Boom's a Bust as Oil Spill Seeps into Perdido Pass

Alabama Live ^ | 6/10/2010 | Ryan Dezember

[Cyropaedia]

>>“Some scientist at a university studied a sample of the oil and determined that it isn’t light crude.”

Something still seems amiss here: why would they need to take a sample after-the-fact to determine what type of crude is coming from the individual wells, when the EIA has supposedly been keeping track of all of the relevant data on crude sent to refineries for ages? I would think from a pricing standpoint alone, if the crude wasn’t light crude that this should’ve been known before.

Bingo!

[justa-hairyape]

The temperature at the release point is irrelevant since it will quickly attain the temperature of the water.

By either giving heat energy to the water or taking heat energy from the water. Knowing the temperature of a liquid product entering a biological environment can be an important metric if the temperature difference is significant. So we can assume there is no heating of the oil as it blows up through the well hole just prior to entering the ocean ?

[norraad]

Oh, pretty much anything is prolly just pissing on a forrest fire, but might as well try.

Any suction that could be applied to any of the leaks in the riser would have been good to help reduce pressure form the other seeps, but they cut that off.

With hindsight, you can see most everything they did was making things worse.

[Yardstick]

Good points. One thing is this wasn’t a production well. It was an exploratory well (though they planned on pumping it later). So maybe the EIA hadn’t been tracking it or something. Or, maybe BP and the EIA knew it was heavy crude and that the skimmers would be ineffective. Maybe that’s why they declined the offer of the skimmers.

[Yardstick]

The temperature of the oil will actually drop as it goes from high to low pressure (that’s why they had trouble with ice crystals in the cap), and it will pull heat from the nearby water which will cool it. But the mass of the oil is miniscule compared to that of the surrounding sea, and the cooling of the water will be insignificant, except in a very localized way. If you put a drop of cold oil into a bucket of water, the temperature doesn’t change much.

[Qbert]

“Maybe that’s why they declined the offer of the skimmers.”

The official silence on this matter is still troubling to me if that’s the rationale. And it seems odd that the Coast Guard (along with BP), would reject the skimmers, and then at a much later date, try to use skimming techniques.

I’m guessing that we know why BP would likely reject any supertanker skimmer idea involving whatever they have for their own fleet- because the cost would exceed their legal liability cap. And at any rate, it would seem that If BP were deemed incorrect in their assumptions about cleanup methods, they should just be overruled by the Feds- but it doesn’t seem clear who gets the final decision in calling the shots here. And why would the Feds reject the offers of 17 other nations? As I understand it, there is a shortage of supertankers, and thus employing them into the Gulf for cleanup purposes would disrupt oil delivery, which would in turn drive up prices. Skyrocketing gas prices would have a deleterious effect on an already fragile economy (and thus, the administration may be choosing economic concerns over oil spill disaster and coastline protection concerns). Is this what the silence is about?

[justa-hairyape]

The water temp issue is actually a complex problem. Yes, if the oil is very cold, could be below the freezing point of water actually, its overall effect on the water temp of the gulf will be small at first. The key is the accumulative effects over time. And also localized affects will have much greater magnitudes then average affects. How an oil slick modifies the solar warming of water is also complex. The oil absorbs more light so it will get warmer then the water, but the water below gets less light and less thermal warming. When the oil slicks warms, it will give some of the the energy to the water and some to the atmosphere. Gonna have to crunch the numbers on that one. Oil slicks cover a significant portion of the water surface and are growing. My guess is solar heat is being trapped at the water surface due to the oil, some of that concentrated heat gets radiated back to the atmosphere at night, some is lost to the atmosphere due to wind during the day and the net result is that the water below is cooling.