Just returned from Destin; it was beautiful, no evidence of the spill. The traffic was brutal, so there are a lot of folks who did not cancel their vacations. However, the eateries seemed a bit less crowed than usual.
1. I've heard at the current rate it will take 7 years to empty. It's big. They are probably going to drill a relief well to start pumping out the oil which should lower the pressure on the leaking one and allow them to cap it. 2. No idea. 3. Oil is less dense than water. It won't sink. Its location depends on water currents and wind. 4. As oil is less dense than water there shouldn't be any that hasn't risen. 5. Really? Did you take any science classes in high school or college? Perhaps you need to do some basic reading on why oil and water don't mix (polar/nonpolar) and why evaporating water to make rain clouds wouldn't bring oil with it. 6. Yeah, making the hole potentially larger sounds good. 7. I'm sure some skimming is happening, but it's a lot of oil.
1. Why doesn't the oil reserve of this well simply run out? Too much oil. This is a big reserve. They wouldn't have had the second most advanced rig on it if it was not. They would have produced from this for a long time. 2. What happened to burning the surface oil? Are they doing it or has it been stopped? When conditions are favorable, they are burning. This is actually the best clean up method there is. THe issue is that the weather had to be perfect and you have to gather enough oil up in one place to make it worth it. The nature of this spill is that you have lots of patches of oil spread over a large area, its not very gathered together, so they have to go skim up a bunch of oil before its worth burning. They can, however, burn a lot of it at once. 3. The giant oil slick is in approximately the same location it was a month ago. Is it going to stay there, sink, start moving more rapidly or what? The weather has been pretty lucky, and oil evaporates quickly in the Gulf of Mexico. If you watch the spill maps over time, you'll see the edges of the slick break up into small parts and then to disappear. This is the natural evaporation. Add to that the clean up effort, the main slick has stayed fairly stable. 4. What about the oil that is staying deep below the surface? Will it sink to the bottom or eventually wash on shore. There is not a lot of oil below the sufrace. The specific gravity of oil says that it HAS to eventually make its way to the sufrace. There are reports of clouds of micro droplets of dispersed oil below the surface in some places. The first "giant deadly plumes" have already kind of broken up as either the bacteria eats it up, or as it slowly surfaces and evaporates. 5. What effect will a tropical storm or hurricane have on this situation? Could it pick the oil up and rain it over a large coastal area? It depends on direction, size, etc. When the IXTOC spill got hit by 3 hurricanes near the Texas coast, it cleaned up, kind of like a big washing machine. THe more you can mix up the oil/water, the faster it breaks up and goes away naturally. So a hurricane MIGHT clean up a large portion of the oil if it were to hit it. THe other side of it is the storm surge. There is the possibility that the storm surge could push oil into the coast. 6. Why hasn't explosives been used to close the well? The BOP is holding back MOST of the oil. If you were to blow it up, it could be 10 times worse. 7. What is going on as far as skimming the oil from the surface of the slick? Seems to be no mention of such operations. There are approx. 1100 vessels working the spill. The vast majority are laying boom and skimming. THey are able to skim large amounts of oil out of the water, or collect it into more concentrated areas to burn. The issue is that the bulk of the skimming is far off coast near the majority of the oil. Very little skimming is beind done right along the coast since 99% of the oil is still offshore. It makes more sense to go after the bulk of the oil off shore, then later, go back and clean up the beaches. If they focused near shore, they would just be fighting back tidal waves of oil. Where they are working now, its keeping the tidal waves from forming. The spots of oil on the coast are actually pretty small "ribbons" of oil that have escaped booms, etc and washed up.
I wonder why top kill did not work? A week ago, it was said it was probably the best solution. You have a hole in a ground that we created, if we fill up that hole, would that not stop anything that comes out of the hole? Of course we have to make sure whatever we pour in does not just disappear into the reservoir itself, something like shoving an equivalent of a cap down first that would seal the opening and then pour enough mud and then cement on top of it?
The reports that I've heard from people have said that too much pressure was escaping out of the top of the BOP and not enough was pushing down. They could actually cut off the oil flow, but could not push the oil far enough down to be able to cement and kill the well. They have also found out, apparently, that the blockages in the BOP that are keeping back most of the oil are BELOW where they were injecting mud, not above. So they were fighting against that as well. This is also why they don't want to just keep injecting mud to hold back the flow because the mud can act as an abrasive and basically carve out and damage the inside of the BOP. I think the biggest disappointment from the whole thing is that they had early success and I think they actually thought it was going to work until they just hit that point of equilibrium and couldn't push past it no matter what they did. The top kill method, while often successful on land, isn't ALWAYS successful for a variety of reasons all of which are above my pay grade.
Good to hear Destin is still clean. My guess is people made reservations months ago before the spill and showed up hoping things would be normal. It will be interesting to see what the tourist flow looks like 3-6 months from now.
Are you factoring in the action of dispersants? From what I have been hearing is that the dispersants injected into the flow in deep water has been causing the oil to sink and also get suspended in the water column. This could potentially have a profound effect on the bottom of the food chain and the deep water ecology of the Gulf. Also what natural bacteria are eating the oil that rapidly?
