The oil spill and risk management
The Gulf oil spill is very disturbing in its scope. Not only did it kill eleven people, but it now threatens the huge fishing industry in the region, not to mention wildlife and beaches that are beautiful and drive the area’s economy.
We still don’t know the all-important details about exactly how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented. But one thing I do know from having observed energy accidents over the years—whether they be oil spills such as this one and the 1969 Santa Barbara incident, or nuclear power plant episodes like Three-Mile Island (or the far worse Chernobyl disaster)—is that they will happen sooner or later no matter what we do to prevent them. The best we can do is to make sure that they occur rarely and are containable.
It is somewhat ironic that, because of the fearful reaction in this country against nuclear power plants in the wake of Three Mile Island (reinforced by Chernobyl), we have become even more dependent on oil (as well as coal, which causes more localized loss of life of miners rather than spreading ecological problems, although proponents of AGW believe it is at least partly responsible for climate change as well).
There is no free lunch for our energy needs. We can talk all we want about wind and water power but they cannot provide more than a small fraction of what is required. Therefore, relative risks must be evaluated, and decisions must be made to develop the most efficient sources of energy for the least risk—knowing that risk there will always be.
I have long been a proponent of nuclear energy, even back in my liberal Democrat days. Europe seems to be of the same opinion, since nuclear power is used fairly extensively there. Three Mile Island was frightening to Americans, but it presented nothing like the danger that was hyped in the media, and you will note that although since Chernobyl there have been a number of nuclear accidents, none of them were particularly serious.
Of course, that does not mean a very serious accident could not happen; it could. But it does mean that safety has improved and is fairly good. Our reluctance to build more nuclear plants (and/or activate the ones we already have that have been shut down) has handicapped us tremendously in the energy quest, and reflects our desire to reduce risk to zero, which can never be done.
However, even if we expand nuclear energy it would not mean that we don’t need oil; the two sources of power are used for different purposes. But we urgently need to figure out what happened in the Gulf to cause this spill and to reduce the risk of future accidents even further. The modern world requires power to run, although many Luddites and environmentalists would like us to return to the days of sparse human populations with a light carbon footprint.
[ADDENDUM: Encouraging news?]
It is interesting that Obama eulogized the miners killed in West Virginia, but I hear little or nothing about the men killed on the oil platform. I guess there is no Joe Hill in the oil business. But on a broader note, there seems to be little public emphasis on the human side of this accident. There is more worry about some temporarily fouled beaches (the gulf leaks oil like a sieve from natural leakage anyway) than about the dangerous, heroic jobs in offshore work both the oil production and the repair and cleanup crews from the industry and Coast Guard/Navy.
The basic materials industries are inherently dangerous and no amount of OSHA or other rules will make them completely safe. Yet they produce things that are vital for everyday life. Somehow these are supposed to magically appear when wanted without risk or drawbacks. As my daughter’s fellow geology students have on a bumper sticker, “If it isn’t grown, it’s Mined!”
The same dangers go for the people who grow and harvest stuff as well. Loggers, fisherman and farmers have some of the most dangerous jobs in the world. But they too are taken for granted and run up and down when they violate some rules.
A great deal of the fear from Three Mile Island was manufactured by the press in order to drive ratings up and crank environmentalist need it to be perpetuated in order to be relevant.
Engineering articles on the subject (for example http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/threemile.html) give a VERY different impression. Only partially mentioned there but one that always stuck in my mind was the great panic over the hydrogen bubble. The interior that they thought was filled had *no* oxygen in it and the hydrogen was a protective measure if certain events occurred. No engineer anywhere was worried about a massive explosion, someone in the press figured out that hydrogen was “explosive” and ran from there.
The automated systems that were put into place to stop a reactor meltdown and radioactive release when the humans or other equipment failed worked as intended. There were still more layers that had to be breached for it to be a real catastrophe of even the scale of a *small* oil spill.
Chernobyl, OTOH, was communism at it’s finest. Due to the secrecy they need to maintain the engineers that should have been present were not, it was the turbine engineers, not the nuclear ones running the plant. They mistakenly thought that the alarms were mainly just warning (well, I guess in some way they were) and didn’t understand that the “Oh Crap – your gonna die” klaxon meant anything other than “somethings kinda wrong”. Couple in the roof of a reactor core being made of a combustible material for similar reasons and you got something that can’t really happen in our country
This is what happens as science becomes political and social first (which follows on the post yesterday over genetic implications in intelligence) – Chernobyl being an extreme example of that. This is precisely why I feel this is going to be bigger in the long run than anything else facing us. That we already live in a partial fantasy world and base broad sweeping ideas based on lies is *already* causing a massive problem. As this gets worse and worse I fear for us and, sadly, this is a world wide phenomena with the US often still not as far as other countries.
I note that Obama is a day late and a dollar short in getting around to noticing and dealing with this economic/ecological crisis. My guess it that–as with most things these days–the Malignant Narcissist in Chief is just not that interested in his duties as President, unless he can milk some political advantage from them.
I also note that a new crisis that he should be on “like stink on you know what”–the attempted car bombing in Times Square last evening–is something he has yet to talk to the Nation about. I guess he just figures that his own “Inspector Clouseau,” Miss Aqua Velva herself, Homeland Security Director Janet Nepolitano, has what she has termed, this “possible terrorist attack,” under control.
At the Grouchy Conservative Pundits forum, several members actually work or have worked in and around the oil industry. There have been a number of threads about this spill.
Update, rig sinks, fire out, 1000 BPD leaking from riser.
Louisiana oil spill
Oil spill off US coast ‘five times worse than we thought’, officials admit
Lawyers flock to Gulf Coast for oil spill lawsuits
BP warned of rig fault 10 years ago
There’s plenty of jargon in the comments and I don’t pretend to understand a lot of it. But it’s still interesting reading anyway, and makes one appreciate all of the hard work, intelligence, and risk that goes into our being able to get gasoline out of the pump at our local gas station when we want it.
Looking at it realistically, major oil spills are pretty rare given the number of oil rigs in operation every day around the world. While they may have severe local consequences, most of us only notice the price of gas going up. The local fishermen are probably the worst affected. But the environmental effects are only temporary, and ecosystems will clean themselves over time, with human help.
In my opinion, the worst thing about this oil spill is that it will be a boon to the Luddites.
The Three Mile Island incident is where I learned the press either intentionally lies or is so ignorant they need to make stuff up. I suspect it’s a combination. I have no use for them. If you know something of the subject, you can clearly see the misinformation.
Risk is the mathematical product of frequency and outcome. Ideally, for the worst case scenario, the frequency is somewhere near zero. If it is not, safeguards are put in place to make as near zero as reasonably achievable. Note that the frequency can never be made zero. Stuff happens. So for the press to say BP did not consider the current scenario to be likely is true, but not the whole story.
At the Market Ticker, Karl Denninger lives on the Florida panhandle, and he is thus in the threatened area. He still says Drill Baby Drill.
One thing that amazes me about the Gulf oil spill is that the blow out preventers did not kick in and end the leak before it started. Since their inception around 30 years ago BOPs effectively ended the possibility of uncontrolled events, as the industry calls disasters. This was not supposed to happen, like breaks failing on a new car.
Neo,
Don’t include the average German in the Europeans who are rethinking nuclear. Last week, 100,000 people formed a 120-km chain in the north to protest atomic energy. Every single distubance at a reactor site is reported on the news, even if it has nothing to do with the safety of the reactor. All the NGO scare reports are treated as objective reporting. There are a lot of people here who believe that a few more windmills will do the trick in providing energy. It is an act of political courage to tell the truth to the populace.
Meanwhile this demo was like a class reunion of geezers wanting to remember the good old days of hell raising. The younger demonstraters are their indoctrinees. Neither group pays much attention to the tropical forests being cut down to supply ethanol for their cars.
I work at a metal Fabrication shop where we cut and bend various parts for on shore oil rigs. One thing the older guys say is that a lot of the steal is not as good as it used to be. I saw a bent piece of metal a few weeks ago where on the same bend, one portion of the metal bent as it should, while another section cracked.
Applying Occam’s Razor and 15 months of experience to our analysis of why Obama didn’t respond timely and well to the oil spill, we deduce that he feels he’s better off to let the thing spread, drift and do maximum damage. The dino-media can be counted on for butt covering, and the more oil all over Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, the more the useful idiots will scream to stop all drilling.
Carter is being left in the dust and Chester Arthur’s dismal term is Obama’s new benchmark. G-d help us all.
