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Quantifying, and Dealing With, the Deepwater Spill
Gooseygoose writes with a link to this analysis by Boston University professor Cutler Cleveland. "Some reports in the media attempt to downplay the significance of the release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why worry? Let's look at the numbers." Read on for a few more stories on the topic of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
theodp writes with some information on the remote-controlled efforts to stanch the oil's flow: "The work Tito Collasius does sounds a little like science fiction: Men on ships flicking joysticks that control robots the size of trucks as they rove miles beneath the sea in near-freezing depths no man could hope to reach. But BP's spill efforts rest in the hands of underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) pilots, who 'fly' the ROVs from command centers aboard ships, joysticks in hand and large banks of screens in front of them offering a view of the challenges they confront in the waters below. ROVs are typically used for commercial (as in the oil industry), oceanographic (science research and exploration), and military (mine reconnaissance and recovery) missions. If you're interested in joining Tito, training's available."
Even if BP were to effect a perfect block for the oil, though, there's still quite a bit of it swirling in the Gulf — you've probably seen some gut-wrenching pictures of the affected wildlife. Reader grrlscientist writes "Some people claim that we should euthanize all oiled birds immediately upon recovering them. But I argue it is our ethical responsibility to protect, clean, and save these birds, even after they've been oiled, just as we should preserve and clean their habitats."
See? The oil spill is all natural. Nothing to see here, folks. The catastrophe was all in your minds. You can go back to driving SUVs, voting Republican, and burning rubber tires for fun again.
...Those people of the effected gulf states will begin to believe it...
Maybe the media can even convince themselves they errored telling everyone its the worse ecological disaster in US history.
Lots of oil and gas are still leaking into the gulf, and the 6000 barrels being captured is not enough especially when you add it to the supposed natural leakage.....
Reader grrlscientist writes...it is our ethical responsibility to protect, clean and save these birds, even after they've been oiled, just as we should preserve and clean their habitats
I love it. The BP executives should themselves be forced to help clean birds and other wildlife. It's the grown-up equivalent of writing "I will not pollute the ocean" ten million times on the blackboard.
Slashdotters are better than the general public at understanding that this BP rupture's quantity of spewing oil is very serious and damaging, even where it isn't obvious on Gulf Coast beaches.
So you should look at who is downplaying it. And then remember next time they tell you something how seriously low their credibility is. That they cannot be trusted. Their usual lying isn't usually as obvious as it is here.
--
make install -not war
Take a look at the site of the Exon spill in Alaska. Although it has been about 30 years the beaches are still a total wreck and the area still can not be fished.
Coral reefs may be the worst injuries as they kill easily and may take hundreds of years to rekindle. It is obvious that financially damaged parties will continue to be damaged for decades.
And the large view is even worse. Human population is exploding and we are now absolutely confronted with the fact that oil driven technologies are a horror story. And we are jumping to adopt newer technologies with no way to estimate the great harm that they may generate. After all, only the lunatic fringe believed that oil driven advances were aproblem until the 1970 era.
People are cruel, shallow, and small minded.
All of us are some of the time.
All a misanthrope needs to do is sit back with a beer and watch humanity destroy themselves with their shallowness and stupidity.
Stupidity often burns me out too, but if we just sit back and do nothing we will run out of beer (and food, and clean air, etc.) and suffer greatly long before the end. So heave a sigh, shed a bitter tear, and roll up your sleeves for another tortuous round of cleanup and rebuild.
Rather than relying on electrical or mechanical activation of the blowout preventer (which failed to occur), why can't they be made so that they activate automatically with the loss of an electrical signal?
I guess you might get some unwanted activations, but it might have saved their bacon with something like this.
it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell
We also have the Centralia mine fire, going since 1961 in Pennsylvania, US (39 years.)
With the possibility of more of this stuff happening (see the Guatemalan sinkholes trying to swallow buildings into huge underground caverns), I'm beginning to see a problem. If something happens in your town but I can't leave relocate for financial reasons, like the bad economy plaging us and how hard it is to find cheap housing or sell/buy another house, there could be a "calculated risk but I must live here anyway" trend as our environment breaks down all around.
