Oil spill could go on for years, experts say

By John Byrne
Friday, May 14th, 2010

The retired chairman of an energy investment banking firm told National Geographic in little-noticed comments Thursday that efforts to stop the oil leak under the Gulf of Mexico could prove fruitless and than oil could gush into the ocean for years.

Matthew Simmons, retired chair of the energy-industry investment bank Simmons & Company, said that BP and the US military's engineers are more or less clueless about cutting off the flow.

"We don't have any idea how to stop this," Simmons said. The former banker mocked a proposal to try and plug the leak with trash, saying it was a "joke."

Simmons noted that the pressure at 5,000 feet undersea -- where the well site is located -- is so high, that containment efforts are likely often to fail. At 5,000 feet underwater, blocking elements have to be able to hold even with pressures off 40,000 pounds per square inch.

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"You're talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels in it," Resink said. At the current spill rate, it "would take years to deplete," he added.

According to a scientific analysis of footage from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico showing the leak, National Public Radio claimed Thursday that the growing ecological disaster is actually ten times worse than previously estimated, saying the rushing torrent of oil pouring into the ocean is equivalent to one Exxon-Valdez spill every four days.

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The Deepwater Horizon well has been jetting oil unabated for just short of one month at time of this writing. Already, the pollution exceeds a scale which most individual humans can fully grasp.

Link: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0514/76111/

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The prospects don't sound good, yet I still don't understand why they cannot drill into the seabed near the well and insert a small tactical nuke sufficient to collapse it.

....death of the humans....and eventually... cleansing of the earth. In a few billion years, none of what we've done here will matter.

They care about profits.

A couple hundred thousand years after we're all gone, and most of the damage will be healed.
A million years, and you would hardly even know we were ever here.
Ten million years, and some other species will be running the place.

Is it something that's been done in comic books of some tee vee show? A "nuke" isn't some giant cure-all styptic or cauterizing tool. The idea is preposterous.

This is a chamber of trapped oil being forced out by the weight of the continental shelf. The pressure at 5,000 feet is already over a ton per square inch just from the water -- dwarfing even the biggest nuclear weapon in existence. And the drill hole into this chamber extends thousands of feet below that.

The Russians previously used nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. A targeted nuclear explosion might similarly help seal off the oil well channel that has leaked oil unchecked since the sinking of a BP oil rig on April 22, according to a translation of the account in the daily newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda by Julia Ioffe of the news website True/Slant.

Weapons labs in the former Soviet Union developed special nukes for use to help pinch off the gas wells. They believed that the force from a nuclear explosion could squeeze shut any hole within 82 to 164 feet (25 to 50 meters), depending on the explosion's power. That required drilling holes to place the nuclear device close to the target wells.

A first test in the fall of 1966 proved successful in sealing up an underground gas well in southern Uzbekistan, and so the Russians used nukes four more times for capping runaway wells.

"The second 'success' gave Soviet scientists great confidence in the use of this new technique for rapidly and effectively controlling ran away gas and oil wells," according to a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report on the Soviet Union's peaceful uses of nuclear explosions.

A last attempt took place in 1981, but failed perhaps because of poor positioning, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report.

Link: http://www.livescience.com/technology/russia-nuke-gulf-oil-well-100512.html

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Of course if you have any better ideas to stem further damage then I'm all ears.

I don't have any idea, but "nuke it" isn't a real "idea" either. It's comic book/movie silliness.

of petro disasters. Oh, and in comic book/movie silliness too. :eyes:

with rocks and sand. While the first few tons might not do anything we could put thousands of tons of rocks and sand on the thing. It seems like it would stop it. Am I wrong?

we exit, stage left, 23 December 2012.:shrug: