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Oil Spill: Here's The Inside Scoop
The Gulf oil spill is much worse than originally believed.
As the Christian Science Monitor writes:
It's now likely that the actual amount of the oil spill dwarfs the Coast Guard's figure of 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day.
Independent scientists estimate that the renegade wellhead at the bottom of the Gulf could be spewing up to 25,000 barrels a day. If chokeholds on the riser pipe break down further, up to 50,000 barrels a day could be released, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration memo obtained by the Mobile, Ala., Press-Register.
CNN quotes the lead government official responding to the spill - the commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen - as stating:
If we lost a total well head, it could be 100,000 barrels or more a day.
Indeed, an environmental document filed by the company running the oil drilling rig - BP - estimates the maximum as 162,000 barrels a day:
In an exploration plan and environmental impact analysis filed with the federal government in February 2009, BP said it had the capability to handle a “worst-case scenario” at the Deepwater Horizon site, which the document described as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout — 6.8 million gallons each day.
Best-Case Scenario
BP is trying to perform a difficult task of capping the leak by using robotic submarines to trigger a "blowout preventer" 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. Here's a photo of the robot trying to activate the switch on April 22nd:
(courtesy of the US Coast Guard)
If successful, the leak could be stopped any day. Everyone is rooting for the engineers, so that they may successfully cap the leak.
Already, however, the spill is worse than the Exxon Valdez, and will cause enormous and very costly destruction to the shrimping, fishing and tourism industries along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Florida. It will be years before good estimates on the number of dead fish, turtles, birds and other animals can be made.
The Backup Plan
If the blowout preventer can't be triggered, the backup plan is to drill another well to relieve pressure from the leaking well.
Here's a drawing prepared by BP showing the plan (the drilling rig on the left will take months to drill down and relieve pressure from the leaking rig):
Here's a graphic from the Times-Picayune showing the same thing (and accurately showing that there are currently 3 leaking oil plumes):
BP will also attempt to drop concrete and metal "cages" over the leak sites, to try to buy time by collecting oil in the cages, and then draining oil away in a safer manner. In addition, BP is using chemical disperents to try to break up the oil plumes as they arise.
Worst-Case Scenario
As the Associated Press notes:
Experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic.
This would, in fact, be very bad, as it would carry oil far up the Eastern seaboard.
Specifically, as the red arrows at the left of the following drawing show, the Gulf Stream runs from Florida up the Eastern Coast of the United States:
[Click here for full image.]
But how could the oil get all the way from Louisiana to Florida, where the Gulf Stream flows?
As Discovery explains:
Many ocean scientists are now raising concerns that a powerful current could spread the still-bubbling slick from the Florida Keys all the way to Cape Hatteras off North Carolina.
These oceanographers are carefully watching the Gulf Loop Current, a clockwise swirl of warm water that sets up in the Gulf of Mexico each spring and summer. If the spill meets the loop -- the disaster becomes a runaway.
"It could make it from Louisiana all the way to Miami in a week, maybe less." said Eric Chassignet, director of the Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. "It is pretty fast."
Right now, some computer models show the spill 30 to 50 miles north of the loop current. If the onshore winds turn around and push the oil further south: "That would be a nightmare," said Yonggang Liu, research associate at the University of South Florida who models the current. "Hopefully we are lucky, but who knows. The winds are changing and difficult to predict."
Imagine the loop current as an ocean-going highway, transporting tiny plankton, fish and other marine life along a watery conveyor belt. Sometimes it even picks up a slug of freshwater from the Mississippi River -- sending it on a wandering journey up to North Carolina.
The Gulf Loop Current acts like a jet of warm water that squirts in from the Caribbean basin and sloshes around the Gulf of Mexico before being squeezed out the Florida Strait, where it joins the larger and more powerful Gulf Stream current.
***
Oceanographer George Maul worries that the current could push the oil slick right through the Florida Keys and its 6,000 coral reefs.
"I looked at some recent satellite imagery and it looks like some of the oil may be shifted to the south," said Maul, a professor at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. "If it gets entrained in the loop, it could spread throughout much of the Atlantic."
In fact, new animation from a consortium of Florida institutions and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicts a slight southward shift in the oil over the next few days.
A graphic from the Discovery article shows what the Gulf loop current looks like:
The Gulf Loop Current enters from the Caribbean basin,
moves around the Gulf of Mexico and
exits out the Florida Strait, where it joins
the more powerful Gulf Stream current.