Apologies on the sucky grammar on my parent post. I also couldn't hyperlink properly to slashdot's sinkhole story --or whatever they're calling the process that eats the limestone ground from underneath poorly chosen sites.
See, for example: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=64864 or http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/02/2010-06-02_the_hidden_death_in_the_gulf.html
I am sure BP is doing everything it can to stop the oil gushing out, despite what all the (sometimes idiotic, very amusing) armchair engineers are saying is the "obvious" thing to do.
However, it seems the real battle that will have the greatest impact on the future of this is over who controls the media now, and that's where BP needs to get its hands tied.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
That's why we need the Shaka Plan for Energy:
1) Replace all coal power plants with nuclear
2) Replace all gasoline imports with coal gassification
Cost-neutral on the price of electricity, price of gasoline at the pump will go down, the influential senators from coal states are happy, and no more funding terrorism in the middle east.
But the Valdez was carrying very heavy oil. The gulf oil spill now is lighter oil.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Try a century or more.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Just what is a "joy stick" and why would sailors be twiddling them?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Maybe this is the final push we need to actually invest money as a notion in alternative energy?
Or not... if the right wing gets involved.
Don't confuse the "rich wing" with the "right wing". The vast majority of Republican politicians just want to rule for the benefit of the rich. The whole social-conservative / southern strategy / religious right association is just a mechanism to get people to vote against their own best interests. If you admit you want to rule for the rich, you've got a big problem in a Republic with universal suffrage, since the rich are by definition a tiny fraction of the public. But politicians know that if you can make someone's knee jerk, you can make their hand twitch in a voting booth. So the Republican party cynically adopted positions that appeal to those groups, and occasionally throws them a bone to keep their support.
But in the run-up to the 2006 elections, the leaders of various socially conservative movements were complaining aloud that they were bringing a lot of votes to the table and not getting much in return... the only surprise is that it took them 26 years to notice.
Of course, by now that has been going on so long that the insane are starting to run the asylum. It's a pretty sure bet that Haley Barber is just shilling for the energy companies, but it's hard to tell whether the likes of Sarah Palin and Barbara Bachman are just trying to make people's knees jerk, or if they've actually drunk the Kool-Aide. Palin is so consistently behind Big Money issues that I suspect she's mostly just shilling, but you never know... As they say, you can't parody this stuff.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Because all people use oil or oil-related products in some form, I maintain that it is both ethical and responsible to try to save as many oiled birds and other wildlife as we can. [...] I think that each life is intrinsically valuable and that each animal is deserving of care and protection. In a world where life is not always respected and valued, I think that saving the life of even one bird sends an important message.
Awww... you want to save the animals? Every life is sacred! Well, you can start by saving the life of the tapeworm that took up residence in your body, or perhaps that mosquito that just bit you and gave you malaria. What? You see a breeding ground for those disease-ridden mosquitoes and want to dump the water? Don't kill the larvae! Or what about the rats that infest your house and could potentially bring disease, particularly if they are allowed to multiple and run rampant in urban areas? You might think that trapping them humanely and releasing them is doing a good deed, but be sure you release them in a habitat where they can find enough food, or you're just contributing to their prolonged starvation as they die a horrible death. Better safe than sorry -- leave food out for them and keep them in your home.
Oh wait -- I bet TFA is just talking about cute animals that aren't annoying, disease-ridden, or parasitic to humans.
I'm against unnecessary cruelty to animals, but it simply doesn't make sense to try to save every possible bird here, from either a monetary or moral perspective. Those which can be relatively easily treated, sure. But the humane thing to do for birds who are unlikely to recover and who would be completely stressed out by prolonged contact with humans is to euthanize them. Just like the humane thing to do for many pets (and even humans) with a likely terminal condition is to stop forcing treatment on them and let them die.
from long dead organisms
You answered your own question. If you don't believe the answer the geologists give you, feel free to read up on petroleum geology, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope calculations yourself.
