A hole in the world

by anderson

This is quite possibly the worst thing I think I've ever read.  Ever.  If this guy is
right, or close to right, the Gulf oil disaster could truly be our
very own Armageddon.

For decades, we have fantasized our own, often self-induced doom, made big, flashy Hollywood movies about it, imagining
all the various ways human kind might wipe itself out or be wiped out: nuclear war,
resource depletion, drought, famine, poisoned air, poisoned water, bio-war, genetic engineering gone
awry (lotta that), and one bloody alien after another.  Umbrella corps and police states flourished, evilly. Turned the earth into a gun-blasted wasted land more times than anyone can count; have even blown it up a few times.

But not once, not ever once, do I recall any of those professional
Hollywood gloom and doomsters or ironic death-cult scifi futurists coming up
with a scenario whereby we literally choke the planet to death with the
very oil we crave, through mostly the pure cheap-shitness of evil umbrella corp BP.

Wow. Out smarted again, and so ironically, too!  It's not terribly gratifying to see that human hubris is still far more clever than human imagination.  Well, at least the dystopian imagineers got the umbrella corp part right.  But
that was always an easy call.

I really ought not to kid, because this Gulf disaster is well on the way to dwarfing anything else going on.  It should start being treated like that.  Should the bore hole go wide open, that hole could spew 150 thousand bbls/day or more -- 6.6 million gallons a day.  Exxon Valdez was 11 million gallons, the worst ever until BP-GOM.  And that's the low end.  It could go on for months.  There is a possibility that we never stop it, and any and all radical efforts, i.e. nuking it, will only make a bad situation worse.

This
is truly frightening.  [Ed: readers are encouraged to follow the link to the Oil Drum to read the article in its entirety.]

...

All
of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore
directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of
"the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart
as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the
well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst
things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging
outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher
blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any
"cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could
be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more
damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the
well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up
less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only
real chance we have left to stop it all.

It's a race now...a race to
drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this
monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and
failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We
are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic
estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually
immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse.
No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and
thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day.
We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in
position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as
I said.

Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also
cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an
impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked
oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to
erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse
which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who
can "get there first"...us or the well.

We can only hope the
race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am
sad to say is that we will not.

The system will collapse or fail
substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and
the worst is yet to come.

Sorry to bring you that news, I know
it is grim, but that is the way I see it....I sincerely hope I am
wrong.

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out
sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now,
because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the
collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short
order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by
the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even
being able to halt it will go down.

The magnitude and impact of
this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if
the worst or even near worst happens...