Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you missed the part about Revelation 8:8. Clearly this guy has the scientific know-how to figure out whether or not we're all going to die.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It turns out humans aren't the only species. For example, there are many that live in the water. And a lot of those live exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico.
If it killed the vast majority of them, I'd consider it an extinction event. And it looks like it might just do that.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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]
The current estimate for total world reserves is just over 1 trillion, so this guy is just a total idiot.
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.
Crude is measured in 42 gallon barrels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_per_day
Pfff, that can’t happen until after Revelation 8:7.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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
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!
But what if, when Jesus said "and the first shall be last, and the last shall be first", he was talking about those angels? ;)
Clearly he was describing a LIFO queue data structure, not angels.
the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which limits oil companies' total liability in case of an oil spill to $75 million.
It's worth noting this refers to Economic liability - i.e, liability for economic damage done to an area as a result of an oil spill. BP is still on the hook for cleaning up the mess, and that's a price tag without a limit.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
All nuclear plants are critical. That is how they goddamned work. Once again, another anti-nuke wacko proves he has no fucking idea what he is talking about, prefering to throw around "scary" words instead of actually researching shit. I swear to god, it's like knowledge is actually taboo to you people.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Not at all. It's just that a big part of the USA has the "Everything is better if it's private" mental disease, combined with the "Regulation is unnecessary bureaucracy" mental disease. So the same corporate policy tendencies for short term profits at the expense of safety that made the Gulf of Mexico Three Amigos cut corners when running a deep water rig can be expected to also apply to privately run nuclear power plants. Instead of a large oil slick that kills all wildlife over hundreds of square miles and takes 20 years to break down, you would have a nuclear waste spill that infects groundwater, rendering a huge area uninhabitable for hundreds of years. Until you completely cut off for-profit corporate contributions to political organizations and campaigns, you can't allow corporations to run really dangerous projects because they'll manipulate the political process to allow them to make more money by cutting oversight on necessary safety processes.
Because even if you haven't figured it out yet after the bank bailouts, many corporate executives have figured out that it doesn't matter whether cutting corners may mean that the company might go bankrupt in 3 or 4 years as long as they can make massive bonuses through increasing profits by cutting safety margins and taking other significant risks with a half-life that's long enough to get them set up for life.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I just had a troubling thought... imagine telling them how the sun works.
I can see it now: A mad rush to mail/telephone their representatives to ban that burning thermonuclear device in the sky.
He who has no