Hold on to your hat, the article itself is worse. There is not one single completely true statement that I was able to find, fixing the grammar of the summary is the least of the editor's problems on this one.
Pretty much everything in the article is incorrect.
Even the statements he makes about his own pond are wrong. A 400,000 gallon pond is almost 10,000 barrels, or about twice the daily rate of oil spilled. It's definitely not 1/5 of the oil spilled.
The only thing I could find that was partially correct was that the oil sitting on top of the ocean is an oil/water mix (up to 90% water). It's an emulsion, and it makes the oil very difficult to clean up because skimmers are very ineffective. However, all the reasons he gives for why the oil is in this state, and everything he says surrounding this one statement are all incorrect.
Seriously, everything. I had a hard time finding anything that was actually true in the article.
I'll help you a little. I'm far from an oil expert, but I do work on an oil field and know enough about it that I spotted the bullshit immediately.
Seriously... the whole gulf of mexico is going to explode into an oil gusher?
This one is the most absurd of all his claims, it is simply not possible. The oil is not in bubbles, it's in sandstone. As oil moves out, heavier water moves in. There is nothing to collapse.
The freaking math doesn't even add up in this story. Its claiming a million gallons a day gushing, but at 4 barrels per second, you don't get to a million in one day. You don't even get to the 500k that BP would be so happy about, you get 345.6k/day. So you need a good 6BPS from everything else to start hitting a million gallons a day. Not the case. Of course he contridicts himself in his own article with at one point saying 500k and at another saying 1m.
He also states the rig gost $1 billion when it cost $350 million, and that it needs to make $5 million per day to be profitable, when anything over $1 million is profitable. 20,000 barrels is a 50% profit, 500,000 barrels is a 3800% profit. Total GoM oilfield production peaked at 1.7 million barrels per day, and averaged about 1.3 million barrels per day last year. The idea that a single well is accounting for more than 1/3 of the total gulf oil production is ludicrous. Nobody who knows anything about the oil would make such a guess. 50,000 barrels per day is extremely good for any single well to produce. There is also a corporate re-structuring going on at BP for US operations (which has been severly interrupted by this spill). That would be my first candidate for why the executives might be on the rig, not some absurd guess about oil production (at a time when the rig wasn't producing any oil at all, no less).
Thats why buoys can be left on the surface to contain it, cause its ON THE SURFACE ONLY.
He's actually right that the oil in this case is a heavy water mix, and is therefore not sitting on the surface. That is one of the reasons they have to use chemical dispersers to gather the oil in large droplets before they are able to collect and burn it. If it were just sitting on the surface they could set it off and watch it go.
The reasons he gives, however, are absurd. Oil cannot fractionate by going from high pressure to low pressure unless you get the pressure so low you drop the boiling point of the oil to below the temperature of seawater. It shouldn't take a physicist to tell that that did not happen. The reason there is an oil-water emulsion is because of the high pressures on the ocean floor and the high gas content of the oil. It's the exact same concept as carbonated water - pressurize the gas and water together and the gas will incorporate into the water. Same thing with the oil - at the 2000 psi of the sea floor the oil and gas incorporate into the sea water, and this mixture is a lot heavier than oil alone (though still slightly lighter than water). Thus, it is a watery mixture (as much as 90% water) that occupies the top few hundred feet of the ocean in the slick areas. This heavy layer doesn't spread out as much as straight oil would either, because it is a lot closer to the density of water. You get large sections that are difficult to control, because the booms can't float and still extend far enough below the surface to catch all of the oil mixture. The rainbow sheen is a very thin layer of oil that has come out of solution from the heavier water mixture.
He also states that the mixture continues mixing into the water, when the opposite happens. The oil separates out of the water and spreads out over the ocean. The more time goes on the more dispersed the oil gets, being in a water emulsion is an unnatural state for oil, and just like that soda water will eventually go flat, so too will all the oil eventually separate out of the water. In the mean time, evaporatio
The current total of the world's proven and predicted reserves doesn't even hit a trillion barrels, so coming up with trillions in the gulf is patently absurd.
There is not one statement this guy makes is true. Not even when he is talking about his own pond (I suspect he doesn't actually have a pond).
Pretty much nothing in the article, beginning with the size of the pipe and moving on from there, was fact.
I'll start listing just a few.
This guy says pipe is 5 feet in diameter (apparently based on a guess), the pipe is actually 18 inches (hello, they have on record the size of pipe they were using, you don't need to eyeball it).
He estimates 4 barrels per second is flowing out, yet the maximum possible based on the pressures involved is about 0.38 barrels per second.
Real honest to god experts estimate the spill to be flowing anywhere from 5,000-20,000 barrels per day (with a theoretical maximum about 30,000), but this guy estimates 350,000 barrels from the largest pipe, which somehow combined with the smaller pipe becomes 1 million barrels? I couldn't fudge the math in any semi-logical way to make that work.
He says the rig must have been producing around 500,000 barrels of oil a day to get the executives out there, even though the well was not in production, and was in fact producing exactly 0 barrels of oil per day. There are a whole lot of executives at BP, and there are a plethora of situations that might warrant a visit from some of them, yet all he can come up with is that they must have been producing 500,000 barrels a day (which, btw, is an insane number for a single well, though not quite impossible). There is nothing to support his claim (which he uses to support his 350,000 barrel per day spill estimate), and a whole lot that suggests the claim is false.
He states that the pressure change from the bottom of the ocean to the top creates a natural fractionating column (which he spells incorrectly several times, btw), separating the heavy compounds from the lighter compounds. The idea is absurd. A fractionating column requires high temperatures to boil the oil to distill the various compounds out of the solution at sea level pressures. Anybody who passed high school physics should know that the boiling point for a liquid increases as pressure increases. Releasing pressure cools liquids, it does not heat them up. The oil will be hot from being near mantle, but it will not be hot enough to burn, and it definitely isn't hot enough to create a fractionating column on the way up.
