Putting an End to the BP Oil Spill

Marine, News

With media coverage consistent on the oil spill for over a month now there have been many suggestions of what to do to stop the flow of oil. To date nothing that has been considered by BP has worked and it seems like the ideas are getting more outlandish and improbable. This week we’re seeing just the latest failed plan to pump a mix of mud and rocks into the base at the blowout preventer. All that has come of this plan has been oil mixed with mud coming out of the pipes with no blockage taking hold.

As we’ve seen, the oil is moving out into the gulf stream, which will have consequences for the Eastern seaboard and potentially for adjacent coastlines as it’s difficult to predict what the full impact of the spill will be. I couldn’t help but feel like I was following the spill as I drove up from Miami to Cape Cod for the summer, passing Cape Hadderas, where the expect the oil to reach. As Discovery explains:

The red arrows indicate the flow of the Gulf Stream, running from Florida up the Eastern Coast of the United States.

Many ocean scientists are now raising concerns that a powerful current could spread the still-bubbling slick from the Florida Keys all the way to Cape Hatteras off North Carolina. These oceanographers are carefully watching the Gulf Loop Current, a clockwise swirl of warm water that sets up in the Gulf of Mexico each spring and summer. If the spill meets the loop — the disaster becomes a runaway.

“It could make it from Louisiana all the way to Miami in a week, maybe less.” said Eric Chassignet, director of the Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. “It is pretty fast.”

As you can see in this map from ROFFS, the oil spill continues to get closer to the loop current

Right now, some computer models show the spill 30 to 50 miles north of the loop current. If the onshore winds turn around and push the oil further south: “That would be a nightmare,” said Yonggang Liu, research associate at the University of South Florida who models the current. “Hopefully we are lucky, but who knows. The winds are changing and difficult to predict.”

Imagine the loop current as an ocean-going highway, transporting tiny plankton, fish and other marine life along a watery conveyor belt. Sometimes it even picks up a slug of freshwater from the Mississippi River — sending it on a wandering journey up to North Carolina.

The Gulf Loop Current acts like a jet of warm water that squirts in from the Caribbean basin and sloshes around the Gulf of Mexico before being squeezed out the Florida Strait, where it joins the larger and more powerful Gulf Stream current.

Friends down in the Florida Keys have been sightings tar balls washing ashore even though the press is not acknowledging that it has hit this area yet. The tar balls are getting “fingerprinted” to be able to tell if they can be linked to Deepwater Horizon or a different oil source.

What I think is one of the most unfortunate aspects of the whole spill is the lack of transparency throughout the process without reaching out to engage the public to come up with clever solutions that do not pander to the economic decision drivers of the oil industry. They are not tapping into the creative and abundant realm of scientists, engineers and just astute people to be able to participate in its resolution and have worked against that happening by not releasing the essential type of information that would help bring about these good ideas:

BP has never publicly released geological cross-sections of the seabed and underlying rock. BP’s Initial Exploration Plan refers to “structure contour maps” and “geological cross sections”, but such drawings and information are designated “proprietary information” and have been kept under wraps.

The government must publicly release details of the geology under the spill site. Until it does so, people will not have be understand what is going on. And failing to release such information may prevent creative scientists from around the world from coming up with a workable solution.

SOURCE: George Washington from The Big Picture: Why Is It So Hard to Stop the Oil Gusher, and Why Was Such Extreme Deepwater Drilling Allowed in the First Place?

As things continue to escalate with no clear end in sight yet, I have a suggestion that is plain and simple.

Here’s the Idea

The pipe is only 20 inches in diameter so it’s like a hypodermic needle going from the reserve of oil through the ocean floor. The plan would be to merely sever the connection and cease the flow of oil.

This is not being considered however because the type of solutions that BP is willing to entertain require that the pipe not be damaged in such a way that it would render it ultimately unusable. That’s why plans have consisted of trying to contain the oil like through the use of a concrete cap or drilling a relief well, which is expected to take months to drill and at least 4 tries to accurately penetrate the pipe because to drill right to the pipe would effectively be like hitting a needle in a haystack. The drilling of a relief well is a proposterous idea that shows the backwards, profit driven thinking of BP to allow the oil to continue to gush while working on finding a new way to tap it instead of block it in an expedient matter.

What should be done  is the pipe should be shut down with explosives, effectively breaking the needle. The pipe should be compromised by using the ROVs that are presently down there, to snake explosives down to severely rupture the pipe. The oil released from the explosion would be stopped by the surrounding earth, which is essentially made up of the same type of composite that contains the reserve of oil naturally. Any additional oil will stop flowing and will be contained below the surface. The major problem with this would be figuring out how to get explosives down there since the oil is flowing at over 2,000 PSI. To give a reference point, a mountain bike tire is pumped up to about 40 PSI.

Comparable ideas have been to use a nuclear explosion to stop the flow but this would be a much more direct way and would have an extreme ecological and environmental impact.

The reason that an option such as this one is not being considered by BP right now is because they would like to continue drilling using this pipe. All of these weeks could have been avoided if they had responded along this line of thinking but they are more concerned that the investment made to drill the pipe would be lost if this sort of solution was carried out.

Outcome = the oil flow stops and the pipe is not usable for future drilling

Motive of BP = deny the severity of the spill to justify the time it is taking to come up with a solution that allows them to save the pipes so they can continue drilling and profit in the future

What is really unfortunate about the response of BP is that they are not confronting the severity of the impact because their focus is on profits and how to minimize the costs of this problem. Their thinking is how to seal the leak so that they can go back to it later and continue to drill and profit off of it. They’ve gone deeper than anyone else and did not instituted the proper fail safe devices, which you would find at other deep water drilling sites in other parts of the world. With such an outrageous annual profit generated each year it is really troublesome that they did not invest the half a million dollars it would have cost to have installed the proper fail safe system.

The problem however is more systemic than just BP’s part in the equation. As blogger George Washington pointed out this week on the site, Zero Hedge:

It’s not just the one BP oil rig. For example, since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there are the 12 new oil and gas drilling rigs launched in the U.S. this week.

And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit that BP’s operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could “dwarf” the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation.

BP is not standing up to what it is ultimately responsible for and they are actively broadcasting a message that the spill is not as major of an environmental emergency as the scientific community is confirming. We are just beginning to understand what will happen to the Gulf of Mexico and now the Gulf Stream when it has this much oil leaked into it as well as what the impact that these dispersants are going to have. They have been routinely alerted to be endocrine disruptors and are making it difficult for the organisms that process and clean the oil naturally to be able to absorb it from the water, yet they are continuing to be used in large quantities.

But where is the good in all of this?

The oil spill will be a hugely significant event in the 21st century.

We have not even begun to see what the fall out will be from this environmentally, economically, and socially nor what its contribution to the momentum of a larger environmental and climatic imbalance will be. Having this amount of oil in the gulf stream will reach much farther flung shores than we could have imagined weeks ago.

But such an extreme example like this will undoubtedly illustrate to people how dangerous this type of drilling is and where the big oil aligns its priorities. It calls into focus our mass consumption and dependency on oil and to what lengths we will go to extract it. Just like tragic nuclear explosions that happened in the 20th century, which alerted people to the problems with nuclear power without implementing the proper safety measures, the same will happen from this spill. Hopefully what we’ll see is more stringent oversight instituted but also a strong voice from the public that deep water drilling of this nature should be phased out entirely. If we took all the resources that this oil spill will take to resolve, stop and clean up we could really be making some strides in our alternative fuel future and hopefully the tragic nature of this situation will prompt the public to demand more of this.

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