fossil fuels are a dirty
business, a subsidiary document
tofossil
fuels disasters, is one in
a series of briefing documents on the problems of power
consumption, posed by the steady depletion of fossil fuels
and most particularly of pumpable oil. One of a grouping of documents on global concerns at
abelard.org.
“While there is no such
thing as clean energy, fossil fuels are the dirtiest
form of energy. It’s a given within the oil industry,
for example, that if you see, touch, taste, or smell
the product you are producing, you’re probably
in trouble.” [Hofmeister,
p.48]
From very early days, the oil industry grew up in an
atmosphere of unregulated wild-west adventurism.
Main street of Newtown, Montana, 1915
Historic
oil extraction and storage
Oil lake, Los Angeles, California
Kern River, California oilfield sump
The Simms gusher, Humble Texas, about 1906.
It produced about 50 thousand gallons of crude per
day
Burning oil storage tankers, USA
1907
The
greatest oil gusher in US history
Lakeview gusher, 14th day
“A torrent of oil that someone had named the
"Trout Stream" was flowing away from the Lakeview
gusher when Frank Hill took charge. The stream threatened
not only to dissipate the oil so that it could never
be recovered but also to flow into Buena Vista Lake,
the source of irrigation water for Miller & Lux
farming operations.
“Work began immediately on building huge earthen
reservoirs to trap the oil in the sloping land between
the wild well and the lake, eight miles away. All the
teams and scrapers that could be hired in the Midway
field and some from as far away as Suisun City, 300
miles to the north, worked around the clock to build
20 huge sumps, covering some 60 acres. Before the job
was done it cost more than $350,000.
“Some 400 men labored to build a barricade around
the well, lacing sand bags and sagebrush into a levee
to hold back the flow of oil.
“Three pumps,
including two 4-inch pumps and one 6-inch, worked to
full capacity delivering oil to a pair of 55,000-barrel
tanks on Producers Transportation Co. property at Maricopa.
The tanks soon proved inadequate to handle the uncontrolled
flow, which reached a peak estimated at 90,000 barrels
per day.”
—
“Finally, on Sept. 9, 1911, 544 days after the
well blew in, the Lakeview gusher caved at the bottom
and died as suddenly as it was born. It had produced
an estimated 9 million barrels of oil, a record for
the time. More than 4 million barrels had been saved.
The remainder was lost.” [Quoted from irwinator.com]
Lakeview oil well site, marked with
stone monument Image:
CLUI
“A bronze plaque reads: "America's most
spectacular gusher 'blew in' here March 14, 1910. Initial
flow was 18,000 barrels per day and later reached uncontrolled
peak of 100,000 barrels per day, completely destroying
the derrick. This Union Oil Company well between Taft
and Maricopa produced nine million barrels of oil in
18 months."
“Most of the oil soaked into the soil or evaporated.
Black mist fell for miles around. Only supreme vigilance
kept it from catching fire. The price of crude plunged
by nine-tenths. And when the flood ended, the well produced
less than 30 barrels a day.
“Today a wide oil-soaked sand pavement is topped
with desert scrub. Petroleum fumes waft from nearby
wells, and haze hides the scene on many days.”
[Quoted from geology.about.com]
Struck
by lightning - allegedly!
Oil tank struck by lightning,
Rock City, NY, 1905
Oil tank struck by lightning,
Bridgeport, Illinois, 1909
“This is the first time I've heard of [a lightning
strike] happening in my 20 years," Baker said.
"No one else can remember it. I'm just relieved
that it's over and no one was hurt."
“A pipe with 20,000 gallons of gas was burning
and two tanks with about 12,000 gallons of gas caught
on fire, Douglas said.”
Since this report, another lightning-sparked
oil fire has been reported by one of the ships helping
clear up the Gulf spill.
Living
with oil industry devastation
So far, here we have been looking at single gushers and
oil tanks. But now to give a better feel for the chaos.
There were often forests of oil derricks, as thousands
tried to join in the black gold rush. Were the locals
scared? Were they crying about disaster? Were they worrying
about cancer? Judge for yourself. Here is Huntington Beach,
California in 1928.
And you can read the excited messages on the postcards
sent to girlfriends and families back East.
“Will have some pretty colored
oils in a few days”
Now another view of Huntington Beach:
. Huntington Beach derricks.
The dark block in the picture is a storage tank.
Athabasca
oil sands, Alberta, Canada
Tar sands open pit mining, Alberta,
Canada. Image:osteis.anl.gov
World’s second largest oil
deposit - Athabasca Sands mining complex. Image: NASA
/ Earth Observatory.
“On a hot, muggy August afternoon during the
summer of 1996, I was hard at work in a conference room
of the Ministry of Aviation Industries of China (AVIC)
in Beijing, discussing human resources for a potential
joint venture between AlliedSignal, the company for
which I was then international human resources vice
president, and AVIC. When the meeting ended, one of
my hosts from the ministry graciously accompanied me
outside. As we waited for the car, he noticed that I
was looking up and down the street and then skyward.
