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Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Below the Gulf's Surface
An anonymous reader sends in a NY Times article about the spread of oil from the BP gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Quoting:
"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given. ... The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. ... [Scientists on the Pelican mission] suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly. ... Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes."
We should call BP big polluter now!
I've been reading a little about oil dispersants. I understand that basically they help to break down oil so that microorganisms can do their thing and use the oil as food. Maybe an oversimplification, but that is what I got out of it.
So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Sarah Palin...
is out parasailin'.
As reported by the WSJ
The insistence of the political mainstream to stick to slogans is so backwards... This includes both the conservatives and liberals.
BP. British Petroleum.
Hold my beer and watch this!
The government has "top men" working on this. Who? "Top men".
Besides, it's silly to think there could be oil elsewhere than the surface.
Yes, there's no value (to us) in trying to determine exactly how badly we've screwed things... It's not like a better estimate would be useful in calculating a level of effort for the cleanup, possibly quantity of cleanup materials, or potential ocean chemistry changes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Great. So the oil is nicely contained in dense plumes. BP just needs to stick a giant straw into the plumes and suck that stuff right up :-)
As an immigrant from a 3rd world, and after watching American and British and lately chinese interests eat away resources such as forests and minerals, and watching western oil companies pollute and then using economic blackmail to suppress voices, I personally feel this is a positive thing.
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
Yes, that evil, American oil company: British Petroleum.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
The free market will fix this. People will stop putting BP gas in their car and BP will go out of business. Leading others to clean up the spill, garner goodwill with the public, and have consumers put that company's gas in their car.
Right?
Right?....
So, you're saying that because a company got greedy, wasn't regulated well enough, and fucked something up, that means we should stop doing it? Wow, that's rational. So I guess if I fall down the stairs today everyone should stop using stairs? Yeah, we as a society should be hellbent on renewable energy and kicking the oil addiction, but in the meantime, I'd prefer to drill locally instead of bleeding out money in the form of foreign oil imports. Really, are you making the argument that because things can go wrong they shouldn't be done under proper regulation, or are you being irrational to accuse Palin of being stupid? So yeah, I'll say it: drill baby drill...along with the less popular 'regulate baby regulate' and 'research baby research'.
Previously known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which is a bit less catchy these days.
Actually BP no longer stands for British Petroleum officially, but meh.. No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
You can't just drop a nuke on the seafloor and expect it to close the well. All it'll gonna do is blow away the sediment, leaving the well open. In order to close it, you'll have to drill into solid rock, lower the nuke down there and blow it to collapse the original well. At this point, you can as well do a relief drilling and shut it down with mud. Nuking a blowout makes sense only when you don't have the capability to geo-steer a relief drill precisely enough to hit the original hole. We can do that now, and it won't take much more time than drilling for a nuke. We could nuke the BP headquarters, though - that might help...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Bear in mind that several years ago, BP merged with another company and kept the BP name. That company? Amoco. AMerican Oil COmpany.
That's like saying the sun naturally releases lots of radiation so it's okay to go jump into a nuclear reactor. The organisms around natural leaks are vastly different and have adapted to such locations over hundreds of thousands of years. And it's not like that 2000bbp, which I'll just take your word for, is all out of one location either. You can't just go pour oil over everything and then go, "Well oil naturally occurs so it'll be fine!" Really rather absurd.
It's a bit worse than that, though not substantially worse. (Depending, of course, on just how much oil is released.) This may be enough additional stress to convert the entire gulf into a dead zone, rather than the partial dead zone that we've dealt with previously.
If enough oil is released it could also spread a dead zone up the Gulf Stream, though I feel this is doubtful. OTOH, the ocean off-shore the coast is already home to many dead zones, so it might not require that much additional stress.
This could be a disaster to the fishing industries, which are already nearing collapse due to over-fishing and improper fishing. (Again, just adding a bit more stress to something that's already overstressed.) This, of course, will cause other food prices to rise, which they were already doing due to the increases in the price of oil.
Nothing here looks like a disaster to the Earth, but it's a pretty big disaster to the humans that happen to live near the area...and to some that don't live that near, but were already under near limiting stress. Also to some species. Some have probably already been wiped out. More probably will be. These were generally species that had already been pushed near extinction, and this will have been just the final blow. Others only live/d in a restricted area, and when that area is rendered uninhabitable, they die.
