https://blog.skytruth.org/ Although crews are struggling to somehow cap the flow of crude oil from the well head some 5000 ft below the surface, the actual flow rate may in fact be increasing. This is not good.
Totally agree, and your sig line Grahame describes the situation perfectly. Here's a recent satellite image of the "spill": Attempts to cap the gushing oil failed today: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/05/bp-on-containment-dome-it-has-failed.html All along the "estimates" of the spill rate have been increasing ... latest numbers exceed 25,000 barrels per day!!! The first oil is washing ashore in some of the very sensitive estuary islands along the low coastline east of the Mississippi River delta. Truly a growing disaster for the gulf region and the Earth in general.
There's an interesting video on the PRI home page that's very enlightening. https://permaculture.org.au/2010/05/28/deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-same-shit-different-day/ What I haven't heard in the media is any talk about the inevitable. If the USA stops pulling oil out of their backyard, is the demand going to fall? NO So when demand is not met by supply, prices rise. The oil economy being what it is, and the USA being the dominant financial force that it is - means that the oil price all around the world will rise. AND - as the GFC resolves the anti-inflationary forces that have been keeping oil prices low will disappear. And there we are - suddenly SO much closer to Peak Oil than we were a few weeks ago. I keep feeling guilty every time I get in my car. I too am responsible for the voracious appetite that will see BP drill for oil at ridiculous depths and without adequate disaster management plans in place.
Thanks for the link eco. The whole Gulf "leak" (more appropriately a spew) has been riddled with misinformation, and as it continues the public outcry gets louder. BP has made available (by direction from Obama) video feeds from the remotely operated vehicles at work a mile beneath the surface. These feeds have gone viral and there are hundreds of forum and blog websites dedicated to publishing and commenting on the ongoing BP drama. All of BP's efforts to date have failed ... the next attempt will be to cut off the damaged top portion of the well head and install a sort of vacuum to collect a major portion of the spewing oil. There are many doubts as to the viability of this approach and by cutting off the crimped piping, they will open up the Gulf waters to the full extent of the oil well output. BP has also been injecting chemical dispersant into the oil flow, which keeps a significant portion of the oil from rising to the surface (where it could be skimmed and reclaimed). These dispersants are highly toxic themselves and they break the oil up into tiny globules that remain suspended in the depths. Many scientists have discovered immense plumes of this dispersed oil moving away from the well head with great concern (no way to reclaim this dispersed oil). BP however, denies that such plumes exist. Workers on surface ships that install floating booms to keep oil off the shore and skim floating oil are being sickened by the fumes of the floating oil slicks. There are concerns for those people living near the shores where the oil has made landfall. All-in-all an unfolding nightmare of epic proportions.
https://postcarbon.us1.list-manage....977054c5ef58219392&id=386a5f060b&e=b27f59eaf2 Deepwater Horizon: This Is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like Posted May 25, 2010 by Richard Heinberg Lately I've been reading the excellent coverage of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill at www.TheOilDrum.com, a site frequented by veteran oil geologists and engineers. A couple of adages from the old-timers are worth quoting: "Cut corners all you want, but never downhole," and, "There's fast, there's cheap, and there's right, and you get to pick two." There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades. The deadly stench from oil-oaked marshes—as spring turns to hot, fetid summer—will by itself ruin tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods. Then there's the loss of the seafood industry: we're talking about more than the crippling of the economic backbone of the region; anyone who's spent time in New Orleans (my wife's family all live there) knows that the people and culture of southern Louisiana are literally as well as figuratively composed of digested crawfish, shrimp, and speckled trout. Given the historic political support from this part of the country for offshore drilling, and for the petroleum industry in general, this really amounts to sacrificing the faithful on the altar of oil. But the following should be an even clearer conclusion from all that has happened, and that is still unfolding: This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet. The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff. Everybody knows we must do this. Even a recent American president (an oil man, it should be noted) admitted that "America is addicted to oil." Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it? Good intentions are not enough. Now is the moment for the President, other elected officials at all levels of government, and ordinary citizens to make this our central priority as a nation. We have hard choices to make, and an enormous amount of work to do.
You know - I'm starting to wonder if nuclear energy isn't safer....? Chernobyl was no picnic, but when you add up all the oil disasters over the years and the loss of life and environmental damage, it starts to make oil look pretty bad and nuclear look pretty tame.