Naval Oceanographic Office
According to ROFFS, the oil spill is getting close to the loop current:
In a worst-case scenario - if the oil leak continued for a very long period of time - the oil could conceivably be carried from the Gulf Stream into world-wide ocean currents (see drawing above).
I do not believe this will happen. Even with the staggering quantity of oil being released, I don't think it's enough to make its way into other ocean currents. I think that either engineers will figure out how to cap the leak, or the oil deposits will simply run out. It might get into the Gulf loop current, and some might get into the Gulf Stream. But I don't believe the apocalyptic scenarios where oil is carried world-wide by teh Gulf Stream or other ocean currents.
Changing the Climate
There is an even more dramatic - but even less likely - scenario.
Specifically, global warming activists have warned for years that warming could cause the "great conveyor belt" of warm ocean water to shut down. They say that such a shut down could - in turn - cause the climate to abruptly change, and a new ice age to begin. (This essay neither tries to endorse or refute global warming or global cooling in general: I am focusing solely on the oil spill.)
The drawing above shows the worldwide "great conveyer belt" of ocean currents, which are largely driven by the interaction of normal ocean water with colder and saltier ocean currents.
Conceivably - if the oil spill continued for years - the greater thickness or "viscosity" of the oil in comparison to ocean water, or the different ability of oil and seawater to hold warmth (called "specific heat"), could interfere with the normal temperature and salinity processes which drive the ocean currents, and thus shut down the ocean currents and change the world's climate.
However, while this is an interesting theory (and could make for a good novel or movie), it simply will not happen.
Why not?
Because there simply is not enough oil in the leaking oil pocket to interfere with global ocean currents. And even if this turns out to be a much bigger oil pocket than geologists predict, some smart engineer will figure out how to cap the leak well before any doomsday scenario could possibly happen.
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Okay - found it . Underwater Oil disperant manf.
NLC - Nalco Holdings - in the news this weekend
Impressive how such an event grows terrible when it happens of your coasts.
so true, it be the worst disaster in human history if the oil was lapping up to the shore at the Hamptons
George Washington,
Thanks for making a space for this discussion. I am no expert, but I posted on this a while back when I learned they were going to be burning the ocean to get rid of the oil. I knew in my gut this was being played waaay down. Many of the comments here are spot on. The best we can hope for is an epic disaster we eventually recover from. Finances be damned. Honestly, the only hope I have is that other countries will see the peril to themselves and lend a hand to help get it under control. Maybe it would bring us together more.
Yeah, I am too hopeful.
Own this. We did this to ourselves. We created the demand for oil by living the lifestyles we are leading. Don't know if "auditing the fed" much matters any more, or putting GS scumbags behind bars. We inherited the lifestyle, we took it as normal and our entitlement, but we did it. The greedy bastards just poked a hole in the only rock we have to live on, hoping to turn a buck.
Damn Skippy!
well said dear. There are no limits, rules or risks we will not break for our petroleum lifestyle. We are in the post peak arena and all bets are off.
Yeah, let's call 1-800-Troubleshooter!
Maybe Iceland can lend a hand? They already seem to have some experience with stuff that blows up, or maybe the taliban has some experts?
Tristan da Cunha did it...
I don't know... yesterday I asked my neighbour where he was at the exact time of the event, and all he could tell me was "Huh?"
This sound pretty guilty to me....
Why not put an empty supertanker over it and connect a pipe? The Environmental cleanup.. it looks like the ONLY option is to chuck vats of bio-engineered microbes into the natural world..and see what happens! crumbs, it's like God lives in Hollywood.
Great, I can finally contribute. As a chemical engineer, who worked for years in the oil business, the insurance of oil business, I can say for CERTAIN, we are totally hosed. Nukes? Please. Fracture the ground? Let's face it. More and more resources are expended to get less and less. Earthlings are getting poorer and more polluted by the day. You think the Gulf Coast is bad, take a trip to China.
As ZH's resident autodidact I would hope that you choose to comment more often. I suspect that this event will contribute mightily to the general public perception that government & business are totally incompetent and unable to do anything right. If BP is totally liable for all of this the company is finished.
Yawn... enviro hype...
Ben Bernanke said the same thing about housing... chances are that Bernanke will be proven more right than those early estimates of this spill.