There are four ways to answer a question. From best to worst:
1) Figure it out yourself
2) Trust the experts
3) Proclaim it an unanswerable mystery
4) Make up something
You're one rung off the bottom. Climb on up!
Well, Sarah has figured out the real reason for the Gulf oil spill, and that reason is those of us who actually care about the environment.
No really, she's serious. We just need to let the oil companies drill unrestricted pretty much wherever and whenever they want, sans restictions and we wouldn't have these problems. Thank God we have a genius like Sarah to tell us unwashed slobs what the truth is.
That unrestricted oil drilling is safe, clean and green!
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Tough luck for the folks in the Gulf . . .
And tough shit for any stockholders in BP . . .
Tough luck for the seafood industry. The price of seafood will go through the roof, where it is available.
This is also incentive for Japan to increase whale and dolphin hunting quotas. Since America doesn't give a damn about the oceans, why should they.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Isn't it obvious? The Gulf of Mexico is the site of an ancient volcano (roughly 75 million years old) where billions of organisms were deposited from spacecraft strongly resembling DC-8's, then nuked from orbit.
Even with no damage, Florida tourism is suffering. There is no real reason why we should care that people are going to lose their jobs, as long as gas is cheap, so that is not an issue. The fishermen have no more or less right to the fish in the gulf than the oil people have to the oil, and the fish might like time to breed, so if all the fisherpeople no longer have work, that is nothing to worry about. Everyone is whining about the loss of oysters, but of course those oysters and artificially placed, not part of the natural process, so that is not an issue.
Sure some people will whine that they have been doing this for generations, and that they have a right to take from nature and others don't, but that solves nothing. It would be nice i the government might have some regulation so that all interests could share these resources, but we live in a free market economy. In such a state, those interest that are most desired by the public, in this case oil, take precedence over other interests. Unless we accept a socialist state in which resources are divided equally by the state, that is the poor with one fishing boat gets the same access to the gulf as the rich with a billion dollar rig, thes situation will remain what it is.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Millions of years of dead plant and animal life, plus shifting tectonic plates (and ever-changing coastlines), can give rise to vast undersea reservoirs of oil. Even the oil industry geologists know it: how do you think they find these reservoirs?
But we all see what you're trying to do there. Hmm, maybe oil isn't from dead plant life after all! Maybe it occurs naturally in the Earth's crust, where God put it! Gosh, maybe there's a practically infinite supply! Maybe it's even naturally renewed! Why, that would mean that all this talk about needing to find alternate energy sources is just a load of hooey! Ha ha, those environmentalist whackos sure are stupid, just like Rush said!"
It's a story being advanced by people who either (1) have a vested interest in the continued profits of oil companies, (2) refuse to believe that the earth is more than 6000 years old, or (3) have a political axe to grind against environmentalists.
And at this point, I've pretty much lost my patience with all of those camps.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Seems like there's far more oil than can be accounted for by dead organisms alone.
The total global biomass has been estimated to be 2000 billion tonnes with 1600 billion of those tonnes in forests.[13][14]
Net primary production is the rate at which biomass is generated in a given area, mainly due to photosynthesis. Some global producers of biomass in order of productivity rates are
* swamps and marshes: 2,500 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* tropical rain forests: 2,000 g/m/yr of biomass[16]
* algal beds and reefs: 2000 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* river estuaries: 1,800 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* temperate forests: 1,250 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* cultivated lands: 650 g/m/yr of biomass[15][17]
* deserts: 3 g/m/yr of biomass[17]
* open ocean: 125 g/m/yr of biomass[15][17]
* tundras: 140 g/m/yr[15][17]
(Multiply by millions of years...)
You can't take the sky from me...
Not certain what you intend by 'dead organisms', but all what is needed is biomass, e.g. swampy areas. As plates shift, some are driven under others resulting in carbon deposits easily being buried as deeply as we see. At one point it was likely very close to, if not on the surface. Bogs can be very large, and very deep... consider, well, the wetlands that are currently threatened, for example.
