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Gulf Gusher Worst Case Scenario
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a listing of several scientific and economic guides for estimating the volume of flow of the leak in the Gulf of Mexico erupting at a rate of somewhere around 1 million barrels per day. A new video released shows the largest hole spewing oil and natural gas from an aperture 5 feet in diameter at a rate of approximately 4 barrels per second. The oil coming up through 5,000 feet of pressurized salt water acts like a fractionating column. What you see on the surface is just around 20% of what is actually underneath the approximate 9,000 square miles of slick on the surface. The natural gas doesn't bubble to the top but gets suspended in the water, depleting the oxygen from the water. BP would not have been celebrating with execs on the rig just prior to the explosion if it had not been capable producing at least 500,000 barrels per day — under control. If the rock gave way due to the out-of-control gushing (or due to a nuke being detonated to contain the leak), it could become a Yellowstone Caldera type event, except from below a mile of sea, with a 1/4-mile opening, with up to 150,000 psi of oil and natural gas behind it, from a reserve nearly as large as the Gulf of Mexico containing trillions of barrels of oil. That would be an Earth extinction event."
We're all going to die!
According to my meticulous, scientific and unbiassed calculations, my estimate of the number of gallons of oil spewing from the ground in the gulf is: too many.
Wasn't this the movie that killed John Cusak's career?
I'll wait for the movie. Thank you.
This is a stolen sig.
More's the pity.
"Extinction" is a very high bar to clear, except for losers like panda bears that are large enough to shoot and barely capable of reproducing without assistance.
However, "Ecological and social shifts leading to grinding, nigh-unendurable; but nowhere near fatal enough to kill you quickly and be done with it" is very much more common and plausible.
Unless we start fucking around with self-replicating strangelets, or largish black holes, or other really exotic stuff, "extinction" is not a serious risk. Even nukes would require some real doing. Unfortunately, though, pushing yourself into "and the living shall envy the dead" territory is typically easier than killing yourself off. Even fairly modest ecological disruption could do the bottom billion or so in(and one can hardly expect that they'll go quietly), and make things pretty unpleasant for the remainder.
We started at 5,000 barrels a day, then 20, 50 and 100,000 barrels a day. Yesterday I saw a figure quoted at 200,000, today I saw 210,000
But 1 million barrels a day? That's almost three full days ahead of schedule for the media. Didn't Slashdot get the memo?
Also whoever greenlighted this article needs to get fired for releasing such a panic-y and fear inducing article to the front page.
moox. for a new generation.
4 BPS*24 hrs/day*60min/hr*60sec/min = 345 600 barrels per day, not 1 million.b
Hey, so do I, and I call bullshit fearmongering on the Yellowstone-like caldera unless someone else chimes in.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
is there any other way to stress the outright critical nature of this disaster? scrubbing seagulls and dancing around in congressional hearings isnt working. We need to pick up the pace, or we risk an entire gulf coast with an ecosystem that resembles a wal-mart parking lot. Shrimp and seafood will become a rather distant memory for the states.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From the cited web page:
Paul Noel, 52, works as Software Engineer (as Contractor) for the US Army at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. He has a vast experience base including education across a wide area of technical skills and sciences. He supplies technical expertise in all areas required for new products development associated with the US Army office he works in. He supplies extensive expertise in understanding the Oil and Gas industry as well.
Born in Lynnwood Washington, he came to Huntsville Alabama, when his father moved to be part of NASA's effort to put men on the moon. Neal Armstrong may have gotten the ride, but his father's computers did the driving.
Paul is also a founding member of the New Energy Congress.
So..this guy has no training on physics, geology, chemestry. He __says__ he supplies extensive expertise in oil indusry, but how exactly? Software engineering?
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to get too freaked out by what this man says. If I can get some supporting information from a geologist I'll then worry.
So, how come Laissez-Faire, don't-tell-corporations-how-to-run-themselves, deregulation didn't stop this from happening? It doesn't make any sense! I mean BP is an oil company. Can you guys help me blame this on Big Government?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Did this ever get green lit?
Put your hands up, and step slowly away from the crack pipe....
Wait. There's that much oil there? I thought the environmentalists said we needed to find other power sources because we were going to run out of oil soon.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
...from a reserve nearly as large as the Gulf of Mexico containing trillions of barrels of oil
hmmm..I thought we passed peak oil? Yes, this leak/accident is absolutely horrendous and should be prevented from happening in future at all costs.
But which is it...has it already peaked, or 'trillions of barrels' left?
what i like is how the linked article quotes the bible,
Revelation 8:8: "The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze [appearance of the burning rig and slick], was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed."
neat.
...and what are his credentials? It says he's a SW engineer with expereince across many technical areas, but I still dont' see how that makes him an expert on estimating flow volumes, etc. He doens't provide sources or backup anything he says. It comes off more as fear-mongering than anything else, especially seeing as he even quotes bible verses.
There aren't 'trillions' of barrels under this particular well. It's not like collapsing this well would cause all the other wells to collapse too. And as far as I know, the likelihood of this deposit collapsing is very, very low; unmeasurably low.
So far, oil isn't even washing up on beaches in any appreciable way. A huge portion of the area is an oxygen-depleted, polluted 'dead zone' anyway because of the Mississippi. Last I checked, only -two- birds had been collected for cleaning. Only about 4% of the gulf is blocked-off from fishing, and the larger fisheries aren't even expecting much damage, they're taking a 'wait and see' stance.
Still, (as of yet) clean beaches and untainted food seem to scare consumers away from vacations and shrimp, not because there's a risk, but because most consumers are total alarmist bozos, just like most career-environmentalists.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
use Volkswagen beetles, not LOCs.
Sweet informative mod.
I expected it to end with Xenu's galactic space cruisers, but after a "small pond in yard" reference rather than cubic libraries of congress he threw in some bible and a bunch of hyperbole. Brilliant!