Mitchman Thanks for that great pdf.
I think the drilled depth is 18000'
Better math then me can calculate 10" pipe at 18000' =? what pressure and what flow rate?
TOD has some EXCELLENT technical commentary happening on this gigantic clusterfuck.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6421
A pleasure on the pdf. Thanks for your posts. Too tired to do the math. Even of it's enviro-hype, everybody loses on this one. Take care.
Eureka! I got it!
Send Counterfeit Ben and his merry band of central bankers to the scene!
They can collectively print up trillions of FRN's and scatter them across the spill and sop up the spilled oil. Goldman can then place some fancy side bets, come in on boats, scoop up the money, wring out the oil and manipulate the oil market!
:-) Heh, Heh.
does anyone have a link that shows pictures of what is going on underwater?
i've seen two photos. one of the bop show here in the post and one of a pipe leaking a brownish fluid at what looks like very low pressure.
both pictures make me scratch my head in wonder. look how clear the water is in the picture of the bop. i've never gone swimming in the gulf of mexico but i doubt anything with "mexico" in its name can be that clean. nah seriously, the floor of the gom has been described as "mud" on the various oil related sites that i follow. it seems odd that the water would be so silt-free down there.
the other pic with the leaking pipe also just looks wrong.
i want multiple pictures of all of the leaking sections. i also want video taken by the underwater robots trying to activate the bop. since i'm at it, give me better satilite and aerial photos of the slick.
So Just trying to get an idea of the pipe size these MM pipes are from 4.4 " to 13.2" so that is in line with a guess of 10" or so.
Forgive me if I am not thinking of my science correctly, but I think of this as being 5 thousand feet down in a hole that is an additional 30 thousand feet under the ocean floor. so the pressure at which the oil is coming through this pipe must be inconceivable.
the graphic in the main post shows 5,000 ft under water and 18,000 under the floor. i've also seen 13,000 ft under the floor posted elsewhere. i think that it is capable of drilling to 30k and beyond but i don't think that it was doing so when the accident happened.
Then we find some fresh drill pipe out of china in these sizes
Outer Diameter(Round):
114.3 - 339.73 mm
Spread you hand out and you got a 8" spread.
My guess is 10 to 12" Pipe Just from viewing drill rigs from a distance.
House pressure of a hose is 50 to 60 psi
I am seriously depressed after reading this. thank you everyone. how does one prepare for the End of Days....?
This assesment will keep you up tonight. Assuming the guys credentials are legit I think it's safe to say we're hosed.
http://pesn.com/2010/05/02/9501643_Mother_of_all_gushers_could_kill_Eart...
The Boston area water main break had about 8 million gallons per hour coming out, or nearly 200 million per day, from a 10-foot-wide line. So take that down to one foot and it's 20 million, half a foot for 10 million gallons per day and you're in the ballpark being discussed here.
Six inch pipe is all it takes.
I think we need to skip the Exxon Valdez comparisions at this point and move on to the Dust Bowl. If the 'cap' doesn't work, it may be time for ten million people to move. Never mind the Everglades, the Keys, Miami Beach, etc.
In 'Sand County Almanac', Aldo Leopold ends the book with a fantastic excursion into the Colorado River delta into the Salton Sea. Marsh grasses over your head, waterfowl blackening the sky, jaguars prowling...in the 1920s.
That landscape no longer exists. The water was all diverted and nothing reaches the old delta any more.
It's like that (potentially) for a quarter of a continent's coastline. Some things you can't take back....
You know that old saying about bad things coming in three's. So you have the Horizon, Boston Water and what else? Holy cow! What a year and it's only May!
Here is the right one. The rig being towed out to sea and the exlosions.
http://pdfcast.org/pdf/horizon-explosion
wow, that beats this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IlrXqcOGSs&feature=related
As I understand it, all that steel is on top of the hole they have to try and cap. It may well take a nuke to get the thing to stop. Thanks for the video.
one can't really appreciate the true power of fire until one is able to experience the wind sucked out of their lungs by a mushroom cloud, even a small one. it's quite a humbling experience.
Is Wanger buying BP stock ?
Is this a Black Swan event ?
Will leveraged funds holding BP/Transocean/Haliburton stock cause a run on the broader market as they are forced to de-leverage thanks to there sustained losses ?
Is it too late to buy put on BP/RIG/HAL ?
