Oil Rigs / Oil Leaks /Oil Spillages

[All Seeing Eye]

I'm sure you are all aware of the recent Oil spillage that's occured.
Can anyone tell me why such spillages cannot be contained by a sea based wall?

HERE is a typical Oil Rig. Now Oil tends to float on the surface of the water does it not? Once the spillage occurs the water floats out across the sea on the surface and becomes more or less impossible to clean and prevent.

So why not take a precaution and build a sea wall around the entire oil rig?

The wall would not even need to drop to the sea bed. It could rise above the sea for so many metre and below the water for so many metre and the centre of this wall would have a buoy that allows this wall to float on the ocean.

Any oil leakage/spillage would be contained then within the perimeter of the wall and not allow it to spread out to the rest of the ocean.

A second benefit of such a wall would be to build a deployable one for tanker spillages. Once a tanker spillage is reported special boats holding these deployable walls races to the scene of the spillage and surround the tanker with the floatable walls.

Do people understand my idea?

Here is a very quick primitive drawing of what I mean. CLICK

 

[Jadzia]

The idea is known as bunding.

They are often constructed around storage tanks of fuel and other hazardous chemicals to contain spillage if that happens.

I'm sure I've seen the oil cleanup teams use strings of sausage shaped floats to achieve the same effect at sea.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

The idea is known as bunding.

They are often constructed around storage tanks of fuel and other hazardous chemicals to contain spillage if that happens.

I'm sure I've seen the oil cleanup teams use strings of sausage shaped floats to achieve the same effect at sea.

Then why do they fail so miserably at containing oil spillages? the current tech must surely be lacking efficiency.

To be truthful I've never actually seen anything like that of which you speak of. All I see on the news is the oil slicks getting bigger and bigger with nobody able to do anything and the oil reaching coastlines and killing wildlife.

Surely there should be some permanent wall placed around these oil rigs and a more efficient type of deployable wall for tanker spills.

 

[Jadzia]

http://www.markleen.com/Catalogo/Imagenes/oil_spill.jpg

Their website specialises in cleanup gear.

http://www.markleen.com/

 

[All Seeing Eye]

http://www.markleen.com/Catalogo/Imagenes/oil_spill.jpg

Looks very primitive IMO and to be honest I'm looking mostly towards some kind of permanent safety wall around rigs.

 

[Trekker4747]

Then why do they fail so miserably at containing oil spillages? the current tech must surely be lacking efficiency.

This may be hard for you to understand but...

Water moves. These "currents" that "wave" water around can take the oil with it before clean up crews have time to react and set-up clean-up equipment or barriers.

In essence, shit happens. If we don't want anymore oil spills then we best find good ways to make things that require oil (like plastics) and to power our society.

 

[scotpens]

The wall would not even need to drop to the sea bed. It could rise above the sea for so many metre and below the water for so many metre and the centre of this wall would have a buoy that allows this wall to float on the ocean.

In the case of the current Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the source of the leak is nearly a mile deep. By the time the oil reaches the surface, it can have been carried dozens of miles by currents. Just how much of the ocean do you propose to enclose with this wall? Hundreds of square miles?

If your idea were the least bit practical, don't you think it would be in common use by now?

 

[PurpleBuddha]

It would be brilliant if the oil would obey our intentions and float straight up. The oil that does will be captured. The rest will eventually reach the surface miles beyond the wall.

edit: Looks like the two posters above this post beat me to it.

 

[constovich]

woah scotpens, flame much? probably should cool those afterburners a tad.

I Am Legend, I am sure the international community will be talking about what measures could be taken in the future because of this. I work at a nuke power plant and we have several safety features to ensure no unintentional release within our design basis.

The design basis for an oil rig would surely include a severed drill head at the well, why are there not fail closed valves there to shut off flow? If there are, why didn't they work?

My other concern about all of this is the end to the debate over US off-shore drilling. With heads 90 miles away there is some time to respond till it gets onshore, when they are <10 miles away, there will be much less time and any oil pontoon system to prevent a disaster would be 1) expensive due to its size and 2) prevent other traffic.

 

[scotpens]

woah scotpens, flame much? probably should cool those afterburners a tad.

I didn't mean to be sarcastic or rude -- sorry if I came off sounding that way.

 

[Deckerd]

The only way to avoid this sort of thing is to stop drilling under the seabed and to stop transporting crude by tanker.

 

[publiusr]

No, for that would make for an even worse economic disaster. Industry can even have a beauty all its own:

http://www.examiner.com/x-21122-GLB...-Mikula-finds-beauty-in-industry-at-the-edges

Remember also that drilling for oil by and large causes minimal surface impact, esp on land, in tapping a reservoir below ground level with a tiny hole. If you are trying to grow fuel on land, you must get fuel not from a three dimentions but from two--with maximal surface impact.

Try to grow both fuel and crops with organic (low-yield) results, and you either starve, lose more habitat to agriculture, or get a Dust Bowl. Thus the true enemy of the Earth is not the drill head--but the plow.