I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania when steel-making was still a thriving, and largely self-contained, regional industry. The iron ore was imported, but the coal was right there in the Connellsville Seam. It was mined, coked, and run up the rail-line to the Pittsburgh mills. Memories of my childhood nights include a horizon turned red against the darkness by the coke-oven fires outside town. Sometimes we drove to Pittsburgh to visit family, the route taking us past the great heap which dripped glowing flows of slag, day and night.
There were sometimes accidents, mine explosions and the like. My grandfather’s sister, my Great Aunt Bets, married a man who was a doctor in the mines where an explosion killed him, leaving her and their young son behind. Everyone knew someone who had been touched by those events at some time or another, especially people who lived out in “the works.” It was a risky business, and everyone knew it.
I’m always somewhat amazed by the environmentalists’, and through propaganda’s power, others’, insistence that these efforts should be made risk-free. It is, as neo says, not possible to make it so. What’s even worse is the notion that these workers labor and are sometimes injured or killed merely so the managers and their companies can make money, and the whole thing is laid down to “greed.” It’s a lie.
The awful BP rig explosion, fire, and oil spill are going to cause terrible damage, but I think even worse would be the consequences of deciding that the event means we have to give up such pursuits. We cannot, not if we are to maintain an advanced life-style–and I include in that each and every benefit our civilization provides. Risks can be investigated, managed, and accident results mitigated, and accidents themselves often prevented, but we cannot stop the efforts. We are accepting risk in exchange for being able to provide ourselves and our children, and their children, and their children’s children, protection against the threats and harms of an unbenevolent nature. Gaia does not care for us, and so we must care for ourselves.
There’s a lot of coverage of the spill, but I’ve seen not so much of the initial explosion and fire that started it all. That’s what I’m curious about. I’m a little suspicious, and can’t help thinking of the Reichstag fire. I know we’ve kicked that one around a time or two, and wondered whether we might at some point see something similar, at least in intended consequence. I cringe when I hear Napolitano talk about possible terrorism, and I shudder when I hear Obama say he’s sending “SWAT teams” to the Gulf rigs. I too wonder what happened to the blow-out preventer mechanisms. This kind of thing has not happened for quite a long time; its timing is so convenient, and its cause so much a mystery, that I, for one, am at least a little unsettled.
betsybounds:
I heard a caller on Mark Levin’s radio show on Friday night who said he was on the platform when it exploded. He described the events leading up to the blast, which he said was caused by high-pressure gas shooting up out of the pipe and settling on the rig (being heavier than air). At that point any random spark could have set it off.
He stated that it was an accident and not sabotage, and said that he wanted to put such rumors to rest. Levin said that he was able to independently determine that the caller was who he claimed to be.
Even so, it’s awfully fortuitous timing for the Luddites in the administration.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/013914.html
SDA as usual is on top of things.
betsybounds
I’ve had some of the same thoughts you’ve noted; but on the other hand, the Louisiana disaster isn’t the first associated with BP. There was an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas that killed 15 workers in 2005; a 55-minute CSB safety video about the disaster can be viewed online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuJtdQOU_Z4&feature=related
Then there was Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha disaster in July 1988, which killed 187 workers.
Link to the first part of a three-part BBC documentary produced on the tenth anniversary of that explosion and fire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU5tC2jhMz0&feature=related
(Yeah, I know it’s BBC, but it does cover the inadequacy of the safety precautions reasonably well.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m also unsettled by the timing of the Louisiana disaster, but there’s also no doubt that Dirty Jobs Guy is right–these jobs are inherently dangerous.
Great link, anna!
It is ironic that because oil drilling is not permitted on the continental shelf, oil companies are pushed out to the deep water where things are more risky and hard to repair.
There is also lots of oil on land in Alaska, near its shore and in the Rockies, but the greenies have nixed that.
Our economy depends on relatively cheap energy. Four dollar gas was the last straw for the economy in the recent recession. There are over 3,000 rigs in the Gulf. Turn them off and you will see a real depression.
Some years ago after the Exxon Valdez spill, a geology friend told me that during WW II the Atlantic and Gulf beaches had lots of oil on them from sunken allied ships. Eventually, it goes away in that it is biodegradable.
Thanks, rickl. Levin has a lot of credibility with me, so that’s good hearing.
