BP to burn Gulf oil than put on tankers?

[RKP5637]

I just saw a segment this AM about BP bringing in a ship next week to burn oil at the Gulf leak than to pump it into tankers. The clip they showed had enormous flames bellowing into the air from a ship burning recovered oil at the Gulf leak site. I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but my first thought was incredible pollution. What am I missing here... somehow it seems to me burning off the oil is wasteful and also another pollutant now into the air than in the sea.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I first thought of the air pollution and debris as well.

[SidDithers]

2. They're burning the natural gas coming up the pipe with the oil...

the oil is still going into the tanker, but the gas has to be flared off.

Sid

[AndyA]

3. Seems extremely wasteful to me, as well as bad for the environment.

I thought we were running out of oil. But it's OK to just burn it, discharging the by products into the atmosphere, which is already in danger due to fossil fuels?

Somebody please explain how this could possibly be allowed. Where is the EPA? Where is Obama telling them NO?

[Brother Buzz]

4. You might be looking at natural gas being burned off

I suspect it's not worth trying to capture the gas in jury-rigged recovery setup.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. If not for the disaster...

this oil would be pumped, refined, and then pumped again into people's cars where it would be burned and released into the atmosphere.

[phleshdef]

6. LOL, I don't think "incredible pollution" is any longer an issue.

My completely uneducated guess is that burning it is a more effective way of preventing more of it from getting into the ocean and making landfall. My guess is thats better because at least its then controlled and more isolated.

The funniest part of this is if they were just trying to capture more of it, people would go back to saying that they just want to get the oil and have no interest in actually preventing any further environmental damage.

[backscatter712]

7. Yeah, they're flaring the natural gas.

There's a huge amount of it, they don't seem to be interested in piping it to a tanker and selling it, so they're flaring it so they don't blow up their rig, again...

[Statistical]

16. No good way to store uncompressed gas.

Attempting to re-compress gas at low pressure is very expensive in terms of energy required.

At sea that energy will be produced by diesel generators.

So burn diesel to compress natural gas or just burn natural gas?

[backscatter712]

20. Y'know, they could burn some of that natural gas to power the compressors.

but they currently don't have the equipment for that...

[damntexdem]

8. Get BP out of the loop of decisionmaking and action taking.

They have only made things worse. Put some competent people in charge -- then charge BP, both criminally and for the costs.

[MineralMan]

9. I believe that the problem is that they don't have enough tankers

on scene to handle the oil that's being captured. They don't use tankers in the Gulf. All the oil is moved to shore in pipelines. It takes quite some time for large tankers to move from the middle east, North Sea, or the Pacific to get to the Gulf.

I believe a supertanker is on its way from the North Sea even as we write. Logistics are tough when you're talking about millions of gallons of anything.

The burnoff is just an interim thing, from what I understand.

[Webster Green]

18. That's what I would think too.

I've heard that most of the big tankers are sitting around full of oil.

[HughMoran]

10. Right now you're seeing gas burned off

But they will be burning off some content of oil too - they just can't capture it all is the problem I think, or they're just burning off some of the more volatile content - I'm not completely sure.

[Statistical]

13. Why can't they capture it all.

The limit on capture rate is the ability to process and separate natural gas and oil. This is about 15,000 bpd.
Once seperated the oil is simply dumped into a tanker.

Supertankers more correctly ULCC have capacity of up to 2 million tons of crude (roughly 14 million barrels or half billion gallons).
Capacity is not the issue. "Processing" = safely seperate natural gas from oil is the bottleneck.

No reason to burn oil.

On edit: Looks like they don't have a super tanker on scene so they will start burning oil until supertanker arrives to avoid running out of capacity on drilling ship.

[HughMoran]

14. Ahh, your edit makes the most sense

Come to think of it, that has a familiar sound to it. My memory is usually good for these things too, oh, well.

[Statistical]

15. How do they not have tanker in place.

I mean come on BP.

They started the cap operation (prep work) almost 2 weeks ago.
They knew if it worked they would end up with a lot of oil.

[MineralMan]

19. There's one on the way...from the North Sea.

Takes a while for tankers to move from one part of the world to another. It's a big planet, and tankers are slow-moving ships. Besides, there are lots of tankers sitting around, full of oil, these days. You can't use a full tanker to take your oil. Others are busy going from one place to another and aren't interested in moving to the Gulf.

It's more complicated than you can imagine.

[Statistical]

21. You can easily use a full tanker.

Buy the oil in tanker at premium (from the likes of JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs).
Sell it to a refiner for a discount (refiner will ALWAYS use cheapest oil first).

When tanker is empty sail it to the Gulf.

Also tankers are slow but they aren't THAT slow especially not when empty. We are talking day 52 of the leak now. Even a mere 12kt is almost 300 miles per day. 52 days is 15,600 nautical miles.

[Statistical]

11. Burning natural gas, storing oil.

Natural gas is expanding uncontrollably during rise to surface.

No easy way to compress that. Compression requires energy and energy at sea usually means buring diesel.

Thus there really is no green choice.

Either:
a) flare the natural gas
b) burn diesel to produce electricity, use electricity to compress natural gas and add another bottleneck to capture process.

[flamingdem]

12. A GUESS: this way they can destroy the evidence of how much spill and pay less fine per barrell nt

[RKP5637]

17. Thanks for all of the responses! n/t