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Professor of Mechanical Engineering Estimates that 4 Million Gallons of Oil are Leaking Every Day
As I wrote
on May 2nd:
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.
Today, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor - Steven
Wereley - testified
to the House Committee on Commerce and Energy that 95,000 barrels a day
are currently leaking into the
Gulf. That's 3,990,000
gallons - just shy of 4 million gallons - per day.
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Now they saw they have 5000 a day flowing through the releif pipe, yet there is still masses of oil coming out the main one. Math doesn't add add up does it.
They are now caught in their own lie.
BP = Beyond Phucked ?
I am not a prudoe professor. However, the movie of the fire got me thinking of piper alpha that burned in 1988 and the footage there of. I would appeal to your sense of scale and for you to make up your own mind:
Look at 6:30 (After the gas pipe bursts) in this video from Piper Alpha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ejWS-GTxS4&feature=related
According to the video this represents a gass fire of 1.5x UK gas consumption i 1988. That corresponds to an energy of 1.5x20 Billion Therms = 30 Billion Therms. Which in turn corresponds to an energy equivalent of 1.4 million bpd.
Now watch this one from Deepwater Horizon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3AvrlYfiJE
The question I ask you is this: Am I missing something, or does that not look like 0.36% (5000bbl/d) of the heat of the first one? What do you think? The platforms are not that much different in size (piper was probably somewhat bigger, but not by an order of magnitude). Also, the flow rate may have eased after the platform sank, but the question remains: does the 5000bbl/d seem at all plausible?
source for UK gas consumption: www.bis.gov.uk/files/file41819.pdf
Source for Therm to bbl of oil conversion: http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/units.html
Slideshow of oil damage and prep efforts so far:
http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=USRTR2D98W#a=3
Exxon Valdez: Eat your heart out.
In the 1930s we had the "dust bowl" which exacerbated the GDI. It was a freak storm which made the economic storm worse when farmers could not grow crops. The dust storms actually made it as far east as New York City.
I see a parallel. An oil spill which started in the GOM south of New Orleans and moves out into the Atlantic, up the Gulf Stream and ruins fishing and shrimping from the Texas Coast all the way to Maine.
Is this the Black Swan event?
Nobody can do anything to stop it. We've got like 2 more months before their relief well is drilled. With our luck, it will also blow up and then it will be 8 million gallons per day and every fish between here and Portugal will choke to death. #%(KING ridiculous.
Imagine if we were at war with Russia and/or China right now? This Government would fold like a cheap suit! They are HOPELESS. This event will exacerbate the global financial meltdown....of course the current fools in power will blame it all on this toxic ocean mess. Get ready for nature's coup de grass, the BIG one blowing its lid in Iceland. That will plug the leak in Al Gore's mouth once and for all. The UK and Europe coated in ice and no fuel to keep warm for the next few years... fun times just around the next bend! What else could possibly go wrong? How about some massive US crop failures...yeah...
How about a Cat 5 Hurricane to take all that surface oil and blow it inland like a coat of paint.
I wonder if Anderson Cooper can manage to stand in a 120 mph wind with blobs of oil shooting at him like a oily bullet.
The World is Fallin' Apart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cppY-n1i79w
The US military should have taken over this disaster within days. Obama did not even respond publically for 9 days while golfing, preening before mirror, etc. Obama has yet to act decisively. I wouldn't trust that slovenly political hack Napolitano to clean out my garage.
Soon they will be labelling the oil spill as another attack by Al Queda, just like they did 9-11.
Black Plague, that is what it will be called. It will crawl across this nation and the world. Perhaps not as oil, but as a economic domino hitting one community and the next as the money stops flowing. There is no oil in Key West, but the cancellations began weeks ago...you know just incase. It is well known that one bad week, no income, can shut down any business...permenantly. The dominos are falling from the Bayou, to Mobile Bay, to Naples, to Key West, to Miami, to Jacksonville, to Mertle Beach, to Savannah, to Hilton Head, to Nags Head, The Chesapeake, Cape Cod, Outer Banks, Scottland Salmon farms, Canary Islands, into the Mediterranean. What fish, oysters, dolphin, turtles, corals, etc. that it does not kill, will contaminate the flesh of the rest.
This is Chernobly. Nothing less than Chernobly.
When you start up your car today, especially your SUV, and ride all by yourself to wherever, remember you are part of the reason BP and others are drilling in mile deep water in the relm of robots only. Without you there is no business, and now because of it...we have no business. We, along the coastline, will suffocate right along with the wildlife, and this plague will last for years, and the bodies will pile high and deep.
Its effects will reach every home and every purse in America and the world.
Don't blame the people and their SUV's, that's preposterous. This is a crime in progress, the pipe should have been plugged weeks ago.