He is correct in stating that the oil is not sitting on top of the water because it is an oil-water mix (aka an emulsion), but he does not understand why. The high pressure at the ocean floor force the water and oil into a solution, just like carbon gas is forced into soda water under high pressure. They will eventually separate out, but it will take time, and it has absolutely nothing to do with oil distilling itself on its way to the surface.
He states that this well needed to earn $5 million a day because BP had invested $1 billion into it. These figures are both pulled out of his ass. The rig cost $350 million, not over $1 billion. Even if it had cost over $1 billion, at $5,000,000 per day they would have doubled their money in a little over a year in operation. That is some insane return on investment. The truth is, operating costs were about $1 million per day, so at $1.5 million worth of oil per day (that's just my guess) you would recoup your initial investment in just a couple years and be incredibly profitable after. That works out to about 19,000 barrels per day at current prices, which is much more reasonable. However, since they paid off their investment 7-8 years ago, anything over $1 million per day is profitable, so they could afford to operate at as little as 12,000 barrels per day. The idea that they would dispose of the well at 20,000 barrels (a 50% profit) is ridiculous, but what is funny is that they were closing up the well to move on to another site. They weren't permanently capping it, just closing it off with plans to return later.
He is wrong on every single point he makes in the article, every single one. The article is absolutely worthless. In fact, it's worse than worthless, it actually has negative value
And as far as I know, the likelihood of this deposit collapsing is very, very low; unmeasurably low.
Try impossible - an oil reservoir is not a bubble, it's rock - sandstone specifically. Oil is able to penetrate the stone, which is why it is found there and not in the solid granite and such. It doesn't squirt out like a squeezed water balloon, it's sucked out by the pressure differential between the surface and the reservoir underground. As the oil gets sucked out, something has to replace it according to the laws of physics, and that something is water. The sandstone fills up with water after the oil is sucked out, it is never empty.
In other words, if the reservoir were going to collapse after you took the oil out, it would have collapsed before you took the oil out, because the sandstone never changes state. In fact, since water is denser than oil, the sandstone would arguably be more resistant to collapse after oil extraction than before.
This dumbass environmentalist software engineer and "oil expert" does not even understand the basic concept of how an oil reservoir works. His predictions of oil volume are based on his own visual estimation of a "5ft" pipe (even though the pipe is known to be 18 inches, and a 5 foot pipe would be impossible at this depth) and some absurd notion of what kind of volume oil executives would be happy with. He estimates they must have been producing 500,000 barrels per day at this one site, even though the well was not in production - that is, they were producing nothing at all. They pump drilling mud on top of the column to prevent oil from rising in these situations - you don't want oil coming up while you are drilling because you've got a frickin drill down the hole!
The oil reserves are not all connected either, they are pockets of oil-bearing sandstone, some large some small, spread throughout the gulf. There is absolutely no way anybody who had even the most basic knowledge of oil reservoirs could think that a leak like this could even come close to emptying out the individual reservoir, let alone the whole of the gulf, if left unchecked.
I seriously doubt this guy has any extensive contact with the oil industry, except as a screaming, fear-mongering, environmentalist wacko.
There are legitimate and very serious environmental concerns with this spill, but claiming a million barrels a day is being spilled instead of the 5000-30,000 that is actually being spilled only serves to cloud the issue and hurt the environmentalist cause in the long run.
Based on current estimates of proved and predicted reserves, we have 30-50 years of oil left.
You've got to remember that does not in any way take into account undiscovered reservoirs. The predicted reserves are areas where they have found oil, but have not yet proved the quantities of the well. Check wikipedia for where the terms come from.
For example, I work on the North Slope oil field in Alaska. We were supposed to run out of oil over a decade ago, yet we keep on producing. The estimated size of the field has been continually adjusted since its discovery, from 10 billion barrels 36 years ago to over 25 billion barrels today. We have extracted about half of what is in the reservoir, the only question is whether or not we'll be able to extract the rest - we keep coming up with new techniques for that.;)
The same is true of all oil fields. There is an amount we are pretty sure is there, but there is also an amount beyond that which could be there. It could be a lot more or a lot less than what the experts think. There isn't really any way of knowing until you actually pull it up.
There are also yet to be discovered sources of oil. For example, I imagine there are loads of reservoirs out in the Pacific, which we have no way of knowing where they are currently. Well, someone will figure out a way, and our predicted oil reserves will spike yet again.
Current global oil reserve estimates - including proven and unproven reserves - is less than 1 trillion barrels of oil. That's basically the oil they know for a fact is there, and the oil they think might be there. It does not account for oil that shows up out of left field, which can be significant. Even so, the proven and unproven reserves would last us about 30 years, and any new discoveries will extend that.
Basically, if the GoM has "trillions of barrels of oil", we're set, and there is no energy crisis as we have enough in one region to last us a hundred years or more. We can let Solar power and nuclear power keep puttering along until it's actually a decent replacement energy source for oil and coal in that time, and we'll be all set. By then global warming due to CO2 emissions will have turned the earth into a tropical paradise to boot, what's not to love?
BTW, I'm totally anti-wind and tidal power. I don't think that's ever a good idea. Just think about where you're getting all that energy from and what might happen if you were actually able to extract a significant portion of that energy out of the air or sea. Your options with these two types of power are either inefficiency such that you never extract a significant portion of energy (in which case, why bother?), or you wind up causing ecological disasters on massive scales, making a piddly 300,000 barrel oil spill look like a duck fart.
1 trillion barrels of oil is about 3 months of world consumption at current rates.
Wow, I had no idea the world was going to run out of oil in 3 months, given that the total estimate of proven and future oil reserves is less than 1 trillion barrels.
1 trillion barrels of oil would last 11,764 days, or 32 years at a consumption rate of 85 million barrels of oil per day.
