I'm not an oceanographer or anything, but I estimate that it's probably because oil tankers can't go one mile under the ocean to get the oil.
and it probably was a tanker spilling instead of a well, basso, anything to question obama. now that was a sad attempt as if obama's a ****ing engineer
JH: The work going on to close the well is taking multiple approaches, and I am aware that BP has sent out a message to all the oil companies asking for help and advice. And I actually sent some people to BP in terms of the spill response cleanup to try to get them aware of a process that has been used in the Arabian Gulf that has not been used in the Gulf of Mexico, and that is to use supertankers, empty supertankers, to suck up the oil off the surface, where they can store the oil, they can treat the water, they can discharge the water and then they can either salvage the oil or destroy it, as the case may be. And I know the mayor of New Orleans and a few other officials are now asking BP about that process as a result of these engineers coming forward from Saudi Aramco. ES: When did that spill happen, John? JH: I don't actually know, but it was sometime back, there was a huge, huge spill that never got reported, because they don't have an open press, obviously... But I was told it was a 700-million-gallon spill. ESQ: That would be the biggest, right? JH: That would be the biggest the world has ever known. And they used six supertankers to clean up the oil and were very successful. We'd do well to get supertankers in the Gulf. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-response-to-gulf-oil-spill-051110#ixzz0nf7xGEJ6
since sarah palin's husband is an oil field worker (a real man's man), if she were president this crisis would have been solved two weeks ago.
Mmhmm, and all you got to do is just send some tankers and sham wows out there and you can clean it all up right? This is going to go down in the epic fail of basso pretend science along with your theory of shoulder-launched WMD's. I should actually do a top 10 list.
Instead of blaming each other the government needs to take a more proactive role. We are looking at one of the biggest ecological disaster in US history.
In actuality, cleaning oil from ocean water is a fairly simple process. Oil is much less dense than ocean water, in fact, the light, sweet crude that this well is leaking is even less dense than the heavey crude from the Valdez. The oil naturally floats the the surface, so while there is some settlement, the impact of oil a mile below the surface is fairly slim. The oil on the surface comes in several varieties. One is the very thin sheen that makes the bulk of this spill. This sheen is actually so thin that it emulsifies and evaportes away. Light sweet crude in water over 80 degrees can actually evaporate at rates of well over 50% of the original volume in the first few days. This is one reason the spill size has leveled off quite a bit. The evaporate is fairly harmless in and of itself and has about as much impact as a small city's car exhaust from a day or two. This is a positive thing. Another variety is the thicker sheen. This is where the oil is pooling up in "thicker" chunks. While these portions of the spill still evaporate, they will require actual mechanical or chemical clean up. The use of dispersants helps this quite a bit, as well as controlled burning. BP has been able to burn a large amount of oil. In fact, burning is probably the most effective way to get rid of large volumes at once. Over the weekend, some estimates have them burning off more oil than the well actually leaked. You then get into the skimming and filtering exercises of the smaller patches that won't burn. The biggest impact, and what makes this spill more of a big deal than the dozens of other spills of similar size over the years, is where it is. 1. Its in US waters, so naturally its a bigger deal and gets more press. The Pemex spill in 1979 was about 10 times larger and went on for 9 months. Since it was in Mexican waters, most Americans don't even remember it. 2. Its close to coastal wetlands. This is the big deal. Grasses and wetlands, marshes, river deltas...this is the crap thats hard to clean. Beaches are actually easy to clean with today's technology. Some beaches on the outlying Louisiana islands that got oil on them are already completely clean. Its keeping it out of the dang wetlands that'll be the challenge.
Obama's good at reigning in Executive Agencies. No news about agency officials being charged with corruption over this. Probably won't for a while, if ever. Sex & Drugs & the Spill By PAUL KRUGMAN “Obama’s Katrina”: that was the line from some pundits and news sources, as they tried to blame the current administration for the gulf oil spill. It was nonsense, of course. An Associated Press review of the Obama administration’s actions and statements as the disaster unfolded found “little resemblance” to the shambolic response to Katrina — and there has been nothing like those awful days when everyone in the world except the Bush inner circle seemed aware of the human catastrophe in New Orleans. Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years. The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken. For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis. Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years. For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.) Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds. Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks. And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right. In any case, now is the time to make that break — and I don’t just mean by cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service. What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology. Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.” Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.
Just saw some fairly positive news about this on CNN (TV version). The new video of the leak, and the fact that the hydrates crystalized so quickly on the first capping attempt may indicate that up to half of the volume coming out of this well is actually natural gas. That would be pretty darn positive and may provide one of the clues as to why the surface area of the spill (other than the massive cleanup operation) is staying fairly constant, as half of the volume may be gas which disperses on the trip up from the bottom.
I don't read krugman that often, but he seems to be saying that Bush and the Tea Party are responisble for this disaster. is that an accurate take on this column?
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EJ91G3e0OBQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EJ91G3e0OBQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> Crazy.
All of the white in that footage is methane, which, as stated before, may be making up half the volume of hyrdrocarbons coming out of the well. Which is a positive thing from an oil spill standpoint, except when you try to cap it.
I was hearing some new studies saying that the spill may actually be far greater than what was reported. Possibly up 84,000 barrels a day. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525 One reason while the surface area may not be that great is that the use of disperants has kept the oil from the surface and a lot may be suspended in the water column.
Perhaps, but then on a couple of videos I watched, the professor making a lot of these estimates clearly mixes up his barrels and gallons when in the discussion. I also read where some of these calculations were based on this being the 21" riser (that's what she said), but the oil is actually flowing from the 9" drill pipe. BUT. If this spill is really 10x worse than the estimate, then the clean up effort has been doing a 10x better job because the spill has remained fairly under control so far.
Not completely, he said that problems in the Bush administration carried over into the Obama administration and that the entire culture contributed to the lack of effective regulation that could have averted the spill.