Just to put things in perspective, a nuclear war that killed off all humans and most other mammals wouldn't be a disaster to the Earth. Only to the people. But as a person, I would find it a major disaster. (Presuming that I lived long enough. Quite unlikely as I live in a major metropolitan area.) Saying that something isn't a major disaster just because it isn't a disaster to the Earth is stupidly unreasonable. Only the collision that split off the moon has counted as a major disaster to the Earth. Even the incident that killed off 90% of all species (genera?) wasn't a major disaster to the Earth.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If humans never (or, say before humans did so) drilled for oil, wouldn't the oil still be there, and occasionally be released by events such as earthquakes?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aUqFB_GbhRYM
Haiti's 7.0 earthquake "may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, [Stephen Pierce, a geologist] said yesterday in a telephone interview."
What earthquakes do not do is drill a hole 18,000 feet deep.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Oh, so you have an economical, reliable method for:
* pumping millions of tons of oxygen
* almost a mile below the ocean's surface
* and dissolving it in trillions of gallons of water
Goddamn armchair engineers... Seriously, you're about as divorced from reality as BP's PR team.
The disasters would happen, but they wouldn't all happen in the same century.
you americans are fucked, hahah. thats what you get with your evil oil companies.
Actually, it's what Americans get when they let a British oil company deploy a Swiss drilling platform with German companies responsible for safety. Massive US lobbying efforts by BP also contributed to the lack of regulation, all in the name of international fairness and free trade.
And historically, Europe's record on oil spills is far worse than that of the US. Of course, being obedient little nationalists, Europeans love to find fault with the US while their own governments are screwing them.
Hopefully, as a result of this disaster, the US will severely limit the ability of foreign companies to lobby in the US, and hopefully it will kick out European oil companies with their poor safety records once and for all.
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Actually, a 5' DIAMETER hole, would have a 30 inch radius, and therefore an area of 2827 in^2 2827*150000 = 424 million pounds of pressure. However, it is actually an 18 inch drill hole with a pressure differential of around 13,000 psi (see various calculations in comments for this post http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1651510), which puts you at just over a million pounds of pressure. The blowout preventer that didn't work properly was a 450-ton device. It isn't much of a stretch beyond that to get a 500 or 600-ton block of something down there to just plug it up.
Protons are protons you fucking idiot yes the sun radiates nuclear radiation
There is no "extreme left" in the United States. Liberal in the US is the equivalent of centrist to slightly conservative in Europe.
I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, goes by the name of "learned helplessness".
With the exception of the occasional mulishly idealistic college student, most people don't take long to stop caring much about things over which they have absolutely no power.
There is a possibility, but the current oil collecting ships like this one from the German Navy collect water by opening a wide 'mouth' on the ship from the top of the water, I wonder if they could install a pump and a long hose to do what you are proposing.
While possibly a valid idea, there are the economics to consider. The "leak" is spewing over 210 million gallons a day, while an average to large oil tanker can store about 62 million gallons (assuming my math guesstimate is correct). That means (at 100% efficiency, inotherwords, 100% oil collection 0% water/sediment/etc collection) it would take almost four tankers a day to collect the spewing oil to prevent an increase in the amount of uncontained oil from increasing.
It would also take an equivalent amount (of gallons) worth of storage and/or processing facilities to deal with the "dirty oil" that was collected. None of this takes into account whatever percentage of the liquid they collect is not oil (ie: say, using such a collection method results in a 60/40% oil/water ratio) - which increases the cost (number of tankers, size of storage/processing facilities, etc).
While I think that BP and those other companies involved should be put on the hook for whatever it takes to prevent this catastrophe from growing any further, the simple fact is that no one at BP is going to even consider or "think up" a method of dealing with this situation in a manner that so adversely affects their bottom line. I also seriously doubt that the government, who is dependent on BP's revenue for taxation, is going to think up such a scenario as well. That is where the economics involved come into play.
