The article is about officers who occasionally don't follow procedures, and therefore fuck up the evidence.
It's more of a "Oh damn, I forgot my Faraday cage" than a "der gots to be a way to stop da magic signals" situation.
Seriously, most SS officers are generally smarter than you think you are, which is pretty damn smart. They aren't exactly at the bottom of the law enforcement officer pool, if you know what I mean. More like pretty close to the top.
Or you could just carry a Faraday cage with you - you know they can be made to any size, right? A little baggy is good enough for a cell phone, and will prevent any remote wipe.
You also remove the battery, in case another wipe trigger - like "wipe if no connection for more than 1 hour" - is set up on the phone.
S.S. procedure is Faraday cage - battery removal, then transport to the nearest shielded agency lab for analysis.
That's not good enough, cell phones never completely turn off. Pretty much all cell phones in the last 5-10 years are capable of remote power-on.
In fact, most PCs with a built-in network card are capable of this as well. It's called a "magic packet", and it allows you to remote power-on a PC if you know the subnet it is on and the mac address.
It can be disabled in the bios for PCs, but the cell phone version (it's obviously not the "magic packet" system for PCs) I don't think can be.
What you need is a Faraday cage (a small bag will do), and to remove the battery (nothing can power it on after that).
That is actually the procedure the S.S. uses, it's just not all agencies were as informed of the policy as others.
I imagine they know a good deal more about such scientific concepts than you do, you have to be a pretty smart cookie to be able to recognize potential threats and investigate such technically challenging crimes as counterfeiting, which is the purview of the Secret Service.
Even if they were too dumb, there is no need to understand the concept at all - just the procedure. I'm sure even you could handle "Put any phones you find in this special bag, then pull the battery out."
God I swear, nerds think they are the only smart people on the planet, when in fact they are in the minority.
If your conditions are "loss of signal" then you'll be wiping your phone an awful lot. That's all a Faraday cage is going to do - cut off the signal.
Battery removal is also not something that can not be worked around without installing intrusion detection for the case. That's some significant modding, but is plausible.
Assuming your wipe conditions are only something like a certain time without connection (which is more reasonable), if they pull the battery quickly enough you still won't stop it.
Also remember that the data can be read without running the phone software itself, so they can make a copy of the intact key and data before any nuking can happen if they follow proper procedures.
There is no reason they wouldn't, all you need is a bag small enough to completely cover the phone. You can make an effective Faraday cage out of aluminum foil. If that's the problem, it's a huge oversight for a small problem.
Also, Airplane mode should block all outgoing signals, but I don't know if it blocks passive reception of signals (there really wouldn't be any reason to), so it may be completely ineffective.
If even 1% of that is oil, then we are totally fucked. Hopefully it's less than 0.01%.
It's a very low percentage of oil, and it's in an emulsion, which is why it's 300 feet deep instead of an inch deep. It must be almost all water or it would not be heavy enough to occupy the top 300 feet of ocean water. You should be able to calculate the density of the emulsion Based on how deep it is able to remain in the water. Seawater has a density of 1021kg/m3, and gassy crude oil like the stuff in this spill generally has a density of 700-800 kg/m3. Pure crude is closer to 900 kg/m3. In order for the emulsion to stay so low in the water it is probably over 1010kg/m3, at least. If that's a good estimate for a density that would allow the oil to sink that low, then there are 11kg of oil per cubic meter in that water, which is in the 1% range. If the density needs to be higher to float that low, then there will be proportionately less oil in the water.
However, if you calculate from the surface slick itself, you have 3650 sq miles of slick (as of Friday). And based on a chart of oil-thickness-to-color, you could say that the oil slick is 50 micrometers thick. This equates to 125 million gallons of pure oil just on the surface.
I can't get the same numbers you got. I'm assuming you multiplied 3650 square miles by 1609 to get square meters, which is 5.87 million square meters. You then multiply by 50 microns to get cubic meters of oil, no? I get 293.5 cubic meters, which at 264 gallons per cubic meter is 77,500 gallons, or 1,844 barrels on the surface. This is in line with the idea that the vast majority of the oil is under water.
