What’s the force on a 1 mile by 4 foot section of sail in a 20mph breeze?
Something else I have yet to see mentioned in this thread…
After the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress placed a cap on non-cleanup related liability. While BP is still required to cover costs of cleanup, there is a $75MM limit to their additional liability.
Yeah it does.
But in this case isn’t the point of origin below the oil rig?
A boom with a larger flange isn’t going to negate the wave action.
What are you going to brace the 4 foot sail with to keep it upright?
The boom works because it is flexible and moves with the swell. Yes, some gets washed over if it gets choppy but if you put a barrier that won’t flex in synch with the swell, the oil slick will go under it. And a lot more will go under than gets splashed over the top.
I’d suspect that if you try to burn the contained oil the boom will burn too.
From Taylor’s formula:
Fw = 0.00256 A V^2
Where:
Fw = the force of the wind acting normal to a surface facing the wind in lbs
A = the area of the surface facing the wind in square feet
V = velocity of the wind in miles per hour
hence Fw = 0.00256 * (4 * 5280) * (20 * 20)
= 21,626.88lbs
Well that’s some thoughtful foresight.
So a 1 inch cable, stainless for salt resistance, would not be overkill to handle a gentle breeze.
This makes me appreciate Christo’s ‘Valley Curtain’ all the more:
The problem they’re having with the standard boom is wave action overtaking it. I picked 4 feet as an arbitrary number but it just needs to be a height that is functionally more useful than the current boom. If it’s used for burning it would have to be designed to withstand the heat. I don’t see this as a huge engineering feat. Instead of throwing up miles and miles of barriers that don’t work it would make more sense to concentrate on the immediate area of the spill.
So at this stage you are proposing a barrier deployed in the open sea that generates more power than the average wind farm, uses materials that are bouyant enough to float, flexible enough to move with the swell, yet rigid enough to remain self-supportingly upright and won’t burn when the oil it is constraining, and splashing on it, is set on fire.
I can see why you don’t consider it a huge engineering feat.
I’m worried about this too. Hopefully a lawyer can chime in on this question: Since BP effectively lied to the government about their preparedness for a blowout, might they be liable on other grounds? A sort of fraud case perhaps?
Also consider, from here:
Not holding up their end of the bargain, does this disaster still fit the definition of ‘accident’ in the liability-shield law?
Corporate power turning loose the lobbyists to force the bought and paid for politicians to pass bills that favor them and put the cost on the people. This is not new. This is America.
In the real world, BP did drill to 18,000 feet. If there was any reason to drill deeper, they would have had to get additional permission (called a dispensation) from the MMS. This is completely normal oilfield practice.
I have nothing useful to say about the bulk of the discussion concerning the Minerals Management Service in the HuffPost article posted by the OP, but I’d take some of the author’s technical assertions with caution:
I have to confess I don’t know what a “deep hole shut off valve” is supposed to be, and I know of no such device that is used during drilling and casing operations of the type being done at the time of the blowout. Subsurface safety valves are a common feature of completed, producing wells, but so far as I know, such a device could not be installed and used practically as the well was configured at the time of the accident. The author may have been confusing this with check valves that are installed in drill pipe near surface to prevent back flow up the pipe, but such a device would not, and could not, do anything about the flow around the outside of the drill pipe that made up the bulk of flow during the blowout. That’s what the blowout preventers were for.
As far as the “willingness to violate the law” line goes, BP apparently drilled the well to the permitted 18K feet and no further. Text from various official sources and several graphics released on the joint response team site all clearly indicate total depth (TD) as 18K, and I haven’t seen a credible claim anywhere that indicates otherwise.
ETA: What Tapioca Dextrin said.
Attempts at getting this applied retroactively are someone’s pipe dream / political grandstanding IMHO
I wondered about this, too. As a veteran of several hurricanes, I’ve noticed that this kind of expedient policy-making is always more about publicity than reality.
Sure, but is the oil spilled after the bill is signed into law and takes effect retroactive?
Seems to me someone’d have to settle that in a court of law; maybe work out some sort of proration scheme between 75 mil and 10 bill based on how soon after the law took effect BP got things under control.
I’ve never head of one either and I can’t imagine what it could consist of in a drilling context.
Most likely a case of a clueless keyboard jockey wondering, “Well why in the Hell don’t they have a shutoff valve on those things”
So, oil company liability was scurrilously limited under the Bush administration. Go figure. Now it is suggested capping it at $10 billion. I have a better idea: cap it at the amount of the damages.
Here’s a quote from a recent article:
Looks like the class-action claimants aren’t thwarted by the $75 million cap. 65 class-action lawsuits is a lotta lawsuits :eek: OTOH, maybe the whole class action thing amounts to an evil-billionaire handshake, the real claimants in this mess both recognizing something will have to be done and lining up all the proles in categories. Individual suits would probably garner a better yield, but then again how could the system handle that many suits? Dopers, help me out with this one.
As for the Huffington Post, well it looks unanimous that the author is bunk. Sorry, I didn’t know, I got the article in my e-mail. Overall, without derailing the thread: Huffington Post, thumbs up or thumbs down?