Informative)
I work as a Petroleum Engineer. The thing about flow in oil and gas wells is that the natural gas has a density that varies with pressure. When the pressure decreases as the fluid flows up the pipe, it increases in velocity and the volume that the gas takes up increases. When the fluid exits the pipe there is going to be a large pressure drop and will give the appearance of a much larger flow rate with small droplets of oil. The flow of hte fluid out of the pipe in the video is not one continuous phase of oil. Gas to Oil ratios in producing wells commonly range from 500 scf/ BOPD through 50,000 scf / BOPD.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A barrel of oil corresponds to 5.6 cu ft. I also saw it reported that BP was removing gas to oil at a ratio of 3000:1 from this well before the explosion.
Since the pressure at 1 mil is about 160 atm that means about 20 cu ft of gas per cu ft of oil at depth. So right there the naive estimate of 80,000 is cut by a factor of 20.
In other words about 4000 bbl/day.
And that doesn't take into account the fact that the pipe is not just cut off and open to the ocean. The leak is through something akin to an orifice.
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:4, Informative)
Scf is standard cubic foot - a measure of volume of gas at a pressure of 1 atmosphere, BOPD is industry jargon for Barrel of Oil Per Day, I believe he meant bbl, which is the unit for a barrel of oil. Scf/bbl is also simply called GOR, or Gas to Oil Ratio.
According to wikipedia, anything less than 10,000 GOR is considered an oil well, and anything over that is considered a gas well.
I have heard that this particular well was very gassy, but I did not hear anybody getting picky about calling it a oil well instead of a gas well so I'd assume it's under 10,000 GOR.
The gist of it is, even experts - who may know a whole lot about about calculating flow rates with various methods - cannot give you an accurate estimation of the flow rate if they don't take into account the various additional factors that are unique to oil. Calculating the flow of an incompressible liquid is a lot different than calculating the flow of a compressible liquid when you come from great depths, and the details are critical for a remotely accurate estimate.
In other words, the fact that it came from an expert doesn't make it any less of a wild ass guess if said expert does not have all the relevant information.
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't understand why:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"BP still has the authority to say "no you can't study the ocean floor.""
Because if you've got half a dozen ROVs [wikipedia.org], each with their own umbilical cable down there trying to fix the problem, the last thing you want is scientists or fishermen trolling across the area as if there was no issue with them deploying their gear too. It's probably challenging enough to keep half a dozen surface ships/rigs on-site and a bunch of ROVs from bumping or tangling with each other.
For as long as BP is in charge of the cleanu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. According to reports, the first insertion of the siphon pipe was successful, but the siphon was subsequently knocked loose when two of the ROVs collided with each other, then with the siphon.
Re:... Hear no evil. See no evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
See, you don't know what you are talking about. Public resources are public and thus under the public protection, otherwise any asshole would be 'sending a robot' to drill on the ocean floor for a common resource. Of-course today the Government is bought by corporations, including the oil companies, so they get easy and basically free access to mine those public resources without giving back much of anything and thus gaining unimaginable profits.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Relief wells don't relieve pressure on a well by pumping oil out of the reservoir, it would take years to measurably reduce the PSI.
What relief wells do is push material in to the well along the pipe column of the original well. The idea is to plug the well up with debris (mud and rocks, stuff that his much more dense than the oil) and thereby reduce the pressure so you can cap the well.
It's not relieving pressure like a relief valve in a pressure cooker, it is relieving pressure like cholesterol in a clog
Call my a cynic... (Score:3, Informative)
}"substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given"
Was there ever any doubt that it would be worse...?
Free Market Man is here! (Score:3, Funny)
The free market will fix this. People will stop putting BP gas in their car and BP will go out of business. Leading others to clean up the spill, garner goodwill with the public, and have consumers put that company's gas in their car.
Right?
Right?....
Big Plug (Score:3, Interesting)
So maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't they just design a big plug and stick it in the pipe? Would that cause the pipe to rupture or something? Or try to reroute the oil by attaching a big to the pipe that's spewing oil?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Big Plug (Score:4, Insightful)
Because every figure he gave was wrong.
The casing pipe (the pipe you can see) is 21 inches in diameter, not 5 feet. The borehole (the hole that was actually drilled down to the reservoir, which you can't see) is 9 inches in diameter.
