You're right it won't go to zero, in the same sense that airplane crashes won't ever go to zero. however that's because it's really hard to prevent all airplane crashes/oil spills, not because people are "too indifferent".
This spill was from an oil rig, not a tanker. Do rig and pipeline spills follow the same trend? Haven't found data on rigs yet, but pipeline spills do not.
Edit: Also, the data you referenced comes from an organization that's run by oil companies and tanker operators (https://www.itopf.org/about-us/the-board/). I doubt they'd just fabricate data, but they are incentivized to massage the definition of what counts as an "oil spill from a tanker". If I were relying on this data I'd probably want to find an independent source.
I appreciate your optimism. The downward trend in amount spilled is nice to see, but that value is unknown for nearly half the entries, so I wouldn't read too much into it. I'm not saying it's impossible that things are getting better, I even think it's likely, but it's certainly not at the same level as airplane safety, where everything that can be done is being done and crashes are incredibly rare. It is trivial to find examples of the oil industry failing to do the bare minimum (here's one recent report, the first thing I found: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-293). I'm very comfortable stepping on a plane, but I would not be comfortable living next to a pipeline or making a living fishing next to an oil rig, and I think the statistics back up my feelings.
This makes for an interesting thought experiment: purposefully combining oil rigs and pipelines with populated areas, so that in case something goes wrong humans get hit first. I imagine then we'd hold oil infrastructure maintenance to a higher standard than the appalling “monthly surface checks”.
Of course, it's idealistic and humans would never behave this way.
Aren't there already pipelines to crowded areas? I mean, that's where they're typically consumed right? Also, it's not like pipelines that are in the middle of nowhere could be replaced with pipelines in urban areas. The whole point of pipelines is to cross between where it's produced and where it's consumed. Even if you built a bunch of pipelines in populated areas for no reason in the hopes that it will gather more awareness, I suspect that what will happen isn't some sort effort to improve pipelines nationwide, only the ones in populated areas.
You underestimate how far-fetched the suggested thought experiment is—it presumes if there is some dangerous extraction away from populated areas (like a rig off shore), then there must be cities created there so that any trouble is felt and observed by humans first and then the rest of the ecosystem.
For now there’s a social outcry if oil spills far away, but imagine you see dead ocean out of your window. Could be a sci-fi setting…
Airplane crashes will continue as long as people use air travel, which is unlikely to ever change. The best we can do to prevent airplane crashes would be to build in enough security in airplanes so that enough amount of systems has to fail before a crash can occur, including eliminating human failure and cascading failures.
Oil spills will also continue as long we extract oil from the bottom of the ocean (and to a degree land). In contrast to airplanes however, we should have a future where we stop extracting it from the earth. In order prevent climate change we need to stop today, and every day we continue to pump it up we are stepping further into catastrophe.
We can have a future were electric planes flies in the sky. We can't have a future were we continue pumping up more oil. The oil need to stay where it is.
It would also be very interesting to see seepage from say, 1910, predating the 10,000 wells that were built in the area, 1925, at the height of the oil boom, and today, but I doubt this information exists.
Edited to say "area" instead of "city" - there was no city at that time.
Histories of California contain many descriptions of extensive oil seepage both on shore and off. Here’s an example from further up the coast, from a book published in 1883:
“The flowing springs of petroleum early attracted the attention of the settlers. The oil was flowing from the earth in hundreds of places, sometimes forming large pools into which cattle, sheep, and horses, as well as wild animals, would venture and get caught, leaving their bones as a warning of danger for future visitors. Sometimes it flowed into the streams and would float away for miles before it evaporated. There were hundreds of acres, perhaps thousands, covered with the residuum left after the evaporation of the lighter parts. Springs of it also occur in the Santa Barbara Channel, and the first navigators had fears of the near vicinity of a hot place, from the villainous smell that pervaded the atmosphere where the oil was floating on the ocean.”
History of Santa Barbara County, California, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers
If the seeps were from the same geologic formations that the wells were drilled into, it would be expected that the oilwells would have reduced the availability of the oil to continue seeping at the previous volume.
Yeah 120,000 gallons is a proverbial drop in the context of the Pacific ocean. Too bad it was close enough to shore to cause this local environmental problem though.
Just because it happens in nature doesn't mean it's OK for us to make it happen in more places. If you've ever been to the beach around that oil seep you'd know it sucks to get the tar on you or your surfboard. We don't need more.
i’ve been getting tarballs on everything and everywhere in santa barbara my entire life. there are several capped oil rigs offshore in the channel.
it seems like even without a spill, these things are dangerous to ecologies over the long term. the petroleum industry has negative externalities at every end and throughout it’s operations.
