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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."
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.
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.
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.
...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.
According to the summary, that is from the largest vent. I didn't read the actual article either, the summary was kinda long and seemed like it had a sad ending.
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?
So....the solution is to regulate them less?
Color me skeptical.
Like the financial disaster, when there is a disconnect between the people who profit in the short term and the people who pay the penalty in the long term, then the market does not work. In the finance industry, people could focus on making really high profits by taking enormous risks, and when the highly leveraged bets worked, they made tons of money. And if the risks didn't work out, the government is there to make it all better. Here, the oil company (BP) has a history of cutting corners to improve profits and crossing their fingers that nothing blows up. When it does, the insurance company or government or the people themselves cover the damage. In this case, they just screwed the pooch more than normal, and it might really hurt the company. But the executives that made lots of money by cutting the corners and improving profits are long gone.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
What, you mean to imply that software engineers aren't qualified to predict geologically driven doomsday events?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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In this case, the regulation that should have been removed was the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which limits oil companies' total liability in case of an oil spill to $75 million.
Without that juicy legislation by Congress, they would have been damn sure their stuff was safe, because they would be on the hook for the entire damages otherwise. Now, they are basically going to decide for themselves which "legitimate" damages they feel like paying.
Good job Congress!
In this case, the regulation that should have been removed was the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which limits oil companies' total liability in case of an oil spill to $75 million.
I would agree with this.
Without that juicy legislation by Congress, they would have been damn sure their stuff was safe, because they would be on the hook for the entire damages otherwise. Now, they are basically going to decide for themselves which "legitimate" damages they feel like paying.
Good job Congress!
No, this is not correct. The problem is that the 'they' in your sentences changes over time. 'they' who run the company now want short term profit, so 'they' cut the corners and make lots of money in the years they run it. Later, some new guy takes over when the whole thing goes to crap, and 'they' would be on the hook. The company goes bankrupt. This does not solve the problem.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
It's liquid volume, not solid volume, so the correct unit is Olympic Swimming Pools per fortnight.
At 5,000 barrels per day, that's approximately 4.45 OSPs/fortnight.
This unit (OSP/fortnight) is perfect, as it expresses the current approximate volume spewed per unit time in a number easily approximated by looking at your fingers for those short on Large Number Equivalency Skill.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
...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.
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