I’ve been wondering for some time now why this environmental disaster–and it honestly may be the biggest man-made environmental disaster in history–down there in the gulf is going on so long and why the FRACK BP and the government are taking so fracking long.
I’ve only had time to glance at the issue but what I’d seen and heard to date wasn’t making a lot of sense to me. I actually tend to be patient, I understand that oil spills are going to happen, they’re bad but there’s lots of bad things and the world doesn’t end with an oil spill anymore than a hurricane or a volcano eruption. But holy cow this thing was looking like it must be rank incompetence in getting it fixed right? Well, wrong apparently. If there was incompetence it was in design of the system in the first place, but just stopping the leak itself (not talking about the cleanup afterward, I’m talking about just STOPPING THE LEAK) looks likely to take months more. Yes, months.
This simple graphic pretty much demonstrates what the problem is. And the one fact that made me understand it instantly, and made the rest interesting but a side diversion is this:
The leak is 5,000 feet underwater. It’s a mile down.
You can’t send divers down that deep. There are very few subs that can even go that deep. A sub that can safely handle 2,000 feet is a rare beast. If you know anything about the Titanic, and what they had to go through to find that and explore it when they did find it, contemplate that it lies only about 1,900 feet down. It is very nearly inconceivable that there are more than a very small number of submarines that can safely take people down 5,000 feet, and of those few that can, that there are many that can do anything useful at all in this situation.
If you’re still having trouble, then here: every 33 feet of water you go down adds about 15 pounds per square inch of pressure. In making a rough calculation, I would put that at roughly 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. I suspect the Navy’s most advanced nuclear subs would be crushed like a beer can at 5,000 feet down.
Army Corps of Engineers? Forget it. Might as well tell them to go plug a leak on the moon. I’m certain the Navy’s ready to render whatever assistance they can, and that assistance mostly adds up to tea and sympathy.
If it matters to anyone, there isn’t much the President can do either. Except maybe declare war on Queen Elizabeth. (That’s a joke.)
This is a massive design failure, with woefully inadequate disaster preparation on the part of British Petroleum, and, whichever government regulators and private insurers greenlighted this project. The robots designed to handle things down there are failing to effectively close the shutoff valves. Valve failure, robot failure, or both, it doesn’t matter. There is no easy way to fix this. Current plans include drilling another hole to try to relieve the presssure. Which will take months.
I would not be in the least bit surprised if this thing is still leaking when 2011 rolls around.
And the enormity of this thing is only going to grow. It is a catastrophe so big, it boggles the mind. Several nuclear strikes probably would not have done as much damage long term as this thing has done and will continue to do.
*Update*: Here’s a list of subs that have existed that could handle 5,000+ feet of depth. As you can see, it’s a small list, and some of them are no longer in service. But let’s say you get one of them: great, you’ve got your sub down there by the hole, and some people in the sub. Now what?
*Update 2*: Excellent information from our amazing commenters. John Eddy points out I got my numbers wrong (the first source I checked was either wrong or I misread) and, more important, this isn’t even close to the biggest spill in history, or even in the Gulf of Mexico. More later.
*Update 3*: A look at the worst oil spills in history (of which this is not one, yet, although it probably will be), and, a rolling update on the current state of the current spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks J1 and everyone else!
{ 25 comments }
the truth is, tho they haven’t wanted to admit it, the only way likely to cap the oil is counter drilling. That was a fact as soon as the blowout preventer failed. Everything done up to this point have all been hail mary passes with little likelyhood of real result. The couterdrilling will work, 100%, eventualy. If anything else slows it down then they are doing a great job. Well great job of everything but PR.
FYI- the wreck of the Titanic is more than two miles below the surface of the ocean.
it honestly may be the biggest man-made environmental disaster in history
Some perspective on the fact that this spill has a long way to go to even be in the ballpark:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/454782/the_worst_major_oil_spills_in_history.html?cat=37
The worst one (by oil spill) was created by…wait for it.. Saddam Hussein.
But, I get it, this affects us during, probably, the worst recession in my lifetime in an area that is still recovering from Katrina.
But, thanks for your fairness in recognizing that the failure to plug the leak is both BP’s AND (^) the government’s failure.
I am an ex USN submariner, and Dean, you are exactly correct. There are only a handful of manned submarines worldwide that can go down to those depths and precious few robotic vehicles that can operate at those depths either. (…and most of those are designed for exploration rather than manipulation.)
To give you an idea of what these pressure figures mean, the average household water tap is about 30 psi.In the open ocean, the pressure figure per 100 ft is 44psi. So at 5000 ft, that comes out to over 2200 psi, or over a ton of pressure for every square inch. Even something as simple as a motor casing, a camera housing, or even the cable that carries the data back to the surface has to be specially designed with that environment in mind.
And that illustration Dean linked to, even though it is informative, it’s not even close to scale. To get a better idea of the actual scale, tape a pocket knife to your ceiling to represent one of the recovery vessels and set a thimble on the floor beneath it to represent the well-head. That is closer to the actual scale.