I wasn't suggesting that it is in anyway acceptable to spill oil, and I think it is interesting that in the same region the spill occurred there have always been naturally occurring seeps that release far more oil into the environment.
And it's also interesting that these companies have been passively capturing the oil from the seeps, which potentially reduces the amount of tar washing up on the shores.
Couldn’t happen to a more appropriate group of people. It’s just deserts for decades of opposing environmental policy. I hope the residents of Huntington Beach are so inconvenienced that they have to relocate to their second homes in Texas.
This will reconsider nothing and just find a way to rob state coffers to pay for cleanup. Basically every calamity that befalls rich coastal residents is handled like I described. Why will this one be different?
Of course it won’t be different. But I’d rather it happened in Huntington Beach than Venice or San Pedro, because the people there actually deserve it.
Perhaps you should seek out a therapist in order to process your violent tendencies and the subconscious traumas that could be leading towards such behavior.
It'll just slowly go back into the ground where it came... I find it funny that a lot of self-proclaimed "environmentalists" who love to espouse the benefits of using "natural" stuff get outraged by things like this, as if oil wasn't a naturally occurring substance.
Isn't there a frequency difference between natural "leakage" and man-made disasters like this? Naturally occurring events made be damaging but happen at less frequency.
According to the subthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740261 , oil has been coming out of the ground on its own for a long time. As in, before humans even knew what to do with it.
Oil is not naturally occurring on the surface of the earth. It can only be formed underground, it is extremely poisonous, it kills almost every living organism. You can say that deep underground oil is natural, but on the surface of the earth certainly not.
This apparently popular argument of the form "hey, it's natural, so it doesn't matter! Hah, hypocritical environmentalists!" is utterly absurd, not only false equivalence, but a brain dead employment of an appeal to nature fallacy. That some amount of seepage is naturally occurring does not remotely excuse the obnoxious, mind-boggling amount of death to nature caused by oil spills due to the economic activity of humans. Every single year in the history of the oil industry there have been major spills. That's 162 years worth of major oil spills. Sure seepage is natural; oil spills are not.
Are oil spills naturally occurring? Were the La Brea Tar Pits caused by an oil spill? [1] Is it morally permissible for an arsonist or an irresponsible camper to burn down the neighborhood and an entire forest with it because fire is natural? [2]
I understand the sentiment, but in this case it's more like, neighborhoods built around oil derricks. Go look up pictures of HB from the early 20's. It was all farmland until oil was discovered, the city came later, with the first developments being built in the 50's. Just about every house in the city along the coast sits atop a capped well.
What’s the plan of attack? Feign outrage on the internet in hopes that someone else will do the hard work of holding these companies accountable? Have Greta stand another day in front of a building as a symbol of triumph of the youth in their struggle against these companies? Have BBC run a few more weeks of environmental destruction pieces saying how the damage is irreversible?
No wait, we got one - front page news: “N more species went extinct recently”. Yeah, that will show them.
I walked along Huntington Beach’s beach today to checkout what happened. Although the cleanup workers did a great job, there were still puddles of oil on the sand, and you could definitely smell it in the air. The puddles were much clumpier than I imagined, but guess that’s just how crude oil is.
From looking at the news videos of the tarballs, some crude oil is just like what has made it to the beach.
In Alberta CA the famous tar sands are about like this, including even the sand, otherwise this is mainly the remaining wax and tar content which picks up the sand when it washes up.
After "weathering" before drifting ashore, most of the light volatile hydrocarbon content has evaporated leaving only the heavy residue consisting of wax & bitumen which balls up as the sheen shrinks naturally.
If it was a light crude to begin with that could quite often look more like root beer (complete with foam) when fresh or even be as semi-transparent as iced tea. And can be quite low in viscosity compared to diesel fuel.
In the case of really light crude there might only be about 1 percent residuum content, IOW for every 100 barrels spilled only 1 barrel of this tar would remain to wash ashore after evaporation of the light ends.
Other times with a heavy crude each barrel might be more than 50 percent residuum, which means orders of magnitude difference in shoreline devastation per barrel lost from the pipeline.
Looks like the operator is Amplify Energy whose spokesman didn't seem that well-spoken, and I think it can be recognized as a deer-in-the-headlights moment. Seems like they are one of the ones finding their niche by taking over proven properties from much larger oil companies who had drilled the wells and fully depreciated the assets years ago. Everything has already paid for itself so attractive deals can always be made for next-generation investors. The majors could have easily gone "green" decades ago with their financial resources (could have divested from oil completely) and provided good shareholder returns from pure financial operations, but naturally there is even more money in continuing to bring in gushers.
