Oil Turmoil

I’m a chemical engineer wannabe, and petroleum is one of our favourite industries, so I’ve taken a particular interest in the BP oil spill over at the Mexican Gulf. It is one of the biggest oil spills in the past decade and is estimated to cost BP over a billion US dollars (up-to-date) just to react to the spill.

Anyway, the spill on the 20th of April was caused by an oil rig blowout, which I’m pretty sure is just a fancy term for an error in design, in this case the design pressure. The platform in which the blowout occurred on was named the Deepwater Horizon, and the blow out caused an explosion on the platform itself killing eleven workers.

This oil spill is truly a major catastrophe, because experts has estimated that the amount of oil flowing out of the unplugged oil well (caused by the absence of the drill platform) was around 1.9 billion to 3.0 billion litres per day. I guess this goes to show that major oils are still only human and make human mistakes, despite them being one of the richest industries in the world and only hiring the cream of the crop to work for their companies. (that’s me ranting for not getting any interviews with major oils)

Well I’ve found this excellent site that puts the spill into a relative perspective so that we can understand the actual magnitude of this problem.

Here is the actual spill location in the Gulf of Mexico


This would be the equivalent spill radius if it was in Melbourne


And this is how it would look like relative to the size of Malaysia

Well I hope that puts into perspective how bad the oil spill actually is. And frankly my heart goes out the the people who have lost their lives working on the Deepwater Horizon platform, and to all the people whose lives are affected by this spill.

And in accordance to the main picture, if I had it my way, the oil spill would have been on a hot explosive mexican dude; and most certainly not an oil spill due to an explosion in the mexican gulf.

Signing out.