And as others have pointed out, at 12460 ft. down, the Titanic is over twice as deep.
The basic problem is that the oil and gas is coming out under great pressure. When drilling a well, they normally have a column of hundreds or thousands of feet of mud to balance the oil and gas pressure until they can seal the well with concrete. In this case they thought they had sealed it with concrete and were removing the mud, but the concrete seal failed. Once the oil is coming out under that pressure it is very hard to seal it back up again.
The technique that seems to always work is to drill relief wells.
In 1979 the Mexican state oil company had similar blowout at the Ixtoc I rig. The blowout preventer failed, and they tried all the things BP has tried. It took 10 months to stop that leak by drilling relief wells, although they were able to reduce the amount of oil leaking by some of the techniques BP is trying. That well was only in 160 feet of water.
In 2009 there was a blowout on the Montara platform in the Timor Sea off Australia. It took about 2 1/2 months to stop that leak after relief wells had been drilled. The Montara well was 240 feet deep.
There just doesn’t appear to be any technology to stop one of these leaks except to drill relief wells. even in shallower water, much less at 5000 feet.
Which is why we need to get back to drilling on land.
The need for oil isn’t going away any time soon. Once the American public and politicians realize that and deal with it realistically we can have a sane energy policy.
It is true that the need is not going to go away quickly, but it is going to have to decrease sometime. We give big tax breaks to oil and gas companies. We need to start giving big tax breaks to alternative energy industries.
The recession has decreased the demand for oil, but once the world economy begins to recover, oil prices will go up again.
Drilling on land has environmental risks too. It would be better to drill in places like ANWR when oil prices are 200+ per barrel. Then oil companies can reasonably be required to take more precautions.
“it honestly may be the biggest man-made environmental disaster in history”
It’s interesting that so many people are saying that, because it’s not even close. It’s a third the size of the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and half the size of the 10th largest oil spill of all time at this point. And that’s just counting oil spills. Granted, base rate information has been notably lacking from news coverage.
“Current plans include drilling another hole to try to relieve the presssure”
That’s not a plan; they’ve been working on that for over a month. It’s probably the only thing that will work.
John, I stand corrected. The first source I checked I swear said Titanic was resting a bit under 2000 feet down (which is still very deep and dangerous) but I checked a couple based on what you said and you’re right, it’s deeper. And took some amazing equipment to get to it–equipment which would only be marginally useful here mind you.
I’ll address the other corrections and objections tomorrow, man I’m tired, maybe it’s not the biggest but it’s not -done- yet and the area affected is simply enormous and going to keep growing. Although they’re working to conatain it. Must sleep…
We give big tax breaks to oil and gas companies. We need to start giving big tax breaks to alternative energy industries.
No, we shouldn’t be giving special tax breaks to any sector of any industry. The government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the private marketplace. If the oil and gas industry gets special tax breaks (other than normal business expenses, which are deductable to every company in every industry because we tax profits rather than revenue), we should remove them. Likewise for alternative energy industries. And likewise, we should remove the massive direct subisidies we give to various politically favored forms of alternative energy, and we should remove any direct subsidies we may give to the oil and gas industry.
BTW, I’m curious what tax breaks oil and gas companies get. The only things that came up in a quick googling was the ability to deduct the cost of drilling from revenue, which seems like a clear-cut case of a normal business expense, like Ben and Jerry’s being able to deduct the cost of making ice cream from their revenues.
I am admittedly ignorant about these issues. Is it stupid to ask why it is that if the only way to comtain a deep water oil spill is to drill a relief well, why is it that a relief well can’t be drilled in advance as a safety measure? Clearly it can’t be as expensive as the cleanup of this disaster will be. No?
It also seems to me that there ought to be much better plans in place for containing a spill should one occur.
Mikeca: Alternative energy companies receive enormous tax breaks and tax credits; most wouldn’t survive without them, because most aren’t profitable without being propped up by the government.
Maggie: You’re right. There was a design failure here. The ‘bots can’t get the shutoff valves closed. If they’d had an alternative method of pressure reduction they would have had this more easily contained. Doubtless they could have had other design improvements as well. This is a massive design failure. Which BP definitely shares in, but so do the private insurers and government regulators who greenlighted this, and also greenlighted continuing production when there were warnings there might be a problem (which there were). The government didn’t want the economic cost of shutting down to affect the already devastated area in a time of economic downturn so told ‘em to keep working while they tried to fix it. So when it blew, the fingers started pointing in all directions, and will doubtless continue to do so.
J1: Thank you soooo much for that link to provide perspective. I’ll put something on the front page about it.
Oh man. Eric took my comment:
This “the oil companies get tax breaks” mantra appears to be one of those lefty things to say that has no reality to it. There may have been, at some point, tax incentives to encourage exploration and drilling; I don’t know. I’d like to know what there is now, too.
To me this is just another unpreventable disaster, like the floods in 93, the Tacoma Narrows bridge or an airline crash. We cannot prevent all oil spills. There will be mistakes. There will be unknown problems. I can’t get excited about it. Obama couldn’t have prevented it and can’t fix it.
