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Hundred-Ton Dome To Collect Oil Spill
eldavojohn writes "After failing to contain the Gulf oil spill any other way, a massive containment dome had the finishing touches put on yesterday. It amounts to a giant concrete-and-steel box made by Wild Well Control that is designed to siphon the crude oil away from the water. They expect an 85 percent collection with this device. It's not a pretty situation as Google Earth illustrates."
Latest reports are that the smallest of the three leaks is now contained. Hopefully the other two will quickly follow suit !
Here's to hoping it works. This is one major clusterfuck, and a really unfortunate one at that. If this concrete dealy doesn't work, what other options do they have?
Living With a Nerd
That number would be more encouraging if the amount coming out were not so massive. This spill is going to create a lot of suck for years to come.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Never been tried > 350 feet of water. And the wellhead is a mile down. Fingers are crossed, tho'.
I don't understand why they can't just bury it under 100 tons of concrete.
And that structure looks nothing like a dome.
Does't the oil business have contingency plans for this kind of thing?! And companies that specialize in this kind of work?! America is filling the Gulf with FAIL.
Can anybody tell me about the chemical dispersants? what happens to the 'dispersed' oil plus these chemicals? This is a naive question, please educate me but surely this means you now have oil+chemical in your water rather than just oil in your water - is the dilution level so low that it doesn't affect the sealife that is later caught to eat, does it combine with the oil to something that it relatively innocuous that breaks down in sunlight, or something that sinks to the sea bed etc?
Information welcomed, just curious about what happens to that oil if its not skimmed off the surface or burnt off, but chemically treated and left in the ocean and left there. Maybe it's just so dilute it doesn't matter, I don't know. Any knowledge on this, folks?
Hmm... weren't there some news, years back, concerning some sort of bacteria that ate oil, consuming it?
Would the resulting products be also quite nasty, or was it all an hoax?
In the end, there can be only one!
Consider R'ing TFA. Second link has pics. Dear Lord, people, who in the world ties your shoes in the morning?
They tried it on Springfield.
rewriting history since 2109
"...is designed to siphon the crude oil away from the water."
Really?
siphon
- a tube running from the liquid in a vessel to a lower level outside the vessel so that atmospheric pressure forces the liquid through the tube.
- A pipe or tube fashioned or deployed in an inverted U shape and filled until atmospheric pressure is sufficient to force a liquid from a reservoir in one end of the tube over a barrier higher than the reservoir and out the other end.
- To draw off or convey through or as if through a siphon.
Nate
I understand that, conceptually, people want to talk about how this works like dropping a dome over the top of the leak, but I'm afraid that this structure is in no way even close to a dome. Hell, I'd be more apt to call it a "four sided cylinder" than a dome and be just about as correct. Twenty bucks says they started off with the concept and the label and then didn't bother to change the label when the engineers told them how difficult it would be to build and maneuver a dome around. So they ask the engineers to make it functional and they get an open-ended box with a pyramidal cap... all the while the managers are standing around watching while murmuring, "Yep... that dome is shaping up nicely..." This whole event has made me wonder how many times in ancient history that a sea floor fault has released spills like this (or worse) in the distant geological past. Seems like we should be ready for this type of event even if we aren't the ones punching the hole through the abyssal plain of the sea floor..
I'd like to know if she's given her opinion on this. I'm sure it would be insightful.
The cofferdam, although not being tried in this deep of water is really their best option at this point.
No need to tie Velcro shoes.
A dome you say? Did they opt for diamondium or diamondilium?
I've been amazed at the Oil industries apparent inability to do any contingency planning. If this dome technology is known to be the best quick-fix for containing this type of oil leak, they should have had a few of them already built and sitting on a back lot in Port Arthur, just in case.
Instead, they have to construct them from scratch when the emergency presents itself. That's resulted in a huge waste of time as the clock is ticking and the environment becomes more and more damaged.
Having spares would have been a cheap insurance policy. Don't these people even think about risk mitigation?
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Who pays for the mistakes? Who pays for the environmental impact? If BP were forced to shoulder the entire cost of this mistake, they would go bankrupt. And so, as usual, it is the rest of us who will have to pay. Socialism for the rich, paid for by the poor.
If you and I lived next to each other, and I ran a pipe from my toilet into your yard, you would be pretty pissed off, wouldn't you? You'd probably demand I stop shitting in your yard. And I would say, "Human civilization can not exist without environmental impact, shit happens, get over your knee jerk reaction and get used to it, hippie."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
my mommy ties my shoes every morning before I go to work :D
No need to tie Velcro shoes.
But you can still try.
My webcomic
I'd like to know if she's given her opinion on this. I'm sure it would be insightful.
Well, from Swamp Politics:
There will be a lot of hearings "to discover the cause of the explosion and the subsequent leak," Palin writes ,and action will be taken "to increase oversight to prevent future accidents....
"Government can and must play an appropriate role here," she adds. "If a company was lax in its prevention practices, it must be held accountable. It is inexcusable for any oil company to not invest in preventative measures. They must be held accountable or the public will forever distrust the industry..."
Yet, she contends, "even with the strictest oversight in the world, accidents still happen. No human endeavor is ever without risk - whether it's sending a man to the moon or extracting the necessary resources to fuel our civilization.
"I repeat the slogan "drill here, drill now" not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills.... I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation."
I don't know if I'd call it insightful but it seems to be a route to maintain her initial assertions of drilling here. I'm certainly not a fan of Palin but that response is probably a lot more reasonable than you or I were hoping for. She and I just share a fundamental disagreement about where our country's focuses for energy and energy independence should lie.
My work here is dung.
Bob Ho stopped them!
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
and it's making me more ill from reading "shock" stories. Man-made messes are never good, but in popular media - we never compare those events to what happens naturally. Natural oil and gas seepage has been occurring for as long as those items have been available. It's even been noted in recorded history. We also seem to forget that oil, tar, and natural gas are ... well ... natural. There are many natural and deadly events - earthquakes, mudslides, lava, etc.
Then the violin starts on how oil spills kill birds ... again, don't get me wrong. I'm not in denial. Yes - oil spills kill birds. But my rant is about the lack of perspective.Oil spills is near the bottom of most lists (Here's one list: http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm). The estimate is 1-2 million die from this cause. What I didn't know is that glass windows (100-900 million) and cats (100 million) dominate the top half of the list. I don't see the bleeding hearts going off on a rampage to ban windows.
I understand that stories like this are focused. I understand that broadening the perspective may "water down" an issue or a solution to an issue ... but leaving out perspective is just a damned bad habit - and sloppy too.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Actually, it's the UK filling the Gulf with FAIL
Actually it's an International Company called "British Petroleum" with British roots that, if we want to get technical has been since 1935 or earlier. I don't know how the fault lays on the United Kingdom or its people for this, they have been operating in the United States for quite sometime--they even have American headquarters in Houston! Blame the company and the lax safety regulations where it happened (if it turns out they followed all safety precautions and this still happened), don't blame the UK. I certainly wouldn't want to be a BP shareholder right now.