Do you see the problem with trying to estimate the amount of oil that is spilling? It's freakin hard, and depending on what assumptions you use (and you have to use some assumptions) you get wildly varying figures.
To illustrate my point, 5,000,000 gallons per day on the surface requires 120,000 barrels per day be pouring out just to equal the surface volume, yet there is many times more oil below the surface. Oil wells simply do not flow that fast, it would be the world's most profitable well by a wide margine. The average flow rate of wells in the gulf is 1600 barrels per day. Assuming this well is a real gusher, the flow rate might be up in the 40,000-50,000 barrels per day range. That's still an incredibly high flow for an oil well.
Simple logic and a little knowledge of how oil wells work, and normal flows and the like would make you extremely skeptical of the very high figures being thrown around.
In other words, when your estimations give you figures that are outside the expected norm by several orders of magnitude, you should probably re-examine your assumptions.
BP didn't pay for the Exxon Valdez either even though it was BP's responsibility.
How was that in any way BP's responsibility? They are in no way responsible for another company spilling that other company's oil. Exxon (aka the largest oil company in the world) was moving oil of Valdez to the lower 48 markets via a tanker driven by a drunk-off-his-ass skipper. At exactly which point was BP involved?
Are you suggesting that if some dumbass at a gas station spills a little gasoline on the pavement, it's BP's responsibility to clean it up? Where the hell do you get off?
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.
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI.
Holy shit, where do you ignorant people get your information?
The casing is 21 inches in diameter, the borehole is 9 inches in diameter. The borehole is the limiting factor, but neither one of them are 5 feet in diameter. There is no drill rig on earth that drills a hole that big.
As for PSI, it's easily calculated. Standard figures (based on specific gravity) are 45psi per 100ft of water, and 100psi per 100 feet of sedimentary rock.
That means the pressure at seafloor (about 5,000 feet) is roughly 2250psi. At the top of the reservoir (an additional 11,000 feet) it's roughly 13,250psi.
There is no 150,000psi, you would literally have a geyser of oil shooting out of the sea at those pressures.
Now, that said, an 11,000psi pressure differential is nothing to sneeze at, but the question of flow is further confused by factors such as the porosity of the reservoir rock, the amount of gas mixed in solution with the oil (which comes out immediately at the pressure drop - it's like shaking a soda bottle and opening the lid), which influences the rate of flow (more gas means more flow) as well as the actual amount of oil that comes out (more gas means less oil by volume).
Basically, plugging the hole is exactly what they've done, but the pressures are too great to simply push something against it. For one thing, the pipe is bent sideways, and under water you have a complete lack of leverage for generating any kind of horizontal pressure. So what they have done is attach the siphoning rig to a plug, and they are going to try to use suction to generate the necessary pressures to stop the leak.
The siphon is already in place, they won't know how effective it will be until they ramp it up to full speed. They can't just flip the switch, or hydrates would form (oil and water binding to form solids) which would plug the pipe. They expect to have the leak under control some time next week.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole by people with no idea of critical factors like the gas to oil ratio, porosity of the reservoir rock, potential obstructions in the shaft is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave).
There, fixed that for you.
An uninformed estimate is an uninformed estimate, no matter how much you try to make it sound otherwise. This is exactly the same problem BP has with their estimate, which is why they say it's impossible to accurately measure the flow of the well and chose the lowest figure they could get away with. They are right, and these "expert" figures are no more accurate than BP's figures, for all the same reasons.
Frankly, a well naturally pushing 50,000 barrels per day is an extreme gusher, and is very rare. The average production of active wells in the gulf is 1600 barrels per day. I find it highly unlikely that this well is pushing out 50,000 barrels per day, but 5,000 seems like a real lowball estimate. A deep sea well wouldn't be profitable at that rate, and though there are plenty of ways to increase the flow of a well, you usually reserve them for after the natural pressure has dropped to the point that it won't push up to the surface adequately on its own. I'd be a lot more willing to believe 15,000-20,000 barrels a day until more accurate measurements can be made. 50,000 barrels is pretty out there.