10 trillion barrels and there is no energy crisis, we're set for a couple hundred years.
Large numbers are hard to comprehend without a reference point.
Indeed. Or arithmetic either. Where the hell do you come up with 90 days? Assuming you just forgot three zeros, you get 11 days, not 90. How did you manage that? I try going backwards, but I just hit a brick wall - 85 million times 90 (3 months) is 7.65 billion, where did your math come from?
You realize that there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water in the ocean, right? One barrel of oil equals 0.158 cubic meters. There are 6 2/3 barrels per cubic meter, or 6,666 2/3 barrels per cubic kilometers. The current estimate of oil spilled is around 300,000 barrels. That's a whopping 45 cubic kilometers, or 3.46 x10^-8% of the global water supply. You probably drink that much oil in your filtered bottled water. By the time any of this oil hits the Pacific, it will be so dispersed only bacteria will notice it (and love it!). Double it, triple it, multiply it by an order of magnitude, it doesn't matter, the concentrations will be almost untraceable.
The short term and long term outlook for SE Asia fish farmers, at least as it relates to the gulf coast oil spill, is just dandy.
The million barrels per day is from a series of wild-ass guesses by a software engineer. I work in the oil industry as well, and I know some software engineers who could come up with some educated guesses regarding the volumes involved. They also understand the basic processes happening to the oil at such depths. They also understand that they are in no way experts in those areas, and would never be foolish enough to pretend they were.
The wild ass guess of four barrels per second is based on another wild ass guess of a 5ft diameter pipe. The pipe is, in fact, 18 inches in diameter, and if he were half the expert he claims to be he would know that it is impossible to drill in 5000ft deep water with a 5ft diameter pipe with current technology. The idea is absurd. So without doing any other fact checking, we know his powers of estimation are abysmal. Since the entire article is simply one guy's series of wild ass guesses, that should be enough. Hell, half his estimation for how much oil is coming up is based on his guess for why there were BP executives on the rig, and what amount of oil it would take to get them there. I mean, really? You're going to call those wild guess figures facts?
Also, even without those little facts getting in the way, he claims 1,000,000 barrels, yet the largest leak by his own estimate only puts out about 346,000 barrels a day. Being generous, how does 350,000 plus some number smaller than 350,000 (he doesn't give his "expert opinion" on the size of the second) add up to one million? The very highest number I can come up with falls 300,000 barrels short.
With the actual size of the pipe, however, you can get a pretty accurate flow rate by estimating the pressure differential between the reservoir and the head. The pressure on the reservoir should be about 15,000 psi (not 150,000, like the article states) - 5,000 feet of water plus 11,000 feet of granite. The pressure of the water column is about 2,000 psi, rough estimate. With a pressure differential of about 13,000 psi, an 11,000 foot length of pipe, an estimated density of about 900 kg/m3 (it could actually be anywhere from 750-950, 900 seems close to what other oil is in area), and assuming a smooth pipe, you get about 15.6 gallons per second, or 0.37 barrels per second.
Worst case scenario you are looking at around 30,000 barrels per day. Since there are a lot of factors involved (like the amount of friction imposed on the oil as it seeps out of the reservoir rock), and all I have are estimations, it is almost certainly a lot less than that. 5,000 barrels is not an unlikely figure for what is actually flowing out of the pipe. It isn't likely to be more than that by much at all, either, as I used pretty ideal conditions for flow. It isn't really possible for much more to flow up.
Also, I don't know where he gets the idea of a ground rupture, comparing it to the Yellowstone magma chamber. Such a thing is unheard of. An oil reservoir isn't like a magma chamber, which is a giant bubble full of liquid rock. An oil reservoir is a layer of spongy rock with oil trapped inside it. There is no bubble. It provides a hell of a lot more structure than the nothing of a magma chamber, and as oil flows out water flows in to take its place. It is not at all likely to rupture the ground, especially with two miles of bedrock in the way. The most this will ever do is squirt (that's actually a very good description of what it is doing right now - squirting).
Frankly, this guy doesn't have a clue. His wild guesses are off by a factor of 10 from what anybody who can do simple math would tell you, and most of what he states as fact are just plain inventions of his own imagination.
Solar today sucks ass compared to oil, 50 years ago it was laughable. Energy companies banking on long-term returns on solar back then probably would have gone out of business 40 years ago. It was a fool's investment, and that is evidenced by the fact that in 50 years it still can't compete without heavy government subsidies.
Wind and tidal power I personally think we are being just as short-sighted about as we were with oil. Sure, a few hundred wind generators isn't a problem, or a few tidal generators in the gulf stream is no big deal, but what about when you get tens of thousands of them? What is that going to do to the weather along the wind/water routes, and what will it do to the ecosystems? What about the weather that is indirectly affected by those winds? You know those things literally suck the energy out of the wind and tides, right? It would be almost impossible to predict the damage prolific wind power could cause. That energy does things for various ecosystems. I frankly can't believe "green" movements are behind things like wind power at all, they appear to have the potential to be far more damaging to the environment than coal or oil. You may stop global warming (in truth it probably wouldn't anyway), but at what cost?
Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about shutting down the gulf stream because it's cheap and apparently abundant energy, killing thousands of species in the process than a massive oil spill once every 20 years. Besides, there are bacteria that just absolutely love to eat crude oil (it is a potent source of energy, after all), which then become food for plankton and such. It would take time to recover, sure, but overall the losses would be balanced out by the gains in new life in the affected areas.
Solar though, I'm all for. The places where you'd use solar are either areas where humans live and the natural evironment is already altered (like on top of buildings and such), or in deserts where there is not much life to affect, and you'd probably be doing the local ecosystem a favor anyway by providing shade and shelter. The only real problem with it is that in 50 years nobody has figured out how to make it cheap - all they can do is increase the output, making the size of the system you may need smaller and therefore "cheaper".
