I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this blog post, but if it’s true, uh, PANIC?!?!?!?!
[This video shows] oil oozing — and then gushing — out of the sea floor itself. There has been speculation that the rapid outflow of oil from the underground reservoir is setting things up for a sinkhole. If that happens, it is almost certain that tens of millions of gallons of petroleum and tons of natural gas will be released all at once.
(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan. More after the jump.)
With this new evidence, the estimated amount of the spill has been upped to as much as 70,000 barrels a day. That is almost 3 million gallons every 24 hours.
There is, as yet, nothing to prove that the seeping oil is related to the drilling or the explosion. It is very likely that there is a causal relationship, however. At these depths (over a mile down, remember) sediment and rock behave differently than they do closer to the surface: rocks that are normally brittle are held together by the immense pressure. Disturbing that rock — drilling, vibrations caused by drilling, an explosive release of gas, the sudden loss of pressure beneath the rock as oil and gas are removed — can weaken its integrity and cause massive cracks. This is a well known scientific fact, one of the many that British Petroleum ignored in their greedy quest for profits. …
In addition to oil coming out of the seabed, observers have noticed a rapid increase of already high amounts of methane (aka natural gas) in the outflow. … Methane is extremely flammable in the presence of oxygen; it is believed that a sudden outgassing of methane is what caused the Deepwater Horizon rig to explode. As microbes “eat” methane for energy, they remove oxygen from the water, meaning that large quantities of dissolved methane usually results in vast anoxic regions where most life cannot exist. In other words, the outgassing is expanding “dead zones” and creating new ones. And, methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas: when the gas begins to seep into the atmosphere, we will see a rapid increase in global warming and resultant climate change.
Even if the well were capped today and its outflow brought to zero, and even if the integrity of the rock is not further weakened and there is no sinkhole, oil and methane will continue to seep out through the sea bed for a very long time. This is bad, people, very bad. And there is nothing we can do at this point to stop it.
It is starting to look more and more like my use of “ecological armageddon” is not hyperbole after all.
But hey, drill baby drill!
Actually yes. Better to drill and get as much out of it before it collapses and is turned loose in the environment. They need to get the original well capped, and they need to drill a relief well.
Wait, are we talking about a sinkhole all the way to the oil reservoir which is several miles below the seafloor? I’m not an expert on this stuff (it seems like nobody is), but that doesn’t seem too plausible to me.
I could see how shallow fractures within a few hundred meters of the surface might extend up to the surface and seep a bit. And you might get some kind of eruption/crater that would blow off the top few meters around the wellhead.
But the relief wells will cut off the oil supply to the upper portion of the drilled channel. Fractures deeper down shouldn’t make their way to the surface; I’m sure many such fractures already exist in large number surrounding the reservoir itself, and they obviously haven’t made it to the surface.
Again, I’m totally being an armchair geologist here, but on the plausibility scale of 1 to 10, this seems like a 1 or a 2 to me.
The AP says we should all just chill on the spill. All the oil in the reservoir would only fill the Superdome like twice, and that’s totally not going to happen, and even if it does, it’ll take like two years.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100621/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_how_big
I feel better already!
AML, I believe David was implying that we should not have begun drilling there in the first place.
Though the issue isn’t drilling, per se, but the shit-tacular regulation and oversight of the Bush administration that made this possible.
Doc, and yet it’s enough to have a devastating and catastrophic impact to an a geographic area the size of Texas… so, you know… it’s like saying that the 70 mg of arsenic in a pint glass is nothing to worry about. Except that’s (quick back of napkin math) about 7 parts per million (rounding up) so you still shouldn’t drink it, because it will kill you. Now the gulf spill, by those numbers is only .2 parts per billion. Which is far less than the one shot fetal dose of arsenic, sure, but you can get chronic arsenic poisoning from just .17 parts per billions. In other words, just because the ratio of spill to gulf is small, less than one part per billion doesn’t make it not deadly. Nor does it make it not a big deal, doesn’t mean it can’t kill the entire gulf. (Thanks wikipedia, fighting blog comment wars since it’s inception… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_poisoning) And because of physics and ocean currents this thin layer of oil is spreading out and killing off massive swaths of ocean. So, yeah, this is a big fucking deal.
dcl, I could be mistaken, but I think Doc was being sarcastic?
Oh… never mind… Sorry, there are people on this blog for whom that would be a serious comment…
Yes, that is also true.
Though the issue isn’t drilling, per se, but the shit-tacular regulation and oversight of the Bush administration that made this possible.
Except if you’ve done any amount of serious reading on this topic, you’d see that the problem with MMS is deeply rooted and goes back decades, so trying to pull an Obama and blame everything on your predecessor isn’t going to cut it unless you’re simply making a poor attempt at farce comedy.
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