[ale] OT - Have you seen this almost trivial solution to the oil mess?

[Quentin Schander]

Reaching for an envelope to do some calculations.

BPs estimate of the leak rate is 5000 barrels per day. 
Times 42 gal/bbl = 210,000 gal/day
Times 8 lb/gal = 1,680,000 lb/day
divided by 2000 lb/ton = 800 ton/day

Other estimates place the leak rate at up to 50,000 bbl/day
or 8,000 ton/day


My estimate of the amount of oil put in each of the basins for the demo: 1/4 to 1/2 cup
or 2 - 4 oz.

Amount of hay reported to be used in each of the basins for the demo: 1/4 lb or 4 oz.

I am going to assume that the maximum amount of oil that can be recovered by a given amount of hay will be equal to the mass of the hay.  I believe that this number can be easily defended in the situation that is being considered and I personally believe that the recovery rate will be much lower than a 1::1 mass ratio.

The minimum amount of hay needed per day would be somewhere between 800 and 8,000 ton/day.

WIKI answers suggests that 4 tons of hay/yr/acre should be considered good production

Using 4 tons of hay as the annual production of an acre of land that means that the yearly hay production of somewhere between 200 and 2,000 acres of land will be needed each day if we assume nearly ideal recovery rates.  Georgia produced hay from 700,000 acres last year.  Again assuming nearly ideal recovery rates, the hay demand for oil recovery after about 30 days of leakage would be somewhere between 1 and 10% of Georgia's annual hay crop.


The problem which is obscured by the demonstration is that the oil is not introduced at the surface of a relatively still basin of water but is introduced a mile below the surface of a body of water which is anything but still and the transit time from bottom to surface is likely measured in hours.  As a result of the extended transit time to the surface and wind and water currents the oil when it first appears will be spread over an area that probably will be measured in square miles.  

Once at the surface, wind and currents have spread the oil over areas that are now measured in hundreds or thousands of square miles.  This compounds the problems of recovery by what ever means is used.

There are two points that I would like to make.  This problem is not amenable to easy solutions  (I said easy, not simple because many of the proposed solutions are conceptually simple but the magnitude of the problems precludes them from being easy.)  The second point is that standard techniques used to contain oil spills are really not much more complicated than absorbing the oil with hay.  They have been tried and have not worked because the real Gulf of Mexico is not a stainless steel basin at a press conference.

Now is not the time to deal with the fact that it appears that many people either were asleep at the switch or were accustomed to cutting corners in ways that we now recognize as unwise.  Those issues must be addressed but not now.

Quentin


>>> On 5/23/2010 at 04:41 PM, in message
<AANLkTilnQCob2JItwnfQir6Qz3EyF1vwh0rgs1zbX1F1 at mail.gmail.com>, Greg Freemyer
<greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote: 
> http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/
> 
> I don't know, but it sure looks simple, cost effective, and doable right
> now.
> 
> Greg