My work here is dung.
Will it blend?
Or yo Mama.
Nope, no way this could possibly be more economically and environmentally damaging than working on switching our infrastructure from fossil fuel to nuclear.
Dick Cheney would be proud to swing by this company party to pick up his yearly pension check.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
So that's what I've been doing wrong...
Let us assume for a moment that the USA is pushing the world towards a climate catastrophe at an ever-increasing pace. Millions of people will die if nothing is done to stop this. We are getting ever closer to some "tipping point" where doing anything will be impossible and we just get to stay on the ride until the very end.
Sounds dire, right?
OK, so now we have this oil well accident that some want to call an ecological disaster of unimaginable proprotions. That this accident illustrates how incredibly stupid it is to drill for oil, and even worse to do so in some ecologically sensitive area.
Fine. Let's stop. How about if we give people a chance here to explore alternatives. We should stop all oil imports, all oil refining and just say it is over. The Oil Age has ended. This sort of alternative action would actually do something and be quite different than a lot of hand-wringing and people protesting without any real effect. Sure, there would be some immediate impact and people would die - perhaps fewer than are killed each day on highways.
I'd say after six months of this we might be able to carry on an intelligent debate on the real issues. Right now, I'm not seeing a lot of that. There is plenty of hand-wringing and plenty of pontificating on how bad things might be in the future.
Yes, windows kill more total numbers... but unless you have one whicked case of dumb bird syndrome, you are not going to wipe out every bird for miles in every direction with windows or cats.
The local impact of an oil spill is what makes it so bad. It isn't that it kills so many, it is that it kills so many in one spot. A colony of birds can recover after losing a handfull to windows over a migration, but when only a handfull of breading pairs are left after a spill it is far less likley that the colony will make it.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Fun things to watch in the news coverage:
Pressure creep. A gross estimate is about a PSI per foot of well depth. Its unlikely the actual pressure at the bottom of the well could exceed 20K PSI. Whats squirting out the top, order of magnitude less. Maybe, extreme cases, you can go plus or minus 50%, maybe. So, people whom know what they're talking about, knowing the drilling mud was around 18 pounds per gallon, and roughly how deep the well is, pretty much know how much pressure the stuff is boiling out of the well. However, the breathless journalists and political hacks feed on each other and one up each other for dramatic reasons. The wildest screamers blew thru 100K psi about two days ago, and I think we're well on our way to nuclear fusion pressure range in journalist-land.
Flow rate creep. An entire modest oilfield might produce 100K barrels per day. Real flow rate out of this well is probably in the range of 2K to 10K bpd. The screaming journalists and hacks recently blew thru 60K bpd, some beyond 200K bpd. We are rapidly approaching the point where the journalists-types will report figures better suited to the entire production of the country of saudi arabia, etc.
Unit changes. The flow is probably a modest 5K BPD. That doesn't sound as cool, so a couple days ago the journalists switched to gallons per day. As the flow decreases, I expect the screamers to switch to pounds per day, finally maybe milliliters per day, just to keep the numbers up.
Flow rate exaggeration. 5K BPD is like a firehose, vaguely. Journalists, over the past few days, have worked their way up on top of each other from adjectives like "dribbling" up to descriptions more in line with a Saturn-V rocket motor at full blast. Its going to flutter the "dome" around like a garden hose hitting a gnat. Uh huh, Yeah right.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I said for awhile now they should have this done as a backup plan in such cases a long time ago, and now that we have evidence this sort of thing could happen again, i think they should come out with machines that plop into the water ans siphon the oil from the water and divides the 2 sending the water (without oil) back into the ocean and keep the oil on board the machine.
this sort of buoyant water filter if you will actually does not test the water per say, but more so collects the oil for further processing.
why have they not come up with these a long time ago, heck if such a place exists where you can go into the middle of the ocean
and plop such big machines that convert oil coming from the bottom into ready oil (refined) to put on the boats, seems to me a lot less traveling is needed for boats and tankers but also makes less travel for the oil to get from the ocean to refinery then refinery to the client?
why give 5 links when only one links to links of pics? Link to the damn pics instead
From looking at the pictures, the dome on this box is pyramidal? I think that the shape of the dome should
be semi-spherical to handle the pressues more evenly that far down. This may be fine for shallow ocean waters, but I'd think the ocean would crush the dome inwards under that much pressure!!!!
MOD PARENT UP!
is available at Skytruth Blog.
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout
Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
I was going to argue that crude oil is just another part of the environment and should be embraced, but then it hit me: Crude oil is Earth's diarrhea.
Sorry, I had too much coffee today...
I just remembered that this is the same bunch of penny-pinching shitfuckers that neglected maintenance on the Alaska oil pipeline, allowing it to corrode, having to be shut down
once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You are mentally retarded.
If we stopped oil imports, the number of people who would be fired from their jobs for not going to them (no gas = no travel, and most businesses tend to prefer that employees show up for work) would be staggering, making current unemployment rates a joke. These people are not going to collect unemployment for doing so either. Those who don't drive to work but are within walking distance would also be affected - lunchtime workers, warehouse people, so on and so forth.
This would leave an outcome where it most certainly would not be possible to kill fewer people than those killed on highways each day (roughly 120).
Perhaps you are not seeing intelligent debate on real issues because you are participating in it. Step back and let the adults figure it out.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0504/russian-paper-suggests-nuclear-explosion-cut-gulf-oil-geyser/ this would be so cool
Turns out that the government already has a rainy day fund to deal with industry disasters. At present it holds $1.5 billion, it is not adequate but I think this is the way to go. The impact of this accident is going to be felt by the entire industry, it is only logical for funds to be collected from all oil companies to help with recovery efforts.
Tax on Oil May Help Pay for Cleanup
Curiously BP is not carrying insurance, it is having self-insurance -- they apportion an amount of almost a billion a year into a fund on the island of Gernesey (the offshore UK tax haven).
Insurance rates will go up
Let me be the first:
Doooooooommmmmmmmmmmmme!
After six months you would be too busy shooting anyone that came to steal what was left of your canned goods and fresh water to have any sort of intelligent debate on the issue.
Score: 4, Insightful? Have you all lost your minds?
Immediate cessation of oil refining into gasoline means that the entire infrastructure we have to deal with getting food from farms to people in cities goes bye-bye. Since 90% of the population in the Western world lives in cities, that means 90% of the population starves. I don't know about your math, but killing off 90% of the population is still more people than are killed each day on freeways.
Never mind that backup generators at critical infrastructure points like, oh, I don't know, hospitals and telecommunications stations are powered by diesel.
Furthermore, even a moderate proposal like a gradual phase-in tax on gasoline doesn't work for the same reasons. Seems reasonable, right? Just gradually tax gasoline more and more until other energy alternatives are cheaper? The problem with that is you've effectively taxed food more and more, and for people that struggle to make ends meet, you've condemned to starvation again.
