On April 20, the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon exploration rig not only killed 11 workers, but has rapidly become more of threat than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill incident. At least 1.6 million gallons of crude oil have leaked out into the Gulf coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida so far. Although no one knows for sure how much oil could be possibly leaked out into the ocean and later spread to coastal beaches, marshes, panhandles, etc, a company source confirmed reports that it was tens of millions of barrels.
This frightening amount of oil can severely and permanently hurt fishing companies as well as wildlife in these regions. Pretty much this oil spill is going to affect everyone is that area "the concerns are both environmental and economic. The fishing industry is worried that marine life will die — and that no one will want to buy products from contaminated water anyway. Tourism officials are worried that vacationers won't want to visit oil-tainted beaches. And environmentalists are worried about how the oil will affect the countless birds, coral and mammals in and near the Gulf" (msnbc).
However, what makes matters worse is the weather. Due to storms and windy conditions, clean-up crews from many different cities have not been able to sail out and start containing the spill. In addition experts have used methods such skimming the oil, burning it or dispersing it with chemicals, but have had little success.
Although BP has their own solution by using 74-ton domes to store contaminated water and oil. They did make these domes ahead of time because seemed inconceivable.
Within a few days, experts have seen the oil spill triple in size and is rapidly spreading.
What can we do to stop/prevent this current incident from happening again in the future(have we learned our lesson yet???) What can we do now? Who is responsible for this crisis? How will it affect our economy in the long run?
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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6 comments:
What's worse is that if the problem isn't relived soon enough, the broken pipe spilling the oil might rupture even further causing more gas to bleed out of the well.
Beyond Petroleum's most viable solution is still questionable at best. They plan to create a box with a hose to cover up the well and siphon out the gas spilling out of it so it doesn't spill over into the water. However, this solution has only been proven to work in shallower waters. At 5,000 below the surface and working with only robotic submarines, they have a very difficult job ahead of them. It's even more coordination-intensive than open heart surgery. If this fails, they would have to resort to plan B, drilling a well to cover up the ruptured well. They plan to drill two in case the first one fails. But the drawback would be that it takes months to complete. Of course, the damage to wildlife by then would have been extensive.
The economic consequences are quite clear: the fishing industry would have to put off its fishing for a while, and an oil rig is lost. Furthermore, this debacle might make Obama think twice about allowing off-shore drilling potentially delaying the oil industry's expansion. We can also expect a ton of litigation or lawsuits from the fishing industries, environmental industries, government agencies, and possibly even the tourism industry.
BP is responsible for this. Supposedly, a worker didn't cap the oil well right causing it to burst.
This is interesting because we talked about this in biotech
but i think the amount is already up to 12 million gallons which exceeds the exxon valdez accident which is just crazy!
But people like Arnold Swhartz... have already took this disaster into consideration and stopped expanding the amount of oil rigs off our own coast. He is normally a super pro oil rig and drilling person but just because of the recent spill he is beginning to stop.
Wow. Well this really sucks. Oil spills are horrible. I remember doing a lab in APES last year where we experimented with different tools to separate and take out oil from a basin of water. It was definitely very difficult to get all the oil out, so I can't imagine how difficult it is to clean up 1.6 million gallons of crude oil.
The animals and wildlife are also out very great danger. I also feel bad for the fisherman because they rely on the wildlife in the oceans for their incomes. Because of the oil spill, there are at a major disadvantage. If nobody wants to purchase seafood from this contaminated water, the fishermans' incomes will come to a halt. The process that Kevin described above seems very confusing and difficult, but hopefully the oil spill problem can be resolved soon. We need to stop these kinds of accidents from happening in the future.
I forgot to elaborate more on the economic effects.
Because of the enormous amount of oil contaminating the waters, the shipping lanes that the cargo ships usually travel through are now tightly restricted. A ton of money has been lost when the ships had to unload their cargo elsewhere and then shipped through another route. The lost time also means lost money. This has far reaching effects on many industries: anything that is shipped by boat could be affected. We can expect the prices of commodoties such as food to rise ever so slightly.
This video should explain how the situation came to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLiqvZOP8TY
Going off of what Josh said, I couldn't agree more. That lab in APES really opened my eyes to the relative difficulty in cleaning up an oil spill, except that we had to clean up maybe a quarter of a cup of oil whereas they have tens of millions of barrels. I do remember that in the lab we had to clean up the oil from the sand, which was utterly impossible.
This is very scary to think that even when there is better technology oil spills can still occur, and it is the biggest in 20 years..
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