Shell did a bit of that last month when they sold lots of their Texas wells to Conoco, I would expect the ones needing extensive infrastructure repair will be passed on to smaller companies like Amplify before the bill for that kind of thing comes due, while the figures still look as good on paper as they ever did.
Could you explain the economics of selling these wells among companies? It sounds like what you are trying to say is akin to Budget selling its fleet of 1 year old rental cars to Rent -a-Wreck and not doing any maintenance on them in the meantime.
It's a business gamble that unfortunately has more than just financial consequences if the second-hand hardware fails to continue performing as "reasonably" expected.
>Amplify Energy Corp. is an independent oil and natural gas company engaged in the acquisition, development, exploitation and production of oil and natural gas properties.
All the actual work is expected to be performed by contractors, so the company can co-exist in the same space as cowboy oilmen who don't have to have great engineers on their staff as long as the contractors have the credentials.
Looking at the Amplify portfolio at this early stage in their business, it can be seen that a good number of their properties consist of oilfields where many or most of the wells are not actually producing any more, even though the remaining subsurface reserves are significant.
These could be expected to be value acquisitions requiring the lowest possible up-front investment. A rise in the oil price might be what is anticipated before the additional cash could be raised that could be used for refurbishment and to bring non-producing wells back into production.
The offshore California play however does have all wells listed as currently producing, plus they ended up with the associated pipeline that goes with it in that case.
They may not have as much experience at operating a subsea pipline compared to their efforts getting into the oilwells themselves.
Either way, once an asset sale is in the works, expensive maintenance would be deferred from that point so the acquiring operator can bear the costs. This would be figured into the negotiated price.
To some extent you get what you pay for, even on the industrial scale.
Lefties want their Rivians and Teslas but fail to understand their lithium batteries are mined by child slaves in Africa and political prisoners from death camps in China.
We all know covid is one of the reasons behind this oil spill. Also - were the oil workers wearing masks!? If they weren't wearing masks this disaster could be so much worse!
I remember after the Exxon Valdez oil spill wondering when we were going to get off of petroleum. 32 years later and the cars are bigger and less efficient.
65 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/alschaben/status/1444664303269728257
You're right it won't go to zero, in the same sense that airplane crashes won't ever go to zero. however that's because it's really hard to prevent all airplane crashes/oil spills, not because people are "too indifferent".
Pipeline incidents have been roughly constant over time: https://portal.phmsa.dot.gov/analytics/saw.dll?Portalpages&P...
Edit: Also, the data you referenced comes from an organization that's run by oil companies and tanker operators (https://www.itopf.org/about-us/the-board/). I doubt they'd just fabricate data, but they are incentivized to massage the definition of what counts as an "oil spill from a tanker". If I were relying on this data I'd probably want to find an independent source.
Edit 2: NOAA data of all spills does not show a downward trend: https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index
I couldn't get the link to work. If it's flat, but the amount of oil being transported is up, isn't that still a decline?
>Edit 2: NOAA data of all spills does not show a downward trend: https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index
I fed the chart into excel and generated a graph: https://i.imgur.com/QKu2Yly.png
looks like even though incidents (orange line) is up, the amount spilled (blue) is down.
I appreciate your optimism. The downward trend in amount spilled is nice to see, but that value is unknown for nearly half the entries, so I wouldn't read too much into it. I'm not saying it's impossible that things are getting better, I even think it's likely, but it's certainly not at the same level as airplane safety, where everything that can be done is being done and crashes are incredibly rare. It is trivial to find examples of the oil industry failing to do the bare minimum (here's one recent report, the first thing I found: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-293). I'm very comfortable stepping on a plane, but I would not be comfortable living next to a pipeline or making a living fishing next to an oil rig, and I think the statistics back up my feelings.
Of course, it's idealistic and humans would never behave this way.
For now there’s a social outcry if oil spills far away, but imagine you see dead ocean out of your window. Could be a sci-fi setting…
Oil spills will also continue as long we extract oil from the bottom of the ocean (and to a degree land). In contrast to airplanes however, we should have a future where we stop extracting it from the earth. In order prevent climate change we need to stop today, and every day we continue to pump it up we are stepping further into catastrophe.
We can have a future were electric planes flies in the sky. We can't have a future were we continue pumping up more oil. The oil need to stay where it is.
They passively collect 100-150 barrels a day from the Coal Oil Point Seep Field.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Oil_Point_seep_field
The oil in question was not from a seep however. It came from the processing platform Elly that supports two other drilling rigs in the Beta field.
Not sure where I am going with this but I just thought it was interesting.
Edited to say "area" instead of "city" - there was no city at that time.