To do what, exactly? Mentally masturbate like you?
The answer is blowing in the wind.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
What exactly is a US naval carrier supposed to do to help with a situation 5,000 feet down? Or a fisherman? Apart from bringing hot coffee and snacks out maybe.
I think that the second half of this post says that that the oil leak is bad, or could cause the end of the world, or something. However, it's such a gusher of spastic sentence fragments that I can't quite be certain.
Someone should drop a containment dome over this guy's keyboard until he's learned to organize his thoughts.
This article is not 'reporting' and should not be presented as 'news', not even news for nerds, stuff that matters.
There are some very interesting details, things that might perhaps be facts, but after presenting a string of them they are always followed with utterly unsubstantiated wild ass guesses that claim to be absolute facts and firmly grounded in expert opinion etc etc. While the Wild Ass Guesses may actually be true, they aren't facts, and presenting them as facts makes it impossible to believe any of the other information presented. At the end of the article all of this much vaunted expertise that the guesses are based on turns out to be this guy is some random programmer with a pond in his back yard.
This topic definitely needs some real reporting, but this sort hysterical speculation (includes quoting Revelations and speculating on this being an "Earth Extinction" event under the general premise of "they said this couldn't happen but it did so this other thing that also can't happen is obviously worth speculating about now") is downright irresponsible. Even if the premise that the news is massively underreporting the size of the spill is true, this is not the way to correct it.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
The article seems to be inaccurate in at least one respect, and one comment calls the author on it: It's not a 5-foot diameter pipe. Various sources say it's either 12-inch or 21-inch, but not five feet. One source says the largest riser pipe made is 21-inches in diameter.
[place clever signature here]
This phrase strikes me as absolute and unnecessary FUD. The message is that if BP tries Russia's "mini-nuke" solution, which worked 5 out of 6 times tried, disregarding the fact that I don't believe it is currently even being considered, that we may all very well DIE. The oil spill is bad enough, let's not give a voice to "anonymous Chicken Littles".
Seriously, it must be great stuff.
"it could become a Yellowstone Caldera type event, except from below a mile of sea, with a 1/4-mile opening, with up to 150,000 psi of oil and natural gas behind it, from a reserve nearly as large as the Gulf of Mexico containing trillions of barrels of oil. That would be an Earth extinction event."
Hard geopressure for that reservoir would be under 20,000 psi (~1 psi per foot of depth)
Caldera collapses are much more energetic than anything you can imagine even with what you're smoking. Try 100,000 times Mt St Helens.
Crude is measured in 42 gallon barrels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_per_day
Can we get a mod to do a grammar check on the summary? It's atrociously worded and nigh incomprehensible.
supports the estimates closer to 1 million barrels per day erupting from this hole BP popped in the ocean floor that contains trillions of barrels of oil and natural gas.
Anyone who starts an article out with a misstatement like that is immediately deemd not credible. If there were "trillions" of bbls of oil at that well (or even in the gulf of Mexico) we would never need to import a drop again and in fact would be the largest holder of oil in the world. S. Arabia has 270 billion bbl proven reserves.
if we take the author of this tripe and put him on the bottom of the ocean then let him continue to blow the hot air out of his ass as he's doing here.
Seriously ... the whole gulf of mexico is going to explode into an oil gusher?
And people are believing it?
Seriously, when the hell did everyone turn off their freaking common sense?
The freaking math doesn't even add up in this story. Its claiming a million gallons a day gushing, but at 4 barrels per second, you don't get to a million in one day. You don't even get to the 500k that BP would be so happy about, you get 345.6k/day. So you need a good 6BPS from everything else to start hitting a million gallons a day. Not the case. Of course he contridicts himself in his own article with at one point saying 500k and at another saying 1m.
He refers to chemicals added to the well head the speed up the fracturing process ... to bad BP isn't pumping those chemicals into the head anymore so thats just complete bullshit.
He compares the oil slick to his back yard pond ... except it doesn't work that way. The oil spreads out rapidly to cover as much surface area as it can, thats what happens when you have a lighter liquid on top of a heavier liquid, it spreads out to get as close to the top as it possibly can. It doesn't stay in one little column. Thats why buoys can be left on the surface to contain it, cause its ON THE SURFACE ONLY.
So the current hole is spewing at 70k psi he claims ( I won't argue it, I'm too lazy to look for facts, just like him ) but when the entire thing 'releases' in his extinction event, its going to jump to 150k psi ... Someone doesn't understand hydrolics very well. The pressure doesn't get greater when you apply it to a larger area, it gets lower as the same force is spread out over a larger area. You have to increase the energy in the system to actually get more out, all you can do otherwise is exchange speed for pressure and vice versa
A hell of a lot less than the oil would of, fractions of whats contained in the oil. He has no concept of how much energy is contained in oil and how efficient of a storage mechanism that it is.
I could go on, but whats the point. This is a retarded story written by an idiot rambling about stuff he doesn't know anything about. Is it an environmental disaster? Yes. Is the gulf coast going to suffer for a while and have a large loss of life? Certainly. Will I notice anything more than a higher gas price at the pump? No. Will it recover? Yes, in a few short years at most. Its bad that this happened, its bad that its still spewing oil, but any moron who buys into this article needs to lock themselves in a bomb shelter and wait for 2012 to kill as all cause thats just as logical and likely to happen.
Finally, I'm really lazy I admit, but can someone tell me if theres a way to ignore timothy and kdawson stories? Since they obviously are going to keep letting idiots qualify as editors I'd hope that CmdrTaco has given us an opt out method at least.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Given the time wasting charade / shell game BP is playing with solutions: A Box, A hat, Now a sippy straw.
