Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
- In Blind Poll, Republicans Choose Progressive Budget Solutions Over Their Own Party's
- Not Guilty By Virtue of Videotape, Which, Unlike the Police, Doesn't Lie
- The 'Land of 10,000 Lakes' Is Running Dry
- Manning: Before Wikileaks, Leaked Docs Offered to NYT, WaPo
- Bob Woodward Embodies US Political Culture in a Single Outburst
Popular content
Today's Top News
Containment Dome Fails to Stop Oil Gusher: No Plan B
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - BP officials desperately searched Monday for a new fix to the enormous Gulf of Mexico oil spill after efforts to cap a gushing leak with a containment dome hit a perilous snag.
An oil soaked bird struggles against the oil slicked side of the HOS Iron Horse supply vessel at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana Sunday, May 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) British energy giant BP, which owns the lion's share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, is facing the jaw-dropping possibility that, failing a swift fix it has yet to deliver with a containment dome, the crisis could spiral into an even worse environmental calamity.
The White House also was scrambling to contain fallout from the massive disaster threatening to take a toll on President Barack Obama's political and energy agenda.
In Washington, Obama on Monday "will meet with a number of Cabinet members and senior staff in the White House Situation Room to review BP efforts to stop the oil leak, as well as to decide on next steps to ensure all is being done to contain the spread, mitigate the environmental impact and provide assistance to affected states," a White House statement said.
Meanwhile the Minerals Management Service (MMS) said it "continues to work with BP to explore all options that could stop or mitigate oil leaks from the damaged well."
The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank some 80 km (50 miles) southeast of Venice, Louisiana April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.
The riser pipe that had connected the rig to the wellhead now lies fractured on the seabed a mile below, spewing out oil at a rate at some 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day.
Sheen from the leading edge of the slick has surrounded island nature reserves off the coast of Louisiana and tar balls have reached as far as the Alabama coast, threatening tourist beaches further east.
Sea life is being affected in a low-lying region that contains vital spawning grounds for fish, shrimp and crabs and is a major migratory stop for many species of rare birds.
The 2.4-billion-dollar Louisiana fishing industry has been slapped with a temporary ban in certain areas due to health concerns about polluted fish.
No Plan B
BP, facing a barrage of lawsuits and clean-up costs soaring above 10 million dollars a day, had pinned its hopes on a 98-ton concrete and steel containment box that it successfully lowered 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) down over the main leak.
But the contraption lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals.
Still, if efforts fail to make the giant funnel system effective, there is no solid plan B to prevent potentially tens of millions of gallons of crude from causing one of the worst ever environmental catastrophes.
Untold damage is already being done by the 3.5 million gallons estimated to be in the sea so far, but the extent of that harm will rise exponentially if the only solution is a relief well that takes months to drill.
Admiral Thad Allen, head of the US Coast Guard, suggested they were considering what he called a "junk shot" to plug the main leak.
"They're actually going to take a bunch of debris, shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak," Allen, who is leading the US government's response, told CBS television.
This could be risky as experts have warned that excessive tinkering with the blowout preventer -- a huge 450-ton valve system that should have shut off the oil -- could see crude shoot out unchecked at 12 times the current rate.
There are also fears the slick, which covers an area of about 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers), could be carried around the Florida peninsula if it spreads far enough south to be picked up by a special Gulf current.
"If this gusher continues for several months, it's going to cover up the Gulf coast and it's going to get down into the loop current and that's going to take it down the Florida Keys and up the east coast of Florida," warned Florida Senator Bill Nelson.
"You are talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, to our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training, which is in the Gulf of Mexico," he told CNN.
On the dome front, clearing out the slushy crystals is easy -- the chamber just has to be raised to warmer levels, Suttles told reporters. Keeping the crystals out so that a pipe can be lowered into the dome to suck the oil to a waiting barge is another matter.
BP began drilling a first relief well one week ago, but that will take up to three months to drill -- by which time some 20 million gallons of crude could have streamed into the sea and ruined the fragile ecology of the Gulf.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
164 Comments so far
Show AllWe need to let Iran help:
http://www.alan.com/2010/05/03/iran-offers-to-help-us-fight-oil-spill/
Too bad Israel is in control of the Congress and the Executive branches of our government.
