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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."
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.
Pay politicians more money to make sure they can continue drilling.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If this concrete dealy doesn't work, what other options do they have?
My understanding is that the only other option is to drill a relief well. Unfortunately it will take months before they have the equipment and logistics in place to do that.
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....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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?
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
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.
This was done the old fashioned way using remote submersibles and capping the pipe with a valve.
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
If this doesn't work, their next option is to wall off the Gulf of Mexico, drain the water, and let the entire thing fill with oil like a gigantic bathtub. Then, we'll get a bunch of old hippies together, throw in a giant effigy, light the whole thing on fire, and have the best Burning Man festival ever!
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.
No need to tie Velcro shoes.
But you can still try.
My webcomic
"condemn an entire industry because of one accident" ... one accident and their complete lack of preparedness for it.
If it was some fly-by-night corp, this would be expected. BP is a bit bigger and more established and should have had measures in place to deal, or attempt to deal, with this sort of scenario. And considering they seem to cook off a rig or two (in the event hurricanes don't do it for them) when ever it looks like oil prices aren't where they want them to be at they should at least be prepared to deal with the cleanup.
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.
Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident. No human enterprise ever attempted managed to get underway without mistakes.
If it's an industry where one mistake translates to environmental and economical damage on the scale we are witnessing at the gulf coast right now, then yes, condemning (and perhaps even abolishing) said industry may be the right thing to do.
What's wrong with offshore drilling? Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident. No human enterprise ever attempted managed to get underway without mistakes. The important thing here is to learn what went wrong and take steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future.
What went wrong was believing the the oil companies when they said they had a plan in the first place. When ever there's a mistake we get boned. Every time - this isn't just an isolated case - the industry has a 100% track record with major oils spills. The contingency plan that was supposed to keep this from happening didn't get implemented or just wasn't sufficient.
For better or worse human civilization can not exist without environmental impact. The knee-jerk reaction to this unfortunate incident by certain politicians is disappointing to say the least.
It is unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction of a certain number of politicians is going to be to defend the oil companies and their actions will predictably be enough to keep us from making any real progress.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
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.
There is a big difference between 1-2 million birds dying in one geographic location over a short amount of time versus hundreds of millions spread relatively evenly across the globe. It also doesn't stop at birds. Crabs, clams, crawfish, fish, etc, etc.
Roughly a quarter million people die each day. That doesn't mean that wiping out the population of Buffalo NY every now and again is "ok". It would simply devastate the area (for other humans who live around there, etc.. probably good for the environment tho...).
I know this stuff happens naturally and I get that. Natural disasters have more or less hit the "reset" button on the planet a few times. But going out and causing it (intended or not) is stupid and entirely preventable. Just because an asteroid or another event pretty much wiped out life on the planet in the past doesn't mean that killing/poisoning large quantities of life now, no matter how small in comparison, is a-ok!
I'm would be all for off-shore drilling if:
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.
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Actually they really where prepared pretty well for it.
There where and are many thousands of feet of booms prepositioned and ready to go.
What no one really seems to be talking about is what happened to the blow out preventor?
That is the huge question and no one really seems to be asking.
This should have never happened. The blow out preventor has no less then three ways to shut off the oil and ALL of them have failed?
This has never happened before! Every rig has one of these and if their is some design flaw it really must be found now.
That and the explosion that took out the rig was also not an every day kind of thing!
I see all these flames about the oil industry which may be valid but may not be. Truth is if you dive a car you depend on that oil. So less heat and more light is what is really needed IMHO.
Oh and BP is going to pay. And since they are not a US company you can bet that Congress will sock it to them big time. The US companies will love that since it will cost them nothing .
Oh and please don't mention clean energy in reference to this. I am sick of hearing idiot energy policy statements.
Solar and wind replace at best coal and natural gas. Only 3% or so of the Electricity in the US is made from oil.
Solar and wind do not compete with Oil at all.
Electric cars which in theory could reduce our Oil use are not popular yet because of the cost of purchase and range. It has nothing to do with not having enough electricity to run them. Not yet anyway if they sell big then yes the cost of electricity could come into play but we are not there yet.
Solar and wind can reduce carbon by replacing coal. Frankly as can nuclear and even Natural gas since natural gas produces less co2 than coal but not zero. It does nothing to reduce oil at this time.
Electric vehicles are good in the city and for some users. Should make great second cars for a lot of people.
Cost of the vehicle and not the cost of electricity are the problem with those as well as range. We will see how the Leaf does. I hope they do well.
In the end if you want to be part of the solution and not just bitch about it.
1. Car pool.
2. Get a small car.
3. Check your tire pressure.
4. Clean out your trunk.
5. Use mass transit if it is an option.
Or you could actually try and ration your own gas. Decide how many gallons you can use a week and stick to it.
If you are short then you stay home from the movies that night, don't drive to the mall to shop, combine trips.
Really folks this ranting really does nothing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident.
Because of course this is the first major incident that has dumped vast amounts of oil into the environment.