I'm not partial to the theories that there is arbitrary oil and coal to be found, provided we dig deep enough. If you are centrally located on a plate, and have deep enough to hit the granite or basalt, respectively - it would be shocking to hit anything else while digging until it is too hot to support the structures in oil and coal. Please contradict me, there are some oddball cases in the middle of plates and I would love to hear about more of them, and about them.
Quite frankly, a non-biological origin for deep oil is the only one folks bother argue, if I remember correctly. I suspect this is because coal contains lots of fossils, thus it is pretty hard to argue samples are non-biological.
Meh, not my specialty, feel free to enlighten me, etc...
From what I understood the difference is that the limestone eating away process is a chemical thing. Water is dissolving the limestone. The Guatemala thing is more of a physical process, water is washing away the volcanic ash on which the city is built.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Umm, hello? The oil was put there by God. How else do you explain it being there with the Earth being only 6000 years old?
2010 - 1961 = 49 years there buddy.
Not that I recommend blowing it up, mind you, but isn't there a lot of water in the Gulf of Mexico which will serve to starve it of oxygen? (and steal heat, and such).
I was under the impression the risks of trying to blow it up with an explosion were more along the lines of "it's still leaking a bunch, and the hole is much messier now and even harder to cap."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I used to attend a private Presbyterian school, and one of my "science" teachers claimed that oil is shot out in high volume every time any sort of organic matter (plankton,dead whales, etc) touches thermal vents.
Obviously a load of horse shit, but so is the earth being 6k years old.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Given millions of years, there are a LOT of organisms around. They came to be buried the same way everything else does over time. If we have to dig up a town a few thousand years old, why not a millions of years old pool?
...there would be at least as much reason to worry. There just wouldn't be any way to stop it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is some debate about oil, but coal is so clearly associated with ancient plant life I don't think anyone could really argue its origin is anything else.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
BP has been providing live feeds of all the ROV missions to the wellhead for the last few days. For those who are curious, here's a pretty decent site hosting all the feeds from the ROVs. Pretty fascinating to watch all the work going on around the BOP, occasionally you can follow a few of the ROVs as they wander off to find old pipelines or prepare the Q4000 direct connection. In a tragic way it almost feels like watching the Titanic discovery all over again.
There have been scientific theories floating around for decades now that support to some degree, an idea that oil can be made naturally without the long process currently ascribed to it. And all this is done without the mentioning of a GOD or 6000 year earth history.
Get off your high horse, not everything suggesting that a process isn't (m)billions of years old as currently understood is some attempt to put god in your life. Not all of these people have a problem with environmentalist (outside of saying they are wrong about the time required to create oil), and not all of them work for oil interests. Of course you will find people pushing gods or claiming the earth is only 6000 years old saying see, it's possible, Of course you will see people making statements that environmentalists or whoever else claiming oil is finite are wrong just as you will find people making statements that the earth is older then 6000 years. And mostly, of course you will find people connected to oil companies making these statements. This is because people who study oil and geology relating to oil, tend to work in oil related industries. It's not guilt by association and maybe you should look past your shallow reservations before passing a judgment. This is science, not a religion.
Ah, the a-biogenic theory of hydrocarbons raises its ugly head again. Chief proponent was Professor Thomas Gold (Cornell but r.i.p.). Pretty much discredited but check out research of Dr. Roger Anderson of LDEO and Larry Cathles at Cornell. they got a DOE grant to drill offshore at EI 330 Field to explore for deeper "plumbing" that might be recharging that 1 billion BOE deposit. No joy however.
Believe it or not, I actually used to receive lots of mod points back in the day when I meta-modded(correctly) everyday, made every post a high-scoring one, and didn't post anything offensive.
Then CmdrTaco posted something like "testing, testing" in the seemingly redundant beta.slashdot.org introductory discussion. When I saw that he was already modded "troll", I followed suit and modded him troll for laughs. For mysterious reasons, the discussion no longer exists.
