Oil rig sinks after explosion off the Louisiana coast

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I just heard about this on BBC radio late this evening.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-04-23-deepwater-horizon_N.htm

Oil rig sinks as 11 workers missing

NEW ORLEANS — An oil rig that exploded in one of the worst offshore drilling disasters in recent U.S. history sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, with still no sign of 11 missing crewmembers.

The Deepwater Horizon sank about 10 a.m. after burning for roughly 36 hours. Survivors of Tuesday night's explosion told company officials that some of the missing crewmembers were around the area of the explosion when the rig unexpectedly went up in flames.

Rescue teams scouring the wreckage site, about 42 miles off the Louisiana coast, have found no signs of the 11 workers, said Rear Adm. Mary Landry, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's 8th District. Coast Guard crews recovered two of the rig's lifeboats, but both were empty, she said.

In all, 126 people were on board the rig when it exploded. Seventeen people were injured, four critically.

[Swatopluk]

Expect deafening silence from the offshore oil drilling lobby on this.

[stellinacadente]

I am actually surprised they were able to air the news....

[Swatopluk]

Spectacle beats sober business speculation I presume

[Opsa]

It has the makings of a tremendous environmental mess, too. We were watching it on the news last night and making comments about all the big oil propaganda we get here. They're always trying to convince us of how safe fossil fuels are. It's ridiculous.

[ivor]

It's the Gulf of Mexico, come on!

[stellinacadente]

I would actually be very very sad if they won't be able to margin the environmental disaster...

but I guess... Mother Earth is giving us many many signals she's had enough of us tormenting her...

[Aggie]

Ayuh, that was the coffee chatter this morning.  Depending on what stage the drilling was at, and how much damage was done to the drill string/casing, this may be very very difficult to control, and almost impossible to actually clean up.

[Opsa]

The Energy Tomorrow ads drive me up the wall. It's terribly glossy propaganda and I am concerned about uneducated people falling for it. Every time I see that lady on their ads, I just wanna slap her! I know this is untaddy of me, but there she is in her business suit and high heels going down the mine shaft all pristine (just as we lost a bunch of guys in a mine collapse in West Virginia recently) and talking about how if we drill we'll have enough energy to last 50 years! 50 years?! Well, that's convenient for her, but what are her grandkids going to do for energy after she's hogged it all and prevented non-fossil fuel research? Hello? Who is actually thinking about tomorrow over there?

I don't know what to do to protest those people.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

You can and you can't.

You can cut your energy bill. You can install solar panels for water heating or electricity. Fundamentally try to get the least amount of energy from the grid as possible, because 80% of our energy comes from that dirty coal.

As for how can you protest them in any other way, I don't know, even the poor sods that have to work in those mines fear a carbon free world because their (incredibly unsafe) jobs would go away.

[ivor]

Think electric cars are expensive now?  Wait until the oil runs out.

[Swatopluk]

The CEO of the company running the WV mine belongs impaled on a stake with a rounded head.
By now he has to employ bodyguards fulltime. That alone says a lot.

[Aggie]

[diatribe]Expect to see more electricity produced from natural gas in the future.  I suspect that the US administration's push for electric cars has much to do with the recent technological advances in extracting shale gas and coalbed methane (y'know, if they'd recover the damned methane in the first place, those coal mines might be a little less prone to explosion).  These wells go in extremely fast using coil tubing rigs (sometimes in a single day compared to weeks of drilling for an on-shore oil well or deep formation gas), get on production quickly, and can get gas in nearly every state, I suspect.  Tends to be hell on groundwater resources, but eh...  sort that out later when the water crises hits fully.

Natural gas hasn't caught on in vehicles directly*, and doesn't have quite the greenwashed appeal of electrics, so using gas power stations to fuel cars is ideal. 