This tells me this reservoir has higher internal pressure than the pressure of any pump we have to counter it? Jeez ... I did not know anything about the drilling technology but is this normal every day operation? are you saying we drill a big hole in the earth that we can't physically contain even if nothing breaks? How could they actually cut off the oil flow?
this pic is more fair and accurate than those from the houston (pronounced howston) street "protest."
Since when do you know what fair and accurate mean? I guess never because that sign also says "Open".
First question: The operation failed not because they couln't pump at a high enough pressure, but because of the leak out of the top of the BOP. When they injected mud, they were getting pressure, but the problem was that they BOP was allowing too much pressure out of the top to be able to push the oil down far enough to cement the well. They were getting SOME pressure and oil was held back while they were pumping, just not enough. If nothing breaks, then the BOP would have shut, the sheer rams would have cut the pipe, and the well would have been sealed and completely held back from leaking by the mechanical BOP alone. Also while they are actually drilling, there isn't a physical drill. They spray high pressure mud to drill. The same force that forces the drill down, also holds back the oil. In a normal operation, when they actually want the oil to come out, they simply decrease the mud pressure and allow it to come out. When a well is working properly, they can increase and decrease the pressure enough to pretty much allow the exact amount of oil out that they want. So if they can create a tight seal, they can apply enough pressure to easily counteract the resevoir. Again, the issue is because of the hole at the top of the BOP it wasn't a tight enough seal to apply enough pressure down. Second question: Like I mentioned before, when they were blasting in the mud, its heavy and thick, much heavier than the water or oil. If the downward pressure of the mud is enough, it can hold back the oil, and this is exactly what was happening. While they were pumping mud, it forced the oil down a little and kept it from flowing out. The problem is the BOP was open at the top too, so too much mud flowed UP instead of DOWN, not allowing them to apply enough pressure to force the oil down enough. The whole operation failed, not because they couldn't stop the flow of oil, but because they couldn't push the oil back down.
I'm not a chemist, but these dispersants don't really do what some people are saying they do. The dispersants aren't a soap, but they act like one. Kind of like when you put Dawn in a dish of grease. The Dawn makes the oil unable to connect to itself, "dispersing" it into small little tiny particles of oil rather than thicker oil. It is still oil, however, just in tiny parts. The specific gravity is the same, it still eventually floats, although it CAN break up so much that you get little clouds of it that is really, really thinned out. But again, it doesn't go down to the bottom, it will either eventually surface, or dilute to the point it doesn't really matter, or get eaten up. Its so broken up that the mircrobes and bacteria can easily eat it up. Also, its not a matter of rapid oil eating, these so called "plumes" of oil if they are dispersed are not large volumes of oil, they disperse...as to say, less oil spread over more volume. Parts per million, etc. sciency stuff. It is actually possible that the oil can be broken down to so small of particles in the large ocean, the parts per million/billion/trillion basically fall back to the every day range over time even if you don't have the bacteria eating it or the wind evaporating it. During the IXTOC1 spill, the natural bacteria blooms from eating all the oil in the 2-3 years that followed were actually the food that led to the recovery of the sea life in that part of the Gulf.
But... the dispersants are changing big clumps into tiny little bits with large surface to volume ratios... large enough to be trapped by the salt water. Add the dispersant covering the drop and it could and does sink. Little drops are then more easily ingested by filter feeders which, you know, kills them and crashes the food chain. Also, the microbes do eat the oil and in so doing remove oxygen from the water. This isn't taking place at the surface, but at depth where the oxygen level is low and every living thing depends on what little oxygen there is... drop the oxygen levels and you have a dead zone, which looks like the future of a large chunk of the Gulf. Supermac, I appreciate the technical info you're bringing, but there is no way to sugarcoat this... it's a catastrophe. If the Obama administration is guilty of anything in this affair, it may be a sin of either omission or commission in allowing such a huge level of deep water dispersants. It would have been much more visually unappealing early on to let the oil rise, but we might be skimming and burning more of it. I don't know enough to say right now, but it certainly would be interesting to see how that decision was made.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="490" marginheight="5" marginwidth="5" scrolling="no" src="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/oil-ticker/video.html" width="300px"></iframe>
Are you sure about all of that? Normally mud is pumped down the drillstring and out the physical drill bit and then back up the space between the drillstring and the formation which provides a number of different uses in the drilling process. The bit still does the majority of the work as far as cutting the hole though. The entire drillstring, including the bit at the bottom, can be turned by a couple of different types of motors from the rig - hence a drill. There are some cases where they use air instead of mud, but there's still a drill bit being turned that's doing the work of cutting into the rock. Not sure why you'd say there's not a physical drill... But then again you said there is no drill and then in the third sentence I quoted you said there is a drill, so I'm not really sure I'm following your point.
Biggest hurdle to paying fishermen so far. They don't pay taxes. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-claims-20100530,0,4758933.story The non-conformist culture of these areas is cash based with very little IRS involvement, so it getting hard to find out how much someone would make.