I think you mean photons, there aren't any protons released by the sun's fusion reaction, it is extremely efficient in that regard, whereas the fission we use tosses protons all over the place. The radiation the sun produces is in the form of electromagnetic waves, which can still be extremely nasty, but the vast majority of the harmful stuff is deflected by Earth's magnetic field, along with any particulate matter from the solar wind.
The vast majority of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth is non-ionizing radiation. Very little ionizing radiation makes it to the surface. Also, the fusion process of the sun produces a lot less residual ionizing radiation than the fission process we use on earth.
The majority of radiation emitted close to a nuclear reactor (i.e. practically touching spent fuel rods and the like) is ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is very high energy and strips electrons from atoms (hence the "ionizing" part). This does very bad things to living organisms.
There are actually pretty huge differences between radiation from the Sun (as far as what hits the earth) and radiation from a nuclear reactor if you ever managed to get close enough to be exposed to such radiation.
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?
Oil seeps naturally into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of about 22 million barrels per year.
If you use the doom and gloom "expert" estimates of 50,000 barrels a day non-stop, in a year this spill would not be able to match it. The truth of the matter is it's probably somewhere between the 5,000 barrels BP gives (probably the most conservative estimate they felt they could get away with) and the 50,000 barrels a day which, frankly, is one hell of a gusher for an oil well. The average flow rate for a Gulf of Mexico oil rig is 1600 barrels per day. You expect newly drilled wells to be significantly higher, and for this particular well to be profitable it would need to produce a minimum of 13,000 barrels per day. A safe guess is that BP was expecting to get more than 20,000 barrels a day from this well, but I could not tell you how that translates to the flow rate of a broken off pipe flowing freely at the bottom of the ocean.
Since recent efforts to siphon the well seem to be going well, as it stands today you can expect that the spill will likely be under control (as in, no longer leaking) in the next couple of weeks, with a permanent solution to cap the well in the next few months. Worst case estimates (frankly ridiculous 70k-80k per day estimates) put that at 4.8 million barrels. By BP's estimates it's more like 300,000 barrels. I sizable surge for Gulf of Mexico oil content, to be sure, but not something you'd expect to cause serious damage to the Gulf of Mexico.
Scf is standard cubic foot - a measure of volume of gas at a pressure of 1 atmosphere, BOPD is industry jargon for Barrel of Oil Per Day, I believe he meant bbl, which is the unit for a barrel of oil. Scf/bbl is also simply called GOR, or Gas to Oil Ratio.
According to wikipedia, anything less than 10,000 GOR is considered an oil well, and anything over that is considered a gas well.
I have heard that this particular well was very gassy, but I did not hear anybody getting picky about calling it a oil well instead of a gas well so I'd assume it's under 10,000 GOR.
The gist of it is, even experts - who may know a whole lot about about calculating flow rates with various methods - cannot give you an accurate estimation of the flow rate if they don't take into account the various additional factors that are unique to oil. Calculating the flow of an incompressible liquid is a lot different than calculating the flow of a compressible liquid when you come from great depths, and the details are critical for a remotely accurate estimate.
In other words, the fact that it came from an expert doesn't make it any less of a wild ass guess if said expert does not have all the relevant information.
The GP's argument is asinine, BP has already spent more on the cleanup ($450 million) than the rig itself was worth ($350 million), and that rig was used to drill multiple wells, not just one.
The losses in their stock price dwarf that.
No, recovering the oil is the least of their concerns.
Relief wells don't relieve pressure on a well by pumping oil out of the reservoir, it would take years to measurably reduce the PSI.
What relief wells do is push material in to the well along the pipe column of the original well. The idea is to plug the well up with debris (mud and rocks, stuff that his much more dense than the oil) and thereby reduce the pressure so you can cap the well.
It's not relieving pressure like a relief valve in a pressure cooker, it is relieving pressure like cholesterol in a clogged artery.
