Oil Being Piped To Surface Will Be Tested To See Whether It Can Be Refined - NOLA.com

Oil being piped to surface will be tested to see whether it can be refined
By Jaquetta White, The Times-Picayune
May 17, 2010, 6:52PM

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A mile-long tube inserted into a broken pipe spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico is capturing about 1,000 barrels of oil daily, or about 20 percent of the oil leaking from the site, a BP official said Monday.

The tube began transferring leaking oil and natural gas onto a waiting ship Sunday. The gas that is being collected is being burned in a process called flaring. BP is testing the oil to determine if it can be refined or if it should be discarded, chief operating officer Doug Suttles said.

It is BP's first successful attempt at containing oil, which is leaking both from a pipe called a riser on the ocean floor as well as from an apparatus called a blowout preventer. The tube was inserted into a gash in the riser, the larger of the two leaks.

"This will diminish the leak," U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said. "It will not contain it completely."

BP and government officials have estimated that 5,000 barrels of oil are leaking into the Gulf each day. Some experts, however, estimate that five times that amount could be escaping.

Suttles said the tube is capable of collecting more oil, and has not yet been fully "optimized." BP will "open the choke" to let more oil in at some point, Suttles said, but is doing so slowly so as not to let in water, which would inhibit the flow.

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Link: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/oil_being_piped_to_surface_wil.html

Stay classy BP...

:wtf:

Or at least start a fund which could be used to pay future damage claims.

I used to travel the mississippi every week and all those refinaries spend all day burning off gas. The question is how much can BP get for it with oil continuing to fall.

...without a whacking great lot of infrastructure, there is no way of collecting and distributing the gas. And it's better burnt and released as CO2 than as methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

They manage to transport the oil without too much trouble. Why not the gas at the same time?
If they use pipe lines to transport oil, why not a parallel line for the gas also?

Gas allowed to expand uncontrollably on the ascent.

Once expanded natural gas to low densities can't economically be recompressed. Recompression would require energy and thus burning more fossil fuels.

There is no free lunch in physics.

...it would take to build a processing facility on site or run a pipeline to a facility on land.

Right now. This instant. The least harmful option is to burn anything that will burn on top of or over the water. Methane, because of its greehouse gas potency is quite possibly be the most important. The other lower weight fractions contribute to keeping the oil fluid and at its most toxic. That is one small advantage that a tropical spill has over an arctic one. A much higher percentage of the spill will coagulate into tarballs, which while no picnic are still less harmful than a fluid oil with the capacity to coat everything it comes into contact with.

At atmospheric pressure gasses are several hundred times less dense than liquids. The butane in a cigarette lighter liquifies at just below freezing. Propane, such as we take camping with us, liquefies only at considerable pressure, then ethane at a higher pressure still and finally methane the main component of natural gas the hydrocarbon which requires the highest pressure of all to liquefy. With a realistic carbon levy it might just barely be ecconomical to recover at the pressures it is flared off at. Without, the least harmful option is to burn it unless it is close enough to an urban area and in shallow enough water to make it viable to pipe it directly into the distribution system.

Consider the size of the flare on a production platform, large as it might seem and figure out how many gas burners/barbeques it represents. The answer surprisingly is not very many in the greater scheme of things. That gas has far more value as simple pressure to push the higher molecualar weight (and hence more valuable) fractions to the surface than it ever would as fuel. What gets flared is the little bit they can't keep bottled up in the oil bearing strata, that bubbles up with the oil and presumably don't need on the platform for their own energy needs.

plants and animals out of it , though...


mark

How would you possibly "discard" this much oil? Where would you put it?

If the seawater concentration is too high the likely will have to discard it.

There are lots of oil wells that are tapped out make nice underground caverns just dump oil back in them.

who will be studying satellite pics carefully, so they can properly bill the states on LA, MS, AL, FL for appropriating THEIR oil:rofl:---> but not really ..

Let's hope those corporate genes aren't spliced into BP....

Sid