And the variability and increasing magnitude of the different numbers they provided. Let alone news surface photos that seem to be polarized not to show oil sheen. Or any admission of the massive undersea spread of oil and gas. (oil blobs are found in subsurface samples far from the surface slick). (In fact their continuous sub-sea dispersant release is designed to do exactly that)
I would tend to believe misinformed internet nutjob numbers (with some linear adjustment) vs corporate PR swindled digits.
World oil demand is around 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day, and increases almost 2% per year.
1 trillion barrels of oil is about 3 months of world consumption at current rates.
10 trillion barrels meets just over 2 years of world demand at current rates.
Large numbers are hard to comprehend without a reference point. I hope that helps, but I guess it depends on what your definition of 'soon' is.
Obviously, one can't easily plug the hole. Now don't tell me that there on earth is NO device that would just connect to the broken pipe and let the oil flow somewhere where we want to see it? Yes, I mean a pipe.
I know that the connection needs a bit of engineering and luck, but for me it still seems several times easier than stopping the flow.
The government is the one subsidizing the losses. So not bailing out companies that make stupidly risky decisions would be a form of deregulation that would make things better in 2 ways: Riskier decisions would be less likely to occur without the bailout backdoor. And in the long run, the creative destruction of bankruptcy would transfer assets from the short term sharks to solvent companies that made good long-term decisions.
Okay, 150,000PSI is 10,444 atmospheres of pressure. Granite has an ultimate compressive strength of around 2775 atmospheres. In other words, at 10K atmospheres, granite would be flowing like water. There's no possible way the oil is coming out at that pressure. And if it was, it sure as heck would be flowing faster than 4 bbl/s. This guy is tossing out some serious BS numbers.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
In the worst case, US always can let that happen (or even force it) and declare their independence from foreign energy sources. Why chase the elluding nuclear fussion technology if will have almost free and almost limitless amount of oil filling all the gulf?
Would somebody stop and think about the seafood!?? Lobsters and crab don't taste good with petrol! It only tastes good with butter and shrimp sauce!
There are many inaccuracies in this article. First of all, the diameter is no larger than 18 inches, not 5 feet (60 inches). There is no rig capable of drilling a hole that large that deep, nor would anyone want to anyways because it would be extremely uneconomical. How does drill torque correlate with diameter anyways? The oil/gas would flow just as well in a 12 inch pipe. Secondly, have you ever distilled crude oil and/or extensively studied its' properties? If you had, you would quickly realize that oil and water do not mix. Water is a polar molecule and oil is not. Lastly, your worst case scenario is extremely off. 150,000 psi is equal to a column of water 346000 feet (65 miles) tall bearing down on one square inch. Does this reservoir really extend into space? A trillion barrels? Please don't be so ridiculous; Saudi Arabia (with the world's largest reserves), only has 267 billion barrels to produce. A trillion barrels is roughly the top 7 countries combined. Go back to software.
Some here are using this as an excuse to push for new government regulation and claim that Laissez-Faire economics does not work. I believe increased government regulation and protection has actually contributed to the problem of excessive risks being taken by many, including BP. Failure is no longer feared because of government bailouts. Remove the bailouts, and fear of failure will keep risks better controlled.
As far as this specific failure, this kind of highly unlikely failure is what insurance was invented for. Government regulations didn't stop this from happening. The government can only regulate and control that which it foresees. This usually means it adds regulations *after* something bad happens. Thus governments tend to be reactive.
At any rate, existing law covers this type of situation just fine. The harmed governments, industries, companies, and individuals will sue and win large settlements from BP and its insurers. Losses due to payments and increased insurance costs will hit the share price, punishing the owners (shareholders) of BP for what has happened. None of this requires new regulation. In fact, any new regulation will result in punishment being distributed beyond BP to others who were not responsible. This will likely lead to increased prices at the pump, which will then mean you and I are the ones being punished. Is this the fairness you propose?
Could a mountain of solid CO2 be lowered onto the wellhead? Solid CO2 is quite a bit denser than water, so it should sink and stay down. Could a big enough block of CO2 lower the temp of the wellhead enough to freeze the oil, thereby stopping the leak, at least until the CO2 melts? If it could last a day, would that be enough time to get another block of CO2 ready, and another the next day, and so on, until the relief well is ready?
Any other way to freeze it shut?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
After all, he is a software guy. MatLab in the wrong hands can virtually destroy the world.
Barrels, gallons...metrics schmetrics. All I know is that's one large milkshake!
or maybe just a crafty way to get rid of Cuba.
from a reserve nearly as large as the Gulf of Mexico containing trillions of barrels of oil
Trillions. 1 trillion bbl is enough for roughly 132 years of US oil consumption (@ 21 million bbl/day.) Guess 'peak oil' can assume its place in the ever growing mound of media bullshit. Or maybe you're pulling numbers out of your plump software engineer ass.
We're either doomed because our supply is about to run out or we're doomed because the supply is so vast one gusher will eradicate us.
He's a Slashdotter.
Feel better now? You can ignore him.
... but I think he's right on one point: It's probably dumping out a lot more than 5,000 barrels a day. I'll wait until this gets peer reviewed before I start choosing a number between 5000, 200k, 500k, or 1M barrels a day.
Texas, Schmexas. I live in Alaska, which if cut in half, would make Texas the third largest state in the country :D
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
1 million Bbl per day is a pretty absurd number. A single well producing 500k bbl per day would be pretty absurd. If there's a trillion bbl of oil down there then how come we import from the Middle East?
Wherever this article got its numbers from they are pure fantasy.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
He's the "Founder and CEO of PES Network, Inc. and the New Energy Congress"
An alternative energy technology focal point - Perendev Motors, new-fangled high-efficiency spark plugs, dubious claims, and pseudo-science.
http://www.pureenergysystems.com/about/personnel/SterlingDAllan/
"What do you know about ELE?"
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Actually the article said Maryland, but I was quoting Billy Bob Thornton from Armageddon.
Also, a guest on the reputable 'Coast-to-Coast AM'.
