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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?
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!
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 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?
Both can be true, actually.
Peak oil doesn't mean we've run out or that we're nearly running out. It means we've reached the maximum yearly production. At some point, extracting additional oil becomes incredibly expensive, and our production falls off. After that point, there's still oil, but we can't extract as much as we used to. So, even if we've hit peak oil, there's decades of production left. And if we haven't hit peak oil, there's an additional buffer of several decades. But even in the most optimistic industry estimates, peak oil is happening within the next 50-70 years.
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]
The current estimate for total world reserves is just over 1 trillion, so this guy is just a total idiot.
Crude is measured in 42 gallon barrels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_per_day
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
Pressure is not the same as expansion force. The reason the oil and gas is under pressure is because it is trapped under all the rock and sand. The pathway to the surface exposes this pressure allowing gushing of oil. This does not mean that the reservoir could expend all this pressure at once in a expulsion/explosion because the eruptive event itself would cancel out most of the source for the pressure. It's comparable to an inflated balloon deep under water. The forces acting on it balances out with the pressure inside it. If you calculate the ammount of potential energy it could smash a car, but pop the balloon and the gas and water would mix resulting in a quite non-spectacular event. Most of the oil isn't even in a chamber, it's in porous rock slowing the release/event. The devestation here will be the release of the gasses and oil into the water and it's effect on coasts and marine life. This is why we should get it under control, not because it would bring on an ice-age. (It won't...)
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.
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.
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?
The existing laws basically protect BP from catastrophic payments. The system is designed to allow oil companies vast profits with only marginal risk.
BP is self-insured. For some reason insurance companies don't want to insure oil rigs or extraction.
Then perhaps BP should have to pay to every consumer of oil as well, as part of the chain of economic damage it has caused.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...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.
We only have enough oil for 10-20 years more.
Call me cynical, but I've been hearing that for the last 30 years.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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.
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.
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.
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.
GE Oil and Gas states:
so I think it's reasonable to assume that the "5 foot" pipe leaking oil is in reality a 18 3/4 inch inner diameter pipe at most if its a piece of broken riser pipe, less if it's the drill pipe (18” and 16” casing strings). I've seen reports that the riser now comes out of the BOP, Blow-out Preventer, goes up for 1,500 feet and is bend back and buried in the sea-floor, so this five foot "pipe" could be the mouth of an Asphalt Volcano forming around the leak, in short the article is at best miss-informed conjector. Also the BP execs were not there to celebrate the well hitting oil, but to give an safety award to the rig for working 7 years without a lost time accident which is much more ironic I think.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Most of the news reports say it as a 21" pipe. Which would give you about a 5' circumference. Lets assume he just got it wrong.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is the DOE good enough? Probably not, but whatever:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html