A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [114]
Meanwhile, engineers are in the process of pumping drilling fluid that, under miles of its own weight and pressure, can push the petroleum and methane back into its genie bottle three more miles to the bottom of the well. This not only holds the pressure in, it neutralizes it.
Success arrives quietly on August 5, after they’ve followed the drilling fluid with tons of cement, which seals off the well’s walls and once again isolates the oil and gas back in its cave, where it had slept for millions of years, away from the living world.
At the end of July, BP posts a quarterly loss of $16.9 billion. BP must now coordinate the drudgery of picking up 20 million feet (3,800 miles) of boom.
With the spigot capped, talk of relief wells ebbs. Two relief wells were supposed to be completed by early August, which, in May, seemed unendurably far into the future. Now the latest tropical storm, which has again forced evacuation of offshore crews, has everything further delayed.
PART THREE
AFTERMATH
DOG DAYS
When I was a kid, we were told that oil formed from dead dinosaurs. The idea is so easy to visualize, it had persisted since the early twentieth century. But back in the 1930s, a German chemist, Alfred E. Treibs, discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains of chlorophyll; the source appeared to be the planktonic algae of ancient seas, blizzards of microscopic sea life gently falling into the depths over the ages. Covered with sediments, cooked by the geothermal energy of the planet’s hot heart, dead microscopic algae became oil.
Some of the waters that made the planet’s oil still exist, like the Gulf of Mexico, which has long received the flows and nourishment of big rivers draining the continent, as the Mississippi does today. Meanwhile, the seas that produced other massive oil fields, such as the Middle East’s, are gone.
For over half a billion years, incompletely decayed plant and animal remains from countless quintillions of tiny organisms buried under layers of rock have been percolating in the pressures and boiling heat of the Earth. Since the Paleozoic era, roughly 540 to 245 million years ago, organic material has been slowly moving to more porous layers of sandstone and siltstone, accumulating there and pooling where it has become trapped by impermeable rock and salt layers. A typical petroleum deposit includes oil, natural gas, and salt water. Crude oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbons with different boiling points that facilitate their separation into materials like asphalt, heavy and light oils, kerosene, light and heavy naphtha (from which gasoline is made), gas, and other components. It gets further refined and blended with other products to make fuels, solvents, paints, plastics, synthetic rubber, soaps, cleaners, waxes and gels, medicines, explosives, and fertilizers.
Petroleum seeps to the surface in many places, most famously the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, which for tens of thousands of years captured mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, lions, and wolves, and today continues to claim pigeons and squirrels. In the early days of Spanish California, settlers used La Brea’s asphalt for roofing.
Though the world has relied on petroleum as a major industrial fuel for only a little over a century, people have been using petroleum for over six thousand years. The Sumerians, among others, mined shallow asphalt for caulking boats and for export to Egypt, where it was used to set mosaics to adorn the coffins of great kings and queens. In about 330 B.C., Alexander the Great was impressed by the sight of a continuous flame issuing from the earth near Kirkuk, in what is now Iraq; it was probably a natural gas seep set ablaze. People being what we are, the potential for petroleum-based weapons was recognized early on. Arabs used petroleum to create flaming arrows used during the siege of Athens in 480 B.C. The Chinese, around A.D. 200, used pulleys and muscle labor to pump oil from the ground, send it through