A show of the highest repute..
"Allan touched on such concepts as magnet motors, plasma energy, jet packs, and zero point energy..."
Shared show with guy who talks about the Jersey Devil, "...reports of a cryptid, of varying descriptions, and possibly with the ability to change its shape, was said to haunt the New Jersey Pine Barrens region, and it became known as the Jersey Devil."
Expect $20 a gallon gasoline in the not too distant future.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
...about how many nuke plants we could have had in operation by now had it not been for the anti-nuke activists.
It could have been the case that offshore drilling wouldn't even have been required.
We could have been well on the way to electric transportation infrastructure.
But, we'll never know now.
Thanks anti-nuke wackos.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As far as I can tell, this idea that somehow this could become a supervolcano and an extinction event seems completely unsupported by the AC's post...
So please, could I have one cite from a scientist even possibly suggesting that? What was said by the software engineer in the examiner blog isn't supported by anything other than his assertion... and only really by his metaphor of calling it a volcano of oil.
I call this talking out of his ass unless more can be presented.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
General fail: proof by hyperbole. LOOK AT THIS HUGE OIL SLICK HOW CAN YOU SAY IT'S 5000 BARRELS A DAY THAT'S CRAZY! is not a persuasive argument.
Specific fail: Pipe is not 5 feet in diameter.
here's a photo of the pipe with a wrench for scale -- BP says the wrench is a foot long. So accounting for perspective, the pipe is a bit more than a foot in diameter. (BP says the outer diameter of the riser pipe was 21" diameter when installed, but it's gotten a bit squished since then.)
Video shows the pipe about half full of oil, so the cross-sectional area of the flow is 1/2 * pi * (7 inches)^2 = 0.05 meters^2.
By following the motion of the blobs and plumes of oil, the flow speed seems to be about 1 meter/second. Flow rate = velocity * area = 0.04 m^3/s, or 0.4 barrels/second.
This is 27,000 barrels per day -- about 5 times BP's estimates, but an order of magnitude less than the article claims.
If you estimate volume by looking at how fast the flow is moving between video frames, you need to convert pixels to inches.
The size of the pipe gives you that scale factor.
If it's off by 2x, then your estimate is off by 2x cubed.
If the pipe is 12 inches and he thought is was 60inches, the volume estimate will be off by 125x.
Seriously?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption suggests that the entire United States only uses 20.7 million barrels of oil per day.
So we just need 20 of these wells? Come on, this article is dumb. The fearmongering about the amount of oil that is spilling is getting seriously stupid.
Assuming the following:
Cost to drill well and get oil to coastal refinery: $1 Bn
Daily cost to run the well and pump oil to refinery: $150 K
Average value of oil over repayment period: $85 / barrel
Prevailing Interest Rate (opportunity cost of using the cash to drill and run the well): 10% -- this roughly BP's return-on-assets for 2010
Years to repay: 3
We can figure that the well would have to produce around 16K to 17K barrels per day to pay for itself at the end of 3 years of operation.
These numbers are still rough, but it gets us in the ballpark. 5 years takes you to 13K barrels per day. 2 years is about 20K barrels per day.
If you assume that the well could expel 2x to 3x per day than a controlled well, you get a range of 26k to 60k barrels per day being spewed into the gulf.
That's 1.8M US gallons of oil per day.
Someone else needs to take over from here. How many gallons of water does a gallon of oil pollute in this scenario? 100 gallons of water plluted per gallon of oil?
That means 180M gallons of water polluted per day. Or 18B gallons of water polluted by the end of 100 days when we expect the oil to stop flowing due to the new well being drilled.
If that is polluting the water to a depth of 100 feet and there are 7.5 gallons of water per cubic foot, you get almost 1 square mile of water polluted to a depth of 100 feet. But we already know that the slick is over 10,000 square miles on the surface. Either the depth of the pollution is far less than 100 feet or the gallons of oil being spewed is far greater than 10's of 1000's of gallons per day and is well into the 100's of thousands of gallons per day range.
In any case TFA's reasoning about the tar suspended in the water seems to be bourne out by the fact that there are many areas where the surface slick has not reached the shore but there are tall balls washing up on it.
I would guess that TFA is generally correct and that what we are facing is, in fact, a "volcano" of oil.
Okay, so we've got a reserve of oil nearly the size of the Gulf of Mexico ready to jump out of the ground.
Wasn't there something a few years back about how we were running low on oil and be looking for a better source?
The population is greatly decreased,
and now the odds are greatly increased,
that I may someday get a chance
to kiss your lips.
I thank the Lord each day,
for the Apocalypse.
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead,
but sugar I won't let it go to my head
My Mammas face has dripped down into the dirt,
but I'm still chasing chittlins, whiskey and skirt.
current state, durability, immunity, strength of homo sapiens sapiens bodies are not able to cope up with going fully medieval in lifestyle, leave aside going neolithic or caveman. in many respects, including but not limited to herd immunity.
and yea, that would be an extinction level event, if we were forced back to middle ages.
Read radical news here
The shear amount of bad math, bad science and pure BS in this post is staggering. No well in history has ever encountered anywhere near 70,000 psi, which is also well above the level for plastic flow of the crust. 15-20k psi is the maximum that has been encountered anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico. No well in the Gulf has ever tested anywhere near 500,00 Barrels per day. BP would have been ecstatic with a sustained flow of 10,000 Barrels per day.
Oil rising up through any amount seawater does not act as a fractionation column, it acts like any other lower density fluid injected at the base of a higher density fluid- it floats to the top, intact!
Natural gas does not disperse well in seawater, although it will form methane hydrate ice complexes if contained which bind the gas in place. No "oxygen is depleted" in this process. When gas is rising to the surface it acts just like an even lighter fluid than oil - it rises faster. Physics 101.
I don't know which is more frightening; the idiot who posted this, or the people who actually believe it. Sad.