If Iran really does have a solution to this problem it is CRIMINAL for the Obama administration to not do everything to get their help.
Yep, This could be a gift if it lead to peace but since the wars are over oil in the first place, miracles will wait.
Any further reports confirming this?
They should make Sarah Palin clean it all up with a straw...SUCK, BABY, SUCK
Thanks for the chuckle on an otherwise depressing problem.
Very good analogy actually.
With a tasty little sprinkling of irony and symbolism.
Doh!
Re: Dubets comment at bottom of thread.
Oil company's have all the money in the world , and therefore , they run the world, wars, banks, wall street, countrys, us anyway. and we have the most powerful military in the world, wow, that worked well.
They are not going to prosecute or jail themselves.
This is not the planet Earth , this is planet OIL.
All life is expendable, good, than there will be no one left to burn oil.
I guess they can bring in the demolition guys now, after 9/11 they can do anything.
Exxon Valdez wasn't disaster enough for us . . . !!!
No lessons learned --
NATIONALIZE THE OIL INDUSTRY -- shouldn't be in private
hands!!
.
"According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"
Wow how sad. They've killed us.
The sadness I feel about this makes everything else going on in the world pale in comparison. If this doesnt change everybody, nothing will.
Sioux Rose
I can second what you said, and I liked your earlier post about the mystics, dancers and poets. Amen to that! IF there is time left to implement it... these ecosystem events reverberate through neighboring ecosystems like an infinite number of overlapping circles. It's so hard to take in what has happened, and continues to happen.
Pisces is the sign of this closing Age phase, and it's related to Poseidon, the "god" of the sea (a/k/a Neptune). Although someone posted an interesting article disputing the origin of oil, I learned that it came from organic sea bed deposits. Thus the profound irony that the Piscean Age ends with the quest for oil ripped from the sea, that being the thing that threatens life, and may exponentially reduce the number of living beings. If the fish die, what of the birds? So much is at stake here... and the dearth of leadership is breath taking.
You stated it very well. NOTHING else compares. Words fail. The war machine in its lust for oil brought destruction to our shores, quite literally. And yes, the consumer demand has added pressure to the deadly mix. How does one mourn for so vast a holocaust, one directed against the very womb of living beings? I share your grief.
No one has commented on what will happen when a hurricane rolls across the gulf, picks up all that oil and sprays it all across the Southern states. What will the short and long-term effects be to the environment and people, animal and plant health? How much oil will have spewed out by then and how much can a hurricane actually pick up and carry and how far?
yes...so far, we are missing dramatics...the oil has not reached much, yet...
the dramatics will arrive, however, as you say...time and tide...and hurricane...
On the boob toob I saw a petroleum industry "expert" say that a hurricane in the gulf would actually be a good thing because it would disperse the oil. Do I have to comment further?
Disperse the oil on... us?
Halliburton will be awarded the no-bid contract for oil cleanup all across the Gulf States. They'll subcontract all the work and make millions from the government contract.
EuroDan, this is the one thing we can know for sure here.
Anyone ever hear of the accumulation at the ocean surface of light plastic at the infamous "gyres" at the center of the North Atlantic and North pacific oceans.
The same principle can be used to confine the oil to a single location or pool as it rises to the surface. If the sea water were to be induced to rotate around the rising oil as it's being "dragged up" alongside, the oil would tend to stay in the center, from which point it could easily be collected, or in bad weather, burned as it reaches the surface.
Burning it would only add the tiniest fraction to the carbon dioxide pollution.
By doing this, the vast majority of the GOM can be maintained "oil free" in spite of the ongoing leak. There are a number of ways the sea water surrounding the oil could be induced to rotate or "spin" as it rises. This is not "rocket science".
How do you cause the sea water to circle around the oil? Why isn't anybody working on this?
Superman flies at mach 20 one foot off the surface of the gulf in a circle 600 miles in circumference. Nothing to it.
Superman's services would not be required. The size of the oil pool would depend on how fast it was collected or burned. If removed rapidly, the oil pool at the center of the gyre could be confined to be much less than a mile in diameter.
so it sounds like one mile deep makes a one mile diameter slick?
Is this based on the amount per second of the leak, the depth or both?