But if he really wants to avoid oil spills he should open up Anwar and the shallow water drilling off Florida and California. Sometimes listening to environmentalists is a bad idea. OK, nearly always. Environmentalists have an ideologically based purity problem that keeps them from the sort of practical solutions which actually help the environment in the real world.
Yours,
Tom
Exactly right, Tom. It is a hell of a lot easier to shut down a leak on a well on land (hello ANWR) or in 150 feet of water instead of 5000 feet.
And the reason drilling is banned in those areas but not in mile deep water ? The environmental impact. So how’s that working out for you environmentalists ???
Ah, great stuff today from the environmentalist wing. Apparently there are issues with nitrous oxide released during drilling and there are, of course, regulations that restrict these emissions. And there are people at MMS that do not want to provide any exemption for BP drilling their relief wells. So, the pace of drilling is slower than it could be. Cut your nose off to spite your face ? Throw the baby out with the bathwater ?
How about jackasses like that should never be allowed within 100 yards of regulating anything. Regulators should be required to have some modest amount of common sense. Clearly this is not the case at MMS.
why is it that a relief well can’t be drilled in advance as a safety measure? Clearly it can’t be as expensive as the cleanup of this disaster will be. No?
For any given spill, yes, it would be cheaper. But in the aggregate, not even close.
Given the Ixtoc spill was 30 years ago, let’s be liberal about the risks and say that gulf spills will happen about every 20 years. Further let’s say that a well has a working lifetime of 60 years. Thus in a well’s lifetime there will be about 3 spills in the gulf. Let’s also be liberal about the expense and say the spills cost $1 billion each for a total of $3b.
There are about 4,000 wells in the gulf right now yeilding a per well spill expense of about $750k.
Thus, it is only cheaper to pre-drill relief wells if the cost of doing so is less than that, which it isn’t, not by a long shot.
I’m not complaining about any of the oil spill upshot, because I want a permanent end to oil drilling, and I want that in turn because I want the USA and the world to transition to alternative fuels, regional and sustainable economies and agrictural bases, and better regional planning which includes regional public transit. I always freely admit my motives on any and all policy issues. And the way I see it, only this type of public shock will push our national leadership and as well as our national economy into the direction of sustainable energy sources.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sustainable energy sources. Hmmm.
Electricity is not easily storable and transportable, so it’s not very good for transportation. Do you know how much more land fast electrical charging stations take then gas stations? Eight times. Because a fill up takes eight times as long. No one is going to enjoy waiting for their car to fill up, especially on long trips.
Electric cars aren’t there yet.
We could fix this if roads had third rails or overhead wires. That’s pretty expensive and will have a noticeable environmental impact.
Wind energy is pretty much useless, and will be until we can convert it into easily storable and transportable energy. It’s no good for baseload, cyclic load or peak load, because it is utterly variable and undependable.
Solar energy is good for daytime usage (cyclic load), except that it gets cloudy. When solar cells are actually cheaper than dirt it will be economical, but right now we have to have build out duplicate capacity for cloudy days. Ugh.
Geothermal and nuclear are great. They are good for baseload, cyclic load and peak load.
None of these are as good as petroleum for transportation.
Yours,
Wince
Wince, “sustainable energy” is a definition that I use for energy that can be grown.
In addition, the combination of regional transit and broadband will enable great reductions in american dependency on fossil fuels of all kinds.
In any case, the oil will disappear and you had better find a way to adapt to a future without it.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
> Wince, “sustainable energy” is a definition that I use for energy that can be grown.
Bio-fuels are pretty good in some ways, but they would take *a very large amount* of land if we actually tried to replace all our oil. They are essentially low efficiency solar energy, which is very diffuse. From a land use perspective, I would think they would horrify you. Geothermal will last as long as the radioactive elements in the earth’s core keep decaying. Nuclear fuel will last thousands of years, especially if we breed plutonium and use thorium. Solar is good as long as the sun is.
With currrent technology it would probably be easier to make gasoline from coal – of which we have plenty, and use nuclear and geothermal energy for electricity until electric cars are good enough.
Yours,
Wince
ONe substitute I’d like to see a lot more of: more telecommuting. There are a ton of jobs that shouldn’t require people to drive to work at all, but hidebound thinking keeps companies demanding it anyway. Not for every job, but for an awful lot of them.
More reliable public transportation would make a huge difference too, but conservatives really, really hate trains and buses. We social engineered everyone into wanting cars by building the interstate highway system, but God forbid you suggest social engineering our way back out of that boondoggle.
“conservatives really, really hate trains and buses”
I hear that a lot but I think it’s absurd. What any fiscally conservative hates is spending money badly which is what most trains do. No one complains about the subway in NY or the El in chicago, but that doesn’t make light rail make sense in a town like Houston or as a viable commuter option between LA and SF. As to Buses they just need to get close to paying for themselves in some way. What with calling that hate?
Comments on this entry are closed.