That's why the government subsidizes alternative energy instead of doing something drastic. Corn/ethanol subsidies are (in hindsight) stupid (I'm a nuclear fan, myself), but at least they are trying something that might work instead of trying something that would have a significant negative impact on their chances to get re-elected.
News flash: you aren't sparking intelligent debate. You're either an anarchist, completely brain-dead, or both. Which is it, Dr. Strangelove?
They obviously use velcro shoes.
My cowboy boots don't have laces.
Should I just throw a lasso around them and pretend?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
It's pretty obvious that you're a Canuck, otherwise you would know that Ah-nuld can't ever be elected president because he is not a native-born U.S. citizen.
This ain't rocket surgery.
unless... Bill Clinton and others are successful in their campaign to change the restrictions on the presidency... and if we see Taco Bell buy out all the other restaurants in the US, you'll know where we're headed.
OK, so now we have this oil well accident that some want to call an ecological disaster of unimaginable proprotions. That this accident illustrates how incredibly stupid it is to drill for oil, and even worse to do so in some ecologically sensitive area.
Yes we have some people making these claims. These people are irrational or have an agenda. The fact of the matter is that all that the actual damage we have documentation of so far (despite all the journalists looking for disaster evidence) are one dead jellyfish and two birds that needed to be cleaned of oil contamination. Otherwise no significant oil contamination in ANY sensitive marshes or wetlands.
The fact is that oil is itself a product of natural biological processes, and nature does have mechanisms for dealing with it over time. The Gulf itself is naturally and continuously contaminated by seepage from oil deposits, to the tune of an estimated 2,000 barrels a day. Every day. Over a history of millions of years. The ecology there has adapted to deal with oil, although not the large quantities from a point source like this incident without some damage.
The fact is that once this spill is contained the ecosystem will recover. It might seem to take forever if you are a fisherman working those waters, but to call it an ecological disaster is just silly.
The only true ecological disasters this planet faces is the accumulated biosphere pressure of human overpopulation and the occasional asteroid strikes.
and if we see Taco Bell buy out all the other restaurants in the US, you'll know where we're headed.
Demolition Man?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
...having a circular plan and usually in the form of a portion of a sphere...
...a domical roof or ceiling.
...any covering thought to resemble the hemispherical vault of a building...
...anything shaped like a hemisphere or inverted bowl.
Maybe 1.c.?
a polygonal vault, ceiling, or roof.
Still, "box" would get the point across better, IMO.
Basically the natural seepage in the northern Golf of Mexico it's about 120,000 barrels a year. For the entire Golf of Mexico it's about 625-1,875 barrels a day (or 2.5 to 6.9 x 10^5 barrels a year).
The "problem" I suspect with the current oil well is the localization of the spill, and thus higher concentrations of the oil. Kind of like trying to eat a teaspoon of hot sauce directly versus adding a teaspoon of hot sauce to a bowl of chili. It's the same amount of the stuff, just dispersed over a larger area.
oil is dead plants and animals.
so this oil spill kills plants and animals.
another kind of gray goo?
This is normal. This is how big stuff gets fixed.
Once there's a rough understanding of the problem, a heavy engineering contractor with a track record on emergency jobs is brought in to fix it. Their engineers quickly design something to get the problem under control. Materials and parts are rush-ordered and sent to a fabrication yard, where the best welders and machinists, on serious overtime, work to put it together. Then the thing gets put on a truck, barge, or rail car and is sent to the trouble spot, where other mobile heavy equipment has been brought into position to install the fix. Top field workers put the fix into place.
There are a number of contractors in the world that routinely pull off fixes like this. Not many. C. C. Myers. Wild Well Control. Titan Salvage. Their employees are very well paid, and used to getting a sudden call to get on an airplane and head for the current fuckup.
Love,
The KGB
(Siberia-1982)
0) "It's not leaking"
1) "It wasn't us"
2) "It's just one mistake"
3) "The media is making it all worse"
4) (still pending) "It's because the liberals hate nukes"
I'm glad you are concentrating on what's important.
IAA(non-certified)PE, although I don't work for any of the companies in question.
Although drilling is a cowboy science, there are a few concepts to it that are not immediately obvious and help explain what they're doing. I'd like to define the problem a little bit better, which may actually lead to someone finding a better answer.
The problem that they're facing is that there is a pipe placed in a hole down many thousand feet into an oil reservoir, most likely at the edge of a salt dome. The reservoir is at very high pressure (which is common in the GoM and one of the benifits of drilling here), and effectively we have an uncapped fire hydrant spewing high pressure fluid into the ocean, which floats up and producing the lovely oil sheen. As you'll notice, all attacks follow this vein... capping the end of a wildly spewing fire hydrant. My personal opinion isn't really relevant, but hey, they've got to show they're trying all options.
During drilling we control well pressures during drilling with heavy mud fluids, which provide counter-pressure and keep this problem in check. From a discussion on a plane yesterday with someone in well completions, they had set a plug in the drilling fluid (probably a brine at this point, replacing the mud) but may not have tested it well enough, and enough gas escaped from below the plug to displace the drilling fluid with a large bubble of gas. The low density of the gas created an unstable pressure system, and allowed the pressure below to burst through the plug and cause a kick, sinking the rig. Note that rigs tend to drill many wells at the same location now, spreading them out using directional drilling but not actually moving the rig. When we drill a well and a production platform is not yet in place, we temporarily cap the well... using the same process that didn't go so great this time. So when the drilling platform sank, any already drilled and capped wells were likely damaged as well. These are likely easier to shut off due to properly operating subsurface safety valves being in place (required in the GoM), and possibly BoP stacks being in place still as well (not likely but maybe? usually these are removed after drilling).
So here we are, with the BoPs not working on this one well, and it's gushing oil. In most situations we drill a relief well, because when we intersect the gushing well, our wellbore is full of drilling mud, and we can kill the flow by using extra-heavy mud weighs to stifle flow right at the source. This is, in my opinion, the best and most complete option. The problem to this method is that it takes days/weeks, not hours/days, and we want an "hours/days" solution. Hence the multi-million-dollar "cork" they are trying to place on top of this fire hydrant. I see estimates of 3 months in the news for the relief well being effective, and I think that's a bit high but reasonable. "Off the cuff" (do not use this as a real estimate) I like to guess about 500 feet of drilling a day, and this well is 13,000 feet, but that's certainly much too optimistic in this case.
Here is a link to an event similar to this one near Australia
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who pays for the mistakes? Who pays for the environmental impact?
Possibly a combination of BP and the US taxpayer - though it should be 100% BP and BP's CEO has said publicly that BP would shoulder the cost. Depending on how much pressure gets put on Congress (I'm expecting a lot) I doubt Congress is going to be in much of a mood to bail out BP especially in light of the economic conditions and the fact that the Democrats are presently in power.
If BP were forced to shoulder the entire cost of this mistake, they would go bankrupt.