I never got mod points after that.
you won't have nuclear reactors with modern technology. france and japan have been relying on reactors for decades. but not in your backyard, no. you know, electric cars, less air pollution, no more funding of geopolitical nightmares, etc.
so instead you'll have thousands of acres of your shoreline turned into a befouled environmental calamity, you'll fund wahhabi madrasas in pakistan through all the money you're giving saudis to drive your SUVs, you'll send your sons, daughters, fathers, mothers to die in pointless wars, you'll fuel global warming, you'll make your cities unbreathable...
but remember, its nuclear power we should be afraid of
read NIMBY's, and reverse your idiotic mental block:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hey look! It's the aptly named troll of assertions!
Aww, isn't that cute... no, no, don't ask him to cite anything. He'll scurry away.
While Palin's pretty shamelessly rent-seeking (drill in Alaska? why, how convenient!) the idea that we've been avoiding one ecologically sensitive area (pristine Alaska wilderness) in favor of drilling in another, potentially more sensitive area which is also much much riskier to drill in (the Gulf) for whatever reason (perhaps it's easier for people to conceive of the former as wilderness-y?)... that part of her idea is not without merit. Regardless of our ultimate course of action, we should be sure that we are weighing the potential environmental impact a bit more dispassionately, and with an eye to overall impact - including the impact of the risks, so elusive and difficult to grasp until disaster strikes.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Don't try and blow it up it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell
Hint #1: Oil/NG needs oxygen to burn.
Hint #2: There is a serious lack of free oxygen 5,000 ft underwater.
I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about an underwater wellhead catching fire and never burning out.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why do you think replacing one form of finite energy with dangerous byproducts is superior to another form of finite energy with dangerous byproducts?
Nuclear can be a useful bridge, but we need to learn how to deal with the limitations of the energy that the sun provides on a daily basis, or harness the thermal energy of the Earth's core. Everything else is ultimately unsustainable.
mostly out of favor nowadays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
TFA is a good example of why everyone should have the Readability bookmarklet handy.
Kid-proof tablet..
This is slashdot; science and logic have no place here!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
wait for what?
$10/ gallon gas?
or $20/ gallon gas?
india, china, brazil... they're using more and more oil. the sources are only getting deeper and more expensive
at what point do you see the need for change?
but thanks for the shortsightedness. thanks for the belief that oil is going to last forever and has no downsides. you're mental stagnation and acceptance of a sucky status quo is a huge help. i love well-funded islamic fundamentalist nutjobs and i love choking on fumes
thanks for your ignorant complacency dude!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
0) Develop a civilian nuclear power generation technology that is good enough that it will be build for a commercial reason other than merely ripping off the taxpayers. The current operating solutions are a stupidly expensive way to boil water and are of little practical use. Now while we could build a lot of them it's a matter of what we give up or tax more heavily to pay for them because suddenly energy is a huge amount more expensive.
IMHO it makes a HUGE amount more sense to develop the emerging nuclear technologies to the point where a full scale prototype can be build AND THEN consider building a lot of them instead of the frankly stupid approach of spending shitloads building a lot of 1970s designs painted green that we know can barely do the job so long as we can keep on shovelling in the cash and have rapidly increasing fuel costs due to scarcity of the fuel they need while other stuff is less fussy about fuel.
Completely avoiding the problem of old designs needing expensive high grade fuel that relies on relatively scarce reserves is enough of a reason to work on something newer instead of building a pile of tweaked 1970s designs. The newer designs are nowhere near as fussy about the fuel but WE NEED TO BUILD ONE TO SEE IF IT REALLY WORKS BEFORE BUILDING 1000.
The earth is very old and we are going through millions of years worth of dead organic matter in coal and oil. There is/was a huge amount of it but the easiest stuff to get is the oil. The deep stuff is there due to plate movement, it was probably a swamp on the shore of a continent once.
Consider for a moment why geologists call the stuff "fossil fuel" and why nobody at the technical end of the oil, gas or coal industries would have any time for your bullshit.
It's just a hopeful fantasy and you are denigrating those of us that work in oil, gas and coal exploration industry by pretending we share your fantasy.