Call PB and tell them how to plug it. Easy to say, but you have no clue, just should have's.
And, yes I do blame everyone including myself, for demanding more and more plentiful and cheap oil instead of living with simpler and smaller cars and finding a better way for transportation. What is preposterious is that it has not been done and folks think the easy way is still the answer.
There are so many solutions that are available today. Alcohol, fuel cells, ion batteries, cars that run on pressurized air-- the list goes on and on. This argument that we need oil to get us to the next breakthrough technology seems to extend to infinity. We never seem to make any serious progress on implementing the new technology. I would be interested to see how much money BP has put into developing alt. energy vs. political lobbying to advance their current model. BP's commercial claims that like 1/3 of their energy comes from solar/wind/other but I would like to see the actual numbers.
My point here is, we have all the solutions in front of us. Unfortunately, there is simply no political will to change things. Until we stop tolerating the fact that our congressmen and political leaders are in bed with these grimy oil mother&$#kers, we'll continue to see this type of periodic environmental catastrophe.
The well will be plugged, they know how. Take the blame only if you can write the check, the rest is hazing the issue.
Blame the peeps! = BP wet dream if it works.
I don't understand why they don't push an explosive deep inside the pipe hole and explode it?, this should make a local explosion and plug the hole or they want to keep pipe end open so they can use the same well without drilling again ? is this all about money ?
because the 1 inch hole at the base is at a force higher than a 1 1/2 fire hose at full force. And the pressures that deep can/will crush any object that is not solid as steel. What are you going to use to overcome that? And, there are numerous holes like than plus the big one at the end. This is a monster from hell, nothing less. It is Pandora's Box, and we humans opened it.
Don't think for one moment that our Military does not have the ability to go that deep and deeper, and have the ability to put a stop to it. Ever hear of the 'Challenger Deep" off Guam???? But there are complications...we don't want the Taliban to know. It would be better to see the world go into a real economic depression over this that come to the rescue and reveal our "secrets".
While their at it why not just shoot a nuclear warhead from one of those subs and vaporize that 3x 10 miles frozen blob of oil .
It might kill all the sealife in a 50 mile radius, but their all going to die any ways from the spill.
As sad as this whole thing is the SNL skit last Saturday summed it up pretty well.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/16/snl-rips-bp-halliburton-f_n_577...
why Obama and the democrats are keeping this 'hush hush'... 1) Midterm Elections,
and 2) Florida who has 27 electoral votes. Florida is about to lose a LOT of
money in tourist money. Hell...most of the guf states will get crushed with this
oil spill. I mean who wants to swim in an oil slick much less smell it? I don't see this as anything but catastrophic to the US economy going forward...
Good news! New Orleans this means you.
http://www.businessinsider.com/pelosi-tells-audience-that-musicians-can-...
Pelosi Tells Audience That Musicians Can Quit Their Jobs And Focus On Their Talents Because The Government Will Give Them HealthcareA 4 inch pipe can suck up 3000 barrels a day
5000 barrels = 5,6 inches
THAT'S THE DIAMETER OF A COFFEE MUG!!
big coffee mug... :) BUT STILL!
They say it's 5000 because that's all they can actually handle.
They can't deploy more resources and if they would say it's more they would need to do that. And if they said it was more, but can't handle it, that would mean the gov. didn't check and there could be some corruption there and BP is lying...
IMAGINE!! The gov. not checking stuff! Or being corrupt! NO WAY!
....
.
IN GOD I THRUST AND ALL THE REST PAYS CASH! ;)
It's funny how people who don't know a thing about lower plaquemines tend to focus on the number spilling out and not the impact that it had today. You don't know anything about the delta. You've never been there and don't understand what's happening. So you try to find every way possible to connect the story with something that gets people's attention, like 6 million gallons of oil flowing into the loop current every day for months and circling the globe and causing horrible calamity.
Let me lay out what is happening. The pictures below were taken today at a place that lies in the middle of what is literally the most productive fishing area the continental US. Specifically, it's Pass A Loutre, a waterway on the east side of the delta that leads out to Breton Sound, which is a large area where the barrier islands begin. If you keep going into Pass A Loutre, you get to a place the locals call the jump, which is the spot at the end of the Mississippi that forks off to the three major passes. Throughout this area, especially on the east side, it's commonplace for 3 people to limit out with 75 speckled trout in just half an hour in this area. Consider that when looking at these pictures in the heart of that area.
http://www.wwltv.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/Oil-hitting-Pass-a-Loutre-94189...