Are we being to careless in our engineering/design/quality control ?
How much of the stuff on this rig came from China ?
What is Bernanke thinking?
I have a .pdf with spectacular photos of the explosion that give one a real sense of how gigantic this disaster is but do not know how to post it to the site. can anyone help?
http://pdfcast.org/
Thank you. I have it on now. Everything is just numbers until you see the photos.
cog dis or leo. cheeky bastard but you never knew where in the fuck that dude is mentally or physically. oh robotrader, but he really isn't into environmental issues.
wang, i think your wang is right.
that's 40 days until this spill eclipses that number and we are almost two into it.
what does your two represent?
salazar from colorado, wondering if he has substance. guess he has time on his hands and can do the sunday morning SHOW UP's and talk HEAD. some of us might say get some head.
two weeks into it
Edited more like 70 days not 40
and the Billion gallon number if anything is overstated so maybe 40 days makes sense, whatever this stands to be like nothing the world has ever seen.
As for Salazar this whole situation stinks of politics (way worse than Katrina, if that is possible ) Ian MacDonald out of FL State has been studying sat and infrared images and is unequivocal that this spill has already surpassed Valdez. NOAA claims 50,000 barrels /day (2.1m gallons) would reflect the max flow from a typical Gulf of Mexico well. The jury is out on the nature of the crude from this spill; typically Gulf of Mexico crude is lighter, however because this is from a very deep well the thought is that it is sweet crude, which is not great but not as bad as heavy. (Valdez was heavy crude).
This is an interesting article on the intentional confusion about oil and how it is measured/described.
http://www.wcl.american.edu/blb/04/documents/Day.pdf?rd=1
Here's the deal, the sum total of all of the major oil spills in history is about a billion gallons. Half of that was from the first war in the Gulf and confined to that area; burning off in fires, evaporating and actually being recovered. The next greatest spill was in the Gulf of Mexico back in '79 when Pemex was drilling a test well. It is known as the Ixtoc I oil spill and leaked aprox 15,000 gallons per day for almost a year, which translates to 184 million gallons. There was a great deal of burning off in the Ixtoc spill and the currents in the Bay of Campeche where Ixtoc was located were not strong, so it took almost two months for the slick to reach the Texas coast. Texas was prepared and in the journey to Texas there was a great deal of evaporation (so to speak). Importantly the Texas barrier islands along with the booms did their job, preventing an environmental disaster.
The numbers for the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico are all over the map but it is clear that 25,000 barrels per day (or 1 million gallons per day) is a likely starting point with Salazar suggesting 100,000 barrels per day or 4.2 million gallons.
Exxon Valdez was an 11 million gallon spill, which using Salazar's numbers translates to an Exxon Valdez every two and a half days for the BP Gulf of Mexico spill. The ecosystem in the Northern Gulf of Mexico is fragile and accounts for more than 38% of the wetlands in America. The Loop current and Gulf Stream combined with the winds and high seas common in that region suggest that the oil will travel fast and far.
The explosion took place on April 20 (two weeks ago). On April 23 the rig sank due in large part to a misguided strategy that tried to extinguish the fire, which resulted in the rig sinking thereby wreaking havoc with the riser pipes and causing the leaks. There are numerous reports that BP had downplayed the possibility of a catastrophic event that could result in a leak and other reports suggest that when the leak did occur, BP downplayed its severity. Still other reports alledge that BP was not prepared with the implication that cost cutting trumped safety.
Mary Landry a Rear Admiral with the Coast Guard was the go to person up until Saturday when the Administration appointed Katrina veteran Thad Allen (commandant of the Coast Guard). It seems the Administration learned from the Michael Brown (Brownie you're doing a heck of a job) situation. Of course President Obama took two weeks to arrive in the Gulf of Mexico so he never had a chance to compliment Mary Landry.
Oddly enough the MSM is not giving this wall to wall coverage, at least not at this point. If anything they are downplaying what could well be a disaster of incomprehensible proportions. Lawsuits have obviously been filed and one claims that BP "consciously understated the magnitude of the leak". Media outside of the US has suggested that the Administration has been slow to respond.
If you exclude the Gulf War and Ixtoc the sum total of the major oil spills in history is about 300 million gallons. Based on Salazar's estimate of 100,000 barrels per day, that's 70 days until this spill eclipses that number and we are almost two weeks into it.