It is neither, merely bullshit spread by idiots that don't want to care about reality and like to pretend that nothing ever changes anywhere.
I'm pretty sure this oil was released by actually drilling for it as opposed to natural means.
I'm not an expert though.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I doubt it was that troll mod. I think the system is just broken.
I'm a regular poster, nearly daily, good karma, decent number of up-modded posts.
I don't meta-moderate anymore because they changed it to require javascript and I noscript the crap out of the web and refuse to make exceptions for lazy web designers.
I get mod points about once a year.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Mod help, please. My post above has gone from 4 to 0.
Ron
A simple google search will also turn up thousands of fucking deranged conspiracy theories so it is up to YOU that makes the assertion a million miles away from recorded wisdom to outline it YOURSELF.
You need to do better than what I can paraphrase as "other people say stuff" - you have to say it yourself and present the points in a way that convince others.
As it is you have nothing apart from putting bullshit in the mouths of people that didn't say it. Go on, name a geologist in the petrochemical industry that writes such bullshit - you only have to find one BUT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO DO SO.
Instead you pretend that people that take these things seriously indulge in your fantasy.
By the way, how come it's been a long, long time since I received any mod points?
Maybe another leak...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you hold up X as an example, it needs to work as an example... End of story. France and Japan are actually proof that Nuclear power plants everywhere will do NOTHING about dependence on oil.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have 2 questions:
1) Why they don't use those oil eating microbes???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VfypUzx1tI&feature=youtube_gdata
2) Why they don't pump this oil at the surface of the sea and put it into a super tanker??? Some water would get pump at the same time, but simply let the mixture sit a little while and the water will drop at the bottom could be pump back into the sea afterward. It certainly would not be perfect but it sure could recover a lot of the oil fairly quickly at a relatively low cost.
That is all part of what they are doing.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Before you blame all of humanity for these things and begin to believe humans are inherently flawed, please read "Ishmael" by Dan Quinn to help cure your misanthropy ;-)
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660
If you moderated that post you've been permanently banned from moderating.
See "Other trolls" at this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Timwi/Slashdot_trolling_phenomena
Wait, what?
You think that if we let Palin drill in ANWR that the drilling in the Gulf would stop? That thought is completely divorced from reality.
Looks like bare assertion to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And yours is in what catagory?
I see your 39 years and rise to 6000.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
#2 They have been doing from the beginning. Between skimming and collection / separation they end up collecting more than 90% water. Very inefficient, slow, and all over has a lame effect on the oil on the surface but they are doing it anyway.
We'll run out of beer? Homebrew.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
There are already oil eating microbes in the gulf. I think taking some that had been cultured and spreading them probably wouldn't result in much more activity (just given how much the oil has spread out).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
ROV operator commenting on fark.com and a pic of control room
"Corporate whores" isn't just a metaphor either. They were known as the "MMS chicks"...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2008/09/mms_chicks_drilling_for_dollar.html?hpid=topnews
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/10/AR2008091001829.html
We are the 198 proof..
All fine except they didn't ignore standards because the safety standard they missed isn't required by the US government in oil rigs. They are a safety requirement that other countries have, but this accident was in newly-acquired US territorial waters.
Sucks to own a Red Lobster franchise, I guess. But those folks have been making their loot through the unsustainabe strip mining of the ocean for years now. It's hard to weep for them very long...
a space horror movie. Or some under water slasher/ghost ship movie.
It just could not end well with a name like that.
It is because of our understanding of how deposits of complex-chain hydrocarbons are formed that we bloody know where to look for them.
This whole abiogenesis bullshit is no more valid science than the statement that "I believe there is a pink elephant orbiting Neptune, disprove me." Until the abiogenesis "proponents" (such and few as they are) produce a model capable of being tested (through drilling and subsequent discovery of deposits not predicted by current understanding) they are not science - they are mental masturbaters exploring interesting concepts.
