Please be advised that I don't have television, don't take a newspaper, and don't have time to pore over info on the web to find an answer. I am just wondering about some of the news bites I've heard on the radio when I'm driving, and don't understand what I'm hearing.

Short, simple explanations are best for this ADD-afflicted reader.

I have heard that there are "over a hundred" organic solutions that could be applied to the oil that would "eat it up" (I think that's what they meant), like breaking down undesirable components when composting into more desirable (or at least less undesirable) individual ingredients.

Then I hear that BP is applying a 'dispersing agent'.

The Flow Rate Technical Group claims that the rate of flow is somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels (42 gals each) of crude oil per day, 1.5 to 2.5 million gallons per day, every day for the last 78 days, with no real end in sight.

I don't understand about this dispersing agent. What good does it do to disperse it? Does BP think that our world's garbage dump (aka called Earth's oceans) will be better off with it thinned out and spread all over the world?

Please explain.

Sue

Dispersal agents work like detergents.
The idea is to keep the oil from forming a slick and coating everything including animals with black tarry crude.

This is a huge oil spill. It is being blown out of the well pipe very fast with extreme pressure.
There are not enough dispersant chemicals to prevent the oil from sticking or washing up on shore.

Organic agents like oil consuming bacteria are to slow and there is not a big enough supply of them either.

I have heard so much media trash talk about solutions that I think you might be better off without the media sources for a while.

The only real news is that it is bad, that it is still bad and that it is getting worse.

I'll call you this afternoon and bring you up to date, Sue.

Bo

I am not trying to answer Susan's question but rather comment on this statement

In 1991, when Saddam put Kuwait oil wells on fire, some hired American contractor said that the fires would need TWO YEARS to put out. That was bad news for us who lived several hundred miles away but still breathing all that smoke. Luckily, the Kuwaitis hired almost everyone else in the world to try find solutions ASAP.

Some Eastern European team ( maybe Romanian or Hungarian I don't remember ) came up with an innovative solution out of the box. They mounted the engine of a MIG jet fighter on the body of a T-55 tank. This monster could approach the burning well and throw a water-air jet that was enough to extinguish the fire instantly.

I hope those who are "trying" to end this mess in the Gulf to hire more people from around the world (even from the third world if need be) and see maybe someone can bring a faster solution.

While so called thinking outside the box can be useful the situation in the gulf is not necessarily amenable to such improvisational methodologies.

The two situations have many differences. First, in the oil fires situation the individual fires were as bad as there were going to get. A failed attempt wouldn't make anything worse. As we saw with the 'top-kill' a failed attempt can potentially make things worse. Snap the well casing off below seafloor level and it could be much worse.

Second, there were a lot of well fires to experiment on. In the gulf there is, may His Noodly Holiness be praised, one well causing the problem. It isn't like you can have four or five divergent options being tried at once. Part of this also has to do with the nature of the location. The ships and equipment used to work on a well a mile underwater are both rare and expensive with little left over for dark-horse efforts.

Third, the number of people with experience and understanding of deep wells is pretty small. Given that things can be made worse and every move in measured in terms of hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour with many millions of dollars of equipment being used it seem unlikely that anyone will send in the janitor and hope he has talents as yet unseen. If you are having your brain operated on you don't want some rank amateur to step up and see if she has a talent for brain surgery she didn't know about.

Fourth, and possibly most importantly, the jet engine method was not used on most of the fires. The idea of using a jet engine isn't really so far outside the box. The Russian army has long used jet engines mounted on ground vehicles to spray a water solution to decontaminate vehicles exposed to chemical weapons.

Also the 'put out instantly' is more advertising hyperbole, and certainly under the category of 'when things go well', than an entirely reliable outcome. Evidently it works on small pipeline and oil well fires but didn't get a chance to fight many fires.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q2/stilling_the_fires_of_war-feature

The majority of well fires were put out with established techniques. In the end most novel methods of handling existing situations fail or are no better than existing techniques. The reason behind this is that the existing techniques all started out as novel out-of-the-box thinking that over time were shown to be reliable. Every new idea has to fight it out toe-to-toe against the existing knowledge.

The fact is that nobody has ever plugged a well under the conditions in the gulf. The entire operation has been outside-the-box from the start.

