You would have to be living on a desert island – hopefully with nice clean sand – to have missed the disaster that has hit the Gulf of Mexico in the last days. The story of the conflagration of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon with the tragic loss of eleven lives has been making the headlines around the world, and rightly so.
The company leasing this very technologically-advanced rig, BP, has a reputation as being among the best of the oil exploration companies in caring for the environment. With more than two hundred thousand US gallons of light crude oil now known to be leaking from the sea bed, every day, the effects of the continuing outpouring will outpace the Exxon Valdez spill twenty-one years ago (March 24, 1989) when the tanker, en route from Valdez, Alaska, to Long Beach, California, ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound with the command chair occupied by the captain, who had been drinking.
Only seventy thousand gallons of oil were released by the freighter the New Carissa when it lost its overnight sea anchor and went aground on February 4, 1999 on the beach just off the North Spit of Coos Bay, Oregon. Part of that broken vessel was towed and then torpedoed out at sea and attempts were made to burn the oil – just as has been proposed in the Gulf – in the stern of the ship where it was trapped for some years buried deep in the beach. (Science note to all: crude oil does not burn at temperatures we can easily generate.)
The burning scenario was also attempted many years before when the Liberian registered supertanker the Torrey Canyon went aground on Pollard’s Rock in the Seven Stones reef between the Scilly Isles and Land’s End, in England, on March 18, 1967 with the spillage of 860,000 barrels of oil (36,120,000 US gallons) greatly eclipsing the Exxon Valdez’ 11 million gallon spillage. The Torrey Canyon survived the best of continual RAF bombing, and nature was eventually left to take care of the oil.
That is not so easily said and done in the Gulf of Mexico disaster; there are no massive tidal effects to disperse the oil, which continues to thrust its way out of the ocean bed. Instead, the prevailing southerly winds are driving the oil into wetlands, estuaries and ponds. Thousands of families in Louisiana and neighboring states will lose their livelihoods as their fabulous fishing and shrimping grounds are destroyed, maybe for generations. Tourists will no longer enjoy that part of the Gulf, a place that has already endured enormous hardship from Hurricane Katrina and the amateur attempts at a response.
Wildlife will be dramatically hit. There are estimated to be over four hundred species of birds and fish that are threatened in the area; whales and dolphins have enjoyed the warm Gulf waters as well – but no longer.
How did we allow this mass poisoning to happen? The lack of regulation, or the remit that the oil industry could self-regulate itself, is clearly a major issue and something that needs to be promptly addressed before any more continental shelf exploration or drilling is permitted. “Drill baby, drill” clearly needs to be replaced with “care, and more care.”
But from an engineering point there is something here that simply does not make sense. If we were designing a power load that had a generator of near-infinite capacity driving it what would be our first safety criterion? If something goes wrong with that load – a short-circuit, perhaps – we would want to shut that generator off by making it unable to keep supplying power to the broken load.
The automatic opening of an oil-circuit breaker (yes, that’s facetious…) is an elementary precaution, especially when the generator is five thousand feet down in the ocean and is unavailable to human diving. It appears from the elementary descriptions that have been released about this particular well that a number of oil sources have in fact been combined to form one wellhead feed to the surface. Each of these “generators” should, of course, have had its own breaker.
In fact, such remotely-triggered "blowout preventers" exist, and are required for offshore drilling operations in the waters off both Norway and Brazil. A similar requirement for the U.S. was contemplated several years ago, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, "drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness." One assumes, in hindsight, that BP would have preferred the up-front cost of about $500,000 to fit such a mechanism, as compared with the estimated $6 million per day they are now shelling out to combat the oil spill.
What would you take to your desert island? A solar panel or an oil rig? In my case, neither, if they had been designed by BP…and especially if they had been funded by them.
