It is a 4" tube Why.....

Because a larger tube requires more force to push it inside the riser pipe. When an underwater robot is doing the placement, your options are limited.

Pretty sure a 4" pipe can flow 20K barrels a day. So it should be adequate.

yep this mornings news indicates the ship is filling faster than they anticipated

Yeah they only have so much capacity topside to handle whatever comes up and they don't want to try to handle to much and risk another accident.

However it would seem like they could split the pipe topside and have two ships taking on whatever is coming up.

Searching...... I'll let the board know if I find anything.

they'll probably lighter the oil/water from the Enterprise to barges. there's a fair number of available barges capable of handling hydrocarbons w/ 30,000 bbls and greater capacities.

This is a pretty standard way of handling oil produced during well testing (temporary flow testing to a rig before any sort of permanent structure is in place). in that case, the gas can be flared and burned, but the oil cannot, so you have to send it off to barges that haul it in.

ETA: "lightering" is when you partially offload liquid cargo from a larger vessel to several smaller vessels for handling purposes -- like if a tanker is too large to get close enough to an offload facility, the volume is transferred to several smaller vessels that can haul it in.

quote:

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Surely the tankers can hold 500,000 barrels.

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Most ships that come upriver are 800ft.'ers and hold a little over 500K. The easy thing (Without knowing too much as to whats going on) is to get a seagoing barge to off load the crude. I'd need a little more info. like anything else. The Transocean Discoverer Enterprise is 835ft. A seagoing barge could come along side and onload with ease.