Deepwater drilling, offshore drilling, deepwell injection, secondary oil recovery, and fracking aren't safe by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Deepwater drilling, offshore drilling, deepwell injection, secondary oil recovery, and fracking aren't safe

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, January 6, 2013 06:43
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Saturday, January 5, 2013 8:50 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

One problem is pressure. The farther down you drill, the higher the pressure you will encounter. The BP well encountered an oil reservoir under extreme high pressure, and all kinds of equipment failed including the concrete casing and the blowout preventer. As a result, oil coated vast underwater tracts of coral and seagrass in a richly productive area, creating a dead zone and causing fish cancers and lesions. The oil is STILL seeping today.

On a related noted, Obama okayed drilling off the coast of Alaska because Shell had supposedly come up with a realistic accident prevention and response plan. But then, Shell failed to keep control of a drill ship when a tow line snapped and a tugboat engine failed, and the drill rig has run aground several times already and is now aground on Sitkalidak Island, slowly being taken apart by winter waves. According to inspectors, the rig is making "sucking and blowing" noises, which means it is holed somewhere. To add to the excitement, a 7.5 earthquake just occurred in Craig Alaska, which is directly across the Alaskan Bay. The tsunami alert was canceled, but if a tsunami had occurred it would have swamped the oil rig. If Shell can't even keep control of a rig BEFORE it begins drilling, how are we supposed to believe they can make future drilling "safe"?

Salt domes are unstable. They're lighter and than the surrounding rock, and over time they literally squeeze through and float upwards through rock formations until they come to the surface, resulting in protrusions called salt diapirs. Unfortunately, petrogeologists don't see them that way. They look at a salt domes and think "oil-capping rock". They also see places for deep-well injection... places to pump toxic waste where it will be "out of sight, out of mind". The toxic waste includes an oil-production liquid with a benign acronym "NORM" ("naturally occurring radioactive material"... thorium/radium/uranium-contaminated salt water that comes up with oil). Well, one of the big salt domes is collapsing. The Napoleanville Salt Dome in LA has had enough of being drilled and filled, and part of the edge has collapsed to form the Bayou Corne sinkhole. This sinkhole has consumed a deepwell injection cavern site and is growing day by day at the surface.

Quote:
The outer edge of Napoleonville Salt Dome near the failed storage cavern is gone, "fracked-out", according to the key geologist working on the Bayou Corne sinkhole disaster who broke the news Tuesday night at a Resident Briefing meeting in Pierre Part.... The salt dome involved in what officials say is a historic event globally, is a 1-mile by 3-mile formation with caverns primarily used by oil and gas industry storage. One of the over 50 underground caverns in that salt dome is leased by Texas Brine LLC, blamed by the state for the disaster due to its failed cavern. Texas Brine has contended that it's cavern failed due loss of integrity elsewhere in the dome due to seismic activity.

http://www.examiner.com/article/sinkhole-salt-dome-outer-edge-collapse
d-fracked

Worse, the collapse has loosened enough rock to form a rubble-filled conduit between a deep gas-and-oil containing formation called The Big Hum, and the surface. Natural gas, toxic hydrogen sulfide, crude oil, NORM and other toxic waste materials are bubbling up to the surface in a sinkhole that is the size of five football fields but is rapidly getting larger.

Just for context, large areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and the Gulf of Mexico are underlain by salt basins. Some of these salt deposits are five miles deep, or deeper, and petrogeologists are looking at these deep salt basins with a gleam in their eyes. They feel they can handle the issue of corrosive salt, unstable geology and extremely high pressure reservoirs (they call them "plays", which seems an awfully lighthearted way of looking at something that can be so dangerous).

Here, in southern California, we have our own oil woes. California (including coastal California) has its own oil deposits. It's thick, sludgy and high-sulfur, but when oil prices are high enough it's worth going back to the old oil fields and trying to recover more oil. You would be surprised at oil recovery companies are willing to try... in addition to re-boring well casings and injecting low-pressure water (which is relatively benign) they have attempted high-pressure injection, in-situ fire (ie creating an underground oil fire to heat up the remaining oil) and creating a special bacteria which would partly break down the crude oil and make it more fluid.

Many of these 2ndary recovery sites are the source of complaints... odors, gas leaks, foundation failures, and the occasional collapse and emergency response. (On of LA's downtown streets- Olive Street- collapsed due to a recovery blowout) And like a lot of other dry places, we rely on underground water. We are also subject to earthquakes.

I'm not going to say much about fracking... I think you all are aware of the related environmental issues related ot it.

Just a few more comments: the Canada tar sands are an environmental nightmare, from extraction to processing to pipeline. (Some of the off-gas pipes contain 50% hydrogen sulfide; even tiny leaks can be deadly because hydrogen sulfide is fatal at 1/10,000 of that concentration. Ranchers around those pipeline complain that their cattle are dying, people living nearby show neurotoxic effects.)

Keystone Pipeline, anyone?

If we think we can drill our way out of our energy shortage, we will be creating a host of other problems that will reduce our productivity in other areas, especially where drilling conflicts with water resources. Of the two projected shortages, water shortage is much more serious.

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Saturday, January 5, 2013 9:07 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Drill Baby, Drill !!!

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Saturday, January 5, 2013 3:34 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Well, not that it means much, but they just got gobsmacked with another huge fine for trying to cover up the fact that yes, it's still leaking.

Also, DTE finally, supposedly, finished cleaning up an old MichCon site, but I am not yet convinced, considering DTE's credibility around here is on a negative balance right now, even with the State Attorney General.
http://www.annarbor.com/news/dte-energy-calls-michcon-cleanup-success/

So long as these companies can take fines and penalties as a cost of doing business, since they are a pittance in respect to the profit they make by doing this crap, they're not gonna change their behavior.

I was actually quite impressed with NY Governor Cuomos response to the public utilities seeking to protect their own stuff at the expense of the citizenry they're supposed to be servicing, he threatened to start pulling certs and breaking their monopolies, and wowza, look how FAST they got on the ball after that, hey ?

I think we need an alt-energy Von Neumann plan, in which the energy produced is exclusively devoted to further alt-energy infrastructure till it reaches the tipping point of supplying more than that required for construction so we don't hear any whining about "wasting" their precious friggin petroleum.

-Frem

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Saturday, January 5, 2013 4:36 PM

BYTEMITE

In other news:

Elimination of trees could solve leaf burning problem.

Titanic: I think there might be a leak.

Look at this duck. Look at it.

None of the pictures I tried to hotlink showed up correctly.

Suffice to say:

Yes.

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Sunday, January 6, 2013 6:43 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

And then, of course, in the Arctic there are the more visible effects like the recent one, which promise more and more of the same:

Quote:
Rig Runs Aground in Alaska, Reviving Fears About Arctic Drilling

One of Shell Oil’s two Arctic drilling rigs is beached on an island in the Gulf of Alaska, threatening environmental damage from a fuel spill and calling into question Shell’s plans to resume drilling in the treacherous waters north of Alaska in the summer.

The rig, the Kulluk, broke free from a tow ship in stormy seas and ran aground Monday night. The Coast Guard was leading an effort to keep its more than 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel and lubricants from spilling onto the rocky shoreline.

The grounding was the latest in a series of mishaps to befall Shell’s ambitious plans to prospect for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off the North Slope of Alaska. Excerpts from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/business/energy-environment/breakawa
y-oil-rig-runs-aground-in-gulf-of-alaska.html?_r=0

While those are more of what the public will see, the points you made are equally valid...and none of it, of course, will stop them...

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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