Their work should be overlooked until that point in time they collect some evidence.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
An interesting cleanup proposal:
1. Blow hay on the ocean surface in the middle of the slick.
2. Wait a short while as the waves mix the oil and hay. The oil attaches to the hay.
3. Skim the hay from the surface.
4. Any hay that gets to shore is easier to pick up than raw oil on the sand.
Here's a video demonstration.
http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/
Yep, I've got a very Conservative (read "staunch Republican") friend who's all about "do what it takes to keep up my standard of living, including vast personal wealth, and let's not worry about this environmental nonsense". In fact, he outright blames environmentalists for causing this disaster. He claims that if there weren't these environmental regulations that we have, the oil companies could be drilling on land or near offshore, hence our environmental horrors are all government's fault, too much regulation. Similarly of course, the financial crash was *caused* by the SEC and government regulation. Basically regulation that might cause some sort of degradation in his lifestyle, even if minor, he hates. But generally he's OK with regulation that *directly* helps him, like drug safety laws, although I'm sure he thinks these are too extreme and probably cut into corporate profits and "innovation" and therefore are undesirable in that way. Recently my area banned phosphate detergents because it was causing hell with algae blooms downstream from the sewer plant. He went on and on about the evil of the regulation when it merely affected the brand of dishwashing detergent he had to buy at Costco. He fussed that it wouldn't wash his dishes as well as the polluting stuff. Not that he'd tried it of course. The ban was just ipso facto evil to him, simply because it *was* a government regulation, environment be damned. I don't know how many people in the population are like this. But the "Conservative" camp, which is huge, seems to be full of them. His kind makes me want to vomit.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
I'm getting sick of people saying that modern life is dependent on petroleum. Sure.. things won't be as easy, but we can make all sorts of things, and won't be giving up all the technological developments of the last century just by switching feedstocks!
This will not drive us back to the middle ages, in the middle ages, we didn't have electricity!
Reducing petrol use in transport, even by only 50% will increase the amount of "easy oil" available for use as chemical precursors for the stuff that can't easily be made from coal or fresh biomass.
Agriculture scares me the most because modern ag pretty much involves turning diesel into meat. But we can make changes here, too.. there's no reason we cant farm electrically, we're already using electricity for irrigation. What scares me the most is a ill-considered switch to biofuels as we could quickly starve ourselves trying to grow massive quantities of fuel from food crops.
This stuff isn't rocket science and I'm getting more and more angry about the lack of political will to start adapting rather than burying our heads in the sand.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1324427&cid=28936879
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183628&cid=15167528
http://everything2.com/title/%2524rtbl
I didn't say that, and no, I don't think it would, certainly not with the way oil politics are structured today. But that's the problem: it's the political climate that determines these things more than reality. We don't drill in the Gulf or in Alaska because it's a good idea or a bad idea in its own right, we drill because the politics make it more convenient.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Palin and Bachman are what are best described as useful idiots.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
two guy sitting on horses watched a ford model t pass them on the road, and one guy on horse said to the other: "someday, no one will ride horses anymore and we'll all ride those things"
and the other guy laughed at him and said "If you hold up X as an example, it needs to work as an example"
electric cars are not warp drives or graviton bombs: exotic science fiction. its a damn battery attached to a damn motor. its really not that complicated. we haven't used them up to now, because gas has been so cheap. its not going to be so cheap, ever again
so now you figure the rest of the story out with your boundless imagination as to the future and the role of electric cars in them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And according to the article he linked, it was 1961.
No one knows exactly how it started, but a coal vein has been burning under the Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia since 1961.
just my loose change
ideopath @ play
That one really wasn't even contraversial until Galileo insulted the Pope, and even then it was a close to even vote with the Cardinals.
You really can easily tell conspiracy theorists and confidence tricksters when they invoke the ghost of Galileo.
What really annoys me is we have nuts like you that think they are helping the oil industry by spreading some stupid fantasy - I'm in the oil industry and you are giving me, the geophysicists and geologists I work with a bad name with this bullshit. Fuck off and "help out" another industry.
