Oil spill

[oz rider]

But yesterday when I got home from work, I thought I was crazy, thought I smelled oil. Winds are out of the south. Well, this morning, it's confirmed, on www.nola.com, we are smelling the spill in New Orleans, which is more than 90 miles away.

This has been in the news here pretty well since it happened, but I wouldn't have imagined smelling it 90 miles away; thanks for the local knowledge.
BP has been named a few times here, with a few grabs from its comms guy who didn't seem to be convincing anyone.

[Skierchickie]

This is horrible. If absolutely ANYTHING positive can come from this, hopefully it will change a lot of people's thinking on environmental and energy issues. Maybe because it has hit America in our own yard? The Exxon Valdez was horrible, the Barrier Reef incident was horrible, but were they too far away to feel real to people?

I work at a research facility that is part of a (primarily engineering) university. I'm amazed at how often I hear pretty scientifically-oriented people at work talking about climate change not being real. Making statements about how humans just don't affect the planet that much. Okay - I'm no expert, and everyone has a right to their opinion. Maybe it isn't real. I, personally, do fully believe that climate change is real, and can see the possibilities whenever I look at a city, a pollution-belching factory, etc. How can we NOT be hurting things? One co-worker said to me "Humans are animals, too. We're part of nature." Do people not get it that we're doing things that no other creatures do, and these are things that do have an impact?

This oil well explosion is a terrible tragedy, and one with repercussions that I can't even imagine. I can't wrap my brain around 5000 barrels of oil per day. For months on end. Accidents happen, yes. Malfunctions happen, yes. But if we're going to strip the planet of all its resources, we'd better have some serious safeguards in place for when those accidents and malfunctions happen, so we don't destroy everything else in our path. There isn't any easy answer to the energy issue, but can't we at least try to do things right, rather than trying to get as rich as possible? Is there no concept of doing the right thing, because it's the right thing, and not only when it makes us the most profit?

Sorry for the rant. I'm upset.

[sundial]

Bmccasland, I've been thinking of you during this oil spill and was wondering if you will be on clean-up duty. This oil spill is not only going to affect NOLA, but the entire gulf coast according the latest developments.

Oil-Spill Fight Bogs Down
BP Says Stopgap Plan to Cap Well May Take Weeks; Weather Slows Effort to Limit Slick

By BEN CASSELMAN, STEPHEN POWER And ANA CAMPOY

VENICE, La.—Engineers prepared to try containing the gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well with giant underwater boxes and siphons, as seaside towns braced for landfall of a giant slick.

BP PLC, the oil giant that leased the rig whose sinking last week caused the disaster, has failed in efforts using unmanned submarines to activate a shutoff device on the undersea well.

A stopgap solution BP is planning—covering the well with containers and pumping the oil out—will take weeks to roll out and is untested at the one-mile depth of this well, however. BP said it would begin working this weekend on a permanent solution to the crisis, drilling a new hole to cut off the damaged well, but industry scientists said that could take months.

The Deepwater Horizon, operated for BP by Transocean Ltd., burned and sank last week, leaving 11 dead and an open well on the ocean floor.

With a quick solution to shut off the spill looking out of reach Friday, the government and the oil industry struggled to contain the resulting slick and keep it from shore. The American Petroleum Institute alerted members that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wanted advice from the industry on how to manage the spill by the end of Friday.

On Friday evening, the National Guard was mobilized to assist in the cleanup, and the Pentagon said BP would have to bear the cost. Earlier Friday, a small drilling rig tipped over in inland waters near Morgan City, La., the Coast Guard said, though no oil was spilled.

The Deep Horizon slick began threatening the wetlands of the Louisiana coast, raising fears of environmental disaster in some of America's richest shrimp, oyster and fish breeding grounds.

Strong winds and choppy seas hampered efforts to hem in the oil. Several vinyl containment barriers, known as booms, broke up in the rough weather. Others remained on shore, as high waves—expected to continue through the weekend—made it impossible to lay them in the Gulf.

An equally pressing emergency loomed more than 40 miles offshore, where the deepwater well kept spewing oil uncontrollably.

Industry scientists say the permanent solution is to close the entire well. To do that, they must drill another hole—through 13,000 feet of rock a mile under the ocean's floor—that will intercept the leaking well. They can then pump in cement to try to plug the leaks.