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4618662963_92a90c1a93.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4052/4619276150_05fe069787.jpg
It just hit pass a loutre today and it's already horrendous. This was DAY 1! A week from now, their will be millions of dead fish scattered throughout the marsh and floating on top of the water. From the pogies to the trout to the cobia to the sharks. And hopefully the damn hard heads (saltwater catfish). We produce 1/3 of the country's oysters and nearly half its shrimp. 70% of the birds that fly south for the winter come right to the delta. Endangered species are an every day site. This is the catastrophic destruction of an entire culture. And anytime I turn on the national news it's all about numbers and crazy soltions and what this means for drilling. I won't watch it anymore. It's repulsive. When BP fixes this leek, they need to pay up every dime they owe everyone and then get the hell hell out of Louisiana because they are a fucking disgrace.
Thank you. I just sent your comment to several friends (those who actually care) with the proper attribution and link to this ZH page.
BP doubtful to pay every dime. What will help is that the hit coast is US. Would be another place in the world, people could sit down and forget about compensation, especially if a US corporation is involved.
Second helper might be that people in Lousiana are told to be lazy. If they start to move and clean the mess by themselves, it will be used against them later when assessing the damage done on the coast. If they dont move, no fixing in the assessment will be possible.
BC
Don't worry Treme will cover the spill in a few years.
I don't know how Goodman will update "Fuck You You fucking Fucks". Maybe "Fuck You You Oily Fucks".
Does anyone envision any type of realistic plan? Or is it just Detroiting the whole Gulf and where ever the Loop current spreads the oil?
Thank you for the education. I'm ignorant about the local ecosystem and fisheries.
Disgusting ! The ecosystem doesn't stand a chance. Even the trees will die from this toxic mess. Yet BP is still out there trying to SAVE its lucrative well.
Just drop a 200 ton block of cement on top of the hole and be done with it.
I think they tried that already...
Where is Gore anyway? Shouldn't he be standing shoulder to shoulder with Costner catching the photops and scooping black gold?
there might be living little creatures near the hole, the 200 ton block might kill them. YOU MURDERER!!! BP will never do that, being budists and all...
http://www.taipanpublishinggroup.com/taipan-daily-051910.html
Bit of background on the events leading up annddd... if there's criminal charges there is no limit on damages.
Obama manages to perpetuate lies through the media (namely, the NY Times) better than Leonid Brezhnev did using Tass.
The funny thing is that Obama actually "has no clothes." The Iranians, Brazilians, and Turks proved that this week.
The sad thing is that America is paying a dear price for his blunders and malfeasance.
It's a continuum... Would things have been better with anyone else? We are in deep sh*t that has been in the making for many years.
Meanwhile all the Kings Horses and all the Kings Men are telling Obama it's only 5,000 barrels per day... hmmm... that kind of willful ignorance is going to make someone rich!
And BP remember has always had very powerful whor... errr... friends...
Hey Z
I get the sense from your comments that you worked in the industry. Yes/No?
Thad Allen's comments above regarding total loss of the wellhead appear apropos.
My interpretation of the problem is that formation fluids channelled through the cement job and pressurized the annulus between the outer casing wall and the wellbore. This would explain a good positive pressure test and a failed negative pressure test.
All was good until they displaced the riser to seawater. When they did that the well blew in through a failure of one of the upper casing hanger seals. I am not sure of the design of these but they are intended to prevent pressure in the wellbore from exiting; I do not know how they would handle pressure in the annulus entering the wellbore. But my hunch is that this was the failure mode.
This also explains the immediacey of the failure. Once the casing hanger seal failed you would have immediate formation pressure in the upper portion of the well with nothing to restrain it. Once this pressure was noted the floor crew had but seconds to live.
Comment?
Also, it appears that the company man survived. He will know exactly what took place, the sequence of events pre-failure and the rationale for all steps taken. Do not understand why congress wastes its time with the BOP blowhard they have up there; that man knows less than I do. The company man would be able to answer every damn question. My hunch is that he will not be a witness as he/BP may be liable for criminal negligence for the deaths of 11 men.
Nope no oil industry experience sushi... although I was heading in that direction until my red/green color-blindness caught up to me in my igneous spectroscopy labs... My boreholes these days are limited to environmental testing and remediation efforts on our fine stable of 'dirty girl' properties.
There is such a lack of relevant information that it is difficult to make a situational assessment but upon hearing confirmation of the timely Schlumberger exit I think you are barking up the right tree.
Getting mud back down this doggies throat is going to be a bitch I think. There are also reports that they drilled this hole much deeper (and into higher pressure horizons) then the original plan laid out. High pressure pumps typically output low volumes and the leaks above the BOP have to be mitigated at the BOP first I think. It's not going to be a slam dunk I fear. Thoughts here sushi?
As for the 'company' man... expect BP to announce next week that he died in the original blowout event...
We have the most sophisticated submarine fleet in the world. The big O is definately aware of the scale of this. That is why it was declared a matter of national security as soon as the navy got a look. It gives the executive branch wide controls over the dissemination of information.
looks more like the semination of disinformation to me...