The Oil, Our End
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 I can't concentrate on anything this week. My industry (travel) is going nuts with mergers and new regulations and fleeing "terrorist" bombers and I am not even paying attention. United and Continental's merger should be the biggest news I've ever heard but I'm not following the story. All I can do, obsessively and all day long, is look for and read news article after news articles about the Gulf oil spurt. This is no spill. This is insane.
The ocean is forever changed.
There is a continuous spurt of oil emanating from a 7 inch wide pipe stuck in a little hole in the sea floor that connects to a huge reservoir of oil that is 18,000 feet underneath this hole, and is filled with an unknown quantity of crude oil. I didn't really get it until I reviewed diagrams. The big arrow says the expanse between the surface and the sea floor is 5,000 feet. The little arrow represents 18,000 feet. BP actually drilled more than 18,000 feet underneath the sea floor, making the well at a depth of 23,000 feet. Do we know what it's like at that depth? We know it's crazy at the depth of the sea floor.
Cement and Pressure
Turns out, we might know "enough". Mexico has a rig in 8,000 feet of water (never mind that little Ixtoc problem back in '79). How deep is the deepest well on land? Looks like the standard for 'deepest' was around 12,000 ft up 'til 1994. Then there's a big jump and Russia has wells deeper than 30,000 ft. now. 30,000 feet from the surface of the earth. For some reason, the frequency and the severity of oil accidents has increased by some huge percent between 1994 and 2006. I guess it had to do with the cement in the deep wells (I unfortunately cannot find that article to post the link right now).
I'm a diver so naturally I'd try to grasp these concepts in terms of atmospheres of pressure. 10 meters of depth is the equivalent to the weight of the atmosphere pressing down on the earth's surface when at sea level. One atmosphere exerts 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch) of pressure. So, as soon as you are 10 meters underwater, you are already experiencing 29.4 psi pressing upon you (we'll get to the shrinking gas volumes thing later). Get to 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) and that pressure has increased to the equivalent weight of 152 atmospheres bearing down upon you and we've only reached the sea floor. Once we're in the well that was being drilled by Deepwater Horizon, there are about 700 extra atmospheres, the equivalent of over 10,000 psi. But I'm pretty sure machinery can generate that much pressure.
There's another part where (rapidly expanding) gas could be released from it's underground home at a cozy 700 atmospheres. Boyle's Law says that for each atmosphere of pressure, the volume of a gas will shrink by a certain percent. The amount of it does not change, just how much space it takes up. The gas becomes more and more concentrated the more pressure exerted. This infers that the gas expands as the amount of pressure decreases, right? So, if we let methane gas out of a 23,000 foot-deep hole, I wonder how fast it expands inside of that little pipe? Oh, and Boyle's law only applies to a constant temperature. The water temperature would affect this behavior... but do we know what the water temperature is at every single stage in the water column?
But there's also the part where pressure increases when a pressurized substance is forced through a small hole (think of the garden hose when you put your finger over it... or the little pipe sticking out of the giant oil reservoir) Can their machinery create this much force?
I don't know the full science here in my armchair. I just know that I have to wonder about the performance of machinery in water under that much pressure and if all factors are even know to account for in engineering calculations.
Cement and Accidents
There have been two deepwater cementing accidents (if you count this one) in recent memory, and the other one, in the Australian waters of the Timor Sea, was at only a fraction of the depth of this one -- 250 feet. You need to add a few zeros to get the depth of the Deepwater Horizon well. Guess who poured the cement in Australia?
The Australia incident in the Timor sea spewed oil for 74 days before it was shut down. They drilled five times before the relief well was properly installed. The Australian government was due to release a study last week. But they held it. The confirmation that cementing was the cause of the accident was previously released. I wonder what else the incident report says. About this one. The fact they won't release it has to mean there is negligence on the part of the operator because they were fully aware of risks and went ahead with the plans for Deepwater Horizon anyway. Did you guess who poured the cement?
According to the Wall Street Journal, "a 2007 study by three U.S. Minerals Management Service officials found that cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period. That was the single largest factor, ahead of equipment failure and pipe failure."
There's another really bad deepwater accident that happened in Mexico in 1979 where they had a pressure problem drilling at around 10,000 feet. It's the second largest oil spill in history (until now) but personally I'd never heard of it. It took 10 months to cap the well.