The pressure is easily calculated - 45 psi per 100 feet of water, and 100psi per 100 feet of sedimentary rock. 5,000 feet of water gives you 2250 psi, and 11,000 feet of rock give you 11,000psi. Total pressure on the reservoir is therefore 13,250psi, with the pressure differential between the two ends of the borehole at 11,000psi.
However, you can't just calculate that out with the density of crude oil to get the actual flow rate, and therefor the pressure, coming out of the pipe, because you don't know the gas to oil ratio of the oil or the porosity of the reservoir rock, which affect how fast the oil flows and how dense it is, which determines the force it exerts as it exits the pipe.
This is why I call bullshit on so called experts who claim to have calculated the flow accurately. Visual calculation methods cannot be made accurately because of the lack of information about the gas to oil ratio - one 50k-100k visual based estimate I read assumes a GOR of zero (no gas), which is absurd, the oil at 150 degrees (the temp of the oil in the reservoir) and 13,000+ psi can hold a crapload of gas in suspension, which could easily make the visual estimate off by 50% or more. This is because as the pressure drops on the way up the borehole, the gas comes out of suspension and expands, causing the flow to increase dramatically but the ratio of oil by volume to gas decreases dramatically as well. The result is what appears to be a massive gusher of an oil leak that is actually mostly gas.
Non-visual based calculations lack even more critical information about the composition of the oil that are necessary to make accurate calculations, like the porosity of the rock, the GOR again, and whether or not there are any obstructions that inhibit the flow.
Frankly I'm very skeptical of anything over 30,000 barrels a day, that's one hell of a high flowing oil well as it is. 50,000 barrels a day I'm extremely skeptical of, and I dismiss anything more than that out of hand as virtually impossible. Oil wells simply don't flow that fast.
Dumping a second poison to hide the first (Score:5, Interesting)
The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic [nytimes.com], which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.
The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view [salon.com], so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.
And we'll believe it.
But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.
Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's Sarah Palin (Score:4, Funny)
Sarah Palin...
is out parasailin'.
Re:Where's Sarah Palin (Score:4, Insightful)
The insistence of the political mainstream to stick to slogans is so backwards... This includes both the conservatives and liberals.
Re:Where's Sarah Palin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where's Sarah Palin (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "extreme left" in the US just like there is no "Left", "Right", "Extreme Right", or "Central".
All of these terms are made up to make us think that we still have a choice. To make us think that this isn't for all intents and purposes a one party system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you're saying that because a company got greedy, wasn't regulated well enough, and fucked something up, that means we should stop doing it? Wow, that's rational. So I guess if I fall down the stairs today everyone should stop using stairs? Yeah, we as a society should be hellbent on renewable energy and kicking the oil addiction, but in the meantime, I'd prefer to drill locally instead of bleeding out money in the form of foreign oil imports. Really, are you making the argument that because things c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's Sarah Palin (Score:4, Insightful)
You are almost right except this: No amount of Government intervention (regulation) can do anything about all possible ways someone may fuck up in all different companies in all different sectors of economy.
Have the Government do what it should do on behalf of the People: Sue the Shit out of BP, Halliburton and Transocean, get the damages, cleanup and x100 or x1000 liability as a way to scare the fuck of all the other companies who are pumping oil, gas, digging coal etc etc etc
Do this: destroy the fucking BP if necessary and also, screw the corporate protection, arrest the management, arrest whoever wasn't doing the job right and also put every single prick from MMS (that's the Government agency literally is fucking with the corporate whores, literally) to jail for 10 consecutive life sentences. Or shoot them Chinese style.
You have to do it. Have to distribute the punishment to the guilty and be consistent about it. That's the way to avoid the future 'calamities' like this one.
Re:i LOL (Score:4, Informative)
Re:i LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually BP no longer stands for British Petroleum officially, but meh.. No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
Re:i LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
"Previously known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company," of Operation Ajax fame. The wikipedia has a decent article on Operation Ajax - maybe some people would like to look at it. The United States literally overthrew a legitimate government, for the sake of BP's profits. Not something that the UK or the US government readily admits to.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
Tell me about it. A few weeks ago, I was posting on another forum about banking, and was recounting how a bank account that I've had for years started out as a regional S&L, and through about 4 or 5 mergers finally ended up being with Bank of America. While researching Bank of America's history in order to get my facts straight, I saw this gem on the Bank of America wiki page [wikipedia.org].
Bank of America's history dates to 1904, when Amadeo Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco....