In which case they just come back later and start sucking the oil out. It would be a lot more efficient to plug it and then put an actual production rig on top of it to suck the oil out. That's actually how it is normally done - a drill rig (which is what the Horizon rig was) drills the hole, then plugs it up with cement. That rig moves on to drill another well, and a production rig moves in, unplugs the hole, and starts collecting the oil.
The last thing an oil company wants to see is oil leaking freely into the ocean. Their ultimate goals (ignoring the PR goals and other regulation induced goals) are naturally aligned with the environmentalists - they don't want to see a drop of that oil hit the ocean.
Sure, it's like when Toyota screws up and creates cars that automatically accelerate, killing 34 people in the US in 2009.
However, 34,000 people died in automobile accidents in the US in 2009, so while Toyota needs to be punished for killing 34 people, in the grand scheme of things those 34 people have no actual impact on the number of automobile deaths in the US.
Toyota = BP, the US = the Ocean, and automobile accidents = natural oil seeps.
What you fail to take into account is that natural seepage and massive release are on such opposite sides of the spectrum that "it happens naturally" is not going to make anyone but yourself feel better about this spill.
Except the average amount of oil that leaks into the ocean by non-natural processes every year is about 100 times that which is leaked by things like oil spills.
You'll see a sharp spike, and you'll get pockets that are very high in tasty microbes but very dangerous to swim in for fish for a while, but even on a timescale of 5 or 10 years this becomes a non-event.
To relate it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the vast majority of the spill affected region bounced back almost completely within a year - in fact, one of the biggest impacts on the eco-system was the fact that fishers took a season off for fear of the oil, and the fisheries became over populated, which damaged fish populations for several years after. The oil itself had zero impact on the fish. You can still find small amounts of Exxon oil in some areas, but there is no measurable environmental impact that has lingered.
This is a very bad thing, and BP needs to be severely punished for allowing it to happen, as should TransOcean and Haliburton for actually causing the problem. However, the long-term impacts (not even super-long term, just 5-10 years) are going to be minimal. It's not the end of the ocean because a few hundred thousand barrels of oil spilled, millions of barrels already spill naturally, and it is something that should be kept in mind.
Why doesn't some government official step in and say, 'look, idiots, get off your asses and find out exactly how much oil is pouring out of there'.
What's more important, finding out exactly how much oil is spilling out so we can be really extra angry about it, or stopping the leak?
If you think BP is sitting on their asses, you're a dumbass. I work on the North Slope of Alaska (check a globe, those of of you educated by the public school system probably won't understand where Alaska is from a simple map of the US, the North Slope is at the very top) and most of our Incident Response Team is in the Gulf of Mexico right now working to clean up the spill. The same of true of all US based IR teams, and probably a good portion of their global IR teams.
They are literally developing new technologies that have never been used before on the spot to fix this thing. To say they are being lazy about the cleanup is to be willfully ignorant of their efforts.
To put it another way, BP's continued operations in the United States are riding on how well they clean up this mess, and it isn't going well. You can bet your ass they are doing their damnedest to get the leak stop, and clean up the spill.
I suspect this thing will be shooting oil until the reservoir it is coming out of goes dry, My guess is 5-7 years before it stops on its own, or gets to a manageable PSI.
Based on your demonstrated ignorance and lack of ability to prioritize (and therefore obvious lack of judgment), I would rather trust a fortune teller than you to guess how long it will continue.
Especially considering the fact that the leak is now capped and being siphoned off from the well head as we speak.
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The article is about officers who occasionally don't follow procedures, and therefore fuck up the evidence.
It's more of a "Oh damn, I forgot my Faraday cage" than a "der gots to be a way to stop da magic signals" situation.
Seriously, most SS officers are generally smarter than you think you are, which is pretty damn smart. They aren't exactly at the bottom of the law enforcement officer pool, if you know what I mean. More like pretty close to the top.