If it killed the vast majority of them, I'd consider it an extinction event.
Thankfully, we have an actual definition for the word "extinction" and don't have to bother with what you consider it to be.
An extinction event requires that all creatures of that species cease to live. There can be no more, because none are currently alive. That is what "extinct" means.
What you described is a species becoming endangered of going extinct. It is not an extinction event. Many species can and do pull out of these situations - our own has faced a few of them and returned from the brink of extinction to thrive. Extinctions are difficult to pull off, but we've managed a few in the past, and nature has managed a whole hell of a lot more.
That's why the argument should be that cracking software is illegal, which it is.
This just makes Rockstar look like dumbasses. Thanks to the DMCA and the way copyright law works, though, Rockstar actually owns the copyrights to all the cracks made for their games. They are totally in the clear legally. It's funny how that works.
It makes Rockstar look foolish, but the fact is Rockstar owns the rights to the cracks because it owns the rights to any non-fair use derivative of their product. That's the part a lot of people are missing.
It is a little mind boggling that they didn't at least clean it up a bit, I mean, that is some serious laziness.
Actually, no it wouldn't. It isn't even within the realm of possibility. The crackers have no copyrights to their cracks because of the very nature of their existance.
See, no matter how you look at it - separate patches, fully re-built executables, whatever - they are derivative works. In order to receive copyright on a derivative work, your usage of the original has qualify as fair use. Unfortunately, no cracks will ever be fair use because the DMCA specifically denies them fair use (a la DRM circumvention, it's why we hate it so much). So the crack for Max Payne 2, or any other video game crack for that matter, is never fair use and the crackers don't get to claim copyright for their work because the cracks are not fair use derivatives.
Following so far?
Furthermore, the original copyright extends to any derivatives by default, so when a derivative work does not fall under fair use, the original copyright holder automatically gets copyrights for the derivative, regardless of who actually created it.
In other words, Rockstar owns the copyrights to the cracks, because they could not by definition be fair use derivatives. The crackers don't have a case, and if they exposed themselves to sue not only do they get laughed out of court, they do a whole lot of the leg work for Rockstar should they ever want to pursue the crackers for copyright infringement. "Look, they just sued us for distributing their illegal crack of our software, for which the court ruled we own the copyright" would work extremely well for Rockstar in court, not so much for the crackers.
Rockstar is 100% in the clear, they just look foolish. It's a lose-lose for the pirateers, no matter how you look at it.
So the people who cracked it might have a claim that they cracked these games for their own archival purpose after Max Payne left stores and did not distribute them.
Except Rockstar is obviously still selling Max Payne.
Except thanks to the DMCA, the cracks are not fair use derivatives, and since all derivatives that are not fair use are owned by the original copyright owner, the pirates would be laughed out of court, then get their ass sued because they just presented a ton of evidence that yes, they were the ones who illegally cracked that software.
If that is the case, why pull it when they got "caught"?
Ever heard of a thing called "PR"?
It's the bad press that made them pull it, not any legal issue. Egg on their faces. Thanks to the DMCA, which elimates any possible fair use DRM circumvention, Rockstar owns the rights to any cracks produced for any of their games. Period. They'd have to sue themselves to get into any legal trouble. Someone up top obviously had no idea that their underlings were being so lazy as to publish an unaltered cracked version of their game through steam, and freaked out when the news hit.
when you create an unauthorized derivative work, the copyright for your derivative is owned by the creator of the original.
You're forgetting fair use. It can be an unauthorized derivative work as long as it is considered fair use (unless you are considering fair use as an "authorized" derivative). The derivative can even contain the entire copyrighted work, unabridged and unedited. Those tend to be a lot harder to show fair use for, but not impossible.
The problem here is that any derivative work that must violate the DMCA in order to exist is by definition not fair use. That's one of the reasons we hate the DMCA, because it eliminates all otherwise fair uses of all kinds of copyrighted materials. All software cracks violate the DMCA, period. There cannot be an exception because anti-DRM circumvention is one of the primary tenants of the DMCA.
Therefor, no software crack will ever be considered fair use, and as such can never be copyrighted. Now we get to your point, which is absolutely correct: all unauthorized derivative works that cannot qualify as fair use automatically fall under the copyright of the original owner.
In other words, Rockstar can release the cracked version of their game because they own the rights to both the game and the crack.
It does not matter if the crack is integrated into the executable or is an add-on patch later. It makes no difference, it is a derivative work that circumvents DRM, and is therefore not fair use, and is therefore owned by Rockstar. Pirates don't have a leg to stand on.
Bingo, 100% of the cracker's code was produced illegally, and so they have no copyright claim. Rockstar gets to do what they want because they do have copyright claim to the work and any non-fair use works that are related to it.
Software cracks are not considered fair use. Duh. Rockstar therefore owns the copyright to the cracks automatically.
In this case, it appears that the "pickpocket" added a fair amount of value to the wallet before it was stolen back.
But they did so illegally, thus, they get no claim to it.
It's like stealing someone's Van Gogh, fixing up all the wavy lines, and wind up having the original owner steal it back. The original owner then decides he likes it, and puts it on display in a gallery, and it sells for millions of dollars. The thief gets no claim to the work or the money, because he had no right to alter the original piece. That the injured party decides he actually likes the vandalized work makes no difference.
Rockstar owns the rights to the game, and since they had to break the law to produce the crack (via the DMCA), I think you'd be hard pressed to show that what the crackers did was "fair use" and therefore copyrightable themselves.
In other words, you don't get to claim copyright for stuff you violated copyright law to produce. The idea is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Hold on to your hat, the article itself is worse. There is not one single completely true statement that I was able to find, fixing the grammar of the summary is the least of the editor's problems on this one.
Pretty much everything in the article is incorrect.
Even the statements he makes about his own pond are wrong. A 400,000 gallon pond is almost 10,000 barrels, or about twice the daily rate of oil spilled. It's definitely not 1/5 of the oil spilled.