The depth and breadth of the oil pool would depend on the "leak" rate, the rate it was removed fromthe surface by burning or being "vacuumed-up", the gas flow ratio, causing turbulence and sea water entrainment when the gas breaks the surface, and the amount of total angular momentum in the sea water vortex surrounding it.
I think it would be quite feasible to confine the oil to a pool less than half a mile in diameter.
It might be useful to add a "mild" surfactant near the leak...not a "detergent" but a mild one like the one that causes the bubbles in Champagne to form and break, for example (Marangoni Effect).
This could be done either passively or actively.
An active way would be to place a number of pumps around the leak, pointing in the same tangential direction and upward at a 45 degree angle from the sea bed. They should probably be set on a platform, six feet above the sea bed.
If you surrounded the leak with a 20-30 foot "coffee can on stilts" allowing water to enter through the gap below the rim of the cylinder, it could work even better. The coffe can would be open on both top and bottom.
A passive way would be to allow the rising oil and gas provide the energy to develop rotation of the seawater and by deflecting it as it approaches. The device would look like a "squirrel cage, and the incoming water would be deflected tangentially with vanes.
The cages would be "stackable" each one 10 to 20 feet high, all deflecting incoming flow from the radial to the tangential direction. It would probably take only 2-4 modules.
I guess you could actually set up a model scaled down experiment to see if it can work.
That would have to be done in any case.
Good Luck!
I don't understand all you are writing about how this could work. However, if you are convinced that it will, you should attempt to contact "the authorities" whether that is BP or MMS or EPA or whomever. I'm not being facetious at all. Anything that could work should be tried. This thing is a monumental environmental disaster.
No it is not rocket science, it seems more like complex hydrodynamics. This swirling vortex sounds like a good idea but superman is too busy trying to rotate the earth backwards to go for a swim.
Like the above poster said how would this be done and maintained?
I wondered why in the hell Corporations were granted, ‘Personhood.’ The following is freaking maddening to hear. The precedent that became law is just another in a long line of screw ups that have pervaded our society. This is one of the reasons that BP will never pay for their crimes in the Gulf… It’s worth a listen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUYPO2b2jDQ&feature=player_embedded
Where is the Dick (cheney) when we need him? Lying low no doubt. Now these men/boys want to throw golf balls at the gusher - why not pumpkin throwing contest. They want volunteers to start to clean it up. Volunteers? How about high paid people who will be putting their health at risk? Boycott BP and remember Rush L. who said the environmental terrosists probably sabotaged the well. Idiocracy but more so! Do BP execs get their bonuses this year? Probably.
Not only should they lose their bonuses, their entire salary should go to all the people who live on the Gulf whose lives they have just destroyed.
Ah, so the corporations want "personhood?" Well, I dont believe in the death penalty for human beings, but corporations? - that is another matter.
BP, Inc. should be terminated, all proceeds from the auction of the company should go toward clean-up and compensation for all the human lives they have destroyed and all the wildlife they have murdered.
In a few months we'll all hear on the news how BP posted record quarterly profits in the wake of this disaster.
Why not shoot Rush Limbaugh into the hole to plug it? If he isn't enough (unlikely on the face of it), then add Savage, Beck and all the other broadcast blowhards.
Fantastic idea! Just make sure it's Michael Savage, not Dan Savage...
Great idea!
FastEddie75 --- thanks for today's only smile.
if only we could reach Doc Savage!
This should refute, once and for all, any and all legitimacy for the tyrannical belief-system, that has been destructively dominating this country, that claims that all of human existence should be "managed" by transnational corporations and the corporate plutocracy.
It is time for the world to be guided by artists, ecologists, mystics, shamans, dancers, poets, concerned, non-corporate scientists, musicians, visionaries, teachers, organic farmers and everyone who KNOWS that the transnational corporate-capitalist model for life is a grotesque killing machine designed to turn the earth into excrement...uh...money...uh...aint no difference....
We have all taken enough from these corporate overlords, their whores in Congress and the White House and all the MSM media whore-cheerleaders pushing their propaganda, and it is time to say, "No freakin more!! That's it scumbags, you're finished, done. We want our planet back, and we are going to take it from your greedy, sick little hands and take all you have stolen and use it to renew the world!"
