A week ago Congressman Grijalva produced a diary about putting the offshore platform workers back in the field dismantling the abandoned gas and oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The job creation is an excellent idea, but I thought we needed to consider other uses that can be made of some of these investments before we remove them.
Tonight there is a front page post on British Petroleum's first escrow deposit, just $3 billion of the $20 billion they've agreed to pay. There is also some truly grim information about the dispersed oil and potential harm to the food chain.
So perhaps we can take two problems, a little innovative thinking, and solve for both of them.
Kossack nathguy suggested that some of these platforms could be repurposed to support wind turbines. Some of these are big, sturdy structures that could take the vibration of a turbine, but they’re far out to sea and the transmission line cost might very well exceed the value of the power produced over the lifetime of a turbine installed there.
I had previously suggested in other places that aeration from these platforms was the right thing to do and I’m going to stand by the idea that a study of this needs to be done.
The technical principles are sound; turbines already exist that are coupled with compressors - they’re used to pump compressed air into underground storage so that the power of the wind can be time shifted to when it’s needed. Such a system could instead be turned to pumping air into the water, much like an aquarium bubbler, and the oxygenated water would support the bacteria that will clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is at once emotionally pleasing to those concerned about the environment; a clean, plentiful source of energy turned to correcting the problems caused by fossil fuel production, benefitting rather than harming the sea life of the Gulf of Mexico. But I’m an engineer by training and I hope to be a national policy maker next January, so I have to ask hard questions. How much does this cost? How long will it last? How many jobs will be created? How much time do we shave off the recovery of the Gulf, both as a natural environment and as a source of sea food?
Considering this is the sort of thing that needs to be expedited. If the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado didn’t have funds available I would proudly file for an earmark to cover the required study at a Gulf Coast region university.
As a nation we need to be making better decisions than we have been. Politics will always require making sausage, but we can do a better job of controlling the quality of the inputs to the legislative grinder. Blind dogma, prejudice, and blatant corruption have no place in planning - we need more men (and women) of science like Noble Prize winner Steven Chu, and fewer oil industry sellouts like Joe Barton. Send me to Congress, and I’ll spend at least some of my evenings in D.C. doing the sort of thing I do now at home - reading on energy technology and policy.
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