The only thing I could find that was partially correct was that the oil sitting on top of the ocean is an oil/water mix (up to 90% water). It's an emulsion, and it makes the oil very difficult to clean up because skimmers are very ineffective. However, all the reasons he gives for why the oil is in this state, and everything he says surrounding this one statement are all incorrect.
Seriously, everything. I had a hard time finding anything that was actually true in the article.
I'll help you a little. I'm far from an oil expert, but I do work on an oil field and know enough about it that I spotted the bullshit immediately.
Seriously ... the whole gulf of mexico is going to explode into an oil gusher?
This one is the most absurd of all his claims, it is simply not possible. The oil is not in bubbles, it's in sandstone. As oil moves out, heavier water moves in. There is nothing to collapse.
The freaking math doesn't even add up in this story. Its claiming a million gallons a day gushing, but at 4 barrels per second, you don't get to a million in one day. You don't even get to the 500k that BP would be so happy about, you get 345.6k/day. So you need a good 6BPS from everything else to start hitting a million gallons a day. Not the case. Of course he contridicts himself in his own article with at one point saying 500k and at another saying 1m.
He also states the rig gost $1 billion when it cost $350 million, and that it needs to make $5 million per day to be profitable, when anything over $1 million is profitable. 20,000 barrels is a 50% profit, 500,000 barrels is a 3800% profit. Total GoM oilfield production peaked at 1.7 million barrels per day, and averaged about 1.3 million barrels per day last year. The idea that a single well is accounting for more than 1/3 of the total gulf oil production is ludicrous. Nobody who knows anything about the oil would make such a guess. 50,000 barrels per day is extremely good for any single well to produce. There is also a corporate re-structuring going on at BP for US operations (which has been severly interrupted by this spill). That would be my first candidate for why the executives might be on the rig, not some absurd guess about oil production (at a time when the rig wasn't producing any oil at all, no less).
Thats why buoys can be left on the surface to contain it, cause its ON THE SURFACE ONLY.
He's actually right that the oil in this case is a heavy water mix, and is therefore not sitting on the surface. That is one of the reasons they have to use chemical dispersers to gather the oil in large droplets before they are able to collect and burn it. If it were just sitting on the surface they could set it off and watch it go.
The reasons he gives, however, are absurd. Oil cannot fractionate by going from high pressure to low pressure unless you get the pressure so low you drop the boiling point of the oil to below the temperature of seawater. It shouldn't take a physicist to tell that that did not happen. The reason there is an oil-water emulsion is because of the high pressures on the ocean floor and the high gas content of the oil. It's the exact same concept as carbonated water - pressurize the gas and water together and the gas will incorporate into the water. Same thing with the oil - at the 2000 psi of the sea floor the oil and gas incorporate into the sea water, and this mixture is a lot heavier than oil alone (though still slightly lighter than water). Thus, it is a watery mixture (as much as 90% water) that occupies the top few hundred feet of the ocean in the slick areas. This heavy layer doesn't spread out as much as straight oil would either, because it is a lot closer to the density of water. You get large sections that are difficult to control, because the booms can't float and still extend far enough below the surface to catch all of the oil mixture. The rainbow sheen is a very thin layer of oil that has come out of solution from the heavier water mixture.
He also states that the mixture continues mixing into the water, when the opposite happens. The oil separates out of the water and spreads out over the ocean. The more time goes on the more dispersed the oil gets, being in a water emulsion is an unnatural state for oil, and just like that soda water will eventually go flat, so too will all the oil eventually separate out of the water. In the mean time, evaporatio
The current total of the world's proven and predicted reserves doesn't even hit a trillion barrels, so coming up with trillions in the gulf is patently absurd.
There is not one statement this guy makes is true. Not even when he is talking about his own pond (I suspect he doesn't actually have a pond).
Pretty much nothing in the article, beginning with the size of the pipe and moving on from there, was fact.
I'll start listing just a few.
This guy says pipe is 5 feet in diameter (apparently based on a guess), the pipe is actually 18 inches (hello, they have on record the size of pipe they were using, you don't need to eyeball it).
He estimates 4 barrels per second is flowing out, yet the maximum possible based on the pressures involved is about 0.38 barrels per second.
Real honest to god experts estimate the spill to be flowing anywhere from 5,000-20,000 barrels per day (with a theoretical maximum about 30,000), but this guy estimates 350,000 barrels from the largest pipe, which somehow combined with the smaller pipe becomes 1 million barrels? I couldn't fudge the math in any semi-logical way to make that work.
He says the rig must have been producing around 500,000 barrels of oil a day to get the executives out there, even though the well was not in production, and was in fact producing exactly 0 barrels of oil per day. There are a whole lot of executives at BP, and there are a plethora of situations that might warrant a visit from some of them, yet all he can come up with is that they must have been producing 500,000 barrels a day (which, btw, is an insane number for a single well, though not quite impossible). There is nothing to support his claim (which he uses to support his 350,000 barrel per day spill estimate), and a whole lot that suggests the claim is false.
He states that the pressure change from the bottom of the ocean to the top creates a natural fractionating column (which he spells incorrectly several times, btw), separating the heavy compounds from the lighter compounds. The idea is absurd. A fractionating column requires high temperatures to boil the oil to distill the various compounds out of the solution at sea level pressures. Anybody who passed high school physics should know that the boiling point for a liquid increases as pressure increases. Releasing pressure cools liquids, it does not heat them up. The oil will be hot from being near mantle, but it will not be hot enough to burn, and it definitely isn't hot enough to create a fractionating column on the way up.
He is correct in stating that the oil is not sitting on top of the water because it is an oil-water mix (aka an emulsion), but he does not understand why. The high pressure at the ocean floor force the water and oil into a solution, just like carbon gas is forced into soda water under high pressure. They will eventually separate out, but it will take time, and it has absolutely nothing to do with oil distilling itself on its way to the surface.
He states that this well needed to earn $5 million a day because BP had invested $1 billion into it. These figures are both pulled out of his ass. The rig cost $350 million, not over $1 billion. Even if it had cost over $1 billion, at $5,000,000 per day they would have doubled their money in a little over a year in operation. That is some insane return on investment. The truth is, operating costs were about $1 million per day, so at $1.5 million worth of oil per day (that's just my guess) you would recoup your initial investment in just a couple years and be incredibly profitable after. That works out to about 19,000 barrels per day at current prices, which is much more reasonable. However, since they paid off their investment 7-8 years ago, anything over $1 million per day is profitable, so they could afford to operate at as little as 12,000 barrels per day. The idea that they would dispose of the well at 20,000 barrels (a 50% profit) is ridiculous, but what is funny is that they were closing up the well to move on to another site. They weren't permanently capping it, just closing it off with plans to return later.
He is wrong on every single point he makes in the article, every single one. The article is absolutely worthless. In fact, it's worse than worthless, it actually has negative value
And as far as I know, the likelihood of this deposit collapsing is very, very low; unmeasurably low.
Try impossible - an oil reservoir is not a bubble, it's rock - sandstone specifically. Oil is able to penetrate the stone, which is why it is found there and not in the solid granite and such. It doesn't squirt out like a squeezed water balloon, it's sucked out by the pressure differential between the surface and the reservoir underground. As the oil gets sucked out, something has to replace it according to the laws of physics, and that something is water. The sandstone fills up with water after the oil is sucked out, it is never empty.
In other words, if the reservoir were going to collapse after you took the oil out, it would have collapsed before you took the oil out, because the sandstone never changes state. In fact, since water is denser than oil, the sandstone would arguably be more resistant to collapse after oil extraction than before.
This dumbass environmentalist software engineer and "oil expert" does not even understand the basic concept of how an oil reservoir works. His predictions of oil volume are based on his own visual estimation of a "5ft" pipe (even though the pipe is known to be 18 inches, and a 5 foot pipe would be impossible at this depth) and some absurd notion of what kind of volume oil executives would be happy with. He estimates they must have been producing 500,000 barrels per day at this one site, even though the well was not in production - that is, they were producing nothing at all. They pump drilling mud on top of the column to prevent oil from rising in these situations - you don't want oil coming up while you are drilling because you've got a frickin drill down the hole!
The oil reserves are not all connected either, they are pockets of oil-bearing sandstone, some large some small, spread throughout the gulf. There is absolutely no way anybody who had even the most basic knowledge of oil reservoirs could think that a leak like this could even come close to emptying out the individual reservoir, let alone the whole of the gulf, if left unchecked.
I seriously doubt this guy has any extensive contact with the oil industry, except as a screaming, fear-mongering, environmentalist wacko.
There are legitimate and very serious environmental concerns with this spill, but claiming a million barrels a day is being spilled instead of the 5000-30,000 that is actually being spilled only serves to cloud the issue and hurt the environmentalist cause in the long run.
Based on current estimates of proved and predicted reserves, we have 30-50 years of oil left.
You've got to remember that does not in any way take into account undiscovered reservoirs. The predicted reserves are areas where they have found oil, but have not yet proved the quantities of the well. Check wikipedia for where the terms come from.
For example, I work on the North Slope oil field in Alaska. We were supposed to run out of oil over a decade ago, yet we keep on producing. The estimated size of the field has been continually adjusted since its discovery, from 10 billion barrels 36 years ago to over 25 billion barrels today. We have extracted about half of what is in the reservoir, the only question is whether or not we'll be able to extract the rest - we keep coming up with new techniques for that. ;)
The same is true of all oil fields. There is an amount we are pretty sure is there, but there is also an amount beyond that which could be there. It could be a lot more or a lot less than what the experts think. There isn't really any way of knowing until you actually pull it up.
There are also yet to be discovered sources of oil. For example, I imagine there are loads of reservoirs out in the Pacific, which we have no way of knowing where they are currently. Well, someone will figure out a way, and our predicted oil reserves will spike yet again.
Current global oil reserve estimates - including proven and unproven reserves - is less than 1 trillion barrels of oil. That's basically the oil they know for a fact is there, and the oil they think might be there. It does not account for oil that shows up out of left field, which can be significant. Even so, the proven and unproven reserves would last us about 30 years, and any new discoveries will extend that.
Basically, if the GoM has "trillions of barrels of oil", we're set, and there is no energy crisis as we have enough in one region to last us a hundred years or more. We can let Solar power and nuclear power keep puttering along until it's actually a decent replacement energy source for oil and coal in that time, and we'll be all set. By then global warming due to CO2 emissions will have turned the earth into a tropical paradise to boot, what's not to love?
BTW, I'm totally anti-wind and tidal power. I don't think that's ever a good idea. Just think about where you're getting all that energy from and what might happen if you were actually able to extract a significant portion of that energy out of the air or sea. Your options with these two types of power are either inefficiency such that you never extract a significant portion of energy (in which case, why bother?), or you wind up causing ecological disasters on massive scales, making a piddly 300,000 barrel oil spill look like a duck fart.
1 trillion barrels of oil is about 3 months of world consumption at current rates.
Wow, I had no idea the world was going to run out of oil in 3 months, given that the total estimate of proven and future oil reserves is less than 1 trillion barrels.
1 trillion barrels of oil would last 11,764 days, or 32 years at a consumption rate of 85 million barrels of oil per day.
10 trillion barrels and there is no energy crisis, we're set for a couple hundred years.
Large numbers are hard to comprehend without a reference point.
Indeed. Or arithmetic either. Where the hell do you come up with 90 days? Assuming you just forgot three zeros, you get 11 days, not 90. How did you manage that? I try going backwards, but I just hit a brick wall - 85 million times 90 (3 months) is 7.65 billion, where did your math come from?