This operation will take up to three months and is highly complex; the drills must precisely hit the leaking well—which is just seven inches wide. When a well off the coast of Australia blew out last year, it took five attempts over 10 weeks to hit the old well and shut it down.

Within hours of the explosion, BP was sending unmanned submarines to the well to try to trigger a device called a "blowout preventer," which is essentially a powerful valve meant to clamp down on the well and shut it off in case of emergency.

The device should have been triggered in the explosion, but wasn't; that failure will be a central question in the investigation.

In theory, the blowout preventer can also be activated by underwater robots. BP has six robots working on it, and says it will keep trying, but so far the valve has not worked. "It's just not functioning appropriately," Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, said in an interview this week.

For now, BP is trying a series of stopgap measures. The company is constructing three steel boxes—each 40 feet tall and weighing 73 tons—that it will place on top of the gushing oil. Pipes running through the boxes will carry the oil to a ship.

A similar system was used after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to capture oil from smaller spills in shallow water. But the technique has never been tried in deep water, which involves much higher pressures and near-freezing water temperatures. Engineers are still figuring out how to connect the steel boxes to the ship. BP has said the project will take two to four weeks.

More here....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...NewsCollection

[shootingstar]

I work at a research facility that is part of a (primarily engineering) university. I'm amazed at how often I hear pretty scientifically-oriented people at work talking about climate change not being real. Making statements about how humans just don't affect the planet that much. Okay - I'm no expert, and everyone has a right to their opinion. Maybe it isn't real. I, personally, do fully believe that climate change is real, and can see the possibilities whenever I look at a city, a pollution-belching factory, etc. How can we NOT be hurting things?

This amazed me also about some scientifically oriented people who don't believe in climate change. While I don't disagree there are a myriad of other factors causing unusual climactic patterns (include soil erosion, excessive tree-cutting), but when humankind introduces repetitive processes at a speed which the ecosystem cannot cope for continuous rebalancing/replenishing, then humankind does need to relook and change their practices.

Dearie's opinion on the low profile mention of BP at this time (which could change soon), he believes the oil industry execs...and U.S. senior govn't would be concerned about way too much limelight that could hurt oil production in general, by the U.S. particularily if its own citizens protest too much.

Meanwhile continue to ride our bikes ..

[OakLeaf]

It is a terrible disaster, and it may be a long time before we know the full extent of it.

I'm of two minds about how much focus should be specifically on BP right now. It isn't like any of the oil companies are any different. It's perhaps a futile pipe dream in a capitalist world, but you have to think that - for instance - if the Valdez disaster had been seen as a symptom of something endemically wrong with the oil industry rather than just something wrong with Exxon, more attention might have been given to energy alternatives.

Pipe dream, I know.

[Grog]

I am pretty upset about this.

In the meantime, this article is interesting:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/...driving?page=1

[Mr. Bloom]

I'm sick over it too! I didn't follow closely at first since I thought that it was a non-issue and contained...boy was I wrong!

[Blueberry]

Every news story I read sounds worse

They're now saying because of the Gulf Stream, it may get the East Coast (or at least eastern FL too).

[shootingstar]

The British Columbia provincial govn't premier (Campbell) has offered up our oil spill experts to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1553788/

Campbell has and continues to actively promote off-shore oil well drilling by British Columbian coast. This has never been done before. And there is alot of concern about this. This whole area is virgin and wild territory/waters.

Grog's article link where author focuses on getting car drivers to reduce oil consumption/dependency by using other transportation modes for shorter car trips, is useful.

The tough challenge is convincing a huge group of people who are very accustomed to living a perceived faster pace of life, getting something instantly..ie. getting somewhere by car, which they perceive is faster (despite sometimes, congestion and driving around to find parking), have their own personal space/privacy (in a car) and be protected from the weather.

One wonders how many people will see the connection between high risk of oil spills in oil extraction that comes with communities and lifestyle all oriented around cars..which depend on alot of oil consumption.

Will they make the connection, when they can not buy fresh/local shrimp/seafood? Methinks even if the dead animals wash up onto the land near their area, alot of people still won't see the big picture. They'll still want to jump into their car several times per week, at any time, for the 3-5 mile drive to the store / bank / library / community centre...vs. cycling, taking public transit or walking or at least car-share. Or maybe the change is/will happen alot sooner.

[tulip]

I read yesterday that they have NO IDEA how much oil is spilled, and that some estimates from satellite images are in the 9-million gallon range already.