Or you could just carry a Faraday cage with you - you know they can be made to any size, right? A little baggy is good enough for a cell phone, and will prevent any remote wipe.
You also remove the battery, in case another wipe trigger - like "wipe if no connection for more than 1 hour" - is set up on the phone.
S.S. procedure is Faraday cage - battery removal, then transport to the nearest shielded agency lab for analysis.
That's not good enough, cell phones never completely turn off. Pretty much all cell phones in the last 5-10 years are capable of remote power-on.
In fact, most PCs with a built-in network card are capable of this as well. It's called a "magic packet", and it allows you to remote power-on a PC if you know the subnet it is on and the mac address.
It can be disabled in the bios for PCs, but the cell phone version (it's obviously not the "magic packet" system for PCs) I don't think can be.
What you need is a Faraday cage (a small bag will do), and to remove the battery (nothing can power it on after that).
That is actually the procedure the S.S. uses, it's just not all agencies were as informed of the policy as others.
I imagine they know a good deal more about such scientific concepts than you do, you have to be a pretty smart cookie to be able to recognize potential threats and investigate such technically challenging crimes as counterfeiting, which is the purview of the Secret Service.
Even if they were too dumb, there is no need to understand the concept at all - just the procedure. I'm sure even you could handle "Put any phones you find in this special bag, then pull the battery out."
God I swear, nerds think they are the only smart people on the planet, when in fact they are in the minority.
If your conditions are "loss of signal" then you'll be wiping your phone an awful lot. That's all a Faraday cage is going to do - cut off the signal.
Battery removal is also not something that can not be worked around without installing intrusion detection for the case. That's some significant modding, but is plausible.
Assuming your wipe conditions are only something like a certain time without connection (which is more reasonable), if they pull the battery quickly enough you still won't stop it.
Also remember that the data can be read without running the phone software itself, so they can make a copy of the intact key and data before any nuking can happen if they follow proper procedures.
all you need is a bag small enough to completely cover the phone.
Don't know how I missed it on preview, but that should be "small bag large enough".
The first cop on the scene probably won't
There is no reason they wouldn't, all you need is a bag small enough to completely cover the phone. You can make an effective Faraday cage out of aluminum foil. If that's the problem, it's a huge oversight for a small problem.
Also, Airplane mode should block all outgoing signals, but I don't know if it blocks passive reception of signals (there really wouldn't be any reason to), so it may be completely ineffective.
A Faraday cage blocks the nuke signal, preserving everything.
I imagine only the S.S. folks who don't keep a Faraday cage handy are having problems (which may be all of them, I don't know).
It's a big oversight for a little problem.
I've got one word for them:
Faraday Cage. ;)
Hey man, we've got an energy crisis looming! They're just doing their part to replenish the oil supply.
It's proof that oil is a renewable resource, and therefore should get all kinds of green tax credits! ;)
Is anyone else getting concerned?
Yes, everyone is concerned.
If even 1% of that is oil, then we are totally fucked. Hopefully it's less than 0.01%.
It's a very low percentage of oil, and it's in an emulsion, which is why it's 300 feet deep instead of an inch deep. It must be almost all water or it would not be heavy enough to occupy the top 300 feet of ocean water. You should be able to calculate the density of the emulsion Based on how deep it is able to remain in the water. Seawater has a density of 1021kg/m3, and gassy crude oil like the stuff in this spill generally has a density of 700-800 kg/m3. Pure crude is closer to 900 kg/m3. In order for the emulsion to stay so low in the water it is probably over 1010kg/m3, at least. If that's a good estimate for a density that would allow the oil to sink that low, then there are 11kg of oil per cubic meter in that water, which is in the 1% range. If the density needs to be higher to float that low, then there will be proportionately less oil in the water.
However, if you calculate from the surface slick itself, you have 3650 sq miles of slick (as of Friday). And based on a chart of oil-thickness-to-color, you could say that the oil slick is 50 micrometers thick. This equates to 125 million gallons of pure oil just on the surface.