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.
So similar to the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Or how about the SEC? We've seen how well those have worked out. Any time you have a small regulatory body working in a single industry you end up with conflicts of interest. Industry players come into the agency to control it, ex-agency employs go to industry to show how to game it, and lots of expensive dinners all around.
Both of those amount to "bankrupt any company that has an incident". Remember that for 2) "pay all costs, without limit" actually means "pay all costs until the company goes bankrupt". While that might sound great to you in theory, in practice it's a terrible idea. Take a look at Arthur Anderson - exactly what you describe happened to them after Enron. Did 85,000 employees that had absolutely nothing to do with Enron deserve to have their lives thrown into chaos as the company imploded? Also bankrupting BP wouldn't really do anything structurally - the other big oil companies (Shell, Exxon, etc) would just pick up the pieces and everything would go on as if nothing happened.
The only thing I agree with you on is the need for criminal action against directors. Far too often companies see regulatory fines (and appeals to avoid them) as simply part of the cost of doing business, as is blatantly obvious in the case of Massey's WV mining operation. Start threatening criminal action against supervisors for repeat offenses and they'll suddenly have a real incentive to implement real protocols.
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.
Yes. This very low cap of the liability is a prime example of successful lobbying in DC.
I'm far enough away from this whole thing that I *almost* want the failure analysis engineering team to deem it necessary to either seal it or burn the reserves via nuke.
BP owns the oil lease, and are responsible for everything that happens there, including safety and disaster mitigation.
When BP contracted to someone to put the rig in place and drill, they set the safety standards for their contractor to follow, and were responsible for ensuring performance to contract.
When your employee doesn't follow your rules, it's as much your fault as theirs.
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
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.
I think a lot of people are very interested to learn why the Blowout Preventer failed, given that they have multiple failsafes, and are built to account for this exact sort of incident, including two "shear rams" that should have been able to cut through anything stuck in the valve to seal it.
BP's got a poor track record, and should be sued into oblivion if we find out that they tampered with or disabled safety measures on the BOP.
However, there's no evidence of this just yet, and several companies were involved with this particular rig at the time of the incident.
From what I've been reading, the BOP failure could either be narrowed down to a complete, colossal screw-up by BP, or a Rube Goldberg series of events that prevented the BOP from working.
Obviously, we'll be seeing many new safety measures installed on all current and future BOPs, as well as ROVs that can supply sufficient hydraulic power to close the shear rams in the event of a multiple system failure.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"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.
The problem with your assumption is that this is destroying an ecosystem. Do you even know what crude oil is? It's a naturally occurring, additive free, organic substance. It doesn't rampantly kill life on contact like say, mustard gas.
It's not an assumption, because this is not the first oil spill ever.
And yes I know what crude oil is, do you know that "naturally occurring, additive free, organic substance" and "harmless" are not adjectives?
Nobody is claiming it's going to instantly kill anything on contact. But if you had any idea of the environmental damage caused by previous spills, you wouldn't be talking like this "naturally occurring" substance isn't going to cause any problems in the quantities and concentrations here. Go ask an actual biologist or environmental scientist or anyone who has actually studied the impact of oil spills if they're concerned about this "organic substance". If they say that yes they are, make sure to remind them that the oil is additive free!
Oil naturally leaks in plenty of places on the planet. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130944.htm
You realize that article is talking about oil seeping out over an extended period of time, filtered through and partially biodegraded passing through ocean floor sediments before it even reaches the ocean water? Not pumped out through a cleanly bored holed designed to maximize pressure and thus output. The Exxon Valdez spill wouldn't have been a big disaster if the oil had been leaked out slowly over twenty years, and 11-110 of them wouldn't be a big issue on the time scales it took it to reach that level of concentration in the soil.
It does kill some animals fairly quickly, but it also feeds algae and other microorganisms as well as plant life on the shore. I expect that the "fallout" from this spill will hurt the fish and shrimp industries this year, but in the coming years, they will have bumper crops. I'm not saying this isn't an environmental incident, I just fail to see the doomsday scenarios that everyone is talking about.
Yeah, now who's making assumptions? Fail is the operative word here. Here's a couple links: http://www.answers.com/topic/exxon-valdez-oil-spill and http://www.eoearth.org/article/exxon_valdez_oil_spill showing how the environmental impact and disruption of ecosystems was ongoing ten and even twenty years later. There's plenty more on teh googles. Fishing was disrupted for multiple years, and catches have never recovered. Mortality remains high among contaminated fish and other animals.
It's not about doomsday from one spill, it's about damage to ecosystems that are already stressed. It's about idiots saying that it's not such a big deal so lets not stop doing it, ensuring that there will be subsequent stresses.
The enemies of Democracy are
"The blowout preventer failing is unheard of in the oil industry."
A 1999 government report found at least 117 failures. Amazing what you can do with a simple google search.
http://www.mms.gov/tarprojects/319/319AA.pdf
Anyone who says otherwise is clueless or lying or both.
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.
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.