HIGHLY unlikely. BP makes a profit of $16-20 Billion annually and has approximately $13 Billion in cash and cash equivalents right now. The total cost of the cleanup is unknown but estimates of $5 Billion have been put forth (not including litigation). For comparison the Exxon Valdez spill was estimated to cost $2 billion to clean up (not including litigation).
That said even if it did drive BP out of business (which it won't) that is nothing to shed tears over. Companies go out of business due to greed and stupidity and poorly considered risks all the time. See Lehman Brothers if you need an example.
100 ton block of concrete measures about 4 by 4 by 4 yards. It's far from what I would describe as "massive" (for the purpose of capping an oil well leak).
1. There was a constant inspection regime paid for entirely by the industry. In other words, there is an armed government official with absolute power to stop drilling, and his salary paid entirely by whoever owns the well and the platform.
Bit of a conflict of interest there don't you think? Do you seriously expect an inspector to readily shut down production on the person that pays their salary? If so you are FAR more optimistic and trusting of human nature than I am.
2. All caps on liability were removed and the owners of the well and platform were forced to pay all costs of a spills, without limit of any kind.
I'm not aware that there are any caps on liability (please cite if you know of any) other than the flesh eating lawyers employed by the oil companies. Given the results of previous litigation the oil companies seem to be able to defend themselves rather effectively.
3. Any evidence of ignoring of safety requirements would lead to lengthy prison sentences for all involved, and a ban on the companies involved in the accident of no less than five years from any extraction.
Sounds great on paper but the problem is in the details. How do you decide who goes do jail and who doesn't? It is NOT an easy question to answer. Furthermore the companies involved are huge multinationals. BP isn't an American company and most of their revenue does not come from the US. Explain to me how you plan to shut down BPs operations in the US gracefully and not seriously disrupt the energy prices and product flow. If you think that is a simple thing to do you haven't really thought about it.
They fucked up big time... Hope they die slowly.
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from the time he entered the Senate until now than they did to any other politician. Welcome to Obama's "Katrina." Or his "Waterloo." Whichever you prefer. Perhaps Waterloo is more appropriate, since Obama views himself as some sort of neo-liberal emperor...
"What went wrong was believing the the oil companies when they said they had a plan in the first place... the industry has a 100% track record with major oils spills."
Let me tell you why your claim is busted thinking.
There are hundreds of spills that you don't hear about that could have been major spills. However, the oil companies have detailed plans and procedures for how to deal with them. As a result, these spills don't become major ones, and they don't count in your grand analysis. Of course the companies have a 100% track record with major oil spills - but what percentage of "potentially" major spills do they make up? You might instead say 99% of potentially major spills are successfully contained.
When a major spill happens people like to point and say, "Oh - they have no plan!", like there's some freaking awesome magic plan wand the oil companies could wave over the situation. Thing is, once it's a "major spill", there's no good plan. There's no easy way to deal with loose crude in large volumes on land, let alone 5000 feet under the surface of the ocean. The plan is exactly what they're doing - booms, dispersants, and now this tool they're going to try. Failing that they dig another well.
"The contingency plan that was supposed to keep this from happening didn't get implemented or just wasn't sufficient."
That remains to be determined. It wasn't just one plan - there were redundant precautions. Multiple equipment failures might have overcame the perfectly sound plan that works on thousands of rigs today. Maybe they got a pressure kick that nobody has ever encountered before. No matter how many redundancies you put in something, there is ALWAYS a scenario to failure. There are something like 5600 rigs drilling at present. They've got their shit together, or you'd be knee-deep in crude.
Demolition Man vs. The Simpsons Movie
Google Fight!
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Demolition+Man&word2=The+Simpsons+Movie
Actually wasn't it "Taco Bell won the franchise wars"?
*Lounge singer voice*
Welcome to the garden...
the garden in the valley...
the valley of the Jolly Green Giant...
Otherwise no significant oil contamination in ANY sensitive marshes or wetlands.
YET. Calling the matter closed when the vast majority of the oil spill has yet to reach shore is vastly too premature.
The fact is that oil is itself a product of natural biological processes, and nature does have mechanisms for dealing with it over time.
"Nature" has a mechanism for dealing with it, and the operative term is "over time". The Brown Pelican, which only just recently was taken off the endangered species list, does not.
The Gulf itself is naturally and continuously contaminated by seepage from oil deposits, to the tune of an estimated 2,000 barrels a day. Every day. Over a history of millions of years.
And over the entire gulf. And filtered through ground sediments, not pumped up at high pressure through a bore hole. Really, people keep bringing up natural seepage, but it really just shows the contrast between nature and off shore oil rigs.
The fact is that once this spill is contained the ecosystem will recover. It might seem to take forever if you are a fisherman working those waters, but to call it an ecological disaster is just silly.
The Prince William Sound ecosystem has yet to fully recover.
"Nature" will recover. The ecosystem, as in the particular ecosystem that exists there today, may not. Nature has recovered from the annihilation of over 50% of all species in a (geologically) brief period of time, but plenty of ecosystems were lost in the process.
The enemies of Democracy are
Ah-nuld? I thought it was Sigourney Weaver with the "It's the only way to be safe" campaign?
How hard is it to design a well-head that includes a GD shut-off valve, for just such an emergency as this? I'm talking about where the oil rig starts drilling into the sea floor. Couldn't you put a giant shut-off valve there, one tough enough to survive, oh say, an oil rig falling on it (in case that happens)? Are there no petroleum geologists who have any plumbing experience?
YET. Calling the matter closed when the vast majority of the oil spill has yet to reach shore is vastly too premature.
There is no particular evidence that the oil spill is inexorably destined to reach land. The spill size is currently shrinking due to various containment efforts. And likewise calling it a world changing environmental catastrophe is vastly premature when the evidence of damage is slight indeed.
The Brown Pelican, which only just recently was taken off the endangered species list, does not.
Oh poppycock. This does not endanger the Brown Pelican - a bird whose range covers the east, gulf and west coasts of the US, and extends all the way south to Chile.
And over the entire gulf. And filtered through ground sediments, not pumped up at high pressure through a bore hole. Really, people keep bringing up natural seepage, but it really just shows the contrast between nature and off shore oil rigs.
Filtered through sediments? Nonsense. You can see globs of it rising to the surface in seepage areas.
The ecosystem, as in the particular ecosystem that exists there today, may not. Nature has recovered from the annihilation of over 50% of all species in a (geologically) brief period of time, but plenty of ecosystems were lost in the process.
Nature and ecosystems are not static; they are in constant flux and have a high degree of resiliency and adaptability. The only real danger is that man's population growth extends to a point where it strips the planet of its biosphere to the point where recovery in not possible.
Who pays for the mistakes? Who pays for the environmental impact?
That's easy, insurance. It's like socialism, only private.
