Fact-checking the "Mother of all gushers could kill Earth's oceans" e-mail.

dorkulon

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Tue May-04-10 05:15 PM
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Fact-checking the "Mother of all gushers could kill Earth's oceans" e-mail.

Edited on Tue May-04-10 05:41 PM by dorkulon

I'm sure you've all seen it by now, on a forum post, blog, or forwarded email. I think this thing is need of a serious Snopes-ing, and I'm looking for your help.

Here it is:

Heard your mention of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this morning, and you (and most everyone else except maybe George Noory) are totally missing the boat on how big and bad of a disaster this is.

First fact, the original estimate was about 5,000 gallons of oil a day spilling into the ocean. Now they're saying 200,000 gallons a day. That's over a million gallons of crude oil a week!

I'm engineer with 25 years of experience. I've worked on some big projects with big machines. Maybe that's why this mess is so clear to me.

First, the BP platform was drilling for what they call deep oil. They go out where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and drill another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. This it right on the edge of what human technology can do. Well, this time they hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Take a moment to grasp the import of that. The pressure behind this oil is so high that it destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it.

When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean.

Now they've got a hole in the ocean floor, 5,000 feet down with a wrecked oil drilling rig sitting on top of it spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that, will you!

First they have to get the oil rig off the hole to get at it in order to try to cap it. Do you know the level of effort it will take to move that wrecked oil rig, sitting under 5,000 feet of water? That operation alone would take years and hundreds of millions to accomplish. Then, how do you cap that hole in the muddy ocean floor? There just is no way. No way.

The only piece of human technology that might address this is a nuclear bomb. I'm not kidding. If they put a nuke down there in the right spot it might seal up the hole. Nothing short of that will work.

If we can't cap that hole that oil is going to destroy the oceans of the world. It only takes one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons of ocean water toxic to wildlife. Are you starting to get the magnitude of this?

We're so used to our politicians creating false crises to forward their criminal agendas that we aren't recognizing that we're staring straight into possibly the greatest disaster mankind will ever see. Imagine what happens if that oil keeps flowing until it destroys all life in the oceans of this planet. Who knows how big of a reservoir of oil is down there.

Not to mention that the oceans are critical to maintaining the proper oxygen level in the atmosphere for human life.

We're humped. Unless God steps in and fixes this. No human can. You can be sure of that.

To give an idea of how I feel about this statement, here's my reply to a friend who forwarded it to me:

This is standard alarmist viral e-mail stuff. The spill is bad, but not this bad. This guy's "facts" are suspect at best, especially the bit about one quart of oil ruining 250,000 gallons of ocean. That's 1 part per million. Nothing is lethal at one ppm--not cyanide, not anything. At 800 ppm, carbon monoxide takes 2 hours to kill people. In fact, it takes a concentration of 500 ppm for oil to kill fish in two weeks. So, whatever credentials this guy is claiming ("big projects with big machines"?), he doesn't actually know what he's talking about, at least on that point, which calls his other claims into question. And while I can't find anything on the position of the rig right now, I could swear I heard a few days ago that it had broken off and drifted a few hundred yards, not that it was "sitting right on top" of the leak. Also, the idea that it's some crazy thing that the pressure was so intense that it "destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it" is silly, firstly because he's describing every blown rig ever, which is fairly routine, and secondly because that rig does not represent the "maximum effort of human science" at all, but a cost-conscious, corner-cutting, deregulated effort.

As to the leak being unstoppable, that's also hyperbolic. There are 2 current plans: One is to drill another hole and then thread a tube through it to plug up the leak with cement--or something like that. It's going to take 3 months, but I don't really see why it can't work. The shorter term plan (about a week) is to drop a big-ass dome on top of the main leak and suck the stuff onto barges, something that may or may not work, but obviously couldn't even be attempted if there were an oil rig "right on top" of the hole. I think the prospect of an unending, eternal oil gusher in the gulf is virtually impossible--eventually, every intellectual and technological resource in the world would be united in working to stop it, and they would. This is a huge, terrible disaster, but it's not the apocalypse.

Here's a little perspective from the New York Times:

"The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991. It is not yet close to the magnitude of the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in Mexico in 1979, which spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of crude before the gusher could be stopped.

"And it will have to get much worse before it approaches the impact of the Exxon Valdezaccident of 1989, which contaminated 1,300 miles of largely untouched shoreline and killed tens of thousands of seabirds, otters and seals along with 250 eagles and 22 killer whales."

So yeah, this is just some guy freaking out on a forum somewhere, claiming in true internet style to have more expertise than he does. And his nuclear bomb solution sounds like something Chuck Norris would come up with. Remember, stuff like this goes viral because it is sensational, not because it's true. The boring truth is that this is just another in a long series of ecological disasters caused by the energy industry and a lax regulatory environment.

I'd appreciate any input you may have, checking the email's claims or my own. I'd particularly appreciate any info on where the rig itself wound up, as I just couldn't find any info on that. Thanks!

EDIT: I've already been alerted to a major error--in the NYT excerpt I quoted! Apparently, the largest previous estimate to this article on the Gulf War oil spill is 11 million barrels, about half a billion gallons. The NYT figure of 36 billion gallons is way off.