Terrible, terrible. It was not an accident. It was negligence--permissible by the industry and by the government. There should have been backups to backups. And Plans B, C, D, and E. But no, there were not.

[bmccasland]

There was an interesting interview with Tony Hayward, CEO of BP this morning on NPR's Morning Edition http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=126468782.

At least the weather is a bit more cooperative today.

[bmccasland]

Lost track of the attempt number to stop this thing, but the latest one has been pronounced a failure.
They say it'll be four more days before they're staged to try the next thing - cut a pipe and cap it, pumping oil to the surface. Which they've tried, and failed, before. But apparently this version will have hot water pumped down to keep things from freezing up, which was the cause of the failure the last time. So four more days of 5000+ gallons/day will pump into the Gulf.

There was an interesting article in today's Times-Picayune about cosy relationship between the State of Louisiana, oil companies, and the state regulatory agency - the same state agency collects royalities and permits wetland impacts. http://www.nola.com
"Oil projects often sail past state regulators" http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpa...630.xml&coll=1

I've dealt with this agancy, the wetland regulatory end of it, and often wonder why my agency is raked over the coals (OK, that's our biased opinion), while we see that the oil companies are allowed to rape and pillage with abandon. Glad to see the dichotomy is out, even if it was burried in the middle of the front section of the paper.

The only good news I can say is that I no longer smell oil or corexit (the chemical dispersant) at my house. Either that or I'm now used to it as a background smell. I guess if a strong south wind blows, we'll smell it again.

And Hurricane Season starts tomorrow.

My heart is sick. I'd love to go for a nice long bike ride to work off the stress, but my bumm knee isn't up to it yet.

[shootingstar]

Am curious to know though...for people living the states that border the Gulf where the oil spill is occurring:

Are most people just horrified by what they see, and just continue on with their lives, but not change aspects of their lives to reduce oil dependency?

I guess until the oil is lapping up literally into their backyard, most people won't make the change. Or they can't eat local shrimp/local seafood right now because it's contaminated?

I know it's not that easy if an area is built ..to depend on cars primarily to get around, etc.

[Grog]

I sat horrified watching this for a while yesterday:
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_inte...ov_stream.html

Right now it's showing some large metal cage (?) but the camera view changes now and then, and for a while it was the oil gushing out of the hole. Terrifying.

[SOAP BOX]

As a civilization we are willing to get oil from more and more remote and dangerous places. And we're pretty snug about it. I read a feature about this guy that specializes in "killing" operations, who boasts that there isn't a well he's not been able to kill, and how confident he is that this one will be no exception. That kind of technical self-suffisance makes me sick. This well might teach us a lesson... but what will we learn?

I can ride my bike to work all I want - great! - but that's just the peak of the iceberg. Everything we consume heavily relies on fossil fuels, including services such as the Internet (how much energy used by a single google search? a post on TeamEstrogen?), television, health care, etc. All things we take for granted. Renewables, you say? Some guy did the back-of-the-envelope calculation to check out whether the UK could live only on renewables. http://www.withouthotair.com/ (There is a 10-page synopsis.) Bad news ladies: basically it would require 75% of the country to be covered in crops for biomass, 500 km of coast line to be used for tidal, and solar panels covering about 5 to 10% of the country. You'd also have to fill the sea with windmills, equivalent to twice the area of Wales. And that would be quite enough at current levels of use. To say nothing of the mining and destruction required to make, say, electric car batteries.

The conclusion is obvious: the only way is to drastically reduce our consumption, not just of direct energy (in our homes) but of everything. Or to keep watching live, in horror, as millions of gallons of oil transform the Gulf of Mexico into a dead sea.

[/SOAP BOX]

If you read this far, thanks for letting me vent.

[Tri Girl]

Grog- I read your soapbox and that study on using only renewables is eye-opening.
You're right- the problem is that petroleum is used in SOOOO many things. We can't just simply do without it. I wonder if we stop using so much as gasoline, if what we don't use there could be used for many more years making the things we depend upon still available to us?
I'll be gone before there is a serious crisis/shortage of fossil fuels (based on projections of how much longer it will last). It will require extreme ingenuity to figure out how to live without it- but I'm hopeful that not only technology will progress, but that humans will be smart enough to figure it out. I think we have to change our habits NOW and start doing things immediately to help future generations.

It's such a quandary...