If it drives up the cost of this kind of oil, that's a good thing - externalities are bad. It's too bad that other sources of oil have their externalities paid for by the government too - the market can't properly price things. Is Colorado oil shale really so expensive if you figure in the cost of oil wars?
Apparently they used 2 out of 3 kinds of safety gizmos on this rig and skipped a half-million dollar one. The insurance policy would be higher without the additional safety gear.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/
Some good maps there, but it leads me to an interesting question...
Select ONLY the "Observed Spill 5/4/2010". Then tell me, doesn't it look like a flamingo is about to attack Florida?
The Birds Get Their Revenge.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"condemn an entire industry because of one accident"
Well blowouts occur more-than-yearly with oil dumps in the tons. Add to that collapses, sinkings, pipe ruptures, and things like tanker ruptures and the numbers get very signifigant.
This is just an unusually large instance in an unusually noticed spot.
I like your thinking, but I'm not sure that nuking the well from orbit will fix anything ...
There is no particular evidence that the oil spill is inexorably destined to reach land.
It's not inexorable, but it's predicted to hit land in the next 3 days as winds turn unfavorable.
And likewise calling it a world changing environmental catastrophe is vastly premature when the evidence of damage is slight indeed.
Good thing I'm not then.
And talking about "evidence of damage" as if present damage is all that matters and the future need not be considered is retarded.
The potential for damage is extremely high, and is what we are all worried about. Hopefully you can at least comprehend that.
I'll be positively ecstatic if your prediction comes true, the slick never hits land, and nothing bad happens.
What will you say if it hits the shores and contaminates the estuaries and an already shrinking ecosystem is further damaged?
Oh poppycock. This does not endanger the Brown Pelican - a bird whose range covers the east, gulf and west coasts of the US, and extends all the way south to Chile.
Poppycock yourself. Do you understand that the gulf coast is an important breeding area for the pelican? Do you understand that when an animal just last year came off the endangered species list, that significant damage in the breeding season could put it right back on? But I guess because you can google up their range, you know better than the experts
Filtered through sediments? Nonsense. You can see globs of it rising to the surface in seepage areas.
Which are not exclusive in any way, and implying so is nonsense. Much of the oil is filtered by the sediment, so only some globs up. The fact that it's globs and not a continuous stream, and that despite 2,000 barrels a day being leaked there are not oil slicks visible by satellite, puts the lie to the idea that the natural seepage and this disaster are in any way comparable.
Nature and ecosystems are not static; they are in constant flux and have a high degree of resiliency and adaptability. The only real danger is that man's population growth extends to a point where it strips the planet of its biosphere to the point where recovery in not possible.
No shit they aren't static and they do have resilience, but they also aren't immortal! Plenty of ecosystems have completely ceased to be in the past, some ecosystems are vanishing right out from under our noses! We have recorded the extinction of a wide variety of animals -- ones with ranges as wide as the Brown Pelican -- because individual species are certainly not as resilient as entire ecosystems, yet the loss of individual species can affect the ecosystem as a whole.
And in what universe do ecological disasters like this not contribute to the stresses on the biosphere that may push it past the point of recovery? Do you think the mere existence of too many humans is going to cause the collapse? Obviously not. Obviously you think that humans consuming the resources of the earth, stripping the oceans of fish and the land of forests and the Great Plains of resources in the soils and so on, will cause collapse.
Trying to separate this disaster from that, when it is in fact a symptom of our growing demand for resources, is ludicrous and contrary to your own line of reasoning.
Talking only about population, and not how the population manages their resources, despite some of the most polluting and most resource intensive societies being population-negative, is just silly.
And the silliest thing of all is saying that nature itself, and to a degree specific ecosystems, are resilient, by way of implying that this negates the risk to ourselves if too many of these ecosystems are damaged. Have you not realized that one of nature's ways of adapting is by letting certain problematic species go extinct?
The enemies of Democracy are
Yes - I was going for funny but apparently it wasn't slashdot geeky enough of a movie to get more than a troll rating for my comment. Perhaps I should have thrown in some reference to Linux. *Sigh* Maybe I'll learn someday.
The fact is that oil is itself a product of natural biological processes, and nature does have mechanisms for dealing with it over time. The Gulf itself is naturally and continuously contaminated by seepage from oil deposits, to the tune of an estimated 2,000 barrels a day. Every day. Over a history of millions of years.
The prairie of the American Midwest naturally deals with periodic drought in a variety of ways; we're still finding out about interesting feedback systems that operate(d) in the native grasslands. That stability didn't make it impervious to abuse by humans bent on using unsustainable farming practices that killed the soil and started the Dust Bowl.
We do not know precisely what the introduction of a sudden, large, concentrated amount of additional seepage is going to do; we can only speculate given past experience. Past spills usually caused ecological damage that lasted for decades. Unless we want to wait for thousands of years for the ecosystem to correct itself, we're going to be responsible for doing the cleanup ourselves. It's going to be expensive, and it's rather likely that in spite of our best efforts, the Gulf's marine life will suffer severe losses. If you ignore "green" concerns, fishermen have been the first ones hurt here; the tourist industry is close behind (happy Cinco de Mayo). It won't do any favors for the region's shipping industry, either, nor for post-Katrina New Orleans.
The fact is that once this spill is contained the ecosystem will recover. It might seem to take forever if you are a fisherman working those waters, but to call it an ecological disaster is just silly.
What the heck would it take for you call an event an ecological disaster? Burning rivers? Blighted coral reefs? Rotting heaps of dead baby seals? Exxon-Valdez was universally called a disaster, and this has every indication of being a bigger spill. We have yet to see whether the oil will cycle inland significantly to affect US river systems and wetlands, but this WILL affect ocean life. As to "evidence" of damage, we're still waiting for the oil to come to land; Google Earth had satellite data showing that much. The hope, today, is that we won't have to wait for stupefying evidence of tragedy before taking action to mitigate its effects. Back during the Dust Bowl, the US Congress couldn't be bothered to sign in agricultural reform law until someone was able to crack the Senate's windows during a session and allow Midwestern dust to cover the room. Hopefully, we've learned something in the most-of-a-century since then.
No, no. The BP executive board.
Enacting Communism and banning capitalism. That's right boys and girls, the mythical free market and Xtianity has created this situation that could destroy the Earth and Rational Communism is the only way to stop this. Naturlally the fucktarded USians would be against it as they are against any progress. If the USians were for progress they wouldn't have elected the oil tycoon and war criminal Shrub.
Sincerely
Signed: The Rest of the World
The fact is that once this spill is contained the ecosystem will recover. It might seem to take forever if you are a fisherman working those waters, but to call it an ecological disaster is just silly.
The only true ecological disasters this planet faces is the accumulated biosphere pressure of human overpopulation and the occasional asteroid strikes.
Your use of disaster seems a bit lenient:
disaster[dih-zas-ter, -zah-ster]
–noun
1.a calamitous event, esp. one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage, or hardship, as a flood, airplane crash, or business failure.
Your argument seems to be that based on current data we cannot prove hardship or death so the spill is not a disaster?
Have you seen the size of the oil slick? (FTA)
Sudden massive relocation of crude to the ocean surface... how is that not a disaster again?
I've read on "The Oil Drum" site that it is possible that the flow may exceed the quoted 5000k estimate. The BOP hasn't been able to close the pipe properly, and it may have managed to just make the hole smaller. Smaller hole, faster flow. If the oil carries sand it may be cutting through steel slowly and making the hole bigger until the flow slows down to where it can't eat the metal significantly any more, but by then the ability to reclose the now-damaged BOP will have diminished significantly.
I find it amusing that the industry thought they could get away with that one. That they thought such a law could withstand the will of hordes of enraged and ruined people. No, BP is going to pay far, far more than $75 million.
My money says you are wrong.
This law was specifically written for exactly this type of incident. The fact that you don't think it will remain in force is naive on your part. The "industry" won't suffer until you no longer need petroleum products. Which is.....not in your lifetime.
In the Incident Command Center in Robert, Louisiana.
1. There was a pressure figure being batted around by the eggheads; I can't remember what it was. Sorry. Blame the 16-hour days.
2. The official estimate of flow rate is 5K barrels/day. The real estimate, behind the scenes, is, "We have no idea." There are small spills and big ones. This is a big one. That's what we know.
I can walk down the hall and watch the well-head video showing the oil gushing out. All I can say is, it's not a dribble. But no one thinks it will flutter the dome. The gearheads say the dicey part of the dome (we're calling it a "coffer dam") is not getting it on the leak; it's coping with the flow up on the *ship*. This hasn't been tried before.
This is my understanding of the situation, based on reading the many posts at "The Oil Drum".
1) There is a device called BOP (BlowOff Preventer) at the sea level that is intended to cut off flow through the pipe in an emergency. This device was activated and failed. The type of device used by BP was found in 2004 to "possibly malfunction" in deep water (sea floor was 5000 ft here). There exists a "super-BOP" device that was meant for deep water but wasn't used in this case (why?).
2) Brazilian and Norway regulations require the BOP to be tested once installed to ensure that it can shear the pipe. It does take an extra day or two, but this test would have shown the BOP's ineffectuality and prevented this disaster.
3) WWC is going to place the bell over the BOP to contain the oil and make it flow to a floating station above. This does not contain all the oil because it isn't possible to make a full seal on the muddy floor bed, and because even if it were possible, the oil would seep through the strata and find some other way out. So all this is, is a disaster mitigation plan, while
4) BP is drilling another tunnel to get to the well and seal it underground. Since the well is 13000ft deep from the sea bed, that is going to take some time (months) during which the well will keep flowing. I don't know to what depth they intend to meet the well though. But that's the only way to stop this.
5) Oil carrying sand has the ability to cut through metal once it reaches a certain velocity. Since 5000k bbl is not the entire well's design output we are assuming that the BOP has partially closed the pipe, which (since the pressure differential did not change) increases flow, therefore sandblasting the BOP and eventually cutting through it and increasing the flow to much larger numbers, now uncontrollable.
Whenever I see something about Nature having a method or similar phrases, I remember what they call Nature's methods of population control: The Four Horsemen - War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Saying 'Nature' has a solution should never be a shortcut to relaxing, or worse, stopping rationally assessing our own possible roles, as normally, 'Nature's' solutions are 'Darwinian'.
Who is John Cabal?
Indeed.
I have never really gotten the mentality that reasons that "nature", as in life on earth, will be okay in the long term, ergo we don't have to worry or do anything.
The enemies of Democracy are
There's been some work on plant derived oils used for aviation fuel, as well as from coal. I think Virgin did some tests with palm oil, at least blends, http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/01/virgin-airlines-powered-pond-scum and the AF has been looking as well. Let me see.... OKey doke, here is a ref, made from coal (ya, still nasty, but domestic supplies are hugemongous theoretically): http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/05/airforce_synthetic_fuel_050509/
As to a wild ass way for heavy lift cargo, using no petroleum fuels, how about huge lighter than air craft, with those thin film printable photovoltaics (the "new amazing breakthrough" ones that appear here weekly, like today, then disappear the next week...) all over the lifting bag shell, and then electric motors and props? Just a thought, in a popular science cover story way..... Most likely they would have to follow the old clipper ships model of following the "trade winds" and currents, just at a higher altitude....
Or just not ship as much stuff in the air, cargo or people. Build and grow more local, slow down this globalism a little, eat local, vacation more local, etc. Business travel..dang, work on better teleconferencing. Commuters, leave a place (the home) with a computer on a desk, travel to another place with a computer on a desk, then go home again, forever... because....I have no idea why this hasn't completely stopped yet.. Physically moving meatbags, twice a day, by the millions and millions, to sit in front of a computer screen is IMO the biggest failure of the computer information age, bar none.
Slowing down wars, dropping such a huge demand for petroleum there as well..that could help. "War" in general, pun intended, is just too profitable. Ike warned against it, said they would accumulate too much control over policy, because the profits are obscenely huge, including this artificially enhanced demand for more petroleum fuels.
This latest leak in the Gulf..the ultimate cost isn't calculated yet, but if it is less than tens of billions I'd be surprised. Now say they had spent those same billions actually constructing plants for manufacturing of those weekly amazing solar breakthrough products, the ones that disappear all the time...
but it's predicted to hit land in the next 3 days as winds turn unfavorable.
There have been daily predictions of imminent landfall since the leak started. Here is one from back in April. Pardon me if projections 3 days out are taken with some degree of skepticism.
And talking about "evidence of damage" as if present damage is all that matters and the future need not be considered is retarded.
My point is that there have been predictions of immediate massive catastrophe for two weeks now. Hasn't happened. In the mean time the slick has actually started DECREASING in size due to various remediation actions.
Do you understand that the gulf coast is an important breeding area for the pelican?
Important for Brown Pelicans living in that area. The world-wide population of the Brown Pelican is around 650,000 and it is distributed throughout coastal areas of both North and South America. It is not endangered or at risk as a species by this oil spill. The article you linked is very much missing a lot of information. In fact this bird disappeared completely from Louisiana once before and came back.
The fact that it's globs and not a continuous stream, and that despite 2,000 barrels a day being leaked there are not oil slicks visible by satellite, puts the lie to the idea that the natural seepage and this disaster are in any way comparable.
Here is a study of a natural seep in California that totally refutes your statement.
http://www.physorg.com/news161440137.html
If there is an all out no holds bar war against Iran, and it spirals out of control when China, Russia and Japan get real antsy about things, plus losing one third of the planet's oil supplies within a few days...we might not have the time to do much of anything, plus the expense would be huge.
We can do it now, but not later, the changeover costs would be un-doable. Make sub prime so called crisis look like a 7-11 stickup. There are too many potential planet impacting black swan type events that could really screw the pooch on a smooth peaceful and economical transition to alternatives to petroleum. And once something bad happens like that, the race to own the remaining supplies could further exacerbate potential bad news situations, ie, major resource wars. Real wars, not little teeny wars like we have now.
