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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."
No, the dome isn't even lowered yet. The first leak was sealed using submersibles. Furthermore, it isn't expected that sealing that leak will do much (if anything) to reduce the total outflow.
I'd like to know how this dome is supposed to work in rough seas. The oil is going to be contained within the dome and brought to a surface ship. What happens when that surface ship can't maintain position due to inclement weather? Hurricane season starts in another few weeks....
Probably the same way the original rig, which was a semi-submersible, dynamically positioned platform, was controlled: via a system of computer-controlled engines which maintain the vessel's position over the drill site.
Actually, you basically can't clean birds. It is just a feelgood measure. At the point where you pick them up, they have been trying to clean themselves already, thereby ingesting a huge amount of crude. Even if you get them clean and they don't die from the stress, they die of organ failure due to the toxicity rather sooner than later. The average survival time for a cleaned bird is 1-5 days, from the last data I have seen. It would be better to just euthanize them.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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
Sorbitol esters. Basically modified sugar alcohols. An example of this class of compounds is the Polysorbate 80 that is used to emulsify mild fats in ice cream.
Extremely biodegradable and pretty unlikely to cause any environmental damage.
The article does not report this, but other articles have noted that this oil is mostly mixed with water (more than previous spills). This could give hope that more birds than normal can actually be saved.