"Death in the Gulf" is the subtitle.
BP and Halliburton are committing a massive ecocide. This WineRev Model series provides a home for pics and vids, plus material that focuses on corporate media distortions.
Here's the the MRGO channel. 500 yards and $3 MM for the booms:
-- Greyrath/Getty
And the CNN fable factory came up with a BP-friendly lie that the "Whale" skimmer will extract 21,000,000 gallons of oil a day.
Our whitis went to the sources and pulled out 63,000 gallons a day as a theoretical maximum.
Nice to see Recommended in the tags:::
The previous diary in this series is HERE.
The pics are astonishing. One critical factor, obvious from what you can see, is that booming is useless as a long term remedy. When wave go even 3 feet high, all of the oil is washed over the booms. For most of the booms, this happens when waves are 2 feet high.
Apparently the normal booms are designed for use in a harbor. They could contain a 1,500 gallon surface spill where there are no significant waves. Put out in the Gulf, faced with thunderstorms and distant tropical storms such as Alex, they are useless.
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The MRGO channel to the Mississippi -- depicted above -- got a professional system installed. The channel is 500 yards wide. The installation used $3 MM in direct installed equipment.
One addition problem at the Louisiana coast is that oil gets concentrated as wind blows it along the surface.
This demonstrate the effect we will see, if and when a cyclonic tropical storm comes through. The front side winds will generate bands of coagulated oil.
Meanwhile, as the Deepwater Horizon pipe remains un-pinched and crude oil and methane spew into the Gulf from at least three holes, the slaughter mounts ashore.
And:
And for some reason tourists have been "scared away."
Having thousands of dead sea creatures float up to your beach kinda does that.
Any sadist who wants to come down for holiday and get a good look and run his videocam so's to show the relatives ??? Maybe worth a look-see there.
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Back to CNN. Here's CNN all ga-ga about The Whale. VIDEO aboard The Whale tanker.
One point comes out: this ship uses a 5 tank separation system. It works similar to commercial water treatment facilites. A Whale does not have large-scale centrifuges, so it is not as effective as the Costner Machines at purification.
First problem comes that CNN and ABC and other corporate media outlets jumped a misquote from the ship's captain. He claims massive pick-up.
"We can effectively skim about 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day," said the ship's captain, Sanio Radhakrishman (sic).
CNN rounds that up to 500,000 barrels a day. Their reports got it to 21,000,000 gallons a day. (1 barrel =EQ= 42 gallons.)
Problem is, Capt. Radhakrishnan is talking about water, not oil.
His ship can process 21,000,000 gallons of water a day.
Enter whitis.
A lot of the media and blogosphere have been screwing that one up. They can't tell the difference between gallons of water with a little oil on top vs gallons of oil. And the oil/water ratio can vary.
If this thing works, it may skim something like 3-15 square miles per day which is much faster than the other individual skimmers but likely much slower than the fleet.
A skimmer concentrates oil two ways. One is by skimming a wide swath and concentrating it into a narrower area. The other is by covering distance and letting the oil pool up in the booms while the water escapes under them. The A whale skims a wider swath, faster. But it isn't clear that the oil accumulates with distance the way those intakes are set up. Not before those gallons are counted.
If your oil is 2microns thick (dark slick) and you concentrate 60M into about 4 meters on the sides, that is a 15:1 concentration level. But that is only 30microns thick. Now you take in perhaps 1cm deep of water (probably be thicker than that). That is only 0.3% oil and your 21 million gallons/day oily water is 63,000 gallons of oil/day.
60m*6knots*1cm*12hours = 21,135,455 gallons
Watching her path today, as she was presumably doing some test runs, we see speeds of 0.5, 1, 1, 1, 1.8,6.5,9.8, 10.5, 9.6, 8.5, 5.7, 2.9 ,1, 0.7, 0.8knots.
Comment HERE.
That 63,000 gallons a day is running close to a theoretical maximum.
When the skimmers were working on a Middle East shallow water blow out, getting one very concentrated ejecta pattern, the result for a good day would scale to 50,000 GPD here adjusting for overall flow capacity into the skimmer.
63,000 gallons of oil a day =EQ= 1,500 barrels of oil a day.
A spit in the world's ocean... compared to the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that Deepwater Horizon has inflicted so far.
Of course they should run this "A Whale" skimmer. It will have a tiny-to-small positive effect on what happens to the Gulf littoral.
Less of this: