Climate: Burn, Baby, Burn (Updated- Much More Oil)

( – promoted by TheMomCat)

God said a fire, not a flood next time.

A “Controlled” Burn of giant oil slick in Gulf of Mexico begins by our Coast Guard, to attempt to prevent landfall of the unprocessed crude oil gushing out of the destroyed BP Deepwater Horizon rig’s wellhead for a week.   In spite of having four remotely operated submarines working nearly a mile underwater,  trying to jigger the automatic shut off valves, the well continues to blow out at least 42,000 gallons of crude a day.

“They lit it with a little float that has a fuel source on it that floats into the oil and ignites,” Petty Officer Cory Mendenhall told AFP. “It did successfully ignite.”

The first burn was lit at around 4.45pm local time (7.45am AEST) and officials said any fires would have to be extinguished by nightfall. Sunset is at 7.27pm local time.

April 27th 2010 image from NASA of the oil slick on the Gulf, near the Louisiana coast

http://earthobservatory.nasa.g…

The burning is not without its own hazards to the water environment, and will proceed very slowly, as first the loose oil has to be rounded up,  and then lit up in small batches for short periods of time, and it’s riding around in non flammable water that’s constantly moving, subject to spring thunderstorm weather.

WSJ 4/28/2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/…

However, burning oil can harm microorganisms on the water’s surface where the activity takes place. It releases heavy particulate matter into the air and smaller burn particles like ash and tar that can be easily consumed by marine life, hurting the food chain, said Richard Charter, senior policy adviser for marine programs with Defenders of Wildlife.

Emergency workers in the Gulf will use booms to contain the oil spill and tow it away to a remote area. Several thousand gallons of oil will be burned at a time for one hour each.

The amount of oil that can be effectively burned will depend on a number of factors such as how much water has been emulsified in the oil, which would make it more difficult to burn, atmospheric conditions and currents. Choppy water will pose a risk and cause the flames to spread.

In its 8th day, if it’s leaking 42,000 gallons a day, it’s already gone to nearly a third of a million gallons of crude spilt into the Gulf.   News reports say the slick is now 600 miles in circumference.  This is a nicer, non threatening way of saying it’s roughly 31,400 square miles in area.   The state of Louisiana, for scale, is about 51,000 square miles.  The slick would currently cover the entire state of South Carolina.

The Coast Guard spokesperson, Rear Admiral Mary Landry, being cautious, said it’s still “premature to say this is catastrophic.  I will say it’s very serious. ”

According to the very good writeup in the Houston Chronicle, the oil slick is expected to reach the shore of the Louisiana coast by Friday.  

BP CEO Tony Hayward, whom I wrote about previously on Sunday, https://www.docudharma.com/diar… said he was “shocked” and “very angry”  and wondered “how could the the hell this happen.”

About 3% of the slick is thick enough to be gathered and burned.  

BP has said that about 3 perecent of the sprawling slick is covered by thicker, clumpier sections of oil. The rest of the slick is what Coast Guard officials describe as a rainbow-like sheen – similar to how gasoline might look if it were spilled on the ground at a service station – that cannot be burned.

BP estimates it can get rid of 50 percent to 95 percent of oil targeted by controlled burning. But Chapman said even if the burns achieve the upper limit, “we’re still going to see some environmental damage.”

How much is an open question. Ian MacDonald, an oceanography professor at Florida State University, has been studying satellite images of the slick and believes BP and the Coast Guard are significantly understating its size. Based on a government-provided metric for gauging thickness of oil on the water’s surface, he believes the slick contains at least 5 million gallons, about 120,000 barrels, of crude. That’s far greater than what BP has quoted since the rig sank on April 22.

To my reading, the government has been downplaying the size of this catastrophe, and we are going to have crude oil on the beaches and vast delta tidal estuaries of the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida soon.  It is unknown at this time how long other techniques to stop the well from gushing, such as installing a sort of dome or drilling a nearby relief well, could take, but it would be days if not weeks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…

Again, if you don’t know what went wrong the first time, with a relatively new technology at the cutting edge of feasibility, you are at risk the second time you attempt to repair it.

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Late evening Update:  Coast Guard finally admits 5 times more oil than previously thought, at least 5000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons of oil per day, is leaking into the Gulf.

MSNBC

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36…

NEW ORLEANS – Five times more oil a day than previously believed is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a blown-out well of a sunken drilling rig, the Coast Guard said Wednesday, an estimate the oil company trying to contain the massive spill disputes.

A new leak was discovered in the pipes a mile below the ocean’s surface. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration experts now estimate that 5,000 barrels a day of oil are spilling into the gulf. Officials had estimated the leak for days at 1,000 barrels a day.

Despite the new leak, an official from BP PLC, which leases the rig, said he did not believe the amount of oil spilling into the water is beyond earlier estimates. Doug Suttle, chief operating officer for BP, showed a diagram that plotted the leaks.