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How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill?
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 And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.
The spill's smell now rivals that of New Jersey.
We will be footing the bill, not you. With higher gas prices that is.
Last i heard they were going to drop a giant concrete dome down on top of the hole and pump that out directly.
As for all the oil already floating around... well... sucks to be an animal in the ocean this month.
Then why are you posting anonymously? When Nixon signed all the current environmental laws in the 1970s, it was because pollution was so bad that it could not be denied as a figment of liberal media. And here comes another such event. Welcome to your worst nightmare. And mine.
We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.
Yet we still need oil, so we'll keep pumping. Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs, and we complain when we need to pay more for gas. Well, we can't have it both ways. If we want to live 25 miles from where we work, we're going to have to pay for it. If we don't pay for it at the pump, then we'll have to pay for it when a shared resource, like the ocean, is destroyed.
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.
It really seems like an understatement to call this a 'spill', as though it were a limited quantity from an oil freighter or something. It's an underwater gusher. I knew it was a huge disaster when it was reported as such with the addendum of at least 30 days to fix. At least. How would they even fix something like that? Has anything like this been attempted before?
Loose lips lose spit.
How about Bobby Jindal?
Or is crying for the feds "You're not doing enough!" all he can do?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Oh, we're far from facing the death of the oceans. Even acidification and warming and ocean current changes won't do that.
What the added oil is is another stressor to the system.
Instead we'll see a slow collapse of traditional fisheries, meaning lots of people going poor and hungry, and Red Lobster offering all-you-can-eat Giant Squid and tilapia dinners.
That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.
* * *
One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.
I'm rather certain it's the oilpocalypse.
Sent from my PDP-11
Why do we have to go through the slashdotted blog.alexanderhiggins.com to see images hosted at NASA? This is the dumbest thing so far this month.
CG Pin-Ups?
> apocalypse
Well, if uncapped it is bound to start burning at some time, isn't?
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
There are two ways of looking at what to do -- proximate and ultimate.
In the proximate sense, one thing to do is volunteer time or supplies if you're in an affected area. I'm in Florida -- in my area, I know right now of Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary ( http://www.seabirdsanctuary.com/uploads/oil.pdf ) and Audubon Florida ( http://audubonoffloridanews.org/ ), which are each asking for volunteers, money, and/or supplies. Other organizations may be looking for help -- help if you can, spread the word even if you can't.
In the ultimate sense, it's hard not to become reactionary to things like this. Clearly there's a need for some serious prevention, and however that comes about, it must. There are boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and the like, and while they may seem awfully pedestrian, the first step in each is something that's been needed for an exquisitely long time -- awareness. People don't tend to realize that the oceans are just downstream from everyone -- for example, just how many people do you think recognize the oil spill that dribbles into the Gulf every year from runoff into the Mississippi watershed? It's once people start to realize what's happening, what's important, and where changes need to happen that movement toward change occurs. Oil being the trigger word that it is these days, it's hard to say whether or not ocean health is foremost in people's minds. Building awareness -- even inland! -- is about getting it there.
I don't know what the key is. Maybe it's kids asking whether the animals they love seeing at the aquarium are going to be lost because of the oil spill. Maybe it's fishermen who lose their livelihoods because their fisheries are either contaminated or outright destroyed. Maybe it's people who worked in tourism and sports industries that previously thrived on healthy beaches and coastal waters. Whatever that key is, some catalysis needs to happen soon, and it needs to start with people simply caring enough to understand and do something, wherever they are, however they can. Too much is at stake.
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
Do people really think offshore drilling should be stopped because of this?
Transitions should be made to other forms of power, but my Lord, what else is there to substitute for oil for transportation in the short-mid term? Nothing. We need to get more oil. The WSJ reported that the Department of the Interior knew about failings of shear rams in deepwater conditions (the mechanism that should have shut this well down) since 2004 but didn't do anything about it.