If this is leak is even a quarter as bad as Salazar suggests and if it lasts longer than a month the economic, environmental and human devastation will be without compare.
Edited 70 not 40 days
There is definitely a technical element to this story, but the root cause of this disaster is the motherfuckers who drove the price of oil down to such an extent that outfits like BP could not put adequate resources into engineering and maintenance (see: Prudhoe Bay pipeline disintegration) while still providing an acceptable return to stakeholders.
That's a pretty sad-assed attempt at explaining away BP's culpability. If you can't make a profit while operating safely and sanely then you shouldn't be in business.
It's time to stop shifting the blame and take responsibility for once. This one is too big to weasel out of.
My God.
I am Chumbawamba.
It may be true however to say that TransOcean's culpability comes before BP's. I believe it is the case in the oil biz. that different outfits specialize in different jobs related to extraction, equipment, maintenance etc. Even big intergrateds like BP don't/can't do everything by themselves. If you hired a reputable firm to bus a bunch of people from point A to point B and the driver runs a red light casing a bad wreck, assumption of liability starts with the bus driver and the bus company. If the bus got hit by lightning that might be different but I'm not sure the exact reason for the blow is known yet. I'm not saying BP is blameless but this might not even be BP's rig, equipment or crews directly involved with the gear in question here.
BP are big boys that knew they were pushing the limits of depth, pressure and technology. They make the call, not TransOcean. If anything, this shows how desperate we've become for oil. Like wars, lies, and "terrorism," no risk is too great.
Until the true nature of the risks are made plain to all who care to see..
Reminds me of the "sophisticated investor" concept brought to fruition.
Good Grief, what a disaster.
I really thought that in this day and age this kind of thing just wasn't really possible. I know that the guys who work on these rigs have to fill out an environmental incident report if they so much as lose a pen over the side so I sort of figured they had the major risks (like the main pipe not decoupling from the sea bed floor and spewing oil) pretty well under control. Guess not.
Also, I'm really surprised that this spewing well-head can't be capped off without launching another Manhattan Project. Lets just walk through some simple math and feel free to correct me here:
- 25,000 barrels per day is a little over a million gallons per day. Let's call it 1 mil. gpd.
- I know I can fill a 5 gallon bucket with a garden hose in a minute, probably much less than a minute but lets call it a minute.
- With the garden hose that's 300gph, 7200 gallons per day. So about 139 garden hoses would pump about 1 mil. gallons per day.
- Most garden hoses are 5/8 inch diameter I think. That's a (circular) area of about .3068 inches. 139 garden hoses together would be a combined area of about 42.64 square inches. How big is this well head pipe that's gushing oil? - has to be at least 6 inches in diameter right? Well a 7.5 in. pipe has an area of approx. 44.17 sq inches which is a bit more than our 139 garden hoses. So, I think this means that one 7.5 inch pipe with the pressure of a garden hose can pump more than 1 mil. gallons per day. A pipe significantly bigger than 7.5 in. would pump 1mil. gpd with a pressure orders of magnitude lower than a garden hose.
-So, I know this problem is a mile under water and all that but we're not talking about some massive geyser that could thrust a trailer home into the sky, we're talking about a 7.5 inch pipe with garden hose pressure or a bigger pipe with much less pressure. How hard can it be to cap something like that? The busted well head must be under some huge debris pile of twisted wreckage or something and they just can't get to it...but even still I must say I'm surprised at this difficulty. A million gallons of oil per day is a terrible environmental disaster but it doesn't seem like a lot of fluid to be able to get under control.
Obviously this is a big, big problem but I'm just trying to wrap my mind around some of the numbers here. If this pipe is a lot bigger than a few inches in diameter and it's under a lot of pressure as some reports have claimed, it's pumping way, way more than 25,000 barrels a day.
Your calculation didn't take into account the pressure caused by a 5000 ft vertical column of water, which this oil pressure is overcoming with ease. This oil is coming out at pressures you and I can't even imagine Mercury...
No garden hoses allowed in this calculation...
divide water depth by 2.31 and you get pressure in psi.
Well volume is volume. I guess it would be more accurate to say that a million gallons a day is =< 7.5 in. pipe flowing at the rate of a garden hose.
High pressure or no it still seems a bit incredible (or humbling as the case may be) that this much trouble can be caused by a six or seven inch hole in the ground.