The Oil Spill

As you know, we spent a week in New Orleans, and to answer your question in advance, New Orleans is over 100 miles from the Gulf.  New Orleans is on the Mississippi, which runs south, and so there could never be any oil in New Orleans from the BP runaway well.  But there is a big mess in the Gulf, and getting bigger. What to do about it?  To me, the answer is so damned obvious, that I cannot understand why my idea hasn’t been used already.

(I wrote this 5/21, but went away for a week’s vacation, so it didn’t get put up on the web site.)

It is difficult to do anything at a mile beneath the surface, and I am not talking about that.  That’s BP’s job!  But since oil keeps flowing upwards from 5,000 feet, why, in heaven’s name, doesn’t BP, the federal bureaucrats, or someone, do what I am about to propose?

A super-tanker has a capacity of over 2 million barrels of oil.  That’s a lot of oil!  Or maybe that’s a lot of oil mixed with water?  Why hasn’t BP placed a couple of super-tankers in the midst of the oil spill, and used vacuums to suck it up? Get it the hell out of there!  Use as many tankers as is necessary, to suck up the mess, and take it someplace where it can be separated, and the oil refined and used.  The water can then be returned to the ocean or Gulf of Mexico.  Go get some more then, and keep sucking it up, as fast as it is released by the 5,000 foot deep, un-capped well.  There are processes which effortlessly separate the oil from the water with which it is mixed.  There are even microbes which will eat oil, and then die if they run out of oil to eat, and leave no detectible poisons or life threatening remains.  It has been used before with astonishing success.

If you are familiar with swimming pools, you know what the ’skimmer’ is at the water line, which skims off the leaves and other flotsam which get into pools.  A ship with a skimmer at water line, connected to a vacuum on board of a super-tanker, could merrily skim up the oil and water mixture which is floating around the Gulf.  Some say the oil is 300 feet deep, which may or may not be true, but that wouldn’t make a skimmer-vacuum equipped super-tanker ineffective.  I sent this to Fox News last week before I left on vacation, and as far as I can see, not only has Fox News not used it, but no one else has even thought of it!

BP tried a huge square concrete thing, which didn’t work.  It froze, because the pipe was too small, and it iced up.  How about this?  A huge half-circle dome metal hood with a huge pipe attached to it.  Maybe a four foot diameter or larger pipe?  A 5,000 foot long pipe.  At the top, obviously, all the oil and gas will rise, and can then be pumped into another tanker.  No pumps or heat necessary, just a huge half circle hood with a huge pipe which will allow the oil and gas to rise to the surface unencumbered as by a small pipe.  The pipe should be larger than the wellhead, so as not to have freezing problems.  Then, just let nature take its course.  Oil and gas will automatically rise to the surface.  Maybe gas can be captured as well as the oil.

They’ve got cameras and lights down there, so they can see what’s going on.  A huge, metal, half circle dome, with a four foot diameter or larger, 5,000 foot pipe on top, will keep it from polluting the Gulf, capture the oil, and maybe even be a sort of permanent oil rig, with tankers rotating as they are filled with oil.  The vacuuming super-tankers can clean up the mess, and perhaps, with a little bit of basic science, as is above, the thing can be solved, even if the flow can’t be plugged.

Now you hundred thousand plus readers of this, please forward it to everyone you know or can think of in the oil industry, news outlets, or whatever.  It is so simple, that the ’experts’ don’t seem to have thought of it.  Maybe my science is wrong, but I don’t think so!