Thanks, Uncle Sam. BP holds blame, the US government holds blame, and Transocean holds blame. But we should increase safety mechanism reliability and oversight without going Greenpeace on this.
Note of credibility: I love LA and am from the Gulf Coast. I grasp what this can do to the local economy and my oyster appetite. I can see rigs from 1/4 mile from my old back yard. Without proper safeguards, this shit happens. But it's unavoidable that we drill. Let's manage risk better.
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.
We all die, of course. It's the end of the world. This is utterly catastrophic and utterly unprecedented. No such thing could ever happen naturally, At no time in the entire history of the planet has erosion or tectonic activity ever ruptured a large oil reservoir. There are no bacteria that metabolize oil and it does not oxidize or decay naturally in any way, and it kills everything it touches. It will float on the surface of the ocean forever, bringing an end to all life.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Considering the weather conditions that have largely persisted since the explosion, what exact good would putting out booms earlier done? Other than, of course, BP and the politicians briefly looking a little better (and by that I mean very briefly). I'd prefer responses that actually do something to responses which seem more designed as photo-ops for BP's CEO and the President.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If BP raises their prices, it opens the door for their competitors to under cut them.
The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price. The the other producers can't meet demand, the price will rise to BP's costs. If the can, then BP will be losing sales and income to them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Generally that channeling mechanism is a pipe of some sort, you can't just hope that the oil will float predictably upwards to a set location through a mile thick medium of salt water that has its own currents.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
to finally convince people to support alternative energy.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
mt
It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.
I just got me a row boat and a bucket. Free oil! Woo Hoo!!! The arabs can kiss my oily ass!
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?
The thing that's been on my mind a lot over the last couple of days is that I've heard numerous accusations over the years that the whole Gulf offshore industry is a health and safety nightmare compared to European (notably North Sea) operations... While we don't know the cause of the explosion yet (and, obviously, North Sea rigs have had explosive accidents) does anyone have any real commentary about Euro vs NA safety, and/or the likelihood of an equivalent type of accident in Europe?
An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.
It is like people who think CO2 emissions don't matter because volcanoes do it as well. Indeed they do, but have these people never heard of adding up. This spil comes on top of all the others. On top of the coral reefs already dying, on top of fish stocks already being over fished, on top of the plastic we have been dumping whole sale in to the ocean.
Will this be the straw that killed the camels back? Hard to say, but if fishing is hurt then that means some areas need to pay more for their food then they do now and not everyone can afford that. Plus the replacement food will have to be grown somewhere else.
And down the line, some fish migrate and others are dependent on long food chains. I don't know what grows in place X that is eaten in place Y that has an effect on populations in Z.
This isn't about one tanker sinking with the oil inside. It is about tanker after tanker being emptied in one single spot with no way to end it so far except waiting for one of the biggest oil fields to run out. And that could be REALLY bad because according to the people who want to drill everywhere, oil doesn't run out.
The apocalypse won't come in a flash of thunder, it will the eco-system slowly dying from being over-stressed. Less 2012, more YKK or Testament.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.
It's swung so far in the direction of statism that "left" and "right" have become devoid of any real meaning. Both used to mean a set of political principles. Now they're just two different approaches to the same goal of expanding government. What is now called "right" wants to expand government for the purposes of defense and national security. What is now called "left" wants to expand government for the purposes of social engineering and entitlements. The result is the same and the two ideologies are little more than excuses or justifications.
The two-party system has done to politics what a reasonable person would expect a duopoly to do to a market. The former fails to serve the interests of the voter just like the latter fails to serve the interests of the customer. In both scenarios the voter and the customer are viewed as a means of maintaining power.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
They will be forced to pay the legal max of $75 million then there is a special $1-2billion fund for oil spill clean up that is part of the gas tax we all pay. As for safety they had a blow out protector/shut off but it's was either damaged or defective as it failed to activate. Right now there not much they can do to contain the spill on the surface because of bad weather. They are doing all they can to get the shut off activated with ROVs but they can only do so much given how complicated it is to do anything 5,000' below of the surface in bad weather. Sadly the vast majority of people are naive idiots who want BP and the Feds to snap there fingers and make it all better instantly. This is a very complicated and complex operation in deep water then again this is /. which is full of "elites" who know they can do it better and fully grasp all the problems and would have no problem getting it done instantly.