Oh, and ethanol is still a hydrocarbon--which means you still have CO2, though it seems that is being taken up at record rates:
http://www.vpr.net/npr/125261271/

This is not surprising in that the use of fossil fuels is simply the re-indroduction of carbon-based biomass to the surface which is where it came from originally.

Other views pro-industry, and con
http://www.michaelspecter.com/denialism/
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-31-michael-specter-denialism-organic-GMO http://www.drroyspencer.com/

But I digress...

We are still going to need hydrocarbons for plastic--and even so, as these links will attest, petrolium has been seeping into the Gulf longer than folks have been drilling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/...alent-of-eight-to-80-exxon-valdez-oil-spills/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7w7v3432r81222m/

Search for "Gulf Petrolium Seeps"

http://news.discovery.com/earth/asphalt-volcanoes-oil-spill.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_volcano

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/07mexico/logs/june26/june26.html
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116785&org=NSF&from=news

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/20-things-you-didn.t-know-about-oil

Comments...

I have a problem with both the Greens and the Browns on this one.
Obermann's guest said that this was proof that oil could not be drilled safely off shore. He forgets that engineers had safety measures and that the companies failed to use them out of profit motives:

http://eideard.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/oil-lobby-killed-safeguards-on-gulf-drilling-rig/

Then the Greens pile on and want us to quit oil cold turkey.

If you are an engineer, the suits shut you out, and out of a disaster that you could have stopped, the Greens shut you down.

Folks on one side don't want animal testing, and the folks on the other side don't want embryonic stem cell research. Fear-mongering from both sides ensues.

Now a U.S. Libertarian Party member will allow both stem cell research and animal testing, but federally fund neither. Useless.

Same with anything else. Take NASA. The Left is made up of greens social workers and activists...fair enough. The Right is made up of businessmen, preachers and warmongers. One wants us in a Dark Age, the other in a Stone Age. A space expert that could say, replace oil with Space-Based Solar Power, gets rebuffed by one party or the other.

Engineers, you must understand, do not have a constituency.

Sadly it took the war machine Von Braun exploited for us just to get weathersats that activists would have nixed for housing, and Tories would have nixed for tax cuts.

But maybe--just maybe--there is hope:
http://www.lesjohnsonauthor.com/paradise_regained

 

[scotpens]

Try to grow both fuel and crops with organic (low-yield) results, and you either starve, lose more habitat to agriculture, or get a Dust Bowl. Thus the true enemy of the Earth is not the drill head--but the plow.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a result of both natural and manmade forces -- specifically, several consecutive years of drought combined with a century of poor farming practices. When farmers plowed the native grasses under, there was nothing to hold the topsoil in place during dry spells and it simply blew away. Thankfully, we learned from that experience and now farm the land more responsibly (contour plowing, crop rotation, planting windbreaks, and so on). The possibility of another Dust Bowl is extremely remote.

Folks on one side don't want animal testing, and the folks on the other side don't want embryonic stem cell research. Fear-mongering from both sides ensues.

Now a U.S. Libertarian Party member will allow both stem cell research and animal testing, but federally fund neither. Useless.

While I've got nothing against federal or state funding for stem-cell research, I don't see why it's absolutely necessary when such research is being carried out by plenty of privately funded institutions.

 

[Jadzia]

Russia's solution to leaky oil wells is simply this.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

This may be hard for you to understand but...

That sort of thing is not necessary here. Save the insults for TNZ.

woah scotpens, flame much? probably should cool those afterburners a tad.

I saw no flame in his post. If you ever do see something you think is a flame, please hit the "Notify Moderator" button. It looks like this:

Thanks!

 

[judge alba]

I'm sure you are all aware of the recent Oil spillage that's occured.
Can anyone tell me why such spillages cannot be contained by a sea based wall?

HERE is a typical Oil Rig. Now Oil tends to float on the surface of the water does it not? Once the spillage occurs the water floats out across the sea on the surface and becomes more or less impossible to clean and prevent.

So why not take a precaution and build a sea wall around the entire oil rig?

The wall would not even need to drop to the sea bed. It could rise above the sea for so many metre and below the water for so many metre and the centre of this wall would have a buoy that allows this wall to float on the ocean.

Any oil leakage/spillage would be contained then within the perimeter of the wall and not allow it to spread out to the rest of the ocean.

A second benefit of such a wall would be to build a deployable one for tanker spillages. Once a tanker spillage is reported special boats holding these deployable walls races to the scene of the spillage and surround the tanker with the floatable walls.

Do people understand my idea?

Here is a very quick primitive drawing of what I mean. CLICK

although it's a kind of good idea how would the supply ships get to the rig?

 

[Lindley]

I don't understand why this is so hard. Can't they just pipe some cement or other sealant down there?

 

[Jadzia]

If it's never been a major problem in the past, there may not be procedures in place to deal with it. They may not know what to do for the best.

 

[diankra]

I don't understand why this is so hard. Can't they just pipe some cement or other sealant down there?

The well is very deep: it's one thing sending down preset concrete, another getting cement or concrete to set down there, in a water enviroment with heavy water pressure (with an outflow working to get past the sealant).

 

[Lindley]

So, use a diving bell or something similar to temporarily dry things off.