Sometimes (often maybe?) the economics of such a situation prevent the better methods of dealing with the environmental aspects from even being considered. Sadly, the reality of human greed of those in power usually trumps environmental needs or the needs of the "not so rich" who get adversely affected by situations such as these. It's far cheaper for them do to nothing, or spend lotsa time "analyzing" the situation to come up with lame-brained but cheap solutions than to actually do something to fix it if the economics are not favorable to the "powers that be" involved in the crisis.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
It's a publicly traded multinational corporation. The world's fourth largest, in fact. I think it's pretty much transcended nationality. The CEO is Swedish, FWIW.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I agree with this sentiment. Oil companies rarely take into account the negative externalities they create by drilling for oil. It would be nice to see this oil spill become such a huge disaster that the entire market changes the way they do business. However, the pessimist in me thinks that regardless of how bad this looks for BP, it will not affect the status quo.
There is no "extreme left" in the US just like there is no "Left", "Right", "Extreme Right", or "Central".
All of these terms are made up to make us think that we still have a choice. To make us think that this isn't for all intents and purposes a one party system.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You are almost right except this: No amount of Government intervention (regulation) can do anything about all possible ways someone may fuck up in all different companies in all different sectors of economy.
Have the Government do what it should do on behalf of the People: Sue the Shit out of BP, Halliburton and Transocean, get the damages, cleanup and x100 or x1000 liability as a way to scare the fuck of all the other companies who are pumping oil, gas, digging coal etc etc etc
Do this: destroy the fucking BP if necessary and also, screw the corporate protection, arrest the management, arrest whoever wasn't doing the job right and also put every single prick from MMS (that's the Government agency literally is fucking with the corporate whores, literally) to jail for 10 consecutive life sentences. Or shoot them Chinese style.
You have to do it. Have to distribute the punishment to the guilty and be consistent about it. That's the way to avoid the future 'calamities' like this one.
You can't handle the truth.
I find curious how apathetic people are these days.
It's like a toon character:
"Hey! Look! The Earth is being destroyed!"
"Yo, man! That sucks!"
Earth may be doomed, but is there hope for us?
We are basically bombarded with completely irrelevant bad news 24/7.
Turn on the TV or radio, fire up a web browser, pick up a newspaper... You'll read about some random person who got kidnapped on the other side of the planet. Or a nasty plane crash somewhere. Or a tsunami.
Yeah, it's sad that somebody is suffering somewhere... But it's really got absolutely no bearing on my life.
And then we're bombarded with big stuff that is relevant, but we can't do anything about it.
Things like the volcano in Iceland, or the oil spill in the gulf. Yeah, it affects me... But there's really nothing I can personally do about it. Maybe throw some money at it in the form of a donation or two... Which might help... But there's absolutely no immediate feedback that I'm doing something to alleviate the problem.
And then we're bombarded with random scary stuff that doesn't even necessarily have a basis in reality.
Somebody, somewhere said that they wanted to kill the President - so now we're at threat level plaid, be afraid! There's some random bowl game coming up and terrorists would love to blow it up, be afraid! Mashed potatoes cause Alzheimers, be afraid! Obamacare is going to destroy Social Security, be afraid!
Is it any wonder that we've learned to tune all that out and just keep chugging along in our day-to-day lives?
It's either that, or stop functioning entirely.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Damnit, I knew we should have bombed Swederland when we had the chance!
which is totally what she said
"Previously known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company," of Operation Ajax fame. The wikipedia has a decent article on Operation Ajax - maybe some people would like to look at it. The United States literally overthrew a legitimate government, for the sake of BP's profits. Not something that the UK or the US government readily admits to.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Lemme guess. You're still in school - or at least you're very recently graduated. I'm not apathetic, myself, but at age 54, I'm getting there. No matter how bad the news, how dire the warnings, or how hopeless the situation, EVERYONE AROUND ME is an apathetic jackass. Phht. There is no "mobilization". We'll just continue to swirl around and around, until we finally get sucked down the toilet, and find ourselves in the septic tank.
Even then - MOST PEOPLE JUST WON'T FUCKING CARE!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
But we can make BP wish they'd never been so reckless, and give pause to any company still cutting corners on the safety.
Can we really do that?
Stop driving gas guzzlers. Don't fill up at BP gas stations.
Haven't you heard? BP is now Beyond Petroleum. They, as well as pretty much all the big oil companies, are diversifying. They're now energy companies. If we don't buy their gasoline we'll be buying their electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever else.
Use other means of transport or propulsion.
Where I live, there's no public transportation.
Assuming there was public transportation... It'd still be running off some sort of energy, which would likely wind up lining some irresponsible corporation's pockets.