Visibility was only about a hundred yards in any direction.
I was shocked. The executive looked at me and said,
"My children do not know the sky is blue."
“He said he had discovered this when he had
taken his family on an outing to the Great Wall of China,
some 45 miles north of Beijing. When the children got
out of the car, they shrieked and began crying: they
thought something was terribly wrong because the sky
was a brilliant blue. He said it took him considerable
time to calm them and to explain the difference between
the polluted Beijing air and the blue sky.
“ A decade earlier, my wife had visited Beijing
in winter. She recalls it as "like being inside
a vacuum cleaner bag while vacuuming in a freezer."
A decade later, when I visited in 2006, my lungs were
so affected by the atmospheres in several China cities,
I could not return to work for a week after the trip.”
[Hofmeister, pp 61-2]
Opencast mining equipment at the
Hambach operation, Rhineland. Image:mining-technology.com
Mountaintop
removal / valley fill coal mining (MTR) - Kentucky, Tennessee,
Virginia, West Virginia - the Appalachians
Mountaintop removal mine, Appalachians.
Image: Jeremy Peters
“Mountaintop removal is a relatively new type
of coal mining that began in Appalachia in the 1970s
as an extension of conventional strip mining techniques.”
—
“Mountaintop removal involves clear cutting native
hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much
as 600 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste
into nearby valleys, often burying streams. While the
environmental devastation caused by this practice is
obvious, families and communities near these mining
sites are forced to contend with continual blasting
from mining operations that can take place up to 300
feet from their homes and operate 24 hours a day. Families
and communities near mining sites may also suffer from
airborne dust and debris, contamination of their drinking
water supplies, and flooding from broken slurry impoundments
such as the Buffalo Creek disaster which left more than
100 dead and thousands homeless.” [Quoted from
appvoices.org
]
Satellite view of some mountaintop
removal mines in West Virginia. Mines are the grey areas,deforested
areas are brown.
5:18 mins. Video on how Mountaintop
Removal mining works and its consequences.
One of the least emotional videos I have seen. (Made for
a benefit concert.)
And
when oil-transport or extraction at sea goes wrong
“The oil tanker “Prestige foundered off
Cape Finisterre in 2002, leaking 80,000 tonnes of heavy
fuel oil on to Spanish beaches. It was his [the 76-year-old
master, Captain Apostolos Mangouras] first SOS in 32
years and in a force 10 gale with 25-foot waves, he
tried to rescue his ship after being refused safe haven
in a Spanish port. Desperate for a scapegoat, the Spanish
authorities threw him in jail for three months and then
kept him under house arrest for a year pending trial.
Numerous investigations blamed the pollution incident
on the decision by Spanish authorities to refuse the
Prestige access to a port.”
Some heavy crude oil and tar being
washed ashore in south-west France.
Remember that this shore was over 800 km, by sea, from
the site of the Prestige spill off Cape Finisterre, northern
Spain.
One of the local fishing boats, helping
to collect the tarry oil drifting on the coast, returns
to port.
In the fierce winter storms, the heavy fuel oil was thrown
far inland.
A barrage being deployed to prevent heavy crude entering a marine lake.
This barrage, positioned soon after the disaster broke,
was effective.
Gulf of Mexico leak, satellite photo from NASA, taken 19 June 2010.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team
“On Saturday, June 19, 2010, oil spread northeast
from the leaking Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf
of Mexico. The oil appears as a maze of silvery-gray
ribbons in this photo-like image from the Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra
satellite.
“The location of the leaking well is marked with
a white dot. North of the well, a spot of black may
be smoke; reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration say that oil and gas continue to be captured
and burned as part of the emergency response efforts.”
It is not clear how
much oil is escaping from the leak 5,000 metres
below the water surface.
This widget from pbs.org
calculates different possible amounts that may be
leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, according to different
estimations. Compare with other major
oil spills.
Refresh the page to reset the calculator
move slider just below ADJUST LEAK RATE to change
calculation rate.
[Note: leakage is given here in US
gallons.
100 million US gallons =
331,100 metric tonnes =
2.4 million US barrels.]
In my view, no-one yet
knows how big this gusher is and very likely reports
are exaggerated to make it more ‘interesting’.
Present reports [22/06/10, Day 63]
claim about 25,000 barrels a day are being collected.
Therefore, it is unlikely that
this leak is, so far, greater than a very large
tanker spill. So it hardly qualifies as the greatest
ecological disaster in American history, as claimed
by the Obama administration.
bibliography
Why We Hate
the Oil Companies: Straight Talk
by John Hofmeister
£10.78
[amazon.co.uk]
publishing 25 June 2010, but some copies already
available
.
