Posted by editor on Wednesday, June 16 @ 13:00:36 EDT
Below are the links and clips that first appeared in the announcements section of the Texas Civil Rights Review before we read an analysis at The Oil Drum which is altogether logical and depressing. We are at a death watch now, praying for a miracle.--gm
Our timeline of events for the first seven weeks with notes, press clips, and commentary. Our chief interest in the facts pertained to calculation of an oil containment and recovery "deficit" derived from subtracting official figures of millions of gallons of "oily water" recovered from official estimates of oil gushing up.
But already by week eight the deficit figures calculated during week seven have become obsolete. As Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson reports, we should be considering the number that a NOAA group wrote on a white board shortly after the fatal blowout: 60,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. Since this is the moral equivalent of war, we should take the higher limit as the challenge before us.
100,000 barrels per day is 4.2 million gallons per day, which means that oil containment and recovery capacities are missing at least 90 percent of the threat. By day 48 we calculated an average "oily water" recovery rate of about 400,000 gallons, but we do not know how to gauge the percent of oil to water, which could be as low (or lower than) 10 percent.--gm (updated June 13).
Plume Detectives: "Think of it as gas-saturated oil that has been shot out of a deep sea cannon under intense pressure – it’s like putting olive oil in a spray can, pressurizing it and pushing the spray button. What comes out when you push that button? A mist of olive oil. This well is leaking a mist of oil that is settling out in the deep sea."
"We urge all readers to research the activities of Halliburton and BP in the months leading up to DeepWater Horizon’s explosion on April 20, and then sinking on April 22, which happens to be Earth Day."
See Latest Footage BP Doesn't Want You to See: The amount of oil we encountered (on June 4 flyover) is staggering. The lack of response vessels working to contain this oil is bitterly disappointing. At the “source” we counted at most a dozen boats with boom working to contain the oil. However, the source is the only place we found these boats and none of them appeared to be skimmer vessels. Other than the “source” itself, we spotted no other containment efforts until we flew along the Louisiana coast from East Bay to Grand Isle.
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Long Road to Restoration: PBS interview with RALPH PORTIER, Professor of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University (expert on microbial approaches to oil cleanup); and AARON VILES, Gulf Restoration Network ("this is going to be a years and decades problem").
What does this mean? It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?...the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad, you close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad, same dynamics.
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
if there was a crack, in the same way as with the BOP, then over time that would have been eaten away as oil, gas and mud flowed through it. Once a flow starts it will rapidly eat out a larger passage, as the above has demonstrated. Once that passage was created then oil flow through it to the surface would make it impossible to see what was going on around the well (look at the cloud above the BOP). In fact there are very clear pictures from under the BOP. This would seem to show that there is no oil leaking there at present.