^{*Safety issues with pressure vessels in parkades maybe? wiki suggests storage tanks take up too much room and the existence of issues with infrastructure for filling stations, but in Canada domestic natural gas is ubiquitous for home furnaces, so it should work here easily - that said, I know of exactly one nat-gas filling station.  Propane is occasionally used for vehicles here, but not CH_4.}

This specifically frees up oil supplies for what I suspect is the largest consumer in the US (barring transportation, perhaps) - the military.  I'd be loath to discount the role of the military's need for oil in the promotion of alternative fuels for the consumer market.
[/diatribe]

very very interesting but short article here.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

[diatribe]Expect to see more electricity produced from natural gas in the future....

Back in the 80's (or 90's? I forget) the current Oklahoma governator was a huge fan of Oklahoma's abundent natural gas supply, and pushed it big-time.

He used influence and had a nat-gas resupply station put in at the midway gas station on I44 between Oklahoma City and Tulsa-- you needed, as pure nat-gas vehicles needed the pit-stop 1/2 way along.

He had all state vehicles converted to nat-gas alternate-energy vehicles, and mandated they could switch back to gas only in emergencies.

He even had a program where local police vehicles were dollied-up as nat-gas and gasoline cars.  There was a cool processor installed, that if the driver stomped the pedal (as in beginning of a high-speed pursuit) the computer automatically switched over from nat-gas, to gasoline for optimum performance.  Or the officer could opt to hit a switch manually.

After the chase was over, hit the switch again, and for normal cruising around, it ran on nat-gas-- a huge cost savings for the cities that had these.

Alas, when that governator moved on, with nobody pushing the technology, they were quietly and without fuss, put away-- the police cruisers were naturally replaced as they wore out, and a few years after he left, the owners of the midway gas station quietly shut down their nat-gas refueling pump.

Nat Gas vehicles are still popular, though-- for fleets and delivery vans.  They carry enough fuel for the day's route, then are slowly refilled overnight at their garages, from the regular natural gas mains, and a slow pumping machine-- takes about 4 to 6 hours to re-compress the tanks to full.   

Nothing preventing a homeowner from buying one of these rigs on their own; except the cost.  The conversion takes several thousand dollars, and usually voids the factory engine warranty--even though nat-gas is far less harsh than gasoline of any stripe.  The pumping machine is several hundred dollars more.  And, in the case of cars, you give up your trunk space (boot) ... the compressed tank now fits where your luggage used to go.

Range is typically 2/3 that of a gasoline tank, or less if the trunk was small.

But.  Your engine will outlast the car by a long many miles--- nat gas is sulfur-free, and burns at much lower combustion temps, so it produces much less NOx too.  And since it does that, your catalytic converter lasts longer as well.

Due to much less carbon/soot, the engine oil lasts longer, too.

But, the power is only 2/3 that of gasoline.  And I already mentioned the range problem.

If someone would only engineer from the ground-up, one of these natural gas autos, these wouldn't be an issue at all... you could even eliminate all the liquid fuel stuff to save weight.   A pure natural-gas designed engine could be changed radically as well-- less need for cooling for example, use of less exotic alloys (less stress).

<shrug> Nobody's buying it, as far as I can tell.

You'd think, here in Oklahoma the land with some of the largest nat-gas reserves, we'd be up to our ears in this tech.

[Aggie]

I get the tank-storage issues with a conversion, but wouldn't one at least in theory be able to replace the gasoline tank with cylinders (agree that a purpose-built design would be better)?  The power problems can easily be solved by stepping up to a larger engine - my car is a four-cylinder 2.4L base model, which has adequate if not impressive power, in theory the standard 3.6L six-cylinder used in the model would give similar output with natural gas.

Such vehicles are supposed to exist in many parts of the world.  I really don't get why Canadians would not embrace this, especially as gas is cheap, domestically produced and gasoline is expensive at the moment (and in many cases imported from the US, from refining Canadian oil ).  If you want to sell them up here, build in a mini-furnace (more practically, a catalytic heater) that will produce hot air as soon as the car is started - there'd be one in every driveway.