Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico - Historic Disaster

[ShadeTreeMech]

According to the highest per day estimate of 60,000 barrels per day, it would take the US 4 minutes 20 seconds to consume the oil spilled per day by the deepwater horizon leak if we do use 20 mil barrels a day.

That's disgusting , really.

[Piwoslaw]

Let's look at it globally, since this spill, and any other for that matter, is a problem for the whole world.

Global oil production is about 75mln barrel per day, so that gets us down to just over 1 minute per day.

[dremd]

NPR is citing leaked internal memo from bp that leak is more like 100,000 varela/day.
I haven't been to the coast in a while, but wish I could go fishing again. (it is about 40 miles to the nearest oil coated beach for me where my cousin work(Ed) and is now out of work allong with at least 12 of my friends.

[cfg83]

dremd -

Originally Posted by dremd

NPR is citing leaked internal memo from bp that leak is more like 100,000 varela/day.
I haven't been to the coast in a while, but wish I could go fishing again. (it is about 40 miles to the nearest oil coated beach for me where my cousin work(Ed) and is now out of work allong with at least 12 of my friends.

If that's true then it's officially bigger than the Gulf War spill.

Your cousin and 12 of your friends?!?!? I've never seen that kind of job carnage among my friends and family. I'm very sorry to hear that.

CarloSW2

[dremd]

Originally Posted by cfg83

dremd -



If that's true then it's officially bigger than the Gulf War spill.

CarloSW2

I do not know if the NPR source is accurate, or not, I just heard it this morning.

Originally Posted by cfg83

Your cousin and 12 of your friends?!?!? I've never seen that kind of job carnage among my friends and family. I'm very sorry to hear that.

CarloSW2

My cousin is included in the 12 friends that I can account for (I haven't talked to everyone so, possibly more.

I live in an oil town, our main buisness is oil, oil and oil followed by fishing and tourism. Unfortunately our mentality goes along with it, I had fruit thrown at me when I went to see an inconvenient truth, the theater only showed it 2 times due to the public outcry. I have been insulted several times for being anti american, anti lafayette, and a bad person for not driving a full size truck/ SUV and not creating jobs. When I defend cars on ecomodder they are the poor ecological choice, when I defend cars in real life the argument is backwards. The discussions I hear about the things they do offshore anger me greatly (my best friend is a BP employee BTW).
So on one front I feel bad for my oil industry friends loosing their jobs, on the other hand I feel that it is the right thing and they need to find something better to do, I look at it like the timber industry, not good to create jobs by destroying the environment.

I do feel very bad for Fishermen, and mostly the tourism industry (my cousin is a park ranger).

Sorry for the poor spelling/ grammar I'm a little crazy and busy (thankfully).

[aerohead]

An apology if someone has covered this one.
I understand that when the Deepwater Horizon fell over,it was then that the pipes were ripped apart from the blowout preventer and the actual rupture occurred.Is that correct?
If it is,should an explosion/fire occur on another platform,is this basically the failure mode? A collapsing platform?
Is there something inherently lacking in the fundamental design of the platforms?
Is 'worse-case-scenario' still part of mechanical engineering lexicon?

[user removed]

I am in no way any authority on this disaster, but I don't see why they did not just build a containment vessel of plastic sheeting, say 500 feet in diameter and the 5000 feet in length necessary.

Sections of a few hundred feet of a circle of 500 feet in diameter, with some re bar at the bottom and something to provide a slight amount of buoyancy at the top. Connect them as you drop them into the area of the leak.

Once you have the leak isolated then you can recover the oil at the top with pumps and barges.

Of course had that been done, then the exact amount of the leak would be known.

It seems like the priority to plug the leak was short sighted, and the cutting of the 21 inch pipe just made the outflow significantly larger.

Not sure why they just didn't try to crush the pipe to minimize the leak, and use the plastic containment vessel to capture and recover the oil.

Not sure of the currents of other reasons why this idea would not work, but I haven't heard any to this point.

regards
Mech

[Piwoslaw]

Originally Posted by aerohead

An apology if someone has covered this one.
I understand that when the Deepwater Horizon fell over,it was then that the pipes were ripped apart from the blowout preventer and the actual rupture occurred.Is that correct?
If it is,should an explosion/fire occur on another platform,is this basically the failure mode? A collapsing platform?
Is there something inherently lacking in the fundamental design of the platforms?
Is 'worse-case-scenario' still part of mechanical engineering lexicon?

From what I understand, there is a device that crushes the pipe closed in an emergency, but it failed. There's some finger pointing about who's responsible for what, something like: the rig was built by one company, the hole drilled by another, the plumping done by yet another, someone else was taking care of the safety devices, etc. etc. It's not our fault, it's their's.

[tasdrouille]

When bean counters pull the strings, designs mostly work instead of never fail...

[cfg83]

dremd -

Man, that's a rock and a hard place. I understand what you mean by feeling for one side even though it's "the right thing to do". I never have a good answer for those situations.

CarloSW2