I agree with Ratzo, we needed a huge push starting back right after the OPEC embargo, and we dropped the ball bad. It stagnated after the tax credits ran out in the mid 80s, and weren't renewed until very recently (and I think they should come back at a full 100% to stimulate alternatives), and the oil industry all of a sudden flooded the planet with cheap oil as well back then, real cheap. That worked, killed off solar and the push for electric cars, etc for two decades more or less. They did not want any alternatives to their products to succeed. They *like* having energy monopolies and cartels, makes big money constantly with vendor lockin.
We had electric cars a century ago. Heck, jay leno owns one, and the original batteries still work! This BS that electric vehicle aren't practical until they can go 300 miles with an onboard charge is nuts. We've had that "solution" for a long time now, it is called the 50 mile, they could build it today relatively cheaply, electric car, then the generator trailer, for those occasional long trips where you need to go that far. Most people just do not need a 300 mile range day to day to day vehicle, they just don't drive that far except once in awhile. The generator trailer could be rented for longer trips, or owned by the driver and used as an emergency whole house generator as well, for those times it is needed. This would work until such a time as they really do improve the batteries, and the battery pack doesn't cost more than the rest of the vehicle. We have boutique car builders now with examples, and home DIY guys have proven that the tech exists just swell for an electric commuter car.but no majors have them forsale yet. "coming soon" and in the meantime, look at these hydrogen million dollar prototypes we have...nuts. Or they want to push hybrids, the most rube goldberg of designs.
an Energy Dome from DEVO.
Would have saved them all that construction time and helped in the fight against bad spuds.
Society doesn't necessarily demand oil, what they want is affordable transportation. If it was electric and good enough, and reasonably price competitive, they would adopt it, at least in some real decent numbers. Oil for plastics could be gotten from plant sources etc.
Now there are some niches where diesel rules, and there's no way to carry enough batteries, our tractors here for instance, but for zillions of cars on the road now..we already have the tech, they have just been real slow on getting it out there. GM and Ford both had viable electric vehicles, then they refused to sell them to the people who leased them and loved them, crushed them outright. Now, finally, with China sneaking up on them with cheap electric cars, and India not far behind, finally they will be making some. Again.
It has really not been so much an engineering problem with electric vehicles (average US commute is reportedly 33 miles round trip..no three hundred mile range needed for millions and millions of people) as it has been political mixed with old big money having huge influence.
I agree with you that oil is our cheapest energy dense fuel, but a lot of the costs are hidden, and are forced on us. If there was an exact extra tax on a gallon of fuel that reflected the decades long heavy US military presence in the mideast... and let's be adults and just admit that oil is 90% of the reason we have been there this long....you might have found a scosh more interest in the electrics. But that actual tax is hidden inside of "general income taxes", but we sure pay for it anyway.
Please. I think we can safely assume that enough oil has gushed into the Gulf to ensure great, tragic and pervasive environmental damage. Just because the bodies have yet to wash ashore, we know for a fact that petroleum like this is enough to create great havoc. I find it ridiculous that you are discounting the obvious damage that has already been caused by this disaster.
Perhaps they're keeping a top-secret project whose goal is to rewrite human history as we know it through a massively complex AI system? Anyone?
Snake? Snaaaaaaakeeee?
There was a study in 2004 that showed the BOP type used may not operate well at the depth BP had installed it. BP used it anyway, despite there being another option (the "super-BOP") that was more expensive.
You're right about the scale and recovery, but you're wrong that it's not an ecological disaster. It is. It's a disaster which is still unfolding, and you don't see that yet, I can only hope you will keep your eyes open and pay attention as this plays out.
Now whether or not it's some mother-of-all-disasters catastrophe, I do not currently know. To my uneducated eye, it seems doubtful at this time.
-josh
I can see it now on CNN ...
Live somewhere in the Gulf: Today BP crack scientists sent a 100-Ton Brick to the bottom of the Gulf to knock the sh*t out of the errent well. More to come.
I don't know why they call that box they want to put over the leak a dome. It does not look like a dome to me. I propose that we call it a sarcophagus. You will remember that the containment structure they hastily built over the Chernobyl reactor was called a sarcophagus. I just like that word.
if there's a pipe under water that is spewing oil like a banshee, why not build an inverted funnel-shape containment unit, hook pipes between the funnel spout and a mothership/tanker above, drop the thing over the spewing pipe and suck all the oil up from there. won't catch what's already out, but ought to keep from making a bigger mess! thanks fer lis'nin' seekertom
As I see it, it is OUR responsibility to have some safety equipment on standby.
We can tax the oil and gas industry and we can ask them to partner. But to me it makes no sense to run around pointing fingers and trying to assign blame because they are doing their BEST to produce a product we all need.
I think we have to expect and any actuary in the insurance industry will agree that accidents will happen.
So I agree with people who ask: "why wasn't the containment thingy already built?". An answer of its: "not cost effective" doesn't cut the mustard for me.
When New Orleans was flooded the Army Corps of Engineers tried to fly that excuse as well!
Not cost effective to build a dike so maybe somehow it is cost effective to flood a city? My gawd. What sort of spaghetti logic is this?
I don't care how much it costs to build a competent containment structure. It should have been ON THE SHELF.
There has been a long history of accidents. The failure here is the lack of leadership in those who choose to govern. Everyone knows that a company will do a risk assessment. They answer to their stock holders. Its the governments' job to govern.
I suspect what happened might be the blow out protector tried to do its job but was not able to completely shear off the pipe. I suspect they drilled near a very over pressured zone. I suspect the well operators did everything right. I suspect as the oil and gas column overbalanced the weight of the mud it simply blew the mud from the pipe and this put the rig in a natural gas bubble which lit. There was simply nothing anyone could do about it.
Now what we have is a very erosive fluid probably full of sand and it will eat the production casing away and by the time 2-3 months elapse which is gong to be how long it takes to contain this thing there might be a well bore that is the size of a small culvert.
BP was not planning on putting this field into production for years. Well - its now on production!
Thus solving the problem once and for all!
Human overpopulation a problem? Can you please give a refereed, peer-reviewed journal article claiming this?
Here is one from back in April. Pardon me if projections 3 days out are taken with some degree of skepticism.
My pardon. Being skeptical of what is basically a meteorological forecast is totally understandable. You're going further and predicting that it won't happen, that's fine, that's your opinion. My opinion is that it makes sense to prepare ourselves for the worst reasonable case, and there is undeniably a reasonable potential for ecological disaster from this spill as the history of oil spills makes imminently clear.
Of course here we are both talking like this is a fixed-size spill, like the fate of the oil currently on the surface and thus near-term weather is all that matters, when the oil is still spewing. Let's talk about what's going to happen in the aftermath of the spill when it's actually after.