Still, these wizards are such great opportunists that it’s not always easy to be clear as to whether you (I) think they’re engineering events or just awfully quick on the spin trigger. I tell you what, I hate feeling like I’m living in the Illuminati trilogy all over again–been there in the ’70s, did that, and haven’t even got a lousy tee-shirt! 🙂
Incidentally, I picked up some wild American shrimp at the grocery today, and noticed that the price has already gone up by $2.00/lb. This is going to be awful for those hard-working fishermen and their families and towns down on the Gulf.
Mr. Frank–The oil from those sunken ships from WWII is still sometimes leaking onto the Jersey shore. because I had to step around such oil washed up on a New Jersey beach a few years ago.
*betsybounds,
I, too am from a steel-making industry family (my grandfather, my uncle, my father and my niece, all either worked at the metallurgical plant or are engineers who graduated Metals and Alloys college), and I spent my childhood summers in a city much like you describe.
Re: the awfully convenient timing : there is a theory I came across that looks into parallel of the timing of Clinton/Lewinsky story and hyped-up necessity to bomb Kosovo – compare the emergence of Vera-plus-Barack love story. In other words: diversion campaign.
jon baker: I wouldn’t be surprised if the steel in question was Made In China.
Mr. Frank, your friend is correct. It’s also true, although not often remarked, that there are enormous natural oil seeps from ocean floors all over the world, and not the least of these are in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m a geologist as well, but when I tell people about these things they aren’t much impressed. We’re drowned out most of the time.
This book (about Prince William Sound and the Exxon Valdez and the great Good Friday Alaska quake), while out-of-print, is a very fine look at the recuperative powers of nature: http://www.amazon.com/Degrees-Disaster-Prince-William-Rebounds/dp/0300068158/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272831532&sr=8-1
Mr. Frank
during WW II the Atlantic and Gulf beaches had lots of oil on them from sunken allied ships.
There is still a visible oil slick leaking from the remains of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor: I understand that many veterans consider it the ship’s symbolic weeping for her lost crew. God rest their souls.
Aerial view of the Arizona Memorial and the “black tears” in the sea current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Arizona.JPG
Have you guys heard this theory that N. Korea sent out a mini-sub that torpedoed the rig, then blew itself up under the rig?
It strikes me as Tom Clancy-like fiction, but there are tons of details to make it sound authentic:
http://noisyroom.net/blog/2010/05/02/rumors-swirl-around-oil-rig-explosion/
Scott, I tried searching in Russian and didn’t find any indication of “Northern Fleet report” that “circulates in Kremlin”. Note, there is no linked source quoted in the article (I went down the chain of links to the original one)
However, I found this piece of information that I don’t remember being discussed in US media or blogs: that at the end of March a South-Korean navy ship was torpedoed and drowned by North-Korean submarine.
I’m enjoying those who are wailing about the damage to tourism in the states that might be affected by this situation. Do they not realize, one wonders, what the effect on tourism would be with less and far more expensive oil?
So let’s see if I have this straight:
(1) Solar energy is too expensive, produces far too little electricity, and only during the day. Its potential is to produce only a tiny, tiny fraction of our needs. Enviros are currently halting a solar plant planned for–get ready–the Mojave Desert!
(2) Wind energy takes huge amounts of land, works only when the wind is blowing (which tends not to be at peak demand times), and is erratic at best. Its potential is to produce only a somewhat larger than tiny, tiny fraction of our needs. Wind turbines also kill birds: Enviro no no. They also mar the landscape of elite leftists: Big no no.
(3) Natural gas, hydro power, geothermal power and other exotic methods are so erratic, unreliable and/or inefficient compared with coal, for example, that again, their potential yield is tiny. Enviros and Obama won’t allow natural gas drilling anyway.
(4) Nuclear Power? Great potential in every way. Environmentalists will fight to the death, even turning terrorist to prevent it. Obama will give it lip service but tie it up so tightly in red tape as to make it impossible.
(5) Electric vehicles? Severe technological limitations on size, range cost, and flexibility, as well as no infrastructure and we still have to produce the electricity to power the damned things.
So, if we’re frightened by the potential risk of off shore drilling, there is plenty of land-based oil and natural gas available, but of course, the enviros and Obama won’t touch that because it can’t be brought out of the ground within 25 seconds. It might take a year or two to produce, so obviously, there is no sense in even starting!
I fear that all of this might be nothing more than one more diversion on the way to our national meltdown under our first socialist president.
A good post.
Some thoughts after reading this.
While there are large oil deposits off shore, we also have large deposits on shore (i.e. ANWR). It is so much easier and cheaper to access, develop and transport oil from dry land locations.
As Neo, and many others have said, we need to be developing more nuclear power capability as quickly as possible because at the present time, it is the best technology for producing the large quantities of energy required by modern society. Some promising advances in nuclear energy can be found here, here, here and here.
While we need to pursue nuclear, there are still significant niche opportunities for wind and solar. Let’s not abandon them, we need all the energy we can get.
The indisputable fact is increasingly coming to light that B.P. was woefully unprepared to react to any disaster. This is becoming a recurring problem for B.P. Several years ago on the north slope of Alaska, B.P. pipelines leaked significant amounts of oil onto the tundra due to pipeline corrosion. The lines themselves predated B.P.’a acquisition of them, but B.P. knew of their conditions and did little to mitigate the problem. Once B.P. acquires a field, their philosophy seems to be to put minimal effort into maintenance and to seek to maximize production until the field becomes less profitable than they want and/or deferred maintenance will require major capital investments. At that point they off load the field and move on. B.P. puts more energy into their commercial effort to show how ‘green’ they are than they do in actually trying to be clean. Now the Gulf Coast and American taxpayers are going to shoulder the bill for cleaning up their mess. They need to pay to help clean up this mess.
One gets the feeling the oil spill will pale in comparison to the spillage of liberal pablum that pretends Man would be much better off if we just didn’t DO THINGS during our stay on this planet.
Looks like this reccession/depression is going to have to get much worse than any of us could have imagined to get this expected perfectionism out of immature people’s system.
All oil fractions are biodegradable. Marine ecosystems include many bacteria species destroying paraphines of any molecular mass. Oil naturally leaks out into ocean from thousand of vents and crevices in sediments covering undersea oil deposits. However, it takes some time for these bacteria to multiply and acquire enough biomass to cope with the spill. In warm climate like Gulf of Mexico this process takes much less time than in Arctic climate, that is why Arctic oil spills are significantly more dangerous.
Risk management is a soft spot of all new and complex technologies. “Challenger” and “Columbia” catastrophes, just as Chernobyl, were examples of bad engineering and poor judgement of managers.
Once saw an ancient fire insurance policy, for a home in northern Michigan ca 1885. The premium was hellacious in comparison to the value of the home. That was because everything was heated or lit by flame. Not even a coal furnace in the basement.
The premium to value ratio is hugely lower now.
But I keep forgetting. Is wood a precious resource oris it sustainable?
Does it depend?
Richard Aubrey: it depends.
Only those logs with certificate of “sustainable practices” logos on them are good for our conscience!
and karma!
How did the blowout occur?
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6407
Irony:
“In light of the massive oil spill in the Gulf, an awards ceremony to celebrate the safety of offshore oil drilling has been postponed. ”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20003638-10391695.html
If Obama were spending as much on nuclear as he is to prop up ‘renewable’ sources like wind or solar, the benefit would be immediately felt. Instead we continue subsidizing alternative sources that still cost more than conventioanal ones.
I’m all for nuclear but with one concern.
Their vulnerability to terrorist attack, it’s the ultimate ‘dirty bomb’. If we build lots of nuclear power plants, they will be a ‘high-value’ target in an exceedingly ‘target-rich’ environment.
I do have a possible solution however. Locate the reactor pressure vessel and any other critical parts underground. Not only would that make a terrorist attack much less likely to succeed but the ground would naturally contain any breach, accidental or otherwise.
Looking at diagrams of the nuclear reactor process, there doesn’t appear to be any reason not to do it, other than a relatively modest cost.
All oil fractions are biodegradable.
yup… energy = food
while we might not to want to take it in, that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of critters who will metabolize a bit of hydrocarbons to pluck energy out of it. even more so if there is a bit of sulfur in it.
I kind of like to think of oil energy along a spectrum, from simple sugars through to complex sugars, then oils as more stuff is packed into the molecules.
not kosher, but kind of serves the purpose when talking to someone about food consumption (and how weight is lost through the nose as this same process is reversed all the way back down to the gasses it started with)