I can't get the same numbers you got. I'm assuming you multiplied 3650 square miles by 1609 to get square meters, which is 5.87 million square meters. You then multiply by 50 microns to get cubic meters of oil, no? I get 293.5 cubic meters, which at 264 gallons per cubic meter is 77,500 gallons, or 1,844 barrels on the surface. This is in line with the idea that the vast majority of the oil is under water.
Do you see the problem with trying to estimate the amount of oil that is spilling? It's freakin hard, and depending on what assumptions you use (and you have to use some assumptions) you get wildly varying figures.
To illustrate my point, 5,000,000 gallons per day on the surface requires 120,000 barrels per day be pouring out just to equal the surface volume, yet there is many times more oil below the surface. Oil wells simply do not flow that fast, it would be the world's most profitable well by a wide margine. The average flow rate of wells in the gulf is 1600 barrels per day. Assuming this well is a real gusher, the flow rate might be up in the 40,000-50,000 barrels per day range. That's still an incredibly high flow for an oil well.
Simple logic and a little knowledge of how oil wells work, and normal flows and the like would make you extremely skeptical of the very high figures being thrown around.
In other words, when your estimations give you figures that are outside the expected norm by several orders of magnitude, you should probably re-examine your assumptions.
BP didn't pay for the Exxon Valdez either even though it was BP's responsibility.
How was that in any way BP's responsibility? They are in no way responsible for another company spilling that other company's oil. Exxon (aka the largest oil company in the world) was moving oil of Valdez to the lower 48 markets via a tanker driven by a drunk-off-his-ass skipper. At exactly which point was BP involved?
Are you suggesting that if some dumbass at a gas station spills a little gasoline on the pavement, it's BP's responsibility to clean it up? Where the hell do you get off?
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.
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI.
Holy shit, where do you ignorant people get your information?
The casing is 21 inches in diameter, the borehole is 9 inches in diameter. The borehole is the limiting factor, but neither one of them are 5 feet in diameter. There is no drill rig on earth that drills a hole that big.
As for PSI, it's easily calculated. Standard figures (based on specific gravity) are 45psi per 100ft of water, and 100psi per 100 feet of sedimentary rock.
That means the pressure at seafloor (about 5,000 feet) is roughly 2250psi. At the top of the reservoir (an additional 11,000 feet) it's roughly 13,250psi.
There is no 150,000psi, you would literally have a geyser of oil shooting out of the sea at those pressures.
Now, that said, an 11,000psi pressure differential is nothing to sneeze at, but the question of flow is further confused by factors such as the porosity of the reservoir rock, the amount of gas mixed in solution with the oil (which comes out immediately at the pressure drop - it's like shaking a soda bottle and opening the lid), which influences the rate of flow (more gas means more flow) as well as the actual amount of oil that comes out (more gas means less oil by volume).
Basically, plugging the hole is exactly what they've done, but the pressures are too great to simply push something against it. For one thing, the pipe is bent sideways, and under water you have a complete lack of leverage for generating any kind of horizontal pressure. So what they have done is attach the siphoning rig to a plug, and they are going to try to use suction to generate the necessary pressures to stop the leak.
The siphon is already in place, they won't know how effective it will be until they ramp it up to full speed. They can't just flip the switch, or hydrates would form (oil and water binding to form solids) which would plug the pipe. They expect to have the leak under control some time next week.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole by people with no idea of critical factors like the gas to oil ratio, porosity of the reservoir rock, potential obstructions in the shaft is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave).
There, fixed that for you.
An uninformed estimate is an uninformed estimate, no matter how much you try to make it sound otherwise. This is exactly the same problem BP has with their estimate, which is why they say it's impossible to accurately measure the flow of the well and chose the lowest figure they could get away with. They are right, and these "expert" figures are no more accurate than BP's figures, for all the same reasons.