Oh come on. Wind has been driving the slick over the booms. It isn't just where it appears on the surface that counts, it's the actual effectiveness of the booms, and that's pretty much determined by weather conditions.
The harsh reality is that there probably was no way to mitigate an event like this. You have at least 5,000 barrels a day barfing out of an uncontrolled well 5000 feet under the water, with intervening currents carrying it all over the place even before it reaches the surface, and then bad weather pushing it even further. The reality is that technologies like booms and dispersant chemicals may be reasonably effective for relatively small spills, but an ongoing high pressure river of oil puking out from the Gulf seafloor is not an event you can control.
The only real solution is going to be to find a way to divert or cap the well itself. Everything else, including washing the seabirds off, is just 6 o'clock news fodder. The fact is that once that platform exploded and burned uncontrolled, any hope of mitigating this disaster in the short term went out the window. I know you want to imagine some set of circumstances after the explosion that wouldn't have lead to a vast slick growing bigger and bigger, but this is simply too big for any containment measures invented thus far. Ultimately the well will have to be capped, as much shoreline as possible will be cleaned off, and the oil will ultimately end up in the sediments like the most of the Exxon Valdez oil did. We're basically going to have to let nature do its thing, and eat the damage to certain industries that is going to incur over the next few years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You seem to be thinking that the ocean needs to be saturated with oil for it to have an effect. Most of the ocean is already dead, always has been. The whole eco-system depends on a few rich spots to feed it. Why do you think so many sea live hold such epic migrations? Because they like it?
How can a tiny bit of metal possibly kill a human being? Fine, let me stick a needle in your brain, see how long you last. Maybe a long time, maybe not long at all.
Killing the eco-system doesn't have to be whole-sale slaughter. All you have to do is knock over one part of the food-chain. It doens't even have to mean the end of life in the ocean. The wrong algea start to grow out of control, and you have plenty of life, and also death at the same time.
Will this be it? Well we better just bloody hope it isn't because else we are screwed. But the right wingers seem determined to keep trying to screw up until they finally really manage to screw us all.
Gosh, off-shore drilling isn't safe. Irak doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Banks do need goverment control. Are republicans even capable of saying "we were wrong"?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Obama is no where near the left. The American political spectrum is shifted so far right that our "left" candidates are too far on the right for most first world nations' center-right parties.
I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."
There is something wrong with a lot of people that prevents them from accepting that we are mortal beings and the world, in many ways, is a dangerous place. It's like they want to live a modern lifestyle directly or indirectly involving such things as cars, other heavy machinery, electricity, oil, prepared foods, medicine, aviation and lots of other things but do not want to acknowledge the non-zero risk associated with them. Unfortunate events like this oil spill are considered newsworthy because they are so rare despite the vast multitude of things that can potentially go wrong, which is nothing other than an engineering triumph.
On a mundane level, we need and want oil so it's a question of where it will come from, not whether we will have it. Apparently it's more acceptable to some to pay foreigners to do the drilling for us than it is to also use our own resources. It's as though birds and fish in oceans in other parts of the world wouldn't suffer from an oil spill as much as the animals affected by this one, as though foreign oil workers killed by an explosion wouldn't be just as dead as our domestic oil workers who were killed by this one.
