Are We Having Fun Yet?
Have some “oil” humor with a Joel Pett cartoon. He’s based in Kentucky, and he gets it.
McClatchy says that Tar balls, new forecast raise fears oil spill reaching Florida
KEY WEST, Fla. — Park rangers discovered 20 “tar balls” on a Key West shore and spotted oil residue farther west in the Dry Tortugas Tuesday, stirring fear that the first sign of the massive BP oil spill had washed up on a Florida shore.
NOAA and the Coast Guard say “don’t worry, be happy, this doesn’t prove anything” to avoid getting into a screaming match with BP lawyers. The problem is that BP will use any excuse to slow down court cases and to cast doubt, which is why no one is going to say anything until they have evidence that can be introduced in court to support their statement.
McClatchy also announced that Bill Nelson, my generally useless Democratic Senator [as opposed to my totally useless Republican Senator] has teamed up with Barbara Boxer and “convinced” BP to release more video – Gulf oil spill videos: See all four views released Tuesday.
Of special interest are the third and fourth videos as they represent the same leak, but number three was before the tube was inserted, while four is after. You can see the huge difference the tube makes… well, maybe if you squint… try inverting your screen…
In other news, Robot subs deployed in search for oil under gulf’s surface
MANATEE, Fla. — Scientists at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium on Monday were in the process of launching the first of three torpedo-shaped robots equipped to hunt for oil underwater in the Gulf of Mexico.
The robots, measuring about six feet long and with little wings, have in the past been used to search for red tide, but now will be hunting for oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to Gary Kirkpatrick, a Mote senior scientist.
Monday, Mote was in the process of launching one called “RU22.” It is on loan from Rutgers University, he said.
Its findings will be reported to the U.S. Coast Guard, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which are tracking oil spilled from the runaway Deepwater Horizon oil well.
In addition to oil, the instruments are designed to look for the dispersants that BP is using, because it is also a dangerous chemical. The microsubs are semi-autonomous, not remotely operated. If you are a Florida car owner you can support Mote by buying the “Reef” license plate.
8 comments
But this was all caused by government regulation, y’know. If the magic Free Market Fairy had been allowed to wave her invisible hand, it would have never happened….
Oh wait. For a moment there I thought I was a glibertarian. Sayyy, have you noticed that the glibertarians have been distinctly quiet about this disaster and what it says about the need for government regulation?
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
.-= last blog ..To be fair to Comcast… =-.
I saw how the “invisible hand” really worked over Transocean who was forced to limit their dividend to a measly billion dollars this weekend. That will show them not to have wells blowout. 😈
I get a feeling that they don’t want anyone to figure out that there was no regulation of what happened. That makes their claims look silly.
To be honest, I have no good idea what kind of regulation would help. I think they need to round up some people who actually know how to do drill in deep water and set up a standard practices model. It’s hard to tell people what they can’t do, if you don’t know what will work.
A well-known chain of sandwich shops is said to be offering something new, a Robot Sub: when it comes to the seasonings, salt, pepper, mustard, mayo and vinegar are optional… but oil is mandatory.
I disagree about assembling people who actually know how to do deep-water drilling properly, if that’s not “a set of measure zero,” as one of my math profs used to say. The more we find remedies to the flaw that led to Deepwater Horizon, the longer we will avoid finding real solutions… and I’m convinced none of those involve oil at all.