Kitaj writes:
"... the transnational corporate-capitalist model for life is a grotesque killing machine designed to turn the earth into excrement...uh...money...uh...aint no difference...."
Excrement is very different from money, part of the beautifully balanced cycle of life and death on the living Earth. Shit is food for life that builds soil that feeds plants that feed animals that shit etc. Each ecosystem uses the shit that is produced within it, and transforms it into more life. No waste in Nature.
Too bad the natural carbon balance that had evolved over millions of years got violently disturbed by those smart humans digging coal and pumping oil and gas...
"This should refute, once and for all..."
Yeah it should, but the fact is, the refutation has been stone cold obvious to any with eyes to see for several generations now. The lure of power (including the artificial concentration of power that is money) has distorted human society to the point of cultural insanity and blindness to the most obvious truths.
Who dares to live in truth? Really, who dares to live in truth? It takes a lot more than blogging. i do not mean this as a personal dig at any of us, here i sit blogging. i have always tried to live in truth, not buy into the lies, not fall prey to the lure of power (the lure of convenience in consumer culture being one of the most potent lures of power). A year ago i finally bought a computer. So i can blog? With batteries made from rare earth metals mined in China? Powered by the corporate energy grid? That's not living in truth.
In truth, we do not need the oil. In truth, we do not need the computers. In truth, we do not need to live, and this truth will come home to us, whatever our illusions of money, and convenience, and "necessity" that have blinded us to the truth.
But i digress...
"It is time for the world to be guided by artists, ecologists, mystics, shamans, dancers, poets, concerned, non-corporate scientists, musicians, visionaries, teachers, organic farmers..."
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
You are correct, I should have chosen a better metaphor. How about "turn the earth into toxic waste of which money is the abstract symbol"?
"In truth, we do not need to live, and this truth will come home to us, whatever our illusions of money, and convenience, and "necessity" that have blinded us to the truth."
The fact that we do not "need" to live nor that the world/universe "needs" us is an ever constant truth. It may not be a need but living is the only thing that an individual living being, from the smallest prion to the largest whale, has. Once it's over it's over. Unfortunately, man has not realized this basic truth and attempts to refute it by varying means and degrees, and destroying life itself more quickly, only to succumb in the end.
I do not mean to say that it is possible to live without other living beings being consumed, that is just the way it is, but that man in his hubristic way of thinking does not realize that the world/universe does not "need" him/her. Asi es la vida. That's life!
OYE
Of course there was no Plan B. Capitalism never has a Plan B. Nothing new or surprising here.
No Plan B to replace the living Earth...
Very hard to watch this coming for the past 40 years...
The people who caused this disaster are getting worried that it might take anywhere from three months to two years to get this monster under control, if ever.
Every effort that they have undertaken has demonstrated that present technology is not adequate to the situation, from the initial failure of the cementing procedure that led to the explosion and fire, to the sinking of the drilling rig, the subsequent revelation that BP chose to save a paltry sum instead of installing a real blowout preventer, to the utter failure of the coffer dam/dome scheme due to easily foreseen creation and accumulation of methane clathrates that have blocked the attempts to vacuum up the results of the oil spewing from the broken and crimped riser pipe.
These attempts have done nothing to address the main blowout which is still spewing crude oil into the ocean at an acknowledged rate of 25000 bbl/day at an estimated 100000 psi.
That psi number is wrong. It's probably 3000 psi. Where does that number come from? The 25k bpd is possible, not much known still. They are probably lying about 5000 bpd.
I did some quick research. This is from The Oil Drum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6421
The upshot is that the blowout is operating at 30000 to 69000 psi. With several millions of barrels of oil to still spew out into the gulf.
30,000 psi? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And one plan is to, what, blow junk (shredded tires, golf balls) INTO the pipe to plug it? That's like throwing paper planes into machine gun fire.
I think the BP folks are packing their bags and just bluffing us with these 'solutions' until they can get out of dodge.
That's why the back-up, back-up plan being seriously discussed is to plant a nuke on the hole and let a fission/fusion explosion seal the drill head.
With 2000 other wells in the Gulf...? Even they wouldn't be so stupid...but, then, back in '03, I thought they wouldn't be stupid enuf to invade Iraq.