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New Oil Slick In Gulf Waters Linked To BP Well
An anonymous reader writes "A new oil sheen appeared in the Gulf of Mexico last week, and now scientists have confirmed that the oil bubbling up to the surface matches the type released by BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well last summer. Ed Overton, a chemist at Louisiana State University, examined samples of the oil and said, 'After examining the data, I think it's a dead ringer for the MC252 oil, as good a match as I've seen. My guess is that it is probably coming from the broken riser pipe or sunken platform.'"
If it's not too bad, then the microbiology will take care of it.
He says it's a dead ringer. Then goes on to GUESS a PROBABLE source. The alternative to his guess is that there's a leak from the plugged well.
You a BP apologist, or did you just skim TFS in hopes of FP?
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Cue a thousand American "news" outlets incorrectly referring to BP as "British Petroleum" and implying that it is somehow linked to the unAmerican-ness of the company that allowed such a terrible thing to happen.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I'm curious, what does 'BP' stand for?
The definition of a "dead ringer" is something that looks a lot like something else, but isn't.
Last summer I thought the Navy should get some giant air pumps and oxygenate the water, to help the bacteria with their cleanup operation. The Navy has "portable" nuclear power plants, which is why I thought they'd be good for the task.
But I'm not a celebrity with a skimmer to sell, so they didn't ask me. Oh well.
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Big Polluter
I'm curious, what does 'BP' stand for?
Beyond Petroleum, what else could it mean?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If they are so beyond it, why are they leaking it into the ocean? Or was that their plan for disposal?
It stands for "Something with the initials BP that the marketing assholes came up with", and nothing else.
You're right, it was originally the Anglo-Persian Oil Company
"[T]he British Petroleum brand was originally created by a German firm as a way of marketing its products in Britain. During the war, the British government seized the company’s assets, and the Public Trustee sold them to Anglo-Persian in 1917."
-- http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9014441&contentId=7027521
Foolish news outlets, mislabling Anglo-Persian Oil as the obviously German "British Petroleum"
When we get some information more solid than "we saw an oil sheen last week", we can start worrying.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bp#Company_name
BP = Broken Pipe
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
The floor of the Gulf of Mexico has numerous chemosynthetic communities that live off methate hydrates, oil seeps, and even pockets of salt saturated water where salt domes are exposed. Oil seeps are prevalent throughout the region. Likely the only reason people noticed this one is they were out there doing research.
I don't see why we're concerned at all. Petroleum is an all natural product containing no artificial chemicals, and it's 100% organic, too!
and implying that it is somehow linked to the unAmerican-ness of the company that allowed such a terrible thing to happen.
I've never seen anyone imply that. Ever. Ya paranoid limey bugger...
Nice! Others heard ...
British Pollution
Big Problem
Bogus Petroleum
Bad Politics
Nah. The messenger will be used as an example of the issue that modern society has frozen evolution in time so that the species has stopped advancing.
About 15 minutes ago NPR reported that robots were sent down there and they found no leaking. The next best guess is that the oil is coming from the shipwreck of the drilling rig, which is one of the theories mentioned in the article.
Bad Planning
He says it's a dead ringer. Then goes on to GUESS a PROBABLE source. The alternative to his guess is that there's a leak from the plugged well. You a BP apologist, or did you just skim TFS in hopes of FP?
Perhaps he didn't want to discredit himself by stating something as fact that he wasn't certain about?
"oxygenate the water"
What you need to add depends heavily on which bacteria are the main ones acting on it, and what the limiting nutrient is.
Terry Hazen has a good overview here.
Kinda long though. Nearly an hour.
Strange trend in recent postings, is this still news for nerds?
I'm sure somebody in the Gulf of Mexico is running Linux.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
and implying that it is somehow linked to the unAmerican-ness of the company that allowed such a terrible thing to happen.
I've never seen anyone imply that. Ever. Ya paranoid limey bugger...
Actually, the president did some of that last year.
It was quite clear (between the lines) that if BP intended to continue to exists, it would be wise to replace the CEO with an American, which they did.
The definition of a "dead ringer" is something that looks a lot like something else, but isn't.
A deceased Avon lady.
C'mon now. You can even go with the reverse tea party angle using "British Petroleum" if you refer to the oil as its old-time nickname "Texas tea".
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Mostly, but it's also "stuff that matters". I'd have to argue that an oil leak in the Gulf, however thin, falls under that category.
You know that big gusher that spewed all that shit for a whole Summer well guess what it was so deep that only about 1% of that crap was surfacing and that the only 1% that BP cleaned. So you can expect big giant bubble of that shit to surface up everywhere the current will take it for the next 20 years!!! And even that is only going to be about 10% the rest will coat the Gulf of Mexico bottom and get into the ecosystem and destroy what life is left in the Gulf of Mexico. I believe by 2020 we rename it the Dead Gulf.
not really, how much of that shit is on the ocean floor, what if a part of it gets stirred up. no freakin mystery scooby doo.
There are literally thousands of oil seeps across the bottom of the Gulf. Those seeps release (as a conservative estimate) "Two Exxon-Valdez of oil every year". That would be as much as 1.5 million barrels, then.
