re: 4 inch pipe to contain a 21 inch pipe?

anymore explanation on the home plumbing sized pipe?

so there is a rubber stopper on the 4 inch pipe??

If so, that would make sense. The stopper holds back the oil, while the 4 inch pipe sucks it up, thereby maintaining a tolerable pressure for the stopper. Haven't heard about a stopper with this attempt though.

(no message)

Tar balls have hit key west.

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The U.S. Coast Guard and marine scientists will be surveying shorelines in the Keys Tuesday morning to see if they find more tar balls after many were found today on Key West beaches.

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Palm Beach Post

honestly, a 4 inch pipe could suck up the vast majority of the oil coming out of the larger pipe, as long as they can suck on it (twss, I know) hard enough to pull the volume of the flow out.

For example, if you can get a 1/4 inch straw and create enough suction through it, you could stop a garden hose (that is turned on) from shooting water out of the end. Just have to suck it out before it reaches the top.

I'm not saying that I know anything about the plan, just saying it's a feasible solution to reducing the amount of oil being spilled

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thus you have the 4" pipe

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A 4" pipe can handle the loss of oil reported, easily.

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people still actually believe BP's "reported" leak volume?

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And what's your scientifically provable calculation say the volume is?

Mine says, I have no idea. You must be a lot smarter than I am.

Like Al Gore smart, he knows that this thing is pumping 62,500 barrels a day into the ocean. He got that number from the same magical unicorn turd formula that he used to show how the earth was warming and would continue to do so at an exponential pace, until it didn't.

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Even BP has admitted that their 5,000 is probably wrong.

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FWIW, I personally don't believe it's right either, but I don't say anything because there's no basis that makes my beliefs any more reliable than BP's.

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skytruth did the math and posted it on their blog

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An internet blog isn't something even worth quoting, especially one that is anti big oil.

Description of a video from their website:

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This ten minute video produced by SkyTruth introduces the impacts of the dramatic growth of gas and oil drilling in the ecologically sensitive Upper Green River Valley in Wyoming, using the latest in satellite imagery, aerial photography, and Google Earth technology.

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Not heinously out of line, but you can't reject BP's estimate because of possible bias and then accept their estimate, you know what I mean?

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multiple scientists have come forward with calculations, and they're all at least 4-5x greater than BP's 5,000 bbl report.

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Again, I agree it's probably more, however, multiple scientists also backed global warming and multiple scientists also back the abiotic oil theory that someone was talking about the other day. If you didn't catch it, google abiotic oil.

Scientists are the best source, but hardly gospel.


As usual, my point is, no one knows. So, when stating possibilities or opinions, please present them as such and not as fact.

and just as a counterpoint, scientists who estimate otherwise:



Dr. Steven Wereley, Purdue University:
LINK

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A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

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Dr. Eugene Chiang, Cal
LINK

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Chiang said he used relatively "back of the envelope" calculations to put an estimated rate for the spill at 20,000 to 100,000 barrels a day.

Chiang studied the angle of the flow of oil and gas from the leaking pipe, and made calculations about buoyancy and gravitational acceleration.

"I estimated that it was moving 100cm per second going up as a very rough estimate, so then all I needed to know was the area of the pipe." His guess turned out to be very close to the measurements released by BP.

"This was just based on back-of-the-envelope scribbling and looking at the vide; but even within that range you can already infer that this is a huge disaster exceeding the magnitude of the Exxon Valdez spill by quite a large margin," he said. "The calculation is uncertain, but I am confident enough to say that this is one of the big ones. It is not 5,000 barrels a day. That much I can say.

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Dr. Ian McDonald, FSU:
LINK

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The main slick, which corresponds to the cross-hatched area was assigned a low value of 0.5 µm. We calculate a total volume of oil for this slick as 8.94 million gallons (212,000 barrels) (Figure 3). Considering that the oil in the water on April 28 has been deposited since the blowout and explosion on April 20, the flow rate should be on the order of 26,500 barrels per day. Some fraction of the total oil released will have been evaporated or emulsified and sunk in the time since the spill began, or collected by the response crews, so this should be considered a minimum estimate.

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