BP in one of its early environmental impact statements filed with the U.S. government gave something like 600,000 barrels a day as a worse case before the well was drilled.
So, relax everyone. It is only able to dump 600,000 barrels of oil a day according to BP.
Living in Chile
You can find better diagrams, but the water from the Gulf of Mexico suices out between Florida and Cuba and carries on over to Europe taking with it whatever it has:
http://harvardair.com/images/oceancurrents.jpg
Normally that Gulf Stream carries with it lots of heat which in dissipating keeps Europe habitable.
The oil can directly and through side effects like killing shore vegetation can cause the water to become deoxygenated and spread on up through the Atlantic to Europe like one of the old death smogs. I had considered the possibility that this oil leak was an accident till I heard of Limbaugh spouting off. Now it looks like BP execs might possibly have been overly cavalier with life on Earth.
If that well was capable of 1Mbpd BP would have been holding more than a party for a safety record - they would have been giving thanks to their chosen deity for a cast iron miracle.
NO single well ever produces that volume of oil, ever. We are talking about 10,000 bpd if BP were really lucky.
What the hell is this article doing being pushed to the front page? Its pretty obvious that most people haven't got the faintest clue about oil exploration if this isn't just laughed at as an onion article.
They've unleashed the VOM !!!!
Why do we give this guy any less credibility than BP? It wouldn't surprise me that BP wants hyperbolic injection so it can play the victim and make this disaster sound less foreboding "like its only a Chernobyl." Did BP put him up to this? I am not inspired by BP's promise to cover the damages and at the same time try to shift the blame.
Stand back! I'm going to try Science!!!
We're going to be calculating flow for a well, guessing a few variables, which I'll explain are guesses. This math is from Production Optimization Using Nodal Analysis by H Dale Beggs, c. 1991.
Assumptions
The well is a saturated reservoir - This means there is no gas cap and that oil is saturated with oil, providing additional lift. I feel that initial reservoir conditions, this is a safe assumption.
The well has been continuously accessing new reservoir without reaching a fault or boundary - This is a very unlikely assumption, but makes my math a lot easier, as it assumes a steady-state flow. The well probably reached a boundary and saw an associated decrease in flow of almost 1/2 in the first week, which decreased again at the next boundary, etc.
Flow is in a bubble flow state - Again, this is a safe assumption in a newly tapped saturated reservoir.
Variables
d - pipe diameter, which I'm going to say is 3" pipe (2.441" ID) which is an ID of 0.0620014 m
mu- viscosity, which I'm guessing is 0.05 kg/m-sec, and this is a wild-ass guess, but in the dense oil range.
rho - density, which I'm guessing is 1000 kg/m^3, which is again, a wild-ass guess, but in the dense oil range.
Pres - the reservoir pressure. Again, we throw out a number, say... 18,000 psi. This is proprietary knowledge like the last two data points and is also a wild-ass scientific guess. If you have a better number, please plug it in and redo the math.Actually if anyone can supply *any* of these numbers, please do so.
Pout - the pressure at the end of the pipe. 5000 ft of water is about 2884 psi of back pressure.
delta_P - the pressure drop between reservoir and fluid release from the pipe. Based on the above, 15, 116 psi, which is 104, 221 kPa.
V - velocity of flow (m/s)
f - dimensionless friction, and this is where I'm really going to cheat. I'm calling f = 0.004 based on 3-inch new steel based on a table lookup
L - pipe length, approximately 13,000 ft is 3962.4 meters
Equations
delta_p = (f rho V^2 L)/(2 gc d)
Actual Work
104,221 kPa = 104,221 N/m^2 = (f rho V^2 L)/(2 gc d)
104,221 N/m^2 = ((0.004) (1000)(V^2)(3962.4))/((2) (1) (0.0620014))
104,221 = 127,816 V^2
V^2 = 0.8154 m^2/s^2
V = 0.903 m/s
with an diameter of 0.0620014 m, the area is 0.049m^2, and the flow is 0.044 m^3 per second.
This is 0.276751674 bbl/s, and there are 86,400 seconds per day.
This is approximately 23,907bbl/day of oil.
So there is a quick, back of the envelope guess of the immediate flow from the reservoir, based on many guesses. Concerns about the environment are left as an exercise to the reader.
The article claims that the pipe diameter of the leaking pipe is five feet. I have trouble believing this. I haven't been able to find a good source for the actual pipe diameter, however. Anyone know a reliable source for this information?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
AAaaaa!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Does anyone know if BP, or anyone else, is paying the government for the oil that they have extracted from the ground?
I'm sure the lease for the rig includes a $.0x/barrel-extracted. I don't see that the fact it's not going to BP's use should matter. "they" have caused oil to be extracted: it's lost to future extractors... pay up. (in addition to the cleanup costs.)
This is nothing but BS/FUD that does not belong on slashdot. There are real scientists and engineers working on this problem in the real world.
The Fact is this is just not the disaster that the eco freaks keep wanting it to be. As of now its just catching up to the amount of oil spilled during Katrina. (we are still at least a month away from exxon valdize territory) The Katrina oil was spilled directly on shore mostly from flooded refineries making it far worse. And yet most of us have never heard of it because it didn't destroy the environment forever as the eco freaks want us to think one drop of oil will. Oil leaks out of the ground every day without mans help and the environment deals with it. In warm areas oil is broken-down quite quickly. In fact small amounts are actually helpful as crude will act as fertilizer (hey it's just really old compost after all)
Now oil spewing volcanos do exist. There called asphalt volcanos and were first discovered in the gulf. (the oils there it will come up one way or the other eventually)
BP screwed up in not having a second blow out preventer and they will pay for that, and I expect there will be a complete reengineering of deep drilling operations.
Notes - the BP execs were on the rig celebrating the Deepwater's safety record (there's some irony for you)
This was and old well being maintained not new exploration as many have characterized it.
