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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Mourning the Gulf Coast (6/23/2010 12:26:30 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kungmaster
Hey everyone OP here:
We should concentrate on discrediting (or verifying) the message not the messenger. Sometimes something is too horrible to deal with rationally so we grasp at anything to disbelieve it. Does anyone have alternative and reliable sources to back up or disprove Mr Hoagland's assertion?
Fair enough, and a quite reasonable request. I'm not going to try to disprove his assertion that the entire Gulf is going to explode in a giant supervolcano of oil, though, for the same reason I wouldn't waste my time trying to disprove Santa Claus. You can't disprove something for which no proof has been offered. If he's making the fantastic claims, the burden of proof is on him, and he has no substantiation whatsoever, for any of that crap.
I can, however, pick a few holes in some of his other ramblings, and demonstrate his ignorance of the general subject. I'll just toss out a few from memory. First of all, he claimed that this imaginary 20-mile wide bubble of methane gas that was swelling beneath the seafloor could not be measured accurately, because civilian GPS technology is not as precise as the GPS equipment the military uses. This is a complete crock of shit. Civilian GPS units are accurate to within a few meters - for him to claim that there's no way to know whether the "gas bubble" is 15 miles wide or 20 miles wide because the equipment used to measure the bubble has a margin of error of about 20 feet is ridiculous. Either he's lying, or he is too scientifically ignorant to understand basic GPS technology. And if he's genuinely that ignorant he has no credibility on the subject on which he claims to be an expert.
Second, he claims that the pressure in the Macondo Reservoir (the reservoir of hydrocarbons that the Deepwater Horizon well was drilling into) has a pressure of about 100,000 pounds per square inch. That's absurd, and completely false. If the pressure was that high, they never could have (or would have) tapped into it. Nobody would even dream of trying to tap that, because it's impossible. There are vast deposits in the Gulf with pressures of 30,000 to 35,000 that nobody is touching because they don't have the technology to contain anything near that pressure, and they know it. For someone to drill into 100,000 psi is inconceivable. It would have blown their entire drill rig halfway to Australia the instant they poked it.
Bottomhole pressures in Lower Tertiary formations such as the Macondo reservoir are typically in the 20,000 - 25,000 psi range. From what I've read, the bottomhole pressure on the Horizon well was at the high end of that, around 25,000 psi. Still a lot of pressure, but nowhere near the 100,000 figure that he apparently made up out of thin air. For a so-called "expert" to make such an enormous factual error discredits everything else he says.
And third, he also claims that geologists have no idea what formations of sand and rock are between the reservoir and the seafloor, and again, this is complete nonsense. They know every single inch of every single formation all the way to the top of that reservoir. And i do mean every single inch. They keep extremely detailed bore logs of every inch they drill, and they know exactly - exactly - what the geology is all the way down. So either he's lying to make his claim sound more dramatic, or - again - he has no clue what he's talking about. Either way, he has no credibility.
And fourth, he completely misuses the term "cavitation" in describing what the effect of these mythical gas bubbles might be. Cavitation is a phenomenon which occurs when the pressure in a liquid (such as seawater) drops below the vapor pressure of that liquid, and the liquid briefly experiences a phase change to gas. He used the term to describe the effect of a large gas bubble escaping from the seafloor, which would not be an example of cavitation. So again, he is either deliberately misusing important-sounding terminology to make his claims sound more menacing, or he has no genuine understanding of the subject matter.
The guy is completely full of shit. He offers no evidence whatsoever to support his fantasies, and he clearly does not understand either the basic facts of this specific event or the terminology of the general subject. He has no credibility at all.
quote:
ORIGINAL: kungmaster
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3226787
A steel ship floats because it displaces a volume of water equal to its weight. A mass release of methane causes billions of tiny bubbles to float up. The density of the water with the bubbles is now significantly lower. So the displaced volume of "bubbly" water has less weight. The ship now weighs more than its displaced bubble water and sinks.
Theoretically, that's probably possible. But it's a long way from a 20-mile wide methane bubble blowing up the entire gulf like a supervolcano and killing millions of people.
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