The Oil
Most scientists are saying it is light crude - the kind easy to disperse. At least one scientist is saying it is a heavy crude of a type unseen before with a very high concentration of the base chemical that forms asphalt. What if it billions of gallons of almost-asphalt are filling the ocean right now?
It takes 27 years for a droplet of water to circle the world ocean and arrive back where it started. Did you get that? Every droplet of water always circles the globe.
The party line was 5,000 barrels of oil per day for a long time. They calculate this by the surface area seen in satellite imagry. There are no sensors operating at the leak sites to show how much oil is flowing into the ocean. They have no way to see how much oil is in the deep water. We have no conception of deep water currents besides the fact that they exist. No one knows where this oil is going.
Every droplet of water circles the whole globe.
Just from the surface slick, some scientists had said there was a billion gallons of oil per day. Some said two billion. Some say the worst case would be over six billion. Remember, the party line is 5,000 barrels (multiply 'barrel' by 42 and you'll have gallons).
The news is confusing you by mixing barrel and gallon numbers in their reports. Bottom line: they have no clue and you have never been provided with an accurate measurement of the flow of oil. Numbers are being obscured.
What if two billion gallons of oil per day has entered the ocean? It's been 16 days. 32 billion gallons of oil out there. [Read the scientist's analysis at SkyTruth, a satellite mapping organization and read the original article how the corporation and the government knows this from the Press-Register.]
And it takes 27 years for a droplet of water to circle the world ocean.
The Gas
There is a powerpoint presentation from Halliburton that demonstrates an explosive capacity created by methane hydrates was also a known risk. [Check the graphic underlayer of slide 7 -- the words 'Destabilization Zone' are what is written underneath the primary text.] The presentation talk of many challenges, mentions economics as a decision factor, but does not at all speak about what the pressure at depth does to the process. [This site does.]
The Aminals
There are dead turtles on the beach. I've read it's suspected they are dying from inhaled oil fumes when they come up to breathe. It's reported they are swimming right within the surface slicks. That means they are swimming with the currents, people. That means the oil is dispersing somewhere, probably at depth, flowing in currents. It means who knows where it is going and how far it goes. Many animals have been seen swimming in and breathing in the surface slick.
We only notice what floats to the surface and science has no clue how deepwater ecosystems function - let alone what even lives there. This spurt is destroying untold natural wonders. There is no question about it. But it may never be reported. We won't know what we killed anyway.
The 80-year Old Solution
I keep saying 'we', not 'BP. That's because we all did it by continuing to use fossil fuel instead of switch to more environmentally sound technologies. The reason always cited: it costs too much. Henry Ford made a vehicle that was 100% biodegradable apart from the frame. In the 30's. In the 1930's we had the technology to make an industrial lubricant from hemp oil that would degrade with absolutely no hazard to the earth. 80 years ago, Ford made this car with a carbon-fiber body and biodegradable lubricants created from plant matter, but hemp became marijuana and then became illegal -- even though there is no substance to smoke on an industrial-grade hemp plant. Nothing to smoke. Propaganda made us think it's all a drug. I'm thinking the wealth-generating capacity of oil could be a drug.
The Disgust
In light of how bad it is already, this article here is the living end. Let's pour tens of millions of gallons of crap into the ocean and then use something we know is not good - for which there is a known replacement that is less bad - to try to disperse it. Dispersing it just means we don't see it anymore; it doesn't make the oil go away. They've only been able to apply dispersant to 1% to 2% of the volume of oil expelled. Sounds like we should give up on dispersing.
Really, we should have given up on this whole thing a long time ago.
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So, for days I do nothing but read this news. In order to get the news. The real information is buried in one-liners that need to be researched independently in order to get the real story. The best sources are the oil industry community websites - which is interesting in itself.
I know this story is bad, very bad. It's changed the world forever. The cause of the "accident" is criminal. Something needs to become more important than money or these criminals will never go away. Seems to me that anything that cannot be replaced is already more important than money but society does not seem to agree.
zerobar.org
...wait, I just this minute heard on CNN (Rachel Maddow) they are admitting to 60,000 barrels now. That's 2.5 million gallons, folks. Per day. 16 days. I can't even bear to type how many gallons of oil that means is already in the ocean. And counting.
However, as of May 12th, I still see that most sources are sticking to the 5,000 barrel (bullshit) story.
Oh... and how much methane is in there, huh?