He may be a software engineer, but I'm retired from the oil business. Where did he get that the pipes are 5 feet in diameter? What a moron. Drill pipe diameters are around 8 inches MAX outside diameter, many much smaller than that. I don't know where his "trained eye" comes from, but it isn't from drilling. Yes, this field might produce as much as 500,000 barrels per day, if SCORES of wells are drilled. This is an exploration well, to boot. You drill enough of a hole to see what's there, cap it, and let the production rigs come in later.
A fractionating column? Give me a break. He's comparing the high pressure and cold water at 5000 feet deep to a hot distillation device?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind. Put on your tinfoil hats and return to what you were doing.
Computer guy comes up with his own number. NPR just said a quarter million a day.
See the NPR report here claiming up to 70,000 barrels, or 3 million gallons, per day:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525
Pretty much sums up what I thought when I first read about it...
More evidence the spill is MUCH higher than previously believed: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525&loc=interstitialskip Estimates of 70,000-100,000 barrels a day.
I'm getting confused with all those barrels, feet, miles and psis. How much is all that in Burmese units?
The article (even summary) claims five foot diameter. This is just plain wrong. The riser pipe spewing oil has an outer diameter of 21 inches, as reported by all credible sources and according to the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig specs : http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17 .
None of the numbers in this article have any meaning -- it is all uniformed drivel and speculation.
The author is a contributor for an alternate energy publication. He's written several articles with questionable information and is a self proclaimed "expert".
Here's his "resume":
http://www.pureenergysystems.com/about/personnel/PaulNoel/
"He has considerable interest in geology. He has traveled among the oil rigs of mobile bay and has been to their shipyards."
Clearly that makes him an expert in this area. The whole bio reads like someone who's completely bullshitting his experiences to claim some sort of expertise. I visited the Mayflower once and have read up on boats, but I don't consider myself an expert in nautical sailing.
Is he really listing an Associates Degree as one of his credentials?
If you fucking hate us so much, stop eating our McDonalds, stop wearing our Levi's, stop watching our MTV (shit, we don't even watch it anymore), and while you're at it, you can stop using the global communication networks we've paid for. Summary: you hate us because you want to be us. You will stop hating us when you wake up and realize you are already us, and that the extravagant American lifestyle you envy does not exist anywhere except on your TVs.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Actually we knew the levees could break, and what would happen if they did. People just discounted the likelihood of such a hurricane hit, as they often do with bad things (i.e. not wearing seatbelts because you don't think you'll get in a car accident, etc). I still have pint glasses from the Bulldog in New Orleans with "Tourist Information" written on them. One of the bits of information is, "If the levees break, everyone will die. Nobody seems very concerned about this."
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
I remember when an article by Paul Noel was linked from Slashdow in Oct. 26, 2005 called "Wilma the Capacitor", in which he said: "Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator, and a massive capacitor bank. As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates acoustically and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away. Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water."
You all thought he was crazy and you were all so smart for pointing that Science Daily published an article on April 14, 2010 titled: "Giant Natural Particle Accelerator Above Thunderclouds". Now its official science.
Are you still laughing?
He was right, you were wrong.
No, he isn't just a software engineer, whose dad encoded the software that put the first astronauts on the moon.
Here is what he wrote this morning to me in a moment of reflection:
It isn't possible that I know what I am talking about is it?
For the record.
I hold 3 college degrees with about 240 Semester Hours including Physics (Including calculus based), Chemistry (Organic, Inorganic, analytic, Qantitative and Qualitative , Accounting, Computer Science, Microbiology, Biology, Accounting, Business, Nursing, and much more). Most PhD's have far less than I hold. I was doing College level Chemistry by 5th Grade. I was doing rocketry, mapping and a lot more before high school. I was breeding plants before I was 11. I don't do it now but I know what is going on. My favorite sciences are agriculture and chemistry. My bedroom was a radio station for 8 years (Ham) during the time I built transmitters, antenna and receivers.
I have done extensive exhaustive studies on public education and what works and doesn't work. I have done extensive work on electronics design and embedded programming.
I have traveled 40 US States and 4 foreign countries.
During my work in Mobile County a typical day might take me as far as Washington County or Dauphin Island. I have worked for months on Dauphin Island and the region around it where the Oil industry works out of.
I am not really wanting to publish all of this. I sort of hate credentials stuff. I figure if the facts don't carry the day it is all a lie anyway.
I just though you might like to know.
So before you go jumping all over this story and dismissing things, do some digging. You just might find out that he is actually far ahead of the curve. He knows as much as most industry experts. The difference? He's not afraid to talk.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
The oil isn't mainly leaking from the drill hole, it's leaking from a pipe; that's why the flow rate is considerably lower than what the platform would have yielded. And the drill hole is not 5 ft in diameter anyway.
Furthermore, we're not talking about a thin layer of rock, we're talking about 3 miles of rock (under 1 mile of water). That's not going to just collapse because there's a small hole in it.
Yes, the oil spill is bad, and, yes, it will kill many animals. BP was careless and should be held responsible. And people should be prudent while stopping it. But it isn't the end of the world.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
4 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 345 600 bbs per day about 1/3 of a millioin, but still a very big number.
Was this taken from the maximum estimates of the flow rate or ??
I think that PB should be taxed on our oil that is being squandered.
Nate
But wait! What about peak oil? I thought the earth was running out of oil? Once the last few drops of this puny "gusher" have bubbled out, the world will shudder and all the SUVs will coast to a stop.
As this disaster shows, oil is getting hard to reach. BP wasn't drilling there for the fun of it. They would have much preffered a simple oil rig on land, but those resources are running out. There is more oil, but it is getting harder and harder to reach while at the same time demand keeps going up. This means that unless something changes, supply and demand could cross.