Frankly, a well naturally pushing 50,000 barrels per day is an extreme gusher, and is very rare. The average production of active wells in the gulf is 1600 barrels per day. I find it highly unlikely that this well is pushing out 50,000 barrels per day, but 5,000 seems like a real lowball estimate. A deep sea well wouldn't be profitable at that rate, and though there are plenty of ways to increase the flow of a well, you usually reserve them for after the natural pressure has dropped to the point that it won't push up to the surface adequately on its own. I'd be a lot more willing to believe 15,000-20,000 barrels a day until more accurate measurements can be made. 50,000 barrels is pretty out there.
Protons are protons you fucking idiot
I think you mean photons, there aren't any protons released by the sun's fusion reaction, it is extremely efficient in that regard, whereas the fission we use tosses protons all over the place. The radiation the sun produces is in the form of electromagnetic waves, which can still be extremely nasty, but the vast majority of the harmful stuff is deflected by Earth's magnetic field, along with any particulate matter from the solar wind.
The vast majority of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth is non-ionizing radiation. Very little ionizing radiation makes it to the surface. Also, the fusion process of the sun produces a lot less residual ionizing radiation than the fission process we use on earth.
The majority of radiation emitted close to a nuclear reactor (i.e. practically touching spent fuel rods and the like) is ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is very high energy and strips electrons from atoms (hence the "ionizing" part). This does very bad things to living organisms.
There are actually pretty huge differences between radiation from the Sun (as far as what hits the earth) and radiation from a nuclear reactor if you ever managed to get close enough to be exposed to such radiation.
GP: To adapt doesn't mean return to status quo.
You: What? Adapt doesn't mean return to status quo.
In other words, learn to read. You agree with the person you are arguing with.
Dumbass.
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?
Oil seeps naturally into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of about 22 million barrels per year.
If you use the doom and gloom "expert" estimates of 50,000 barrels a day non-stop, in a year this spill would not be able to match it. The truth of the matter is it's probably somewhere between the 5,000 barrels BP gives (probably the most conservative estimate they felt they could get away with) and the 50,000 barrels a day which, frankly, is one hell of a gusher for an oil well. The average flow rate for a Gulf of Mexico oil rig is 1600 barrels per day. You expect newly drilled wells to be significantly higher, and for this particular well to be profitable it would need to produce a minimum of 13,000 barrels per day. A safe guess is that BP was expecting to get more than 20,000 barrels a day from this well, but I could not tell you how that translates to the flow rate of a broken off pipe flowing freely at the bottom of the ocean.
Since recent efforts to siphon the well seem to be going well, as it stands today you can expect that the spill will likely be under control (as in, no longer leaking) in the next couple of weeks, with a permanent solution to cap the well in the next few months. Worst case estimates (frankly ridiculous 70k-80k per day estimates) put that at 4.8 million barrels. By BP's estimates it's more like 300,000 barrels. I sizable surge for Gulf of Mexico oil content, to be sure, but not something you'd expect to cause serious damage to the Gulf of Mexico.
Scf is standard cubic foot - a measure of volume of gas at a pressure of 1 atmosphere, BOPD is industry jargon for Barrel of Oil Per Day, I believe he meant bbl, which is the unit for a barrel of oil. Scf/bbl is also simply called GOR, or Gas to Oil Ratio.
According to wikipedia, anything less than 10,000 GOR is considered an oil well, and anything over that is considered a gas well.
I have heard that this particular well was very gassy, but I did not hear anybody getting picky about calling it a oil well instead of a gas well so I'd assume it's under 10,000 GOR.
The gist of it is, even experts - who may know a whole lot about about calculating flow rates with various methods - cannot give you an accurate estimation of the flow rate if they don't take into account the various additional factors that are unique to oil. Calculating the flow of an incompressible liquid is a lot different than calculating the flow of a compressible liquid when you come from great depths, and the details are critical for a remotely accurate estimate.
In other words, the fact that it came from an expert doesn't make it any less of a wild ass guess if said expert does not have all the relevant information.
The GP's argument is asinine, BP has already spent more on the cleanup ($450 million) than the rig itself was worth ($350 million), and that rig was used to drill multiple wells, not just one.
The losses in their stock price dwarf that.
