A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean reached the Southern California coast
npr.org
npr.org
Oil platforms a few miles offshore a busy public beach? Sure why not? Offshore wind farms? Illegal!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope in the future humanity is better with mycoremediation.
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.
You may want to look up the history of the invention of petroleum jelly...