Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
They can and are, and this one was. Additionally, some can be remotely triggered by, in essence, sonar pings at a certain frequency. I've read conflicting reports on whether this particular BOP had that capability. None of this really matters, because the crew on the rig hit the button to trigger the ram shears while they still had contact to the BOP and they didn't activate, at least not completely.
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
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!
Build a jig that would attach to the pipe below the flange. Push a tapered brass finger into the open end of the pipe with hydraulics. If the taper is right, it would not require huge pressure.
Call it "Dutch Boy."
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.
OK, all you armchair generals and Monday morning drilling engineers:
Before you post your wonderfully insightful method for stopping the spill, read up on the several thousand other suggestions here.
The rest of you just read the various threads anyway. More signal to noise than anything I've seen so far. Even think of donating to help the servers keep afloat.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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...
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!
2010 - 1961 = 49 years there buddy.
My understanding is that a rubber bushing essential to the operation of the BOP was damaged a few days before during a test of it (or something related) and this damage contributed to the massive failure of the BOP.
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.
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
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!
> but it simply doesn't make sense to try to save every
> possible bird here,
What harm is there in trying?
> from either a monetary or moral perspective.
Oh, right, you're really just worried about the cost. Of course. But hey, if you add "or moral" in there, it makes it seem like you really thought this out and that you're not really just a greedy miser. You should (do?) work for BP, it's great thinking like yours that got them where they are now.
mostly out of favor nowadays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
This is slashdot; science and logic have no place here!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity... Years of research and fine-tuning are ahead before the idea could be commercially viable -MSNBC
circumstantial evidence strongly favors a [biogenic] origin for almost all found to date. -The Straight Dope
Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat. -WorldNetDaily
Skeptics say that while traces of abiotic hydrocarbons may exist, little data support the idea of economically meaningful deposits. "Companies have been looking for oil for 100 years. If all this abiogenic stuff is there, why haven't they found it?" asks geochemist Geoffrey Glasby, who spent nine months investigating the matter for a 2006 review paper in Resource Geology. He concluded the totality of the evidence did not support the concept. -Forbes (my link)
You may want to read the articles before you cite them.
PS: WorldNetDaily? Really? What's next, Mad Magazine and Star?
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.
We've long known that hydrocarbons can occur without biogenesis - and finding new sources of them, or methane on Titan, isn't any sort of revelation despite media labels like "game-changer".
However, as far as I'm aware we've never found any abiogenic petroleum - long-chain, more complex hydrocarbons (primarily paraffins and cycloalkanes) than the much simpler/smaller hydrocarbons like methane. It's possible abiogenic petroleum exists of course, but it's never been discovered in commercially-significant quantities, certainly.
The Science Daily article you cite is interesting, and contains some bold claims from Stockholm researchers, but they appear to be based solely on simulations to date. When/if they can show their simulations match reality (e.g by drilling where their simulations indicate, and discovering quantities of petroleum lacking in biotic markers), then that might be considered a "game-changer".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Nuclear power is far, far, far cleaner than fossils. What would you rather have? A concrete box of toxic nastyness, or a mist of global warming inducing toxic nastyness all over the place. I agree that we should move to solar and other sources (by the time nuke runs out, I think we'll be flying around the galaxy on zero point energy modules). I actually don't think the suns energy is "a limitation" it is actually far, far more than 15 billion Americans would use. Continuing on the GP's theme, I think the most promising technology in this regard is thermochemical technology. If we coat just 5% of the Sahara desert with this technology, we can make oil for 6 billion Americans.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
We will wait for a crisis. We always do. At best when the oil gets really expensive, expect rationing to occur. At worse, expect civil and global warfare over this precious resource.
Individually, we are very smart. Collectively, we're fucking dumb as shit!
Life is not for the lazy.
#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.
ROV operator commenting on fark.com and a pic of control room
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.
Let's see...a stuck pipe in the well, a modified, improperly installed blowout preventer that had three separate hydraulic fluid leaks, a dead man switch hooked up to dead battery, the metal casing used was known a year prior not to be able to take high pressure, pressure tests conducted...and then ignored even when they showed catastrophic build up of gas, including two hours before the explosion, improper cement used, use of sea water instead of drilling mud, and other failures that are slowly coming to light from leaked internal engineering reports from the day of the explosion to over a year prior to the explosion. Hell reports are coming out nearly every day--Deepwater Horizon was so ineptly managed at all levels its explosion was a certainty. Plus, BP accounts for 97% of all "egregious and willful" safety violations issued by OSHA in the last three years, 760 violations in all. This is indicative of a corporate culture, one that comes directly from the top and permeates the company, to cut corners at every and any opportunity and damn the consequences. The consequences of their egregious and willful violations of safety this time is an oil volcano vomiting out up to 95,000 barrels of oil a day, over five times greater than the link in TFA's laughably low "worst case." BP is a corporation that should have it's corporate charter revoked, assets seized and sold off, and executives investigated for criminal activity. Tony Hayward's life isn't worth spit at this point. Look for him to show up in a non-extradition treaty country any day now.