Steve, the basic problem is one of energy density. Right now oil or oil-like substances store more energy per pound than anything else we have available for us, short of nuclear power. Everything else either runs into the problem of either requiring too heavy of a containment infrastructure (e.g. liquid hydrogen), or just not having much energy per pound (any conceivable battery technology, which is why you don’t hear about electric planes — there simply is no way of storing sufficient energy in a battery to get its own weight off the ground). The energy density issue is also why solar is not the be-all and end-all, for example a solar-powered automobile would have a top speed of about 15mph at 12 noon on a cloudless day in the summertime, because that’s all the energy that falls on the roof of a car. That’s fine if you’re designing a Mars Rover that has no need to go anywhere fast, but clearly that’s not going to work for shipping a large number of Florida oranges to Minnesota before they turn into something more akin to wrinkled prunes…
Without energy-dense power sources, you don’t have large-scale civilization because transportation grinds to a halt, and technological civilization simply cannot exist. Without technological civilization, approximately 3 billion people die rather swiftly, within a matter of months rather than a matter of years, because they lose the ability to transport food and water and manage its distribution. And right now, storing energy in the chemical bonds of complex hydrocarbons is the best way we know of doing that. Perhaps we can reverse-engineer how plants do this, and create these hydrocarbons with nothing but carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight, but my suspicion is that the energy density needed to create sufficient hydrocarbons that way would require nuclear power to do it on a big enough scale to keep technological civilization going… and nuclear power has its own problems, albeit mostly political ones since the latest designs are inherently safe (they utilize the laws of physics to ensure that it’s simply physically impossible for them to melt down or explode as long as they’re loaded with the specified fuel — you’d have to change fundamental universal constants to make it happen, and if that occurred, exploding nuclear reactors would be the *least* of our problems).
So anyhow, that’s why we (humankind) are going to keep drilling as long as it’s less expensive than hooking a nuke up to a photosynthesis simulator. It’s all about energy density, in the end… at which point, you have to talk about making it as safe as possible, because saying “don’t do it” simply isn’t going to work, there’s just too much relying on having an energy-dense power source.
– Badtux the Energized Penguin
.-= last blog ..To be fair to Comcast… =-.
The Defense Department is currently running tests, including flying over my house in A-10s that use “pond scum” jet fuel, which is a form of bio-diesel. There are known ways of producing liquid fuels that don’t involve drilling, they just need to be ramped up to reduce the cost of production.
The “pond scum” reduces CO2 when growing and releases oxygen, so it’s “green” at that point.
There are better and safer ways of doing things, they just don’t involve profits for the entrenched corporations.
Badtux, I get your point, but I’m not sure you’ve mentioned all the options. Please read this article from the Independent/UK, “Breakthrough as US Researchers Replicate Photosynthesis in Laboratory / GM viruses offer hope of future where energy is unlimited“. Will it work? I don’t know, and the article’s author is a bit too gee-whiz enthusiastic for my taste. But it is an energy technology possibly capable of the required energy density… hey, weeds run on the process, and Dog knows they grow fast… and I’ve not seen it discussed in any major forum. I’d welcome your… and Bryan’s… thoughts.
It is very interesting work, but they don’t know if it will scale to a usable size, how it will react to less than pure water, and there is no mention of the lifespan of the virii. It is definitely research that needs to continue as there are real possibilities there.
There’s also the fact that photosynthesis is a remarkably inefficient producer of hydrocarbons. Less than 5% of the solar energy which hits a plant (and algae, or “pond scum”, is a plant) actually becomes hydrocarbons. By contrast, even the cheapest thin-film photoelectric cells are at 11% efficiency, and most crystalline silicon cells are at 22% efficiency now. So “pond scum” might suffice to build sufficient oil to power fighter jets, but has the same energy density issues as every other alternative to oil / coal other than nuclear.
So anyhow, photoelectric decidedly beats any sort of biofuel for powering a society, other than the fact that it is useless for transportation other than via wired applications (catenary/3rd rail) because of the energy density issue. There’s then the fact that covering sufficient of the Earth’s surface with solar cells to power a modern technological society would result in an ecological disaster by cutting off the sunlight to major ecosystems (not to mention that the sun shines only during the day, duh). So even if we did replace all our cars with electric street trolleys and electric trains, we have to power them with *something*. And that something is going to probably be nuclear in the end, because everything else has even worse environmental repercussions.
I hear all these things about how we should just cut back our lifestyle yada yada yada. But the majority of energy use is for manufacturing and transportation, i.e., is necessary in order to maintain technological civilization. Besides, I don’t see anybody who talks about “cutting back our lifestyle” rushing out to live in unheated one-room shacks with no electricity or hot water, giving themselves baths only in the summertime with a sponge and a pot heated on the stove. Well, there are a few who do that, but generally they’re not the same ones talking about “cutting back our lifestyle”, typically they’re just antisocial and don’t like people and this is the only way to live if you’re not willing to embed yourself into a social network…