Using a technique they developed in the early 1990s to help explore for oil in the deep ocean, Earth Satellite Corporation scientists found that there are over 600 different areas where oil oozes from rocks underlying the Gulf of Mexico. The oil bubbles up from a cracks in ocean bottom sediments and spreads out with the wind to an to an area covering about 4 square miles. "On water, oil has this wonderful property of spreading out really thin," said Mitchell. "A gallon of oil can spread over a square mile very quickly." ...
It's quote possible that there is an oil seep within a small distance of the BP well, that happens to be seeping the same oil. Not saying there is, but it hasn't been ruled out.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Don't forget that they'll also forget about the other partner companies in the well, who are jointly and severally liable along with BP. But since that's likely to result in bankruptcies and lost jobs in the US South as the companies fold, it'll probably not be noticed.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It stands for British Petroleum.
It used to (and is obviously where the initials came from in the first place), but it officially doesn't any more. There was some marketing drivel about "Beyond Petroleum", but basically it's meaningless.
However, if one wants to use the former name to note its origins, then it should be pointed out that the current "BP" was actually formed from the merger between BP and Amoco in the late 1990s and was originally known as "BP Amoco" before the name was shortened. So perhaps those insisting on the "British Petroleum" name should refer to it as "British Petroleum / American Oil Company". Though I doubt they will.
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I can think of at least one plausible (and very unwelcome) scenario that could have Macondo reservoir oil coming up to the surface, but not from the original well. Actually, now I can think of three ways.
There could be a leak from one of the two relief wells. Which would be unwelcome in the extreme, but at least they're known quantities, and re-entering a well in good condition for an "intervention" is a pretty routine operation. That's the nice option that has Macondo oil coming to surface but not from the MC252 well.
Alternatively, with all the high-pressure operations happening on the MC252 well and on the relief wells, then it's possible to have fractured the cap rock over the HPHT (high pressure high temperature) reservoir, allowing oil and gas to start to migrate up to the surface, in exactly the same way that natural oil seeps occur all over the Gulf (and other oil provinces). That could be the start of a long-drawn out process of draining the reservoir to surface. Which shouldn't take more than a few centuries.
Actually, there is a third plausible option : searching for naturally occurring oil seeps is a well-established technique for exploration. I've had several satellite imagery companies trying to convince me of the value of their imagery and analysis tools for finding precisely this sort of oil seep, as a guide to where to put your seismic boats, then your seabed samplers, then your drilling rigs, then your production platforms. I don't know if BP/Andarko used seep-tracking in their prospecting in this area, but it's certainly possible. In which case, this may just be a "normal" seep that is being noticed because of the intense scrutiny of the area.
Anyway, with those several possibilities, the chemist is being correctly cautious about attributing the origin of the oil. He can be confident that the oil has the same characteristics as the ones that he's measured from the main flow, and that suggests but does not prove the point of origin, or the reason for the oil coming to the surface.
Oil from the rig?
It's not impossible that there was enough crude in storage on the Deepwater Horizon for it to have started seeping now. But it's fairly unlikely. By the stage they'd got to in the well, they should have finished testing the well, and the testing equipment spread would have been being stripped down for return to shore (and taken OFF RENTAL, as the encouragement to get it done NOW). You don't ship separators, chicksans, production chokes etc full of anything other than thin air, let alone full of flammables. So there is unlikely to have been more than a few gallons of Macondo crude onboard. Plenty of diesel, lube oils, gas bottles for the galley or the welder, certainly helicopter fuel ... but Macondo crude itself is unlikely to have been present in more than sample quantities. And all of those hydrocarbons have very different chemical signatures, so should be easily distinguished.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There's are a lot of nutrients in the gulf, especially from the farm runoff (would be interesting to experiment with "bubblers" in the dead zone, but that's another topic). I've loaded your video (thanks!), but haven't watched it all yet.
Several of the pages I read last summer said the oxygen deprivation was serious... From my original piece, To Save the Gulf, Send the Enterprise:
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Absolutely. Think how much cleaner and safer the world would be without excessive regulation!
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
They can't prove it came from anywhere. They have just proved it came from no other known sources, and the chance of there being a new and unrelated source that matches the BP spill is essentially zero. At this point all the evidence points to it being from the BP well, and none pointing to an alternate source. So I'm curious why you are asserting the opposite of what all the evidence points to? Is there some conclusion you don't like if it were from BP's incident?
Learn to love Alaska
maybe Billionaire's Plaything?
Obama, please read this message, the US economy is in dire need of major money...right?
If BP oil is found at the root of this spill/leak again, hit them harder this time, like say 100 billion dollars....and take it from them, dont tell them they need to pay it off, I know they have it in all the oil stocks and what not...so just take it, as you already took the oil in the middle east(had no problems doing it then).
Do not leave them a choice....so now you have 100 billion more, cool....
Then say they have to find and plug the leak, and this time have to do it in a week...else for each week after they will be charged another 10 billion dollars...
Let's see anyone spring a leak after this one....
The only way is to make an example out of the, especially being a second repeat offence.