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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 And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
Here's my question: How come something like this hasn't happened before naturally, as the result of an earthquake or something? (Or has it, and we just weren't paying attention that century?)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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
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
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?
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.
From what i understand it does happen. All the time.
But theres a huge diffrence between a natural crack or fault covered with sediment and mud, often a pretty thick layer. And a nice large bore hole drilled right down to the oil.
The 'natural' oil leaks take some time to filter up to the surface and many of the 'heavy' parts of the oil are trapped in the seabed and very little makes it to the ocean surface.
And also in a natural leak you don't have an oil company pumping water or other waste down the hole to boost the pressure and bring the oil up.
So no it's not the end of the world. But on our time scale, it could still be a disaster of unprecedented proportions that we will have to deal with through our lifetimes.
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.
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.
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.
Do you really think more regulation of the oil industry was going to pass in 2004-2008?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
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
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.
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.
The Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act is discussed here. I like the following section on the safety of offshore drilling.
Myth: Drilling poses great risks of oil spills. The last major offshore oil spill in America occurred off of Santa Barbara in 1969. Critics of offshore drilling still refer to this incident, but much has changed in the interim. Drilling technology has greatly advanced in recent decades, and any new drilling will have to comply with strict safeguards that did not exist then.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, "[I]mproved production technology and safety training of personnel have dramatically reduced both blowouts and daily operational spills." Currently, only 1 percent of oil in North American waters came from offshore oil wells, far less than that attributable to natural seepage from the sea floor. Hurricane Katrina provided another reminder that fears of oil spills are overblown and anachronistic: Despite 170-mile-per-hour winds and massive waves striking many platforms, there was not a single significant offshore oil spill.
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."
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
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.
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.