Never has the term "Anonymous Coward" been more appropriate.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Commentators both left and right are calling this "the worst environmental disaster ever". They evidently choose to ignore Tuskunga, Chernoble, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Pinatubo, Vesuvius, Krakatoa, The Year Without a Summer (1816), the dust bowl, the black plague, the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and numerous other earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, volcanos, hurricanes and meteor strikes.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
http://kiloseven.blogspot.com/2010/06/open-letter-to-keith-olbermann-on-being.html explains succinctly, with references, how to shut down the leak.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Perspectives from an engineer on the gulf oil spill. Submit your favorite solution by filling out a form here: http://www.horizonedocs.com/artform.php HOWTO fix the gulf oil spill and minimize impacts. “Oil-water separators” Kevin Costner’s “invention” is not a new technology. The same results can be achieved with a suction pump (the “goes in”) that discharges to an oil water separator ( widely available commercially in capacities of 5000 gallons per minute with capacities of 50,000 gallons – probably more). From the oil water separator tank, the oil and water are then discharged to an external tank and the ocean respectively. “Insufficient Oil Booms” This is not only a problem of insufficient quantity, but also a case of insufficient type. Regarding the insufficient type, a deep-water boom (going to the depth of the spill) is necessary to contain the discharged oil to the immediate vicinity to minimize the environmental impact and for ease of collection and cleanup. The inability to meet the demands for smaller, more traditional (off-shore) booms can be met locally using readily available local labor, much the way sandbagging is handled. This would require a length of fabric, an equal length of steel chain or other heavy material, two sewing machines a spray foam blower and an ounce of imagination “STOPPING THE LEAK” Method 1: Freeze seal and weld a cap - Cryostop of Wilmington, NC makes freeze seals of sufficient size and there are liquid nitrogen tanks of sufficient capacity available at various naval shipyards. Once a freeze seal is in place the pipe can be capped or even fitted with a valve for future use. Method 2,3: Plug/Cap the hole – Using the mathematically determined flow rate to deduce the well pressure (along with the surface area of the pipe opening) will enable engineers to determine the weight of a plug necessary to overcome the pressure and stop the leak. This plug can be bullet shaped and go inside the pipe or an elongated, cone-shaped cap that seats on the outside wall of the pipe. Method 4: Reduce the flow rate by inserting large porous material(s) – Since the capacity of the attached system is already maxed out, reducing the flow rate is essential to enable currently installed systems to handle the amount of flow. Aside from capping the hole or creating a new one to relive the pressure, the only way to reduce the flow rate is to increase the differential pressure throughout the system, such that the pressure at discharge is lower (and thus the flow rate). This is done by increasing head loss throughout the pipe. Head losses occur normally due to friction or from any treacherous path such as a bend in the pipe, but can be created artificially by introducing a treacherous path into the system. Cutting into the pipe to insert a series of plates to create a series of treacherous paths would be too risky, but inserting porous materials (large sponges etc) into the pipe opening would provide the same results, provided the materials are kept inside. Method 5: Use hot taps to divert the flow – As hinted in Method 4 it is possible to reduce the flow rate of the leak by making another hole to relieve the pressure. Simply making an extra hole in the pipe would defeat the purpose, fortunately there is already a product called a hot tap that is used to do exactly that and is used all the time in the construction industry to tap into live natural gas lines. These hot taps can be used to attach alternate pipes/tubes for removal and accommodate the lack of capacity of the main line. Method 6: The Plunger Method - When a plunger is inverted the upward force on the bottom creates an outward force along its circumference. In this situation inserting a large “inverted plunger” would create a self sealing plug due to the upward force of the well pressure. Method 7: The Flange insertion Method – It is possible the cut off the majority of oil flow by cuttin
I suggest that if deliberately spreading lies on the internet results in such anger you should take up a different hobby for the sake of your blood pressure.
Lol.. Says the troll. You wish you got my blood pressure up. What was a deliberate lie being spread? Hm?? You see troll, once again, you are making statements that you can't back up and you are once again in a position of looking like an ignorant fuck who is making shit up and spreading lies if you attempt to show anything.
I used to be against abortion. Now I'm sorry I help that position- it may have talked your mom out of having one.