Art

I am not suggesting 50 teams crowd there under water and everyone tries their best shot. What I am saying is that they just form a consortium of experts and non experts just to search for ideas (brainstorming). Maybe one of those ideas has been swept under the rug prematurely and can be upgraded/improved/polished to help in this situation.

Many establishmnts hire consultants not necessarily because the consultant is any smarter than in-house engineers, but because the consultant hasn't drowned in the establishment's redtape, protocols, "vision", or politics. An outsider can focus on the problem only and quickly "see" a solution that is not seen by the engineers despite being in front of them all the time.

The gravity of the situation requires searching for ANY kind of idea. The more brains being stormed, the better.

BP has a open suggestion line that has taken many thousands of ideas. As I understand it you can submit the idea via computer but I've also heard they are mailing out packets and maintaining a second track for the more interesting ideas via mail and e-mail.

At one time there was mention that every submission would be reviewed by a BP engineer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003173.html

http://news.discovery.com/tech/the-4-feasible-oil-spill-ideas-from-the-public.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/02/national/main6541297.shtml

The CG also has its own process.

There is no shortage of ideas but engineering isn't just a matter of good ideas. It is usually a matter of a good idea, typically based in specific knowledge of the field involved, well and fully communicated to someone who is, by way of politics, money, or disposition sympathetic.

I agree.

All great ideas were, at one time, new and crazy.

By the way, many engineers from my college who had the craziest ideas are running successful companies right about now.

The problem is that with close to 7 Billion people on the planet there is something north of 7 billion "new and crazy" ideas out there and not one tenth of one percent of them are good. Great is even rarer. The vast majority of good ideas come from people with intimate knowledge of the situation. People who have been working in the industry every day and who are familiar with the equipment and environment.

Historically open calls for ideas are useless as a method of finding solutions. They are good PR because it presents the organization as being open and keeps the public engaged. But historically, well recorded back to the first years of WW2, the numbers of really useful ideas and results have been insignificant. It still works as PR.

But even a "great idea" make no difference if the person cannot effectively communicate it. The difference between a great idea and a lousy one is often presentation, timing and luck. An idea on its own means very little.

The whole mythology about building a better mousetrap is bull. You have better odds picking up golf club for the first time and finding out you are the next Tiger Woods. We are way past mousetraps. Education, expertise, and familiarity with materials and science are vital if you want to have any impact. The days when a high-school dropout could ride an idea to prosperity are essentially gone.

Even within the small group of knowledgeable engineers, there needs to be someone to step outside the box in order to come up with a truly ground breaking idea. The leak is on, what, day 80 or so? CNN has simply stopped showing the leak on TV. I guess that's because CNN doesn't want people to stay pissed - out of sight, out of mind. However, the leak is still there as big as ever, and we keep hearing the same old song and dance about techniques they've tried in the past. We do need some fresh thinkers on this thing.

In the academic world, engineers may receive credit for systems that work in theory. However, In the world at large, engineers are valued for systems that just work.

As mentioned previously, dispersant acts like detergent to split up the oil into very tiny droplets, which should help speed up the natural detoxification of the oil and consumption by bacteria. Also, it hopefully minimizes big, thick surface slicks which then wash ashore and coat whole beaches with oil.

However, there are lot's of unknowns with the dispersant being used, Corexit. There aren't good studies on its environmental effects. Corexit's safety information from the manufacturer admits as much. The dispersants may cause genetic mutations and cancer in wildlife, so there is an argument that short-term damage may be minimized at the expense of long-term wildlife health.

I read one account which said BP has used a third of the world's total supply of dispersant, and this was fairly early in the disaster. Eventually, if BP continues at this pace, it's may have to switch to using even more toxic dispersants because the supply of less toxic ones are exhausted. Actually, who knows if that point hasn't been reached already?

BP is also using the dispersant in new, untested ways, like injecting it directly into the oil plume. No one really knows if that might have unintended consequences.

Another angle to the use of dispersants is public relations--since it breaks up the slick, it's harder to see the oil on TV. And besides that, there is continuing controversy over the control BP has over negative images--prohibition, arrest and fines for people taking pictures in public areas, threatening clean up workers who wear protective equipment like respirators, etc.

Here's my take on it.

Imagine a radio antenna like you would pull out of a portable radio - the telescoping kind that get thinner and thinner at the top.

Flip that antenna over. That's your well. At each joint as the "telescope" extends into the ground, you need to seal things tightly...more on why later.