It is also reasonable to presume that the oil reserves are limited, we know the method by which it was created is not infinite or renawable (not at the rate we consume it anyway), so going with current estimates we can predict roughly when we will start running out, NOT because all oil will be gone, but because what remains will be so costly to get that it is no longer affordable. Only after oil has become far to expensive to extract will it ever possibly run out. Simply put, when it costs the same as gold to extract, we can't be running petrol cars anymore.
But to keep it simple for the press, peak oil == running out.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
obviously, since this isn't the worst blowout that has occurred historically.
Alternatively, that's got to be the most bizarre and unreasonable conspiracy theory I've heard in a while. A Yellowstone Caldera event? Oh, please. Those kinds of eruptions involve CUBIC KILOMETRES of magma. In the case of Yellowstone, an estimated 1000km^3 600000 years ago (compare to Mt. St. Helens at "only" ~1km^3). There isn't enough oil in the whole FRICKING RESERVOIR to equate to that.
Thanks for the laugh, but please get a clue (check your math), and/or stop smoking the cheap stuff.
How did this nonsense get past the editors?
As a Earth Science major and having worked in the Geo-sciences arena for 20 years, I can say this article is so far off base, I can't believe it was elevated to being posted on Slashdot. There is no way possible for a Yellowstone type eruption. That is just straight up bullshit. Sure there is a significant amount of pressure, but not of volcanic proportions. This article should be redacted from the Slashdot site!
This will amount to the greatest catastrophy of humanity.
In the coming days, decisions, hard decisions must be made.
Indication point to the loss of the Gulf of Mexico! Industries, Fisheries, all life, even human life.
If left un-checked, the catastrophy will threaten Homo Sapiens, as the slick meets the Gulf Coastal Current, rounds Key West, and heads north to Altantic City, later to encounter the British Isles, and beyond.
President Obama, must now consider extention of Homo Sapians a certainty.
Recomendation: Use a neclear depth-carge to close the well; the Gulf of Mexico is dead! Do it now, not later, or all ... will be lost.
With all greatest candor and respect.
Well, it could be an error in translation. For some substances, maybe you could describe them as a barrel. Like, if someone threw a gallon of bull semen on you, vs if someone threw a barrel of bull semen on you, would it be that much of a difference? You might just say that someone threw a barrel of cum on you, and no one would really fault you for exaggerating. Maybe timothy figures crude oil is as offensive as bull spunk. Who can blame him for that? I know that if I was a jellyfish, I'd be ultra pissed off right now. Maybe that's where tim is coming from.
1. Upper management tells middle management to follow the rules ...but also sets goals that can't be met unless middle management breaks said rules
2.
3. When shit happens, blame middle management for not following the rules
4. In fact, sue the fuck out of the middle management yourself for defaming the company and costing the owners revenue
That only makes sense if 'they' are willing to gamble that 'they' will get other 'they' to replace them before their corners cut back. There is still greater incentive than the expressly limited safety incentives provided now.
Contrariwise if 'they' had been replaced by other 'they' unless it happened so close to an accident occurring that the latter 'they' couldn't have been reasonably expected to make significant changes to safety policy, then the later 'they' *should* be on the hook for their incompetence.
The fact that their is a hypothetical window of time under which one person could make another hold the bag for an unpredictable future event isn't logical reason for saying that neither of them should be responsible for the costs of failure to any significant degree. If you want government regulation point to one that would effectively solve the problem you raise. Don't point to an unrelated problem as a reason not to change an ineffective regulation.
1 million barrels per day. A new video released shows the largest hole spewing oil and natural gas from an aperture 5 feet in diameter at a rate of approximately 4 barrels per second.
4 X 60 X 60 X 24 = 345600
learn math slashdot!
"A third of the ships were destroyed"
I have not seen those news yet.
Force BP to make an offer to it's competitors - if they can fix it before BP - they can have exclusive rights to the well and BP will still be held responsible for the cleanup effort.
We also knew terrorists would planebomb buildings, and that offshore deepwater drilling is unsafe.
We just trust "the system", namely "it can't happen to us". And we spend $TRILLIONS a year on the people who run the system so it doesn't happen to us.
Those people have been largely Republicans, and the Democrats who go along with them.
--
make install -not war
I don't eat shrimp. I don't like seafood. I've never visited Louisiana, Texas, Florida, or any other part of the Caribbean, and have no intention of doing so. My idea of beautiful landscape is a golf course beside my resort hotel. Why should I care? I've got a lifestyle to maintain, and this is 2000 miles away with economic consequences that will not touch me in any way. Drill, baby, drill!
The research on Asphalt Volcanoes is so timely. So much so, that the wikipedia article referred in parent was created on the April 30th this year. Barely two weeks ago. Maybe a bit too timely, I am afraid.
But to leave uncanny coincidence aside, there is a crucial bit of the information missing in the wikipedia article: how does nature's own Asphalt volcano compare with the human's one?
Q: What's purple and works from home? A: A non-Abelian group. (It doesn't commute.)
... beard, sandles and feels more comfortable hanging around with other guys. Cleary the bible writers got confused between carpenter and programmer - easy done.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Would it'd be funny if it were gushing 1000's of barrels of monkeys per day?
Until we ran out of bananas...
~yes, we have no bananas~
Texas - that wonderful state allowed, at a whim, to divide itself by five and suddenly become a senate powerhouse.
It's not a sinister plot by the Evil Liberal Conspiracy, nor is it the result of some sinister plot by oil & coal companies. The simple truth is that nuclear plants are not economically viable without an enormous amount of financial assistance from the government. If oil & coal prices go up enough, eventually nuclear power plants will become economically viable, but right now they're not.
Glenn Beck told me that environmentalism is the same thing as being a Nazi. Why do you hate America? Why do you hate our freedom? [/teabagger]
...does this estimate factor in the large amount of dispersants used? Not all the oil that spewed out of the oil volcano ended up in the slick we see on the surface.