Somehow I don't see them playing that bit of their history up what with their Stars and Stripes logo and all.
Re:i LOL (Score:5, Informative)
Bear in mind that several years ago, BP merged with another company and kept the BP name. That company? Amoco. AMerican Oil COmpany.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah - as someone who has been through 4 mergers, it's the "tow-mah-tow" to acquisition's "tow-may-tow". Probably there are differences in accounting and filings to regulatory agencies, but within each company, what ever name was kept was the winner.
Re:i LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a publicly traded multinational corporation. The world's fourth largest, in fact. I think it's pretty much transcended nationality. The CEO is Swedish, FWIW.
Re:i LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Damnit, I knew we should have bombed Swederland when we had the chance!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
BP's corporate headquarters are still firmly rooted in the UK, and all major corporate decisions come out of corporate home base. Trust me, I work for them.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
While that is ordinarily not a reason to trust you, I guess I'll trust you on this. ;)
Re:i LOL (Score:5, Informative)
you americans are fucked, hahah. thats what you get with your evil oil companies.
Actually, it's what Americans get when they let a British oil company deploy a Swiss drilling platform with German companies responsible for safety. Massive US lobbying efforts by BP also contributed to the lack of regulation, all in the name of international fairness and free trade.
And historically, Europe's record on oil spills is far worse than that of the US [wikipedia.org]. Of course, being obedient little nationalists, Europeans love to find fault with the US while their own governments are screwing them.
Hopefully, as a result of this disaster, the US will severely limit the ability of foreign companies to lobby in the US, and hopefully it will kick out European oil companies with their poor safety records once and for all.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worst Catastrophe In History (Score:5, Funny)
Great. So the oil is nicely contained in dense plumes. BP just needs to stick a giant straw into the plumes and suck that stuff right up :-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a possibility, but the current oil collecting ships like this one from the German Navy [wikipedia.org] collect water by opening a wide 'mouth' on the ship from the top of the water, I wonder if they could install a pump and a long hose to do what you are proposing.
Re:Worst Catastrophe In History (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a possibility, but the current oil collecting ships like this one from the German Navy [wikipedia.org] collect water by opening a wide 'mouth' on the ship from the top of the water, I wonder if they could install a pump and a long hose to do what you are proposing.
While possibly a valid idea, there are the economics to consider. The "leak" is spewing over 210 million gallons a day, while an average to large oil tanker can store about 62 million gallons (assuming my math guesstimate is correct). That means (at 100% efficiency, inotherwords, 100% oil collection 0% water/sediment/etc collection) it would take almost four tankers a day to collect the spewing oil to prevent an increase in the amount of uncontained oil from increasing.
It would also take an equivalent amount (of gallons) worth of storage and/or processing facilities to deal with the "dirty oil" that was collected. None of this takes into account whatever percentage of the liquid they collect is not oil (ie: say, using such a collection method results in a 60/40% oil/water ratio) - which increases the cost (number of tankers, size of storage/processing facilities, etc).
While I think that BP and those other companies involved should be put on the hook for whatever it takes to prevent this catastrophe from growing any further, the simple fact is that no one at BP is going to even consider or "think up" a method of dealing with this situation in a manner that so adversely affects their bottom line. I also seriously doubt that the government, who is dependent on BP's revenue for taxation, is going to think up such a scenario as well. That is where the economics involved come into play.
Sometimes (often maybe?) the economics of such a situation prevent the better methods of dealing with the environmental aspects from even being considered. Sadly, the reality of human greed of those in power usually trumps environmental needs or the needs of the "not so rich" who get adversely affected by situations such as these. It's far cheaper for them do to nothing, or spend lotsa time "analyzing" the situation to come up with lame-brained but cheap solutions than to actually do something to fix it if the economics are not favorable to the "powers that be" involved in the crisis.
Re:Worst Catastrophe In History (Score:4, Informative)
At 42 gallons/barrel, that would be 5 million barrels per day. TTBOMK, no oil well in history has ever come within an order of magnitude of that sort of flow rate. BP's estimate is 5,000 bbl/day, often converted to 210,000 gal/day by the media. Even the nightmarish estimates some academics are putting out are on the order of 80,000 bbl/day, or 3.4 million gallons/day. You appear to be off by a factor of anywhere from 60 to 1,000. Using BP's estimate of the flow is rate, and your estimate of tanker capacity, it's about one tanker every 300 days.