Take your antenna, drill it it in the ground, until you hit a pocket of fluid highly compressed by some kind of gas, so the fluid begins to shoot up the concentric telescope from smallest (deep down in the hole) to largest (near the surface). Imagine a bottle of soda with a cork in it and a straw through the cork. Shake the bottle.

OK, now you have soda spraying all over the place. So you want to cap the pipe right? But you see, what we didn't tell you at the start is that it's super-cold and ice is forming on the part of the antenna sticking out of the ground, and as you put the cap on, ice forms, you can't get a good seal. Worse still, remember those joints at each telescoping section? Well if you just cap off the top of the pipe, the pressure could blast out of those joints, and that would mean all kinds of fluids blasting out under the surface into which your drill goes and THAT could collapse everything under the well - that would be bad.

Now in terms of the situation in the gulf, there's more complicating factors, including:

- It's 5,000 miles below the surface, so everything is done by remotely operated vehicles.
- The physics of very high pressure environments (tons per square inch) affect things dramatically - including how gasses like methane behave and form "hydrates" (basically Ice) that gum up the works.
- The force of the oil coming out is just tremendous - picture trying to stop the flow of a fire hose using only a pair of vice grips and some sheet metal and you have a sense of what they are up against.
- The well has some construction flaws that could make any capping activity a problem - as in the oil would come out from the joins in the well casing that is under the seabed and that could erode and collapse the entire seafloor and release some or all of the the oil in there. Not. Good.

As far as "outsider ideas" let's put this into perspective. It's not like a house has caught fire like 2 zillion other houses have caught fire and the ways to get the fire to stop range from Water to Foam to innovative dry chemicals. But it's a house, you know how they burn and you have a pretty good idea of how to stop the fire.

It's more like Apollo 13 - a situation that, in retrospect, was a result of an intrinsic flaw in the engineering, but nobody was better informed and prepared to solve the problem than the same engineers who basically were to blame for the problem.

No "outsider" to Apollo 13 could have given better solutions to the situation any more than someone without the engineering knowledge related to oil drilling and in particular deep-water oil rigs (of which there aren't many comparatively speaking).

Do I think BP is doing everything possible to stop this oil? Yes, I do, and I'm a vigorous opponent to off-shore oil drilling - yet I don't deny that they are obviously trying every possible solution that the best minds in their business can come up with. There's no economic rationale to NOT stopping the oil, there's no motivation to NOT cleaning it up where and how they can (including dispersants)and while they are fumbling the PR, realistically, how can any company in this situation manage the PR?

Well I've gone on a while, hope that helps.

BP's number one motivation is being profitable as a corporation. There are other lesser motivations, but they all must lead back to the number one motivation.

What happened when BP learned that BP will be responsible for every gallon of oil spilled? What do you think was the most effective way to address that threat to BP's number one motivation?

The answers are found in exactly what BP did. First, BP reported low leak numbers. Reporting higher leak numbers would cause BP to pay more money based on BP's own admission. BP became an instant compulsive liar about the amount oil spilling from the leak. The numbers were going up and down daily. It would have been comical if the implications weren't so dire. If you believe BP engineers know what they're doing, they you must also believe that BP knew the leak numbers were way higher than what BP was reporting. BP generally didn't fully cooperate with the U.S. government when the U.S. government wanted things like the best leak video and accurate stats about the spill. Second, and perhaps worse, BP spent millions upon millions of dollars on a public relations campaign, which included expensive television ads.

BP has not been doing everything possible to stop the oil. Doing everything possible would involve not partaking in the things mentioned in the last paragraph. Further, trust is earned via actions. BP's actions have proven BP to be untrustworthy. We have here a company that misdirected energy and resources that should have been used to fix the damn leak. For example, BP could pay more money to the best experts and/or pool the top engineering minds from around the world. BP may be doing some of these to an extent. However, when I see expensive damage control ads on television, the ads alone are proof that BP's resources are not focused on doing everything possible to fix the leak.

What would make anybody think BP is doing everything possible to fix the leak anyway? BP didn't do everything they could BEFORE the leak. For example, BP didn't develop leak fixing technology that was equally advanced as their drilling technology. BP should have. Also, BP ordered the use of sea water (cheaper) instead of drilling mud right before the explosions on the rig. BP shouldn't have. With such a prevalent culture of negligence, it's not possible for BP to be suddenly doing everything possible to fix the leak.