Just to update this post. The Miami Herald reports the pipe in 21 inches in diameter.
You sound like Obama making wide generalized conclusions when you don't even know what happened, which is similar to "The Cambridge Police acted stoopidly" right after "I don't know what happened, but"...
Except you are: "This is the fault of capitalists private industries" right before "we don't know what happened" and then "government bailouts are the only thing that will save you stoopid capitalists". Could you be any more propaganda?! You didn't even try to blend it with something intelligible like your other government hired comrads.
Why isn't some tycoon plugging it and putting a pipe in it?
Ooh, snap! That's cold!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Shape a cone with an angle of about 10 degrees (long and narrow so it sits firmly in the whole and can't tip back out) out of lead or something equally dense. Even if it doesn't form a perfect seal, it should slow the leak down a good bit. Probably even enough to lower the dome back on top and have it settle properly and form a seal with the ocean floor. I'm not an engineer, obviously, but what's preventing them from doing something like this?
Er, unless my math is wrong
4bbls = 168gallons (42 gal/bbl)
200gal/sec * 60 sec/min * 60min/hr * 24hr/day = ...
drumroll please....
14,515,200 barrels per day
And thats before the riser blows completely out and the casings around the rathole which penetrated the reservoir are ejected. Then we're really wide open.
... about how many Chernobyl-style accidents we would have had worldwide without a very healthy and skeptical opposition to unrestrained nuclear power development. BP could bring its deep water off-shore drilling safety management to the nuclear power plant in your town too, hooray!
I'm all for nuclear power, but people have good reason to be concerned about the risks of nuclear power done wrong. And before you say that Western nuclear power plants can't fail like Chernobyl did, reflect that those more robust designs are a result of people's very deep concerns and their ability to hold their government and, through regulation, energy companies accountable.
This accident is a good argument in favor of greater development of nuclear energy, but alienating nuclear energy opponents by calling them wackos isn't. Their concerns are legitimate and ought to be addressed. We shouldn't just give industry free reign to build nuclear power plants without significant oversight any more than we should have given the oil industry free reign to drill anywhere no matter the risks.
Calling people names just hardens their position.
Thanks, pro-nuke wacko.
through it that is five feet in diameter! Even the casing is not that big, much less the riser through which the oil is flowing!
And I am not an anonymous coward; just too lazy to create an account.
Mike Nifong, disbarred
An expert in fluid mechanics from Purdue, Steve Wereley: "I spent a couple of hours this afternoon analyzing the video, and the number I get is 70,000 barrels a day coming out of that pipe," said a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor, who used video footage and a particle velocity analysis to come up with that 70,000 barrel per day amount. That is around 3,000,000 gallons per day. Still less than the quoted original article, but closer to a linear, not exponential difference. I stand by my previous comment.
I've added the following to the story:
Errata 5/16/2010:
We originally reported that the main hole was 5 feet in diameter, spewing an estimated 4 barrels per second, with a possible total approaching 1 million barrels/day. The pipe is actually 21 inches in diameter; and the high end estimated total leakage is in the range of 3.4 barrels/day (Ref.). We deeply regret the error.
And I've added this from Paul Noel:
May 15 Update and Correction
Take a look at the May 15 story in the New York Times: Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html
This represents the oil per my prediction including the distillation that I told you was happening with the tar balls. The stunning implication is that I was wrong in quantity and the leak may in fact be much larger than I said. My curiosity has to do with the motion of these mats. Will they sink or will they warm up and float up somewhere? Big surprises and not fun ones could be in store. I sort of suspect they will hang around and wander for a while and then rise to the surface. (Only a suspicion-- Lets hope it doesn't happen!) Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows.
Just one mat the size described represents over 240,000 barrels per day over the entire spill duration and the article implies more than one of these! We are absolutely safe to say I am totally confirmed on oil volumes and then some. The article suggests 4 or 5 such mats. If this is so the gush could easily have exceeded 1 million barrels of oil per day.
I can safely say now that if there was any doubt of what I was saying about the leak there should be no doubt now.
On a side note: I just learned from Alabama sources that the situation is far worse than is being portrayed. No facts to describe this except that qualitative analysis.
Sterling the riser is in fact and I was wrong on the size it is a 21 inch riser. Sorry to all but none the less it is massive. Even if the pressure were 20,000 PSI shouldn't that about be Sci-Fi to most people. You don't want to stand in the way of that for sure. I suspect based on the mat sizes that my pressure statements are correct.
The facts are that BP has just kicked out into the ocean a spill that is much more than equal to Exxon Valdez every day for 18 days now. It could be 3 times that every day.
I will say it now and without any reservation: The heads of BP, Haliburton and Transocean should be arrested and tried under the Common Law for crimes against humanity and against nature itself. On conviction they should be executed for their crimes as a monument to corporate management that you should never consider to do such evil deeds again. What has happened here is beyond war crimes. It is absolutely evil what they have done. Silence and no action on this licenses more disasters to come.
BP testimony before Congress states that their worst case was 60,000 Barrels per day. That estimate is at least 7 times too low to account for the now observed facts. I am assuming only one such mat exists for this estimate. I can only guess based on this that my estimates could be low by a very wide margin. I am definitely not high at all.
My apologies for any errors that may have allowed distraction, but this situation is vastly out of hand.
I think if you realize that one mat described is about 1.7 cubic miles in size, and the well keeps on blowing and easily could do this for years, you get a hint of the size of the oil deposit under the Gulf of Mexico. At this rate the Deposit could deliver in 1 year something in the order of 35 cubic miles of oil. It could blow for a decade or more if it is not stopped. It isn't anywhere near out. I just hope they get it corked up shortly. That relief well they are drilling could blowout too!
I told you there was a "dragon" down there! [Symbolism] I have warned people that he has only nipped us. [Symbolism]
This is by no me
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.