Fire off angry letters to Congress.
Except that this isn't just a national problem. These are international companies acting irresponsibly all over the world.
It may not sound like much, but enough people doing these things will hit them where they live.
Except that it probably won't.
These guys are hired to make the company money - nothing more. Nobody cares what kind of collateral damage there is. As long as the stockholders make money, they're happy.
And even if somebody actually gets fired over this... They've probably got plenty of money to tide themselves over until they get another job with another giant corporation that'll do exactly the same thing.
Hell... Absolute worst-case scenario they just re-brand themselves and pretend like the old corporation is dead while continuing to do business-as-usual under a new name.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic, which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.
The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view, so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.
And we'll believe it.
But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
At 42 gallons/barrel, that would be 5 million barrels per day. TTBOMK, no oil well in history has ever come within an order of magnitude of that sort of flow rate. BP's estimate is 5,000 bbl/day, often converted to 210,000 gal/day by the media. Even the nightmarish estimates some academics are putting out are on the order of 80,000 bbl/day, or 3.4 million gallons/day. You appear to be off by a factor of anywhere from 60 to 1,000. Using BP's estimate of the flow is rate, and your estimate of tanker capacity, it's about one tanker every 300 days.
While I have mod points, I feel the need to comment here (I wish that the AC had had some courage).
The AC's point was that America does not care when it is out of sight, out of mind. AC is 100% correct.
The problem is that AC limits it to just America. That is a mistake. It absolutely should include EU as well as Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and most of all, China. Basically, it is the industrial nations that are doing this. Now, most of the west has cleaned up OUT nations, but a big part of that was done by outsourcing. It is hypocritical on our part to do that. It needs to change. That is why I keep speaking out against the EU approach on Climate: that is for the west to tax ONLY our goods. That is the dead wrong approach. Instead, every nation should be taxing ALL goods based on the pollution (start with CO2) that is in the area for the good as well as the largest sub-component. After time, change the CO2 to include Mercury, and other pollutants. THis approach is the ONLY way to clean up the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.
The Red Cross is doing just fine..
Net Assets $2,559,637,123
We have determined that this charity has a privacy policy which requires you to tell the charity to remove your name and contact information from mailing lists it sells, trades or shares.
They sell my blood for $200 a pint and then sell my name and address as a blood donor.
Because every figure he gave was wrong.
The casing pipe (the pipe you can see) is 21 inches in diameter, not 5 feet. The borehole (the hole that was actually drilled down to the reservoir, which you can't see) is 9 inches in diameter.
The pressure is easily calculated - 45 psi per 100 feet of water, and 100psi per 100 feet of sedimentary rock. 5,000 feet of water gives you 2250 psi, and 11,000 feet of rock give you 11,000psi. Total pressure on the reservoir is therefore 13,250psi, with the pressure differential between the two ends of the borehole at 11,000psi.
However, you can't just calculate that out with the density of crude oil to get the actual flow rate, and therefor the pressure, coming out of the pipe, because you don't know the gas to oil ratio of the oil or the porosity of the reservoir rock, which affect how fast the oil flows and how dense it is, which determines the force it exerts as it exits the pipe.
This is why I call bullshit on so called experts who claim to have calculated the flow accurately. Visual calculation methods cannot be made accurately because of the lack of information about the gas to oil ratio - one 50k-100k visual based estimate I read assumes a GOR of zero (no gas), which is absurd, the oil at 150 degrees (the temp of the oil in the reservoir) and 13,000+ psi can hold a crapload of gas in suspension, which could easily make the visual estimate off by 50% or more. This is because as the pressure drops on the way up the borehole, the gas comes out of suspension and expands, causing the flow to increase dramatically but the ratio of oil by volume to gas decreases dramatically as well. The result is what appears to be a massive gusher of an oil leak that is actually mostly gas.
Non-visual based calculations lack even more critical information about the composition of the oil that are necessary to make accurate calculations, like the porosity of the rock, the GOR again, and whether or not there are any obstructions that inhibit the flow.
Frankly I'm very skeptical of anything over 30,000 barrels a day, that's one hell of a high flowing oil well as it is. 50,000 barrels a day I'm extremely skeptical of, and I dismiss anything more than that out of hand as virtually impossible. Oil wells simply don't flow that fast.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller