Oil Spill -- Non-Political & Non-Legal Issues

[Zathras]

Well, now that the leak has stopped, it is time to shift the microphones over to the Monday-morning quarterbacks with 20/20 hindsight so than can start testifying in the court of public opinion about how this (and every other conceivable) calamity could have been prevented. Second- guess every decision. Where were these self-proclaimed [-]media whores[/-] experts BEFORE the latest "disaster of the week" befell us? I get tired of hearing these smug I-told-you-so wonks whining "nobody listened to us before" -apparently they didn't have the credibility in their professional/academic communities to get their theories and processes implemented upfront... Why should we listen to them after the fact?

Without specifics on which reports/experts/individuals you are speaking of it is difficult to answer your question.
Many people (certainly not all) that are critical of this event WERE warning about this before the disaster. It is just that the media was paying no attention or weren't out digging for more information.

Yes, there will besome Monday morning quarterbacking but there are also people that had no idea of the risky behavior or the ignoring of safety issues that, in part, led to this disaster. Now that they are aware, they are naturally asking questions.

And yes, some catastrophies are unavoidable, but some are avoidable.

 

[Westernskies]

I agree with you. One guess is that whoever will be paying a bazillion dollars per day for this thing (BP) wants to make sure that it works better than a guy in a rowboat with a colander.

Now, if you put coffee filters in that colander... then you'd have something..

 

[ERD50]

I agree with you. One guess is that whoever will be paying a bazillion dollars per day for this thing (BP) wants to make sure that it works better than a guy in a rowboat with a colander.

But as I understand it, this guy has no contract with BP. I think if they just started scooping up, and documented what they captured, some sort of payment would be worked out. I don't think BP is going to get away w/o paying them (contractually -yes; PR-wise -No) if they document that they were able to help.

Whatever the other ships are getting paid, pay the A-Whale guy the same rate per gallon captured.

Seems awful simple to me. Now if .... <self-delete following comment to stay within thread title>

-ERD50

 

[calmloki]

Latest oil covered bird is responsible for massive tourist resurgence on the gulf coast:

 

[kumquat]

I think it's time I volunteered to help with the cleanup.

 

[harley]

Latest oil covered bird is responsible for massive tourist resurgence on the gulf coast:

While I agree with the non-political aspect of the thread title, until the oil is removed I'm not completely convinced about the legality issue.

 

[Avalon]

Latest oil covered bird is responsible for massive tourist resurgence on the gulf coast:

Heh.....I was thinking 'one slick chick'.

 

[travelover]

Kinda reminds me of the last time I changed my own oil.

 

[TromboneAl]

Next time say "No, Honey, you can't watch."

 

[BigNick]

Without specifics on which reports/experts/individuals you are speaking of it is difficult to answer your question.
Many people (certainly not all) that are critical of this event WERE warning about this before the disaster. It is just that the media was paying no attention or weren't out digging for more information.

Yep... but there are plenty of people out there for whom, if it didn't happen on TV, it didn't happen. That would be a wrong approach, simply on arithmetical grounds, even if the media didn't have a combination of their own agenda and the need to keep the sorts of people interested who buy the advertisers' fine products.

 

[John Galt III]

I just read (Yahoo news I think) that this is the second largest oil pocket in the world. I wonder if any other wells are currently extracting oil from it?

 

[chinaco]

Shell drilling engineer goes after BP well design and drilling practices at the Aspen conference. This does not look good for BP. A little shocking. I have never seen a big company go after another like this.
Shell Video on "How to Drill a Well" Now Posted - Science and Tech - The Atlantic

The other large oil companies do not want the focus on them... They would prefer it to be a careless BP problem rather than a careless Oil Industry problem.

 

[Leonidas]

I just read (Yahoo news I think) that this is the second largest oil pocket in the world. I wonder if any other wells are currently extracting oil from it?

That rank doesn't seem right. It appears that the area where BP was drilling Macondo prospect (Mississippi Canyon Block 252) was estimated to have about 3.5 billion barrels of oil. http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PDFs/2009/2009-022.pdf Shell just found a much smaller field (100 Million bbls) in the Mississippi Canyon just before the Deepwater Horizon blew up.

It seems like there is a lot of oil being discovered in the GOM (BP found an estimated 4-6 Billion bbls in the Tiber Field - Keathley Canyon), but compare it to what was found offshore in Brazil about the same time (Tupi, Jupiter, Sugar Loaf) and it's small. Those fields combined are more than ten times larger than Macundo or Tiber. Similar sized field was found offshore of Kazahkstan in 2000.

Of course the significant difference is that the GOM projects were all either pumping oil, or well on the road to doing so. And of course the GOM is friendly territory

Map that shows wells, their depths, and includes the Deepwater Horizon site.

 

[Leonidas]

Where is all the oil?

So, there was this giant oil slick - the size of Kansas - floating around out there in the GOM. And now?

The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.

Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.

"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

BP Oil Spill: Where Did All The Crude Go? Mother Nature Breaks Down Slick in Gulf of Mexico - ABC News

150 planes are flying daily patrols from Florida to Texas looking for oil. A fleet of 800 skimmers is floating around just waiting to attack some oil like Chester Nimitz sinking enemy carriers at the Battle of Midway.

Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, a government on-scene coordinator, is stationing vessels at the many inlets that run into Louisiana's precious marshes to ward off the arrival of any toxic sludge, what he calls his "fire department."

"In the event we do see any oil approaching... we're right there waiting for it, ready to attack it and get it before it really gets into those marshlands," he said.

So we have real admirals, the skies are dark with spotter planes, and you could practically walk from skimmer boat to skimmer boat; and what do they find? 200 barrels.

Just a week or two ago, the oil slick was going to end all life along the shore from Brownsville to Key West. And now they can't find it. Where did it all go? Did friendly aliens come take it away? Is it swimming underneath the Mississippi on it's way to attack St. Louis?

 

[TromboneAl]

If the impact is minimal, they'll have to give Tony Hayward his job back.

 

[REWahoo]

If the impact is minimal, they'll have to give Tony Hayward his job back.

...along with his life.

 

[Westernskies]

If the impact is minimal, they'll have to give Tony Hayward his job back.

...and a nice big bonus for being CEO when BP earned the tax credit ReWahoo brought up here:

http://www.early-retirement.org/for...s-20b-damage-claim-fund-51332.html#post961977

 

[ERD50]

So, there was this giant oil slick - the size of Kansas - floating around out there in the GOM. And now? BP Oil Spill: Where Did All The Crude Go? Mother Nature Breaks Down Slick in Gulf of Mexico - ABC News

I saw a bit of that on Good Morning America, was going to post here but got new appliances delivered today, so I've been busy. But I wanted to try to put it into perspective, so I did a few calculations:

The GOM contains 6.6EE17 gallons of water.

The high end of the spill estimate on wiki is 180EE6 gallons of oil.

An Olympic Swimming pool contains a minimum of 660,000 Gallons (6.6EE5 gallons)

That means an Olympic pool is 1 trillionth the volume of the GOM (EE17-EE5 = EE12 = trillion).

And, one trillionth of the oil spill is .00018 gallons. At 768 teaspoons per gallon, that amounts to .138 teaspoons of oil in an Olympic pool. Or 10 1/2 drops according to a cooking conversion site.


So imagine 10 1/2 drops of crude oil in an Olympic size pool.

I wouldn't be surprised if nature just absorbed most of it and went on with life with a big yawn. Of course, if a portion of that oil hits a concentrated area, it is going to do some damage, and that is bad and we should prevent it from ever happening. But I still found the perspective interesting. And you'd also need to scale the size of the beaches for comparison (not 1/trillionth since we are talking length rather than volume).

I'm also not sure if that high end estimate of the spill was reduced by whatever they collected, so 10 1/2 drops might be overstating it.

-ERD50

 

[harley]

I saw a bit of that on Good Morning America, was going to post here but got new appliances delivered today, so I've been busy. But I wanted to try to put it into perspective, so I did a few calculations:

The GOM contains 6.6EE17 gallons of water.

The high end of the spill estimate on wiki is 180EE6 gallons of oil.

An Olympic Swimming pool contains a minimum of 660,000 Gallons (6.6EE5 gallons)

That means an Olympic pool is 1 trillionth the volume of the GOM (EE17-EE5 = EE12 = trillion).

And, one trillionth of the oil spill is .00018 gallons. At 768 teaspoons per gallon, that amounts to .138 teaspoons of oil in an Olympic pool. Or 10 1/2 drops according to a cooking conversion site.


