Gulf Oil leak

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by matthew809, May 30, 2010.

  1. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

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    480
    Can anyone give a link to some sort of detailed diagram of this leak? All I've seen so far are general animations which really shows nothing in regard to the exact condition of the leak. How can anyone come up with a good way to stop the leak if we can not see exactly how it's leaking?

    I've been watching the news about this leak since it first happened. I still haven't gained a clear picture of what the leak looks like other than the officially released animations which show nothing, and the grainy video of the plumes coming out of an unknown source.
     
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  3. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

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    Also, I do not understand why the simplest method did not work. I assume the top hat was just a large open-ended cylinder attached to a tube and pump up top. It's simple physics but they gave us some lame excuse about something freezing down there or something. I don't understand the need for any moving parts or complex engineering down there for this idea to work. It should just be a cylinder and a tube leading all the way up to a ship where the pump would be.

    Someone please tell me why this top hat procedure did not work because I just don't get it.
     
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  5. h.g.Whiz Registered Senior Member

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    Can the pipe be magnetized ?

    If the pipe could be magnetized strong enough then a custom fit cap with valve (left open of course) would cling to it, weld the edge then close the valve.
     
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  7. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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  8. h.g.Whiz Registered Senior Member

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    If the pipe is clogged beyond the break isn't likely that the pipe will just bust again?
     
  9. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    But the pipe isn't clogged , it is open and flowing freely now. All they need do is insert a deflated beach ball type of thing then add air to enlarge it to stop the flow of oil.
     
  10. kmguru Staff Member

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  11. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Or they could insert a one quarter inch smaller pipe into the larger one thereby allowing full capability to retrieve all of the oil now leaking into the Gulf. The smaller pipe would be pushed as far down as possible so there wouldn't be any leaks. :itold:
     
  12. Dredd Dredd Registered Senior Member

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  13. johnny26 Registered Member

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    nature

    This is so sad. nature is the one suffering for all of this.
     
  14. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    People are as well for many jobs have been lost by the fishing industry for ecades to come.

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  15. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    The simplest method I could have suggested initially would have been "Freeze" it.

    This would require taking bottles of liquid gases and releasing them at the leak point to freeze the oil in the pipe(or generate a frozen wall of ice from the surrounding water.). Obviously they would have to maintain the temperature, perhaps placing thermal deflectors around the frozen mass and using freezing units.

    The problem with this idea however was the potential fatigue that freezing would cause to the actual pipework.

    I did also consider whether freezing the water with the oil mixed in, would allow thawing out the water from the oil as a seperation method.
     
    Last edited: Jun 13, 2010
  16. Dr Mabuse Percipient Thaumaturgist Registered Senior Member

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    The best method would have been the supertanker method used in the Saudi oil spill. Two of the US engineers who worked on it started contacting BP and the White House on day two of this disaster, they were ignored and still are today.

    "We're doing everything we can"

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    80% of the massive Saudi spill was recovered from the water via the supertanker method. The most ever.
     
  17. Actual Facts Banned Banned

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    I haven't seen any diagrams of submerged dinosaurs and algae fossils 5,000 feet under water magically subducting themselves 30,000 feet into the mantle in order to produce a 100,000 barrel a day blowout. Have you?
     
    Last edited: Jun 20, 2010
  18. invert_nexus Ze do caixao Valued Senior Member

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    9,686
    A question on the nature of crude oil.
    It is biodegradable. How long does it take and what does it break down into?


    A note on the leak.
    Can you believe it's coming up on two months and no end in sight?
    What if they can't fix it?
    Ever.
     
  19. Actual Facts Banned Banned

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    10
    It takes awhile for cyanobacteria and archaea to consume the hydrocarbons. Eventually the complex hydrocarbon bonds break down and they become methane.

    They should've fixed it a long time ago.

    If they can't fix it ever then that's a very very big problem because what BP drilled into in the Macondo Prospect (Mississippi Canyon Block 252) is what is called a "migration channel," a deep fault on which abiotic hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight.
     
  20. River Ape Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think more than a handful of people have grasped just how TINY this leak is.

    It is terribly difficult to get agreement on the scale of the leak, but in round figures we may be talking about 100,000,000 gallons. It sounds a lot, but it wouldn't actually fill the lake in New York's Central Park. (Check the volume of your local reservoir; you will likely find a larger number than you expected -- even if it is only one-thousandth or one-ten-thousandth the size of Lake Mead, which weighs in a 7,750,000,000,000 gallons.)

    Crude oil is a mixture containing quite a large number of different chemicals. Mostly, it is lighter than water, so it tends to rise to the surface where it can be skimmed. The other tendancy is for it to disperse into the surrounding seawater, quickly becoming dissolved to one part in a thousand or less. I regret I have found no data for the volume of oil that has been skimmed at the surface, and therefore the real effective volume of the leak into the waters of the Gulf.

    Let's guess (to keep the arithmetic simple) that the volume of oil let loose into the Gulf of Mexico (i.e. and not skimmed) is 64,000,000 gallons. The volume of seawater in the Gulf of Mexico is 640,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. IN FACT, in relation to the Gulf as a whole, THE OIL LEAK IS PROBABLY NOT EVEN THE GREATEST SINGLE SOURCE OF POLLUTION! US river outflows have been cleaned up by legislation, but the toxic effluents of some Latin American rivers are probably doing more lasting harm than the oil leak.

    The newspapers are not full of maps showing the hundreds of miles of coastline covers by oil. I believe only a few miles (are they on an offshore sandspit miles from nowhere?) out many hundreds of miles of coastline are badly affected. Elsewhere a few tarballs have shown up. There are no shoals of dead fish washed up on the shoreline. There are no reports of people dying from eating lethal prawns. In fact, the notion that this is "America's worse ever ecological disaster" is beginning to look silly.

    The US public is being presented with a picture of an unstoppable leak without their attention being drawn to the math of the situation. If the oil were to be dispersed into the nearest 1% of the waters of the Gulf, the degree of dissolution would be one part in a hundred million.

    Fishing, subject to monitoring in a few areas, has always been completely safe. It is merely the public perception of hazard that has put fishermen out of business. Tourism is suffering on an equally false premise. Almost all the economic damage caused by the leak is down to the media and public perception rather than to BP.
     
  21. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    The Russians had 4 "spills" and used bombs to collapse them all so they don't "leak" any longer.
     
  22. superstring01 Moderator

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    I was wondering why we didn't do that?

    ~String
     
  23. Repo Man Valued Senior Member

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    Get lost OilIsMastery.
     

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