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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.'"
Cleanup is a farce anyway. The only thing you can do is stop or prevent leaks.
The rest is up to the microbiology.
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.
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.
Big Polluter
I'm curious, what does 'BP' stand for?
Beyond Petroleum, what else could it mean?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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"
That's right. Humans abdicate responsibility and leave it to some of the most primitive organisms on the planet.
Primitive? I guess that depends on your point of view. You see, a human generation is about every 20 years or so. A dog, every 6 months or so. Bacteria reproduce anywhere between every 20 minutes and every 2 hours. So how many generations of bacteria have there been since 2001? Well it's still the same human generation, but it's been close to 260,000 generations of bacteria. Evolution isn't all about growing a third arm or changing the color of your fur. Just looking at the biochemistry that a simple bacterium is capable of will show you that they are far, far more "advanced" than we are, even if they don't vote or sit around watching sit coms.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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"
Michael Bay, is that you?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If it's not too bad, then the microbiology will take care of it.
You've got to stop listening to the oil companies. They claimed the same BS about the Valdez accident and here it is 20 years later and all you have to do to find oil is dig down a foot. Bacterial action is very slow when it comes to large quantities of oil. They were claiming days after they sealed the well that virtually all the oil was gone. It would have taken a mass of bacteria the size or Rhode Island to eat that much oil that fast. They also need other nutrients which is one of the factors that slows the process. The point is most of the oil will be ingested by fish and other marine life long before bacteria get most of it.
They obviously did a patch job on it and called the emergency over but a year later there's still leakage. Odds are it'll be leaking for the next 100+ years. They'll just claim the remaining seepage isn't hazardous. The real justice would be forcing the oil company executives and their families to eat sea food from the area until it's cleaned up like they expect everyone else to do. Kind of adds a new spin on "blackened fish". I'm sure the problem would be fixed in record time.
BP = Broken Pipe
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
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!
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.
"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!
The definition of a "dead ringer" is something that looks a lot like something else, but isn't.
A deceased Avon lady.
Perhaps you would be interested in meeting an acquaintance of mine who is prepared to do just that. Her name's Irene.
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.
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"
Actually, if the oil was 1-2mm thick then it wouldn't be a sheen--- it would be opaque, or at best translucent.
A "sheen" occurs when the thickness approximates the wavelengths of visible light. The sheen effect, with all its multiple colors, is the diffraction of light into its component wavelengths as the light passes through.
So a sheen is ridiculously thin---which means it takes almost no oil to create a large sheen. A single drop, for example, could probably produce a square meter of sheen (guessing, based on what I have seen happen with gasoline).
b.g.