G'day eco Much has been written about the 'nuclear solution' of late. So-called 'environmentalists' - such as James Lovelock and Barry Brook - have been vocal on the subject. Two questions I would always ask of any advocate for nuclear energy (if I had the time and patience): 1) Do you have a financial interest in the nuclear industry, and 2) Would you be prepared to literally store the waste from the nuclear industry in your own back yard? Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), long time anti-nuclear campaigner, had this to say on the subject back in 1985: What we find today is a totally immoral economy and society which has managed to unearth the secrets of matter and the secrets of life at the most fundamental level. This is a society that, in no sense, is capable of utilizing this knowledge in any way that will produce a social good. Obviously there are leavings from a banquet that fall from the table but my knowledge and my whole experience with capitalism and with hierarchical society generally is that almost every advance is as best a promise and at worst utterly devastating for the world. So when one speaks of this combination which has occurred. only within my own lifetime, of plumbing the deepest secrets of matter, notably nuclear energy, and transforming matter into energy and bioengineering, I feel that we are confronted with a revolution of monumental importance and while this revolution is in the hands of capital and the state, its impacts upon society could very well be devastating. I cannot foresee that it will benefit human society or the ecology of our planet as much as is will be utilized for domination and hierarchy, which is what all technological innovation, to one extent or another, has always been utilized for. My own thoughts mirror those of Bookchin's on the subject. Perhaps we need to revive the 'clamshell alliance', and take the issue to a world-wide 'village square'? Cheerio (forever the optimist), Markus.
I'm reading Lovelock at the moment - which is very timely given the oil spill. He is happy to have all of Britain's waste stored at his place. He says that it amounts to a volume equivalent to one sedan car. Personally I think we need to reduce our dependance on energy dramatically rather than just keep finding new ways to fulfil our greed - but as I type this I'm very aware that I'm sitting under fluoro lights at work with the aircon running..... Redesigning lives to cope with it is going to be a challenge. I have made major steps towards it at home, but at work (where I am at present) it is so much harder.
keep up the good fight eco. Changing oneself, rather than proselyting, I always find most difficult. The oil spill is a catastrophe. Is the GBR still a major shipping route? What are our disaster plans for it? The brother of a Canadian friend of mine has invented an oil spill sponge, no one seems interested. https://www.koamtv.com/Global/story.asp?s=12466464&clienttype=printable
Yes it is, and Anna Bligh & Co's disaster plan is ...... lets sell more coal, and CSG, and every other thing we can rip out of the ground, and ship it all out via Gladstone. Definitely a "disaster" of a plan
Um, forgive my ignorance, but can you mine uranium and build nuclear power plants without oil and it's derivatives?
Not yet... But you also need a lot of oil to build a wind farm, or a solar installation in the desert.
Any form of mining is exremely resource hungry. As a small example, if they go ahead with the Olympic mine expansion as planned, it will require every Caterpillar plant in the world, to work 24/7 for three years, to supply the dozers, etc to strip the overburden, before they actually get to the ore body. They will need to build a dual pipeline from the Spencer Gulf to carry in the diesel fuel and the water - trucks won't be able to maintain the quantities needed. Nuclear is really a short term option ("short" being a relative term here - it'll take at least ten years to build a Nuke power plant from scratch). Renewable is longer term, and definitely more sustainable than any fossil fuelled ideas. Continued "growth" in economic, population, and infrastructure terms, will, however, make a mockery of any attempts to maintain our energy wasteful lifestyles as they are. The only true solution to the energy crisis is to reduce consumption of energy, in ALL its' forms. Transition to a low energy life is coming. Whether you cose to embrace it, or fight it, doesn't really matter (except to your mental state), because it will happen!
. Natural Oil Spills; November 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by MacDonald; 6 Page(s) "Beneath the Gulf of Mexico, to the south of Texas and Louisiana, tiny bubbles of oil and natural gas trickle upward through faulted marine sediments. Close to the seafloor, these hydrocarbons ooze past a final layer teeming with exotic deep-sea life before they seep into the ocean above. Buoyant, they rise through the water in tight, curving plumes, eventually reaching the surface. There the gas merges with the atmosphere, and the oil drifts downwind, evaporating, mixing with water and finally dispersing. The best time to witness such a natural "oil spill" is in summer, when the Gulf stays flat calm for days at a time. In the middle of the afternoon, with the full heat of the tropical sun blazing off the sea, one can stand on the deck of a ship and watch broad ribbons of oil stretch toward the horizon. Cruising upwind along one of these slicks, one will notice that the sea takes on an unusual smoothness. The clarity of the water seems to increase, and the glare of the sun off the surface intensifies. Flying fish break from the bow waves and plunge into the water again almost without making a splash. Presently, the scent of fresh petroleum becomes evident--an odor that is quite distinct from the diesel fumes wafting from the ship--and one sees waxy patches floating on the water or clinging to the hull." https://www.sciamdigital.com/index....LEID_CHAR=EE1FB5A2-FE98-459E-9488-7AC9F54E37E .
If we had a smiley icon with the little yellow face tapping the side of his nose with his index finger I would use it here. But I'll settle for a wink
Gotta love those deep water oil platforms (sarcasm)... but Amerika has all the best technology for this stuff and still there are these disasters. What happens when we get more deep ocean drilling like the proposed ones off the Great Aust. Bight?. Deep drilling is the next oil rush so....?????
