Posted on 06/15/2010 7:02:12 AM PDT by markomalley
PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. BP won permission to start burning oil and gas piped up from its broken seafloor well as part of a pledge to more than triple how much crude it stops from spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Federal authorities gave permission late Monday for BP PLC to use a new method that involves pumping oil from the busted wellhead to a special ship on the surface, were it would be burned off rather than collected.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
All that resulting soot should help to belay our demise from global warming.
and how long ago did BP request permission to burn the oil??
SMOKE PARTICLES + NORMAL COASTAL POP-UP AFTERNOON THUNDER STORMS = DELUGE..................
Aren't they already burning it?
(from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2534778/posts?page=22#22)
I hope their air pressure is set properly or this is going to anger Gaia.
If they can send it to a ship that burns it off, why can’t they send it to a ship(s) that collects it?
For the next few months the whole world can see the black smoke pouring into the air every night on the 6 o'clock news as the commies push their “green” energy agenda.
Timing is everything.
Environmental documents produced as part of that project, an exploration well proposed by Total E&P of Britain, said burning the oil posed "a moderate risk to the environment" that would release sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, methane and other chemicals.
Obama visited Mississippi and Alabama (pic below) Monday as part of a two-day "oil" stop "tour" sought to assure residents -- and the country -- that the government will "leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before."
BP has (finally been allowed to ?) contract actor Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions for 32 of their availalbe centrifuge machines designed to separate oil from water.
Wilma Subra, a chemist with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, said BP should avoid burning the captured oil - which she said raises new health risks - and instead bring in more processing equipment.
Additional equipment has been ordered and more dredgers will be moving into the area soon, along with barges that will help block the passes.
EverGreen burner to be deployed.
Have you plugged the hole yet daddy? [May 28]
50 days...
Alabama Gov. Bob Riley watchesas President Barack Obama makes an unannounced visit to Tacky Jack's, a restaurant in Orange Beach, Ala., as he visits the Gulf Coast region affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill Monday, June 14, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
What, they can’t line up a few empty tankers?
They have clean-burning oil technology that is used throughout the world, but for months they didn’t even try to pursue this here because the Obama administration thought it would look bad politically to their environmentalist whacko supporters to allow BP to burn oil.
So instead, it’s been spoiling fisheries and beaches. But at least it isn’t being burned.
Finally, Obama agreed to the plan, so in the next day or two another 5-10 THOUSAND barrels a day of oil will stop leaking into the gulf.
They are hooking this up to an existing pipe on the original cut-off (one of the backfill pipes) — they probably could have hooked this up at any time. In fact, it is the pipe they used to try the top-kill, which was destined to fail but was one of those “Obama said we should plug the hole, so we’ll try to plug the hole” things.
By July 1st, they will have a much bigger production facility come online, and be able to handle even more oil, and by mid-july they might be doing 40,000 barrels a day.
Which hopefully is enough to lower the pressure to where the leaks are minimal, but it’s scary to think there’s 40,000 barrels a day to be processed (that’s 1.6 MILLION gallons a day of oil)
Right now there are too many ships already in the immediate vicinity. To process the oil requires a much larger ship, along with an oil tanker to take the oil off the processing ship. They already have one processing ship and one barge operating, along with their dispersant ships and the ships working on the next phase.
It’s a lot quicker and takes a lot less space to burn it off. They converted the top-fill platform to be a burning platform, and it won’t need any other support ships.
This is still a short-term solution, by mid-july everything they are operating will be replaced with two 20-thousand-plus barrel processing ships hooked to two risers that are spaced a few miles apart. The first of these bigger ships is on schedule for July 1st.
But even then, they can still operate this burning ship, which is tapping a small pipe off the malfunctioning blow-out preventer (the pipe they used to try the top-kill).
Thanks for the interesting info!
If BP wanted to start burning the oil right away and Obama told them not to, BP is going to have some great defenses to a lot of the costs for cleanup.
Best thing Obama could have told them was for BP to solve the problem and suspend all laws or policies that hindered their efforts.
BP already has an airtight defense for the costs. The law as written caps their liability at $70 million.
For political and business purposes, they will spend billions on the cleanup. But legally, they have very limited liability.
Obama can give speeches and claim he’ll “make sure they pay”, but he has no power, except that which he illegally claims as he has in other cases.
>> Right now there are too many ships already in the immediate vicinity.
Given the months that have passed, I find this logistics failure hard to believe.
It’s not really a logistics failure, it’s a simple matter of volume. There’s a lot of station-keeping, a lot of lines and pipes and other things that are rather at risk of damage (the current riser is particularly risky, they expect to replace it with more robust undersea risers over hte next month).
They simply can’t risk trying to drive another two large ships trying to station-keep, knowing that a 20-minute power failure on any of the ships could cause another disaster.
They can burn off the oil, it’s a perfectly rational solution at this point.
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