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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (79030)	7/2/2010 9:45:10 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 149317

"Next, the Obama administration can waive the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from operating in U.S. coastal waters. Many foreign countries (such as the Netherlands and Belgium) have ships and technologies that would greatly advance the cleanup. So far, the U.S. has refused to waive the restrictions of this law and allow these ships to participate in the effort" Been debunked about 3 million times. Methinks the administration response is better, or at least more honest, than the faux response to the response. == wrb on July 1, 2010 - 10:03am I think the argument is that the offered skimmers have a relatively insignificant potential impact. When this started there were, according to the response plan,skimmers available and contracted for this purpose already in the gulf capable of skimming many times the amount of oil being spilled. Over time it became apparent that the skimming capacity was inadequate. The reason being that the stated capacity was the gross amount of oil they could suck in if the oil was in a deep pool. But here it wasn't. You saw it blossom to cover thousands of square miles in just days. It is often just microns thick. The relevant measure is the amount of area a skimmer can cover in a day. For the larger skimmers that is still typically less than a square mile. Of course every entrepreneur in the world who owned a skimmer wanted to get hired on and approached their governments to offer their skimmers FOR HIRE. In the emergency response business your equipment sits idle much of the time but when you can get in on an emergency you can cash in big time. Of course they are going to raise as much of a fuss as they can. At first it didn't make sense to hire them because of the excessive capacity understood to be at hand. Now hiring them is at least questionable because their stated capacity and potential impact are just as inaccurate as was that of the existing fleet- and there might be better uses of the money that also keep it closer to home. What they are doing is equipping around 3000 local fishing boats to skim. That makes sense. It would be interesting to see if 4 fishing boats skimming 50' ea could out skim A Whale. The Whale is almost perfectly inefficient. A huge tonnage with a skimming width of only 200'. It is the skimming equivalent nuking the well. There is something strange in the workings of the minds of those who think that a bigger bang or a superer tanker will save the day. There is almost no conceivable skimmer for which it wouldn't be more efficient to buy fuel, imo. theoildrum.com == Gobbet on June 29, 2010 - 1:59pm Farther down, craigk reports that the Taiwanese would-be skimmer-tanker A-Whale has cleared Key West and entered the Gulf. This vessel has a beam of 200' and the beam is what forms the collection surface. Therefore, if it skims at 1-2 knots like everyone else, it will be able to skim only up to 1 sq. mile of ocean per day. So set aside the grandiose claim that it can process a gaudy 500,000 barrels of oil-water mix per day and remember that <1 sq. mile, or roughly 1/1000 of the slick. Moreover the collection system is a jackleg idea that has not been tested on oil. The Seacor Washington and its two Dutch-armed sisters (nobody seems to know whether they exist, wake up, journos!) have a collection width of 160' each and almost certainly a more efficient collection mechanism. So I question whether the Whale will be able to gather more oil than SW (however much that is, wake up, journos!). The Whale will face a regulatory challenge regarding returning oily water to the sea. I think it will have to offload seawater constantly in order to maintain a precise amount of ballast. The waterline needs to be kept at the level of the collection slots, or, obviously, it will not be able to skim at all. So (a) they will install pumps to spray the water over the bow, which would qualify according to an EPA ruling or (b) they will be refused permission to skim or (c) the political firestorm will cause the EPA to suspend its rule. Since they were planning to separate the oil only by gravity, the water will be pretty oily, and there will be a vast amount of it owing to the crudeness of the collection device (slots in the hull). If you Google A-whale, you get a zillion posts on conservative blogs howling about how federal red tape and bureaucratic bungling are going to stop the Taiwanese entrepreneur from saving the Gulf. theoildrum.com