Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (73652)	5/23/2010 2:54:48 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

On emulsions: Emulsions are fun, and quite useful and quite valuable. <NYT says Gulf is "The Mother of All Salad Dressings." > BP Oil had a whole lot of emulsions work going on quarter of a century ago. One of the main ones was Orimulsion, a 30% water emulsion with Orinoco heavy crude. They'd pump water and surfactant down the well and that would turn the crude oil into a pumpable liquid. The emulsion would then be shipped to power stations where it was burned with the water still in it. It would seem at first glance that it might not burn well, but in fact that much water takes only 3% of the energy to evaporate it. There is enough Orinoco goo to fuel the planet for a century. Without the emulsion, the goo was too thick to get moving. If the emulsion broke, separating into goo and water, that would make a hell of a tarry mess. One of my hobby horses was diesel emulsion [my job was to look after diesel fuel design and marketing]. I had the idea of mixing water, methanol, emulsifier and heavy grotty cheap diesel together for heavy transport. And also good quality diesel components for city transport and in light vehicles. By mixing the right amount of water and methanol, the droplets would float perfectly in the diesel without the water sinking to the bottom. If ethanol was used instead of highly toxic methanol, and the fuel was made from vegetable oils, with lecithin emulsifier, with vitamins added, a tube could go from the fuel tank to the driver and they could use it as fuel too. If some methamphetamine was added, the driver could happily drive for days before a rest period at the destination. With a cyberphone linked via Globalstar, they could also do telemarketing while driving to earn extra income. Emulsions can invert and just a couple of days ago I accidentally made one when thoughtlessly mixing flour, water and lecithin together. Ironically, just a day or so before that I was thinking of the instructions we would give machine shop operators on how to mix soluble cutting fluids to avoid exactly that problem - I had been goofing around in the shed with some oil. When they invert, instead of the oil being drops in the water matrix, the water becomes large drops in an oil matrix, like human body cells are mostly made of water, but have a semi solid texture. If drops of oil are small coming out of the BP well due to flow speed, or gas mixed, or emulsifier being added, then the drops will float faster or slower, depending on their size and density. The submarine plumes of emulsion will disperse very slowly and go up the Gulf Stream and be subducted into the ocean depths. No problem. The oil is food for various microbes and the microbes will be food up the food chain. It isn't a toxic plume in the sense they used the word - implying poisonous. It's more that the oil is very nasty to get in breathing apparatus, in feathers and the like. Gasoline was vastly more toxic than that crude oil spill, but people used gasoline to wash greasy engine parts and hands when doing engine repairs. Not only was it lethal because of the benzene content, which causes myeloid leukaemia, but lead was added which poisoned brains. Inhaled, it caused pneumonia - siphoning fuel by mouth was hazardous. I can hardly believe what I used to do when young and ignorant. The crude oil spill isn't too toxic. Methanol is toxic. 20 ml swallowed is fatal. Interestingly, the antidote is ethanol, which is also toxic but less so. There's a bug call cladosporium resinae which loves eating diesel fuel nzetc.org It's a problem in underground storage tanks and trucks. There's always some water around, even if just by condensation as tanks are emptied and refilled. As fuel is pumped out, humid air is sucked in and condensation in the tank collects on the bottom of the tank. Spray the oil spill with that fungus and it will become an oceanic food supply. The Gulf Stream flows quickly so it wont be long before the oil is heading north and being dispersed in the ocean waves and wind blowing the oil slowly west towards Europe. Maybe it will get stuck in one of those oceanic rubbish gyres which people have tried to make newsworthy recently but they are trivial. Barnacles and other sea life soon sink anything floating. Overall, the problem looks minor. Now the news media are excited because they have got some landfall oil from the spill in a swamp which looks as though the reeds and other plants collect the oil quite well. By injecting the right emulsifier and heavy components such as microfine clay into the oil stream, it could be made to stay under water rather than float. By including fungi, the plumes would soon decompose. It would be a big composting plume. Mostly, the spill is an opportunity for so-called environmentalists and politicians to strut around posing and demanding this that and the other. They had better enjoy it while it lasts because it's not going to amount to much and won't last long. On the scale of the world's problems, it's insignificantly trivial. Which is not to say some people haven't been grossly inconvenienced. Mqurice