On a more philosophical level, we are mortal. One can deal with that by fearing every little thing that might bring harm. In that case, you should not drive and you probably shouldn't stay home either since many accidents happen there. Good luck having any real quality of life if you spend such a great deal of time worrying about the end of life. Or one can deal with this by taking reasonable precautions and then viewing mortality in a different light, as an incentive to taste life to the dregs and enjoy every moment you have and every person you know as much as possible during the time you have. The problem with media sensationalism and politics is that fear sells and there is little profit and political power to be had by seeing it this way. The one strong advantage this gives is that anyone who holds this viewpoint does it genuinely as an individual choice since it's exactly the opposite of what we are daily encouraged to believe.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Really? By that logic,
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
...this one will do that in three days if that crimped riser pipe gives way. And how long are they saying it'll take to fix it? Months?
He's a corporatist. If you think he is left wing, you really have guzzled the Flavor-Aid.
Both Left and Right are corporatist. They are merely two different brands of corporatism that use different approaches to achieve the same goal of statism. Pick the most "conservative" political candidate and pick the most "liberal" political candidate. Then do some research and look at their list of sponsors. See all the names they have in common? Why, it's almost as though the people who bankroll campaigns don't care who wins...
The bickering about Left vs. Right is designed to distract attention away from what is actually happening. I wish I could recall and attribute the eloquent quote about our politics becoming more polar as our political parties become more homogeneous, for it's an accurate one. The distraction is all about divide and conquer. Like "bread and circus" or "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" it's an age-old tactic used by rulers and governments throughout history for the simple reason that it's effective. Here's why it works: the more time we waste blaming "the other party" for society's ills the less time we spend demanding more freedom in the form of minimal government.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The top 10 rated "News" shows are on conservative networks in the US. Please elaborate on your premise of a liberal-biased media.
One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/01/nation/la-na-oil-spill-investigation-20100501
Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
I define "statist" in terms of the size and power of the federal government. Currently its size as measured by dollars is around 35% of GDP. Compare that to just ten years ago and you'll quickly see my point. Note that the relative size of government measured as a percentage of GDP should be inherently self-adjusting for inflation.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're absolutely right. I'm Irish and to me, the Democrats are, at best, moderate and at worst, on the hard right compared to my left wing politics. In fact, the former American Ambassador to Ireland, Tom Foley, once called me "an out and out Marxist". Now I'm no Marxist, hell, I'm not even communist, but considering his politics and the huge swing to the right that Americans have had since Reagan, I took it as being that I was simply one of the few true left wingers that he had encountered in those early days of his tenure in Ireland!
There is no -1 disagree
You can't get more liberal than chris matthews, keith olderman, rachel maddow and the rest of cnn. In fact, I can only think of two commentators who aren't socialistic liberals, and neither of them are on cnn.
with the exception of a couple of centrist commentators on fox, liberalism dominates the mainstream media.
Why we thought that the oil companies could honestly handle this on their own is beyond me.
Didn't you get the memo? Government is the problem, not the solution. The free market will handle everything!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time.
We could also take it as a sign that our way of living needs to change. We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources. People hate to acknowledge it, but it's the simple truth.
Just writing this sort of accident off as "the cost of doing business" only works in the short term. Eventually, the cheap, accessible oil will be gone, the ecological damage will be irreversible, and then we'll still have to switch over to other energy sources. It's clear that we're heading down a blind alley, so why not turn around ASAP, rather than waiting until all possible damage has been done?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Oh, this oughta be good. Please. Name some "centrists" who have shows on Fox.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
There were 6 safety systems that all had to fail for this to happen
Which is a pretty good indication that there was only one that had to fail to happen: we had to let Conservatives talk us into trusting an oil company to install 6 layers of safety.
Thing I don't get is why every car today is still running on oil based fuels.
30 years ago, the LA times truck that pulled up each week to offload the "Calendar" sections we put in the Sunday papers. On the back, it had a sign which said "this truck is running on clean natural gas". I thought, "cool, no more smog!" If they are already using on LA times trucks, it can't too long before some cars have it too. No more Arab oil embargoes, etc.
