Rosalea Barker: The Devil’s Diarrhea

Back in the 70s, the Venezuelan delegate to OPEC famously referred to oil as “the Devil’s excrement”. Watching the live video that BP is supplying, it’s easy to conclude that the Devil has a bad case of Montezuma’s Revenge. But don’t go looking to me for any sensible commentary about the oil fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m one of those daft people who, when the news first broke, had to bandage up their jaw after it hit the floor while watching initial news reports suggesting the valve blowout was no big deal.

::Bring in the psychics!::
I grew up in an area rich in hydrocarbons, where many locals worked on offshore natural gas platforms. One time on a bus trip home from the Big City where I’d gone to live, a fellow passenger struck up a conversation with me when she saw that I was about to take off my hastily put on sweatshirt, turn it rightside out, and put it on again.

“Don’t do that,” she urged, “It’s bad luck. If you put clothes on inside out, you should wear them that way all day.” She was not only a mine of gypsy folklore and superstition, but was a practicing psychic on her way to a little coast-side town to impart her wisdom to one of her regular monthly clients. He was an executive with the Shell BP Todd oil company that owned the drilling rights to the offshore gas fields.

::What and when did the cartoonist know?::
On May 5, Fox aired an episode of American Dad called Incident at Owl Creek. In it, that bulwark of CIAism, Stan, is standing on his neighbor’s springboard, about to do a dive bomb at a pool party when he begins to fear that he will poop on landing. When his worst fears are realized, he fakes his family’s deaths and they drive from one distant backwater town to another, only to find their fame has followed them. President Obama comes to the rescue with mixed success.

Given the “Devil’s excrement” meme, it’s kind of amazing that the air date for that episode came at just about the same time that the media was beginning to give a more realistic report of the consequences of the blowout.

::Pour in the heavy water!::
Obviously, oil is lighter than seawater or it wouldn’t float. And just as obviously, oil and water don’t mix. But what about heavy water, which doesn’t contain any hydrogen atoms? Maybe they should have tried plugging the pipe with heavy water instead of garbage.

Okay, okay. My thinking about chemistry and physics is entirely misinformed, but then I did warn you at the outset not to look for anything sensible in this column. (Just putting in a plug for nuclear energy.)

::Meanwhile over at Shell::
The first 2010 issue of Shell Technology—“a global quarterly magazine highlighting Shell projects and technology”—is entirely devoted to “World-class deepwater exploration and production”. How timely is that!

Shell’s Perdido rig in the Gulf of Mexico saw its first flow of oil on March 31 this year, and is drilling in 2450m of water—the deepest yet. My Spanish dictionary tells me that the adjective “perdido” means a variety of things depending on the context—presumably the meaning Shell chose it for is “isolated” rather than “lost” or “promiscuous”, which might refer to the fate or the proclivities of its workers.

The Perdido rig receives oil from 35 wells drilled into 3 different reservoirs of oil and natural gas, via 5 subsea boosting stations. Each undersea wellhead has its own Christmas tree down at the seabed, but instead of having low-pressure risers and subsea blowout preventers, like the one that failed for BP in April, the Perdido operation has surface BOPs and high-pressure risers.

Hard to say if that would be any better; what really interested me in the Shell brochure were the many mentions of separating the gas from the oil down at the wellhead. So, what’s happening to all the gas in the BP field? It must also be entering the ocean.

Jeez, the Devil really should cut back on his burrito intake!

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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