No, recovering the oil is the least of their concerns.
Relief wells don't relieve pressure on a well by pumping oil out of the reservoir, it would take years to measurably reduce the PSI.
What relief wells do is push material in to the well along the pipe column of the original well. The idea is to plug the well up with debris (mud and rocks, stuff that his much more dense than the oil) and thereby reduce the pressure so you can cap the well.
It's not relieving pressure like a relief valve in a pressure cooker, it is relieving pressure like cholesterol in a clogged artery.
The other option is to just plug it up...
In which case they just come back later and start sucking the oil out. It would be a lot more efficient to plug it and then put an actual production rig on top of it to suck the oil out. That's actually how it is normally done - a drill rig (which is what the Horizon rig was) drills the hole, then plugs it up with cement. That rig moves on to drill another well, and a production rig moves in, unplugs the hole, and starts collecting the oil.
The last thing an oil company wants to see is oil leaking freely into the ocean. Their ultimate goals (ignoring the PR goals and other regulation induced goals) are naturally aligned with the environmentalists - they don't want to see a drop of that oil hit the ocean.
Sure, it's like when Toyota screws up and creates cars that automatically accelerate, killing 34 people in the US in 2009.
However, 34,000 people died in automobile accidents in the US in 2009, so while Toyota needs to be punished for killing 34 people, in the grand scheme of things those 34 people have no actual impact on the number of automobile deaths in the US.
Toyota = BP, the US = the Ocean, and automobile accidents = natural oil seeps.
What you fail to take into account is that natural seepage and massive release are on such opposite sides of the spectrum that "it happens naturally" is not going to make anyone but yourself feel better about this spill.
Except the average amount of oil that leaks into the ocean by non-natural processes every year is about 100 times that which is leaked by things like oil spills.
You'll see a sharp spike, and you'll get pockets that are very high in tasty microbes but very dangerous to swim in for fish for a while, but even on a timescale of 5 or 10 years this becomes a non-event.
To relate it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the vast majority of the spill affected region bounced back almost completely within a year - in fact, one of the biggest impacts on the eco-system was the fact that fishers took a season off for fear of the oil, and the fisheries became over populated, which damaged fish populations for several years after. The oil itself had zero impact on the fish. You can still find small amounts of Exxon oil in some areas, but there is no measurable environmental impact that has lingered.
This is a very bad thing, and BP needs to be severely punished for allowing it to happen, as should TransOcean and Haliburton for actually causing the problem. However, the long-term impacts (not even super-long term, just 5-10 years) are going to be minimal. It's not the end of the ocean because a few hundred thousand barrels of oil spilled, millions of barrels already spill naturally, and it is something that should be kept in mind.
Why doesn't some government official step in and say, 'look, idiots, get off your asses and find out exactly how much oil is pouring out of there'.
What's more important, finding out exactly how much oil is spilling out so we can be really extra angry about it, or stopping the leak?
If you think BP is sitting on their asses, you're a dumbass. I work on the North Slope of Alaska (check a globe, those of of you educated by the public school system probably won't understand where Alaska is from a simple map of the US, the North Slope is at the very top) and most of our Incident Response Team is in the Gulf of Mexico right now working to clean up the spill. The same of true of all US based IR teams, and probably a good portion of their global IR teams.
They are literally developing new technologies that have never been used before on the spot to fix this thing. To say they are being lazy about the cleanup is to be willfully ignorant of their efforts.
To put it another way, BP's continued operations in the United States are riding on how well they clean up this mess, and it isn't going well. You can bet your ass they are doing their damnedest to get the leak stop, and clean up the spill.
I suspect this thing will be shooting oil until the reservoir it is coming out of goes dry, My guess is 5-7 years before it stops on its own, or gets to a manageable PSI.
Based on your demonstrated ignorance and lack of ability to prioritize (and therefore obvious lack of judgment), I would rather trust a fortune teller than you to guess how long it will continue.
Especially considering the fact that the leak is now capped and being siphoned off from the well head as we speak.
Dumbass.