“The flowing springs of petroleum early attracted the attention of the settlers. The oil was flowing from the earth in hundreds of places, sometimes forming large pools into which cattle, sheep, and horses, as well as wild animals, would venture and get caught, leaving their bones as a warning of danger for future visitors. Sometimes it flowed into the streams and would float away for miles before it evaporated. There were hundreds of acres, perhaps thousands, covered with the residuum left after the evaporation of the lighter parts. Springs of it also occur in the Santa Barbara Channel, and the first navigators had fears of the near vicinity of a hot place, from the villainous smell that pervaded the atmosphere where the oil was floating on the ocean.”
History of Santa Barbara County, California, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers
https://archive.org/details/historyofsantaba00maso/page/n189...
it seems like even without a spill, these things are dangerous to ecologies over the long term. the petroleum industry has negative externalities at every end and throughout it’s operations.
http://seeps.geol.ucsb.edu/
And it's also interesting that these companies have been passively capturing the oil from the seeps, which potentially reduces the amount of tar washing up on the shores.
If it didn't naturally seep out of the ground, humans never would have discovered it and started using it. See this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740261
It isn’t formed on the surface, but it is naturally occurring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
You may want to look up the history of the invention of petroleum jelly...
I hope in the future humanity is better with mycoremediation.
Oil platforms a few miles offshore a busy public beach? Sure why not? Offshore wind farms? Illegal!!
No wait, we got one - front page news: “N more species went extinct recently”. Yeah, that will show them.
Worked before, might work again, you reckon?
In Alberta CA the famous tar sands are about like this, including even the sand, otherwise this is mainly the remaining wax and tar content which picks up the sand when it washes up.
After "weathering" before drifting ashore, most of the light volatile hydrocarbon content has evaporated leaving only the heavy residue consisting of wax & bitumen which balls up as the sheen shrinks naturally.
If it was a light crude to begin with that could quite often look more like root beer (complete with foam) when fresh or even be as semi-transparent as iced tea. And can be quite low in viscosity compared to diesel fuel.
In the case of really light crude there might only be about 1 percent residuum content, IOW for every 100 barrels spilled only 1 barrel of this tar would remain to wash ashore after evaporation of the light ends.
Other times with a heavy crude each barrel might be more than 50 percent residuum, which means orders of magnitude difference in shoreline devastation per barrel lost from the pipeline.
Looks like the operator is Amplify Energy whose spokesman didn't seem that well-spoken, and I think it can be recognized as a deer-in-the-headlights moment. Seems like they are one of the ones finding their niche by taking over proven properties from much larger oil companies who had drilled the wells and fully depreciated the assets years ago. Everything has already paid for itself so attractive deals can always be made for next-generation investors. The majors could have easily gone "green" decades ago with their financial resources (could have divested from oil completely) and provided good shareholder returns from pure financial operations, but naturally there is even more money in continuing to bring in gushers.
Shell did a bit of that last month when they sold lots of their Texas wells to Conoco, I would expect the ones needing extensive infrastructure repair will be passed on to smaller companies like Amplify before the bill for that kind of thing comes due, while the figures still look as good on paper as they ever did.
>Amplify Energy Corp. is an independent oil and natural gas company engaged in the acquisition, development, exploitation and production of oil and natural gas properties.
All the actual work is expected to be performed by contractors, so the company can co-exist in the same space as cowboy oilmen who don't have to have great engineers on their staff as long as the contractors have the credentials.
Looking at the Amplify portfolio at this early stage in their business, it can be seen that a good number of their properties consist of oilfields where many or most of the wells are not actually producing any more, even though the remaining subsurface reserves are significant.
These could be expected to be value acquisitions requiring the lowest possible up-front investment. A rise in the oil price might be what is anticipated before the additional cash could be raised that could be used for refurbishment and to bring non-producing wells back into production.
The offshore California play however does have all wells listed as currently producing, plus they ended up with the associated pipeline that goes with it in that case.
They may not have as much experience at operating a subsea pipline compared to their efforts getting into the oilwells themselves.
Either way, once an asset sale is in the works, expensive maintenance would be deferred from that point so the acquiring operator can bear the costs. This would be figured into the negotiated price.
To some extent you get what you pay for, even on the industrial scale.
Oil is natural. Death camps are not.
... also, lefties are faggots
We all know covid is one of the reasons behind this oil spill. Also - were the oil workers wearing masks!? If they weren't wearing masks this disaster could be so much worse!
Automobiles kill more kids than anything else in America: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsr1804754#:~:text=.... . When are we going to finally develop a reasonable transit system?
This petroleum based life style is killing our children.
The same petroleum powers the hospitals and ambulances that save many more children.
You also offer to feasible alternative except a complaint that it's not happening fast enough for your liking.