deep water drilling
sastyk | October 10, 2010Final report from John on the ASPO Conference
I am back on the train to New York, reviewing what occurred in the last three days. Thinking over what I learned in the talks given on an autopsy of the Gulf Oil spill brings to mind the ones given in the "Message, Media and Outreach" section.
There was no question that in the speaker's minds that the Gulf accident was the result of a series of almost inexplicable mistakes by the crew on the rig. There was a profound lack of communication between various levels of command both on the rig and above. As the errors were discussed, the realization…
sastyk | September 2, 2010Yesterday I was on the phone with my Rabbi, who was asking me for data bout the BP oil spill and wanted to know whether there was any connection to peak oil. I told him that there certainly is - the BP oil spill is in many measures a consequence of a society under deep pressure to develop every conceivable source of oil, at great monetary, energy and ecological cost. The connection to peak oil is obvious - once upon a time, one dug a well in the ground and oil came spurting up - the version of oil prospecting one can still see in Bugs Bunny Cartoons today.
Now increasingly, the world's…
sastyk | June 16, 2010Reader Stephen B. pointed me to this comment at The Oil Drum by someone who argues that there's more going on under the Gulf that we think. For those who think it is strange that I be highlighting a comment in a thread, I should note that TOD attracts many, many petroleum geologists and other professionals, and while sometimes the comments are the same "pulled it out of my ass" as on every other website, often, the technical knowledge on offer is pretty astounding. This one passes my smell test, which is usually pretty good - that doesn't mean I claim commenter Doug R is right - it means I…
sastyk | June 16, 2010In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous "Jack" oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data - people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil - five miles down underneath the ocean. The media was excited, ignoring the fact that large oil field potential reserves are routinely revised - and almost always downwards. The public and the media, without enough knowledge of oil production…
sastyk | June 2, 2010Definitely read the whole thing
More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were…
sastyk | May 20, 2010Thanks to fellow science blogger Ed Brayton for the link to this New York Times article, which suggests that because of ties to the company, BP chose to flood the Gulf with a dispersant that is both more toxic than many of the other options and also less effective.
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., whose current leadership includes executives from BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that…
sastyk | May 17, 2010We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…
sastyk | April 29, 2010The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez:
Over the last few days, estimates had held that the Gulf of Mexico oil spilling was leaking about 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, into the water each day--bad, but still not historically bad on a scale like the spill caused by the Exxon Valdez. Except now, after closer investigation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that oil company BP's estimate might in fact be five times too low.
Rear Adm. Mary Landry, the Coast Guard's…