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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?
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?
Actually, it's the UK filling the Gulf with FAIL
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
Consider R'ing TFA. Second link has pics. Dear Lord, people, who in the world ties your shoes in the morning?
yes, the safety valve designed to prevent this failed: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/photogalleries/100504-gulf-mexico-oil-spill-containment-science-environment-nation-pictures/?now=2010-05-04-00:01#gulf-oil-spill-containment-device-blowout-protector-preventer_19879_600x450.jpg
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.
Risk mitigation implies you believe there is a legitimate risk, which scares voters, which scares politicians. And, after the fact, it's way easier to say "We had know way of knowing X could happen resulting in Y damages" than "We had a contingency plan in place, so X only resulted in Z damages". No matter how much smaller Z is than Y, people will hate you more for it. Because you knew it could happen, therefore, you LET it happen, you are a villain! But if you were "caught totally unawares", you're the victim. Hell, you're the hero if you even slightly mitigate the damages.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
So they put all their faith in a blowout valve that apparently had an unanticipated failure mode. That's not risk mitigation, that's as assumption that, since you don't recognize the risk, there is no risk.
One layer of protection here was far to thin. In Norway and Brazil they require that wells also have remote control shutoffs. That would have been another layer of protection.
Keeping extra domes around would have been another layer of protection - a relatively low cost "when all else fails" measure. Seems like they didn't do it because they had too much confidence that all else couldn't possibly fail.
They were wrong.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
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
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
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.
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.
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
one of the first things cheney did when bush was elected the first time is get the regulation changed so that a backup was not required for off shore drilling.
"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.
Do you have a citation for that? Because if that's true, that's pretty frickin' serious.