Important for Brown Pelicans living in that area. The world-wide population of the Brown Pelican is around 650,000 and it is distributed throughout coastal areas of both North and South America. It is not endangered or at risk as a species by this oil spill. The article you linked is very much missing a lot of information. In fact this bird disappeared completely from Louisiana once before and came back.
You're missing a lot of information that wasn't in the WP article you just read. Pelicans migrate. Birds from all along the eastern seaboard will nest along the Gulf coast -- are currently nesting. The reason they vanished from Louisiana was because the species nearly went extinct, and it's only there now because of human reintroduction efforts. Pelicans are still recovering. Many animals that are taken off the endangered species list end up right back on it, should unfortunate factors turn against it. Especially things that occur when they're nesting, which is now. If a lot of pelicans die because they're trying to feed in oil-slick-covered waters (note this doesn't require the slick reach shore), and thus their breeding season isn't successful, that weakens the recovery, and leaves them vulnerable to other factors that might not be as bad otherwise, like a bad hurricane season. You're right that possibility doesn't threaten the entire species directly, and I was not trying to say it does. But it does affect the recovery and stability of the whole north east region's population.
Which is important. Brown pelicans, plus countless other seabirds and if we're unlucky shorebirds and other animals that will be affected by the spill play important roles in the ecosystems in which they live. Unbalancing those ecosystems puts them under further stress and makes them vulnerable to further industrial accidents or natural disasters. Nature is resilient but that resilience is not infinite, and individual species can and do go extinct. Replacements for their ecological niches don't magically reappear; recovery can occur over periods far longer than human timescales.
Just this past weekend I had face-to-face conversations with actual ornithologists experienced with endangered species recovery programs. They were concerned, ergo I am as well. You're not, but that has nothing to do with a well-informed opinion on the risk factors to the brown pelican. It's because you apparently aren't concerned with anything less than the complete collapse of the global biosphere. Well, real conservation has to start long before that's a realistic possibility or it's long too late.
Here is a study of a natural seep in California that totally refutes your statement.
Here's a better version where the graphic actually works which I read shortly before making those statements. It's funny because it does refute the part about there not being satellite-visible slicks, while simultaneously supporting the important point which is that the scale is vastly smaller than the major human-caused spills, and suggesting that biodegredation in the sediments as the oil
The enemies of Democracy are
If I'm not mistaken, in the mid 1980s, only 10%-20% of our oil consumption came from the Middle East (or maybe anywhere outside the US).
As a large percentage of our oil consumption goes toward transportation, we probably could have been completely independent of foreign oil if we wanted to within a very short time.
But sadly, the automotive industry (and general public) weren't very motivated to make more fuel efficient cars. [I don't see the replacement of station-wagons with SUVs to be much of an improvement. ]
This is an obvious cover-up for the development and storage of Arsenal Gear.
I wish I had mod points
You must be fairly new to teh intertubes, son. :postpics: icon there.
"This Thread is Worthless Without Pics" is an old standby from the
FC message boards. Indeed there used to be a funny
Its (humorous) use there was always in reference to a thread with some vaguely
sexual connotation.
Sad that this sort of internet history is getting forgotten.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/06/latest-updates-gulf-oil-spill/
[Updated at 12:11 p.m.] A patch of oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been found on Louisiana's Freemason Island Thursday, the Coast Guard reported.
[Updated at 12:27 p.m.] Two Coast Guard teams were scrambled to reset protective booms around Louisiana's Freemason Island after it was reported oil had reached there from the Gulf of Mexico. The area is located the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish. The amount of oil that reached shore was not immediately known.
Trace amounts of sheen from the undersea gusher have been reported to have reached the shores of southeastern Louisiana over the past week, but the landfall reported Thursday marks the first confirmation of oil hitting the shore, said John Curry, a spokesman for well owner BP.
And guess what's in the process of breeding on Freemason Island right now?
Go Coast Guard. Here's hoping they succeed, and they can stop the damage while it's still minimal. Let's hope the booms stay this time. Not that this will help when the adult birds go to fish beyond the booms as seabirds are wont to do.
But hey I bet you think the Coast Guard is wasting their time since the spill will just clean itself up naturally and not hurt anything, just like natural oil seeps, right?
The enemies of Democracy are
fact of the matter is that all that the actual damage we have documentation of so far (despite all the journalists looking for disaster evidence) are one dead jellyfish and two birds that needed to be cleaned of oil contamination. Otherwise no significant oil contamination in ANY sensitive marshes or wetlands.
Are you really this dense??? It hasn't fucked up the land yet so we have only lost one jellyfish and two birds? What about all the ocean life?
The New York Times has a diagram of the containment dome that shows how the oil will hopefully be trapped by the dome and then piped off to the surface. Click on the thumbnail of the diagram on the left side of the page. The system includes a second pipe that surrounds the pipe conducting the oil that is used to warm the oil so that it doesn't freeze.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07container.html?hp
The sea floor is a veritable desert compared to the ocean surface. The food chain starts in the first 10' of water, where plankton have access to sunlight.
Absolutely wrong. Anybody who has ever gone diving or fishing knows that the bottom is where all the action is. A reference: http://www.fathom.com/course/10701050/session2.html
While the food chain starts at the top, the biodiversity is accumulated near the bottom. Even if you might not care about biodiversity, commercial crab, shrimp, and lobster fisheries will depend on organisms on the sea floor to be uncontaminated, even if they do survive.
There are creatures that will be effected by oil on the sea floor like crabs and such, but it's still better than letting it run ashore.
Better for whom? The tourist industry?
Briefly, oil on the ocean floor or dispersed in the water column is bad. Oil on the ocean surface is worse. And oil on the ocean surface at the shoreline and in the estuaries is an ecological catastrophe.
Still wrong. As far as animal life is concerned, each is bad for its own reasons. Surface oil may affect animals that are visually more photogenic--birds, dolphins, seals--but oil on the bottom will make life difficult for the myriads of bottom-dwellers. Sea urchins and starfish are especially sensitive. http://echinoblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spiny-skinned-canaries-in-coal-mine.html
(yeah, I know I'm posting two days later)
Sweet! Random hot naked chicks calling us on videophone!
Well here we are two weeks later. Where is the landfall of oil slicks? Where are the masses of oiled birds?
This entire thing is going to be a case study in irresponsible journalism.
Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/18/us/18spill_CA1.html
Again, Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Oh what utter baloney. One bird and is not a mass of birds. And 3 meters of coastline is not an environmental catastrophe.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/no_oil_spill_landfall_through.html
They don't even know if the so-called "plumes" are actually oil. Let alone if the oxygen depletion is real.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/05/gulf-oil-spill-noaa-skeptical-of-oil-plume-reports.html
And the business you fed me about brown pelican nesting? Again false.
"Nesting for the eastern brown pelican, in the Southeast Region, is generally confined to the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana, and the Caribbean. "
It is not exclusive to the Gulf like you are trying to portray.