That ice came from global warming.
/sarc
Time to let oil companies drill on land. We are in a total experimentation mode with the mile down leak/seepage. No man can go down there and everything is being done by robotics. An almost impossible task like a blind man shooting at a mile away target.
I wonder how long it would take to make a 5000+ foot long vertical containment boom?
Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said the tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island. He says the substance needs to be tested, but officials think it came from the oil spill.
Oh, that's easy.
% tar -xfv
Problem solved!
A guest on Coast to Coast AM on Thursday night predicted that this was exactly what would happen. I would have to go to the web page to get his name. VERY bright man. Perhaps BP should give him a call.
So, it’s crystals...like ICE....what is the temperature down there in the water,...I’m confused, we’re talking GULF here not ARTIC.
I’m not a chemist but at what point does methane gas freeze and thaw?
I don’t understand why ice clogs up the dome yet it doesn’t clog up the hole in the pipe or wherever these three leaks are.
Ice nine?
In some ways to have this fix stalled by methane hydrates is quite ironic. Hydrates are so abundant they are be a greater energy resource than all our oil and coal deposits combined.
see this old report on methane hydrates:
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
The ocean depths involved put this site in the ultra-deep range. We are drilling here because that is where the remaining reservoirs of oil exist. (The South China sea has too many political disputes over ownership to make it practical.)
As much as we would like to think there are untapped reservoirs just waiting on federal land, the reality is that most of the hydrocarbons in those locations are in the form of tar oils (where only the bitumen remains due to erosion) or oil shale, which is really kerogen, a precursor to crude oil. (In other words, the oil shale has never been exposed to the temperatures needed to convert it to oil, and some heat source - and energy - is needed to do that.)
The liberals are busy with derisive “Spill, Baby, Spill” comments, but if this incident shuts down off-shore drilling, we are in a world of hurt. Even if we found a new reservoir within the continental United States, it would take years to bring it on-line. This is why the military highlighted the lack of investment in oil drilling in its March Joint Operating Environment report as being a threat by 2012-2015. According to that report, we could be short 10 million barrels a day, or 13 percent of global crude production by that time. And that assumed off-shore drilling would continue as usual.
Keep pulling for those engineers and technicians at BP.