In about 2004 or 2005, the Washington area metro converted its entire fleet of buses to natural gas in about a year. I work near a major Metro station and could see the first few buses and was excited. Within a year, it was rare to see an old diesel bus. No more smelly diesel fumes!. If an agency as incompetent as Washington Metro can convert its entire bus fleet in a year, how hard can it be?
We have been able to do this easily for at least 30 years. Apparently to convert a regular gas engine to natural gas requires only a few modifications, to the gas tank (obviousely), fuel lines and injectors. As anyone who has been to a Home Depot or most grocery stores knows, the distribution system is also already in place.
Imagine the marketplace if we had 3 different fuel systems for transporation: Oil, Natural Gas, and Electricity. Then as a bad computer analogy, imagine if Windows, Linux, and OS/X each had about a 33% market share.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Oh I agree, and furthermore, if this accident turns out to be as bad as the worst case, then I'd predict that this is probably the end of BP the company. They're probably looking at bankruptcy, and then being broken up into assets that are purchased by their competitors. In the worst case.
Ultimately, BP is responsible for this as they leased the rig and hired the subcontractors. I'm not going to demonize BP. Right now, the cause is all a matter of speculation until they can get the well capped and do a proper investigation. Accidents happen (and yes, I live in a gulf state not too far from the coast), and the truth is, no one is giving up fossil fuels anytime soon, because there simply isn't a really practical replacement right now. Supplements, yes. Replacements... not so much. I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Not "cementing the rig shut". Cement is often used to seal the gap between the borehole and the well casing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well#Drilling
Have gnu, will travel.
That might just make things worse. Whether its melting the top of the drill string shut with a nuke, or some other method of slamming a valve shut, you've got to think about what 10,000 feet of flowing crude represents in terms of inertia. It'll probably just squirt the drill pipe right out of the borehole. Many well control systems include a 'down-hole' shutoff valve in addition to the surface blowout preventer. Its the only way to stop such a flow once it gets going.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.
If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors, s-type eductors and just plain mops and buckets.
I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.
But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.
The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.
Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.
This thing went *BOOM* in a way it's not supposed to go boom.
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Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.
What do you call the government-sponsored bailouts of various financial companies, or government expanding into the health-care insurance market? Or a few years prior to that, the federalization of airport security into the TSA, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, or the Patriot Act? If these are not (relatively) new policies I don't know what would qualify.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
How are are the results "the same"? The US government already spends some 41.5% of the world's military expenditures, and probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces. It also spends a lot of money on social security, medicare, and soon health care, and the results of those programs are people who might survive job loss, illness, or old age. Now, which one you care about more depends on your political views, but it does matter where the government is big.
They're the same because the federal government is looking for growth areas and will exploit them wherever they are found. Any benefit to me as a taxpayer is indicental.
You mention Social Security and health care. If I could, I would opt out of Social Security entirely. I'm in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one. That is, I cannot tell you why my failure to plan ahead should become someone else's emergency. I certainly cannot tell you a good reason why the Baby Boomers could not have felt the same way as I do, why they prefer to burden their children and grandchildren instead of working to make sure they have a better life then they had. As far as I am concerned, they are the most selfish group to ever exercise suffrage.
It's likewise with health insurance. I pay a monthly premium for my health insurance. I see it this way: I pay an insurance premium so that I am prepared in the event of a medical disaster, or I risk bankruptcy. I chose to pay the insurance premium. Other people will have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis as they see fit. So long as they don't dip into my wallet to make up for their shortcomings, I have no problem with this.
Where the government is so big is precisely where people don't want to use some foresight and plan ahead and take personal responsibility for their situation. There's nothing politicians love more than a crisis to solve. The problem is, a "crisis" that involves adults who could not properly plan for inevitabiltiies is not actually a crisis at all. Those adults deserve to be left to their own devices. If they succeed, uphold them as examples of good planning. If they fail, use them as examples of why one should think of these things ahead of time. Yet that's not good enough for big government, and it's apparently big business to protect people from their own poor decision-making.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The problem is that there are "Progressives" in BOTH parties. It's not about left/right or liberal/conservative or even Republican/Democrat. Nixon, both Bushes, Carter and Obama were/are Progressives.