You realize that there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water in the ocean, right? One barrel of oil equals 0.158 cubic meters. There are 6 2/3 barrels per cubic meter, or 6,666 2/3 barrels per cubic kilometers. The current estimate of oil spilled is around 300,000 barrels. That's a whopping 45 cubic kilometers, or 3.46 x10^-8% of the global water supply. You probably drink that much oil in your filtered bottled water. By the time any of this oil hits the Pacific, it will be so dispersed only bacteria will notice it (and love it!). Double it, triple it, multiply it by an order of magnitude, it doesn't matter, the concentrations will be almost untraceable.
The short term and long term outlook for SE Asia fish farmers, at least as it relates to the gulf coast oil spill, is just dandy.
The million barrels per day is from a series of wild-ass guesses by a software engineer. I work in the oil industry as well, and I know some software engineers who could come up with some educated guesses regarding the volumes involved. They also understand the basic processes happening to the oil at such depths. They also understand that they are in no way experts in those areas, and would never be foolish enough to pretend they were.
The wild ass guess of four barrels per second is based on another wild ass guess of a 5ft diameter pipe. The pipe is, in fact, 18 inches in diameter, and if he were half the expert he claims to be he would know that it is impossible to drill in 5000ft deep water with a 5ft diameter pipe with current technology. The idea is absurd. So without doing any other fact checking, we know his powers of estimation are abysmal. Since the entire article is simply one guy's series of wild ass guesses, that should be enough. Hell, half his estimation for how much oil is coming up is based on his guess for why there were BP executives on the rig, and what amount of oil it would take to get them there. I mean, really? You're going to call those wild guess figures facts?
Also, even without those little facts getting in the way, he claims 1,000,000 barrels, yet the largest leak by his own estimate only puts out about 346,000 barrels a day. Being generous, how does 350,000 plus some number smaller than 350,000 (he doesn't give his "expert opinion" on the size of the second) add up to one million? The very highest number I can come up with falls 300,000 barrels short.
With the actual size of the pipe, however, you can get a pretty accurate flow rate by estimating the pressure differential between the reservoir and the head. The pressure on the reservoir should be about 15,000 psi (not 150,000, like the article states) - 5,000 feet of water plus 11,000 feet of granite. The pressure of the water column is about 2,000 psi, rough estimate. With a pressure differential of about 13,000 psi, an 11,000 foot length of pipe, an estimated density of about 900 kg/m3 (it could actually be anywhere from 750-950, 900 seems close to what other oil is in area), and assuming a smooth pipe, you get about 15.6 gallons per second, or 0.37 barrels per second.
Worst case scenario you are looking at around 30,000 barrels per day. Since there are a lot of factors involved (like the amount of friction imposed on the oil as it seeps out of the reservoir rock), and all I have are estimations, it is almost certainly a lot less than that. 5,000 barrels is not an unlikely figure for what is actually flowing out of the pipe. It isn't likely to be more than that by much at all, either, as I used pretty ideal conditions for flow. It isn't really possible for much more to flow up.
Also, I don't know where he gets the idea of a ground rupture, comparing it to the Yellowstone magma chamber. Such a thing is unheard of. An oil reservoir isn't like a magma chamber, which is a giant bubble full of liquid rock. An oil reservoir is a layer of spongy rock with oil trapped inside it. There is no bubble. It provides a hell of a lot more structure than the nothing of a magma chamber, and as oil flows out water flows in to take its place. It is not at all likely to rupture the ground, especially with two miles of bedrock in the way. The most this will ever do is squirt (that's actually a very good description of what it is doing right now - squirting).
Frankly, this guy doesn't have a clue. His wild guesses are off by a factor of 10 from what anybody who can do simple math would tell you, and most of what he states as fact are just plain inventions of his own imagination.
Solar today sucks ass compared to oil, 50 years ago it was laughable. Energy companies banking on long-term returns on solar back then probably would have gone out of business 40 years ago. It was a fool's investment, and that is evidenced by the fact that in 50 years it still can't compete without heavy government subsidies.
Wind and tidal power I personally think we are being just as short-sighted about as we were with oil. Sure, a few hundred wind generators isn't a problem, or a few tidal generators in the gulf stream is no big deal, but what about when you get tens of thousands of them? What is that going to do to the weather along the wind/water routes, and what will it do to the ecosystems? What about the weather that is indirectly affected by those winds? You know those things literally suck the energy out of the wind and tides, right? It would be almost impossible to predict the damage prolific wind power could cause. That energy does things for various ecosystems. I frankly can't believe "green" movements are behind things like wind power at all, they appear to have the potential to be far more damaging to the environment than coal or oil. You may stop global warming (in truth it probably wouldn't anyway), but at what cost?
Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about shutting down the gulf stream because it's cheap and apparently abundant energy, killing thousands of species in the process than a massive oil spill once every 20 years. Besides, there are bacteria that just absolutely love to eat crude oil (it is a potent source of energy, after all), which then become food for plankton and such. It would take time to recover, sure, but overall the losses would be balanced out by the gains in new life in the affected areas.
Solar though, I'm all for. The places where you'd use solar are either areas where humans live and the natural evironment is already altered (like on top of buildings and such), or in deserts where there is not much life to affect, and you'd probably be doing the local ecosystem a favor anyway by providing shade and shelter. The only real problem with it is that in 50 years nobody has figured out how to make it cheap - all they can do is increase the output, making the size of the system you may need smaller and therefore "cheaper".
If it killed the vast majority of them, I'd consider it an extinction event.
Thankfully, we have an actual definition for the word "extinction" and don't have to bother with what you consider it to be.
An extinction event requires that all creatures of that species cease to live. There can be no more, because none are currently alive. That is what "extinct" means.
