|
harm. Don't get me wrong, this is not going to be pretty before it is over, but one advantage the tropics have over colder climes with a spill of this nature is that surface temperatures are high enough to vapourise a good percentage of the lower weight hydrocarbon fractions. The overall result of this is that a considerable percentage of the oil will rapidly be turned into grease and then tarballs in the warm chop.
Also beneath the surface, even at the incredible water pressure at the depth of the well head, the escaping oil undergoes rapid decompression, disolved gasses (mostly methane) will bubble out rapidly cooling the remaining liquid considerably. Sufficiently chilled oil at the depths of the well head will be an extremely viscous, fluid that will rise very slowly to the surface and form an isostatic zone isolated from the surrounding seawater. In effect a streamer and then fan of very thick goo that sticks with its own kind, and has a very high aversion for water. Left to its own devices what will eventually surface is a large cohesive blob of viscous goo that will damned near be harvestable by cutting it into chunks and towing it away.
Much of what is floating on the surface and enroaching on shorelines is the froth that came up with the gas that was mixed in with the oil. Only a fraction of what is exiting the broken wellhead. The majority is down there in a fairly well defined supercold blob that is slowly undergoing fractional distilation as it ascends towards the surface and decompresses.
There's a fair chance that even if this blob makes it into a well defined current, it will by that time, be viscous enough to be pulled almost like taffy and eventually surface where the surrounding still warm surface waters will finish the job of baking off anything lighter than kerosine (or perhaps even diesel). And wave action would again roll the rest into tarballs.
There is absolutely no denying that there will be considerable ecosystem damage, but perhaps not the catastrophic total eradication of all life that is being predicted by the worst of the doomsayers.
I would also suspect that if my basic guesses based on my high school level understanding of hydrocarbon behaviour are remotely correct, then BP most certainly would have had the same idea and done the numbers in far greater detail. And come to the conclusion that in their modeling of a total blowout that the outcome would not be an utterly unmittigated disaster. That environmental conditions would serve to accomplish much of the cleanup and eventual dispersal of the mess with a limited/acceptable overall level of ecosystem damage. Nothing good enough for you want to list amongst the reasons in favour of drilling the hole, or even making it a part of considering the cost benefit of not forbiding it. But perhaps enough to get you off the hook after the fact. Take some lumps as if for any ordinary 11 death accident and an over abundance of minor spills and move on, business as usual.
The unfortunate truth is that ruthlessness gets results. It only takes a little bit of pressure at the top of a large organisation to have a profound effect in the middle. When only results matter, middle level managers are inclined to overlook incidents that (in theory at least) should result in a site shut down and inspection and to otherwise ignore everything but the immediate goal of meeting targets. And when they fuck up as some invariably will do sooner or later, they are a natural legal cutout that gives the movers and shakers doing the pushing plausible deniability on the levels that truly matter and figurative slaps on the wrist for failing to "self regulate" properly.
Whatever the truth, or final evinronmental outcome, I can almost guarantee one thing, as much blame as is inhumanly possible, will be dumped on the idiot who ignored safe operating procedure and elected to continue after another idiot stripped fifty feet of drill string through the blowout preventer, even after chunks of rubber gasket started coming up.
Absent evidence of a direct order from above, countermanding his order to stop operations to check for damage and make necessary repeairs, or something equally incriminating in the way of documented company policy, this poor bastard is going to be left wearing the lion's share of the liability. Suicide(?) perhaps? If he hasn't already had the good grace to be amongst the 11 missing(presumed dead).
In the end BP's crime will be talked down to something along the lines of "failure of oversight", and they will be lauded for all the effort they are now putting into cleaning up the mess caused by an overzealous or incompetent foreman or manager failing to follow well documented (not to mention legally mandated) policy.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