So imagine 10 1/2 drops of crude oil in an Olympic size pool.

I wouldn't be surprised if nature just absorbed most of it and went on with life with a big yawn. Of course, if a portion of that oil hits a concentrated area, it is going to do some damage, and that is bad and we should prevent it from ever happening. But I still found the perspective interesting. And you'd also need to scale the size of the beaches for comparison (not 1/trillionth since we are talking length rather than volume).

I'm also not sure if that high end estimate of the spill was reduced by whatever they collected, so 10 1/2 drops might be overstating it.

-ERD50

Unless, of course, that you had to drink from that pool, and the oil was urine instead, and the guy that p*ssed in your drinking water was a rich b****rd who could care less. How does that math work?

 

[Texas Proud]

ERD.... I would say your analysis is flawed a bit... you are using volume when the oil is almost always on the surface...

Do the math based on suface area of the GOM to a depth of say 1 ft... then tell me how much oil we need to put in the pool to get the same coverage... I bet it is more than a few drops...

 

[ERD50]

Unless, of course, that you had to drink from that pool, and the oil was urine instead, and the guy that p*ssed in your drinking water was a rich b****rd who could care less. How does that math work?

It doesn't change the math at all. And I'd be a lot more concerned with the chlorine levels and dead skin cells and other junk in that water than 10.5 drops of urine diluted to 0.27 parts per Billion. I wouldn't want to drink pool water OR (pre-spill) GOM water - yuck!

Those ppB numbers assume total dispersion, which isn't going to happen, but it does provide some perspective - remember that the EPA wanted to verify that the A-Whale wouldn't exceed 15ppM of oil output, so that is acceptable to the EPA, and that is ~ 55,000 x the theoretical number we are talking about.

A quick google indicated (I didn't check the refs, just skimming results) that the standards for things like arsenic, lead and atrazine are 10 to hundreds of times higher than that.

I thought I was clear - some areas will be far more concentrated and there is damage done and it (probably) never should have happened, and there definitely should have been a containment plan. I'd blame both BP and the Govt regulators for that, but then I'd be outside the bounds of T-Al's title for this thread, and I wouldn't want to do that.

I'm just pointing out that it seems the experts are saying that the oil that is remaining in the Gulf waters seems to be diluted enough at this point that nature is processing it. That's a good thing. But the spill itself and the damage done is a bad thing - no question about that for me.

-ERD50

 

[ls99]

Today the skimmers are still looking for the oil. What I have not read anywhere is what percentage of "gush" from the uncontrolled well was oil and what was gas. Much of the gas either dissolved into the GOM or rose to the surface and became part of the atmosphere then breaking down.

The guesses of how much oil was ejected into the GOM seem to have assumed that all of it was crude oil. Me thinks it was 50/50. No basis in fact for that guess, absent any official numbers that is as good as any.

Anyone have real numbers?

 

[ERD50]

ERD.... I would say your analysis is flawed a bit... you are using volume when the oil is almost always on the surface...

Do the math based on suface area of the GOM to a depth of say 1 ft... then tell me how much oil we need to put in the pool to get the same coverage... I bet it is more than a few drops...

It depends what you are looking for I guess. The oil is getting mixed in with currents and waves, and it is getting denser as the volatiles evaporate, so it might mix much more than 1 foot. I don't know, but they are reporting that it seems to be getting eaten up biologically.

But I agree that we should compare on surface area, for another perspective. I tried running numbers on surface area, but something is not matching up between two different calcs. I will look at it fresh later, the spreadsheet is getting blurry the more I stare .

-ERD50

 

[ronocnikral]

oil and water are immiscible.

highly improbable that any resulting density of a hydrocarbon product after the lighter ends "evaporate" would be greater than the density of seawater under these conditions.

anyone scrutinizing the flowrate [-]estimates[/-] WAG's? maybe they are less than thought?

how ever this is happening...it's all a good thing. i saw cnn this morning saying none the marine life the gummit has tested is positive for oil...

 

[ronocnikral]

surprisingly, time mag is bordering on cranking out some journalism...

The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated? - TIME

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater Horizon oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is comparatively light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Prince William Sound, is balmy at more than 85 degrees, which also helps bacteria break down oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. Finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes, and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I had ever seen that were actually black. "It comes back fast, doesn't it?" Van Heerden said.