Think of it like a milkshake. (Score:3, Insightful)
All we need to do is drink the milkshake.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Worst Catastrophe In History (Score:5, Interesting)
As an immigrant from a 3rd world, and after watching American and British and lately chinese interests eat away resources such as forests and minerals, and watching western oil companies pollute and then using economic blackmail to suppress voices, I personally feel this is a positive thing.
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
It's the only way anyone learns - to borrow an IT analogy, there are two types of people in this world. Those who take backups and those who have never lost any data.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hah. Because in the 3rd world, American trash gets dumped right in your backyard, rather than down in Texas where nobody gives a shit. :-)
Re:Worst Catastrophe In History (Score:4, Interesting)
The AC's point was that America does not care when it is out of sight, out of mind. AC is 100% correct.
The problem is that AC limits it to just America. That is a mistake. It absolutely should include EU as well as Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and most of all, China. Basically, it is the industrial nations that are doing this. Now, most of the west has cleaned up OUT nations, but a big part of that was done by outsourcing. It is hypocritical on our part to do that. It needs to change. That is why I keep speaking out against the EU approach on Climate: that is for the west to tax ONLY our goods. That is the dead wrong approach. Instead, every nation should be taxing ALL goods based on the pollution (start with CO2) that is in the area for the good as well as the largest sub-component. After time, change the CO2 to include Mercury, and other pollutants. THis approach is the ONLY way to clean up the world.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So, if we wern't drilling for oil... (Score:5, Insightful)
If humans never (or, say before humans did so) drilled for oil, wouldn't the oil still be there, and occasionally be released by events such as earthquakes?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aUqFB_GbhRYM [bloomberg.com]
Haiti's 7.0 earthquake "may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, [Stephen Pierce, a geologist] said yesterday in a telephone interview."
What earthquakes do not do is drill a hole 18,000 feet deep.
Re:So, if we wern't drilling for oil... (Score:5, Insightful)
The disasters would happen, but they wouldn't all happen in the same century.
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Re:So, if we wern't drilling for oil... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bit worse than that, though not substantially worse. (Depending, of course, on just how much oil is released.) This may be enough additional stress to convert the entire gulf into a dead zone, rather than the partial dead zone that we've dealt with previously.
If enough oil is released it could also spread a dead zone up the Gulf Stream, though I feel this is doubtful. OTOH, the ocean off-shore the coast is already home to many dead zones, so it might not require that much additional stress.
This could be a disaster to the fishing industries, which are already nearing collapse due to over-fishing and improper fishing. (Again, just adding a bit more stress to something that's already overstressed.) This, of course, will cause other food prices to rise, which they were already doing due to the increases in the price of oil.
Nothing here looks like a disaster to the Earth, but it's a pretty big disaster to the humans that happen to live near the area...and to some that don't live that near, but were already under near limiting stress. Also to some species. Some have probably already been wiped out. More probably will be. These were generally species that had already been pushed near extinction, and this will have been just the final blow. Others only live/d in a restricted area, and when that area is rendered uninhabitable, they die.
Just to put things in perspective, a nuclear war that killed off all humans and most other mammals wouldn't be a disaster to the Earth. Only to the people. But as a person, I would find it a major disaster. (Presuming that I lived long enough. Quite unlikely as I live in a major metropolitan area.) Saying that something isn't a major disaster just because it isn't a disaster to the Earth is stupidly unreasonable. Only the collision that split off the moon has counted as a major disaster to the Earth. Even the incident that killed off 90% of all species (genera?) wasn't a major disaster to the Earth.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Who said anything about the dinosaurs adapting? The *Earth* adapted.
Re:Nuke the F-ING thing. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nuke the F-ING thing. (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I [wikipedia.org] spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I [wikipedia.org] spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave). But Ixtoc 1 "only" released a total of 3 million barrels over those 9 months, an average flow rate more like 10,000 barrels a day.
Deep Horizon looks like it will only take 60 days to break the world record for an accidental oil spill, and we are now in day 30, with no estimate of when it is
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Protons are protons you fucking idiot yes the sun radiates nuclear radiation
Re:So if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, so you have an economical, reliable method for:
* pumping millions of tons of oxygen
* almost a mile below the ocean's surface
* and dissolving it in trillions of gallons of water
Goddamn armchair engineers... Seriously, you're about as divorced from reality as BP's PR team.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't tell that to the homeopaths.