Personally I believe that the government that governs best governs least.
We are. Shame on us.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Even though hydrogen is an inefficient carrier of energy, hydrogen isn't stupid if electricity is cheap enough. With enough hydropower (no new technology needed), we'd have enough power to make enough hydrogen to do pretty much whatever we wanted in terms of power. We would at least have a chance of getting the transportation sector (our achilles heel) off of oil.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Let not forget which party made this their slogan.
You know that Obama put those clouds there, right?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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. 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.
The huge mistake you make is in assuming that all forms of calamity can be warded off with proper planning. It's true that there's a heck of a lot that can be avoided with foresight and preparation. But a well-placed hurricane, bullet, love affair, or metastatic tumor can annihilate every one of those plans.
I suspect you're the kind of personality that thrives on feeling like you're in control and have the moral high ground. And that's all very well and good up to a point, but:
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!"
(Robert Burns)
No matter how carefully you plan, it can all go to shit in an instant. And there's nothing you can do about it. EVER.
So if your worldview depends on cognitive errors like the just-world fallacy, or blaming the victim...well, then you're almost guaranteed to spend your last days in a state of abject terror and despair. Good luck with that.
depends on whether BP wants to take the short view or the long view. they're probably bound to lose a little on the disaster, but, as someone noted elsewhere, if they want to take a longer view, they can restrict global supply, causing prices to rise... competitors *could* increase output to keep prices down, but higher prices are in their competitors' interest as well...maximizes the profit for any well that is currently producing, so their competitors are likely to capitalize on the higher prices rather than trying to stick-it to BP by increasing production. the problem with the picture as you paint it is that each company is trying to maximize the profit they can make off each well while at the same time getting enough of a share of the market that they can fund continued operations. if prices suddenly rise, it's not in their interest to bring them down...likewise, it's not in their interest to make up for anything but a significant shortfall in production. of course, they are also walking a delicate public-relations and public-policy balancing act, so they have to give a little sometimes in the interest of keeping the customer hooked...but it's certainly not a case of the market working strictly in the customer's favour.
People do get to judge their neighbours and do it all the time. Americans lately seem to want to express their opinion on how shitty everyone else's healthcare is even if they have zero experience with it.
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.
In a few million years when the cockroach archaeologists are poking around, they are going to have a hell of a time figuring out what actually killed us off.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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 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.
Seriously; no more new business allowed for British Petroleum in the US. They had a an oil spill in Alaska because they ignored maintenance that lead to pipe corrosion; had a massive refinery explosion in Texas with fatalities, and in this case, they glibly assumed this very failure would never occcur (which was rubber-stamped by ineffective Bush-era 'regulators' in the Minerals office). In every case: profits before common sense. You have to be an incredibly craven entity to make ExxonMobil look moral in comparison.
Enjoy (if you've got the patience to read through 22 pages of comments!)
A couple of highlights -
First radio interview from someone on the rig:
http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article...422&spid=32364
Second - OSHA's website has some of the best diagrams:
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/oilandgas/well_completion/well_completion.html
Third - the specs from this platform/ship:
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17 -- check out "Thrusters: 8 x Kamewa rated 7375 hp each, fixed propeller, full 360 deg azimuth"
JGG
On a slightly more practical level, the planet is mortal and we really can't afford to kill it off.
It is very, very sensible to fear every little thing that is capable of wiping out an entire species or ecosystem, or that is capable of making irreversible changes to our habitat. A single individual can risk a threat to themselves, but we cannot risk existential threats to our species. This oil spill might raise to that level if it kills too much of the gulf.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I.. I just... wow.
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.