What you described is a species becoming endangered of going extinct. It is not an extinction event. Many species can and do pull out of these situations - our own has faced a few of them and returned from the brink of extinction to thrive. Extinctions are difficult to pull off, but we've managed a few in the past, and nature has managed a whole hell of a lot more.
That's why the argument should be that cracking software is illegal, which it is.
This just makes Rockstar look like dumbasses. Thanks to the DMCA and the way copyright law works, though, Rockstar actually owns the copyrights to all the cracks made for their games. They are totally in the clear legally. It's funny how that works.
This is clearly copyright infringement.
The group needs to sue. They're due money on every copy purchased.
You do realize that the original copyright holder also holds the copyrights to any non fair-use derivatives, right?
You also realize that, thanks to the DMCA, no video game crack, regardless of how it is delivered, can ever be fair use, right?
Therefore, Rockstar owns the copyright to the cracks, and the only people who could sue them for it is themselves.
Now that would be one interesting court case!
It makes Rockstar look foolish, but the fact is Rockstar owns the rights to the cracks because it owns the rights to any non-fair use derivative of their product. That's the part a lot of people are missing.
It is a little mind boggling that they didn't at least clean it up a bit, I mean, that is some serious laziness.
Actaully, it probably would work.
Actually, no it wouldn't. It isn't even within the realm of possibility. The crackers have no copyrights to their cracks because of the very nature of their existance.
See, no matter how you look at it - separate patches, fully re-built executables, whatever - they are derivative works. In order to receive copyright on a derivative work, your usage of the original has qualify as fair use. Unfortunately, no cracks will ever be fair use because the DMCA specifically denies them fair use (a la DRM circumvention, it's why we hate it so much). So the crack for Max Payne 2, or any other video game crack for that matter, is never fair use and the crackers don't get to claim copyright for their work because the cracks are not fair use derivatives.
Following so far?
Furthermore, the original copyright extends to any derivatives by default, so when a derivative work does not fall under fair use, the original copyright holder automatically gets copyrights for the derivative, regardless of who actually created it.
In other words, Rockstar owns the copyrights to the cracks, because they could not by definition be fair use derivatives. The crackers don't have a case, and if they exposed themselves to sue not only do they get laughed out of court, they do a whole lot of the leg work for Rockstar should they ever want to pursue the crackers for copyright infringement. "Look, they just sued us for distributing their illegal crack of our software, for which the court ruled we own the copyright" would work extremely well for Rockstar in court, not so much for the crackers.
Rockstar is 100% in the clear, they just look foolish. It's a lose-lose for the pirateers, no matter how you look at it.
So the people who cracked it might have a claim that they cracked these games for their own archival purpose after Max Payne left stores and did not distribute them.
Except Rockstar is obviously still selling Max Payne.
Dumbass.
Except thanks to the DMCA, the cracks are not fair use derivatives, and since all derivatives that are not fair use are owned by the original copyright owner, the pirates would be laughed out of court, then get their ass sued because they just presented a ton of evidence that yes, they were the ones who illegally cracked that software.
Who is that stupid?
If that is the case, why pull it when they got "caught"?
Ever heard of a thing called "PR"?
It's the bad press that made them pull it, not any legal issue. Egg on their faces. Thanks to the DMCA, which elimates any possible fair use DRM circumvention, Rockstar owns the rights to any cracks produced for any of their games. Period. They'd have to sue themselves to get into any legal trouble. Someone up top obviously had no idea that their underlings were being so lazy as to publish an unaltered cracked version of their game through steam, and freaked out when the news hit.
when you create an unauthorized derivative work, the copyright for your derivative is owned by the creator of the original.
You're forgetting fair use. It can be an unauthorized derivative work as long as it is considered fair use (unless you are considering fair use as an "authorized" derivative). The derivative can even contain the entire copyrighted work, unabridged and unedited. Those tend to be a lot harder to show fair use for, but not impossible.
The problem here is that any derivative work that must violate the DMCA in order to exist is by definition not fair use. That's one of the reasons we hate the DMCA, because it eliminates all otherwise fair uses of all kinds of copyrighted materials. All software cracks violate the DMCA, period. There cannot be an exception because anti-DRM circumvention is one of the primary tenants of the DMCA.
Therefor, no software crack will ever be considered fair use, and as such can never be copyrighted. Now we get to your point, which is absolutely correct: all unauthorized derivative works that cannot qualify as fair use automatically fall under the copyright of the original owner.
In other words, Rockstar can release the cracked version of their game because they own the rights to both the game and the crack.
It does not matter if the crack is integrated into the executable or is an add-on patch later. It makes no difference, it is a derivative work that circumvents DRM, and is therefore not fair use, and is therefore owned by Rockstar. Pirates don't have a leg to stand on.
Bingo, 100% of the cracker's code was produced illegally, and so they have no copyright claim. Rockstar gets to do what they want because they do have copyright claim to the work and any non-fair use works that are related to it.
Software cracks are not considered fair use. Duh. Rockstar therefore owns the copyright to the cracks automatically.
In this case, it appears that the "pickpocket" added a fair amount of value to the wallet before it was stolen back.
But they did so illegally, thus, they get no claim to it.
It's like stealing someone's Van Gogh, fixing up all the wavy lines, and wind up having the original owner steal it back. The original owner then decides he likes it, and puts it on display in a gallery, and it sells for millions of dollars. The thief gets no claim to the work or the money, because he had no right to alter the original piece. That the injured party decides he actually likes the vandalized work makes no difference.
For example, you can't sue a hitman for breach of contract if he fails to kill your wife.
Well, you could certainly try, you'd probably just wind up landing both of you in jail for attempted murder though. ;)
Rockstar owns the rights to the game, and since they had to break the law to produce the crack (via the DMCA), I think you'd be hard pressed to show that what the crackers did was "fair use" and therefore copyrightable themselves.
In other words, you don't get to claim copyright for stuff you violated copyright law to produce. The idea is absurd.