There is no valid analogy between the Gulf spill and Apollo 13
I am honored to present this guest post by Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Dr. H. Harrison Schmitt – Anthony
President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!
The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft, illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled, in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.
Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant.
Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.
Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.
A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War, in which America raced to demonstrate to the world the superiority of freedom over the Communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire analogy ceases.
The NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.
The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?
President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the Administration could not make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use previously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill.
In addition, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to protect the state’s shores and wildlife habitats, by building offshore sand barriers – as unnecessary as having to make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?
The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude oil, natural gas and brine, contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.
Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and did not have a deep-water, robotically emplaced crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.
Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?
Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production prospects has driven American exploration away from more easily discoverable and producible resources – and into the much more dangerous and technically challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare, in spite of the geological, engineering and weather-related difficulties that explorers and producers face as a consequence of these misguided restrictions.
Long-term, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial action. Remember that the fuel oil which blackened the world’s beaches as a result of World War II ship destruction disappeared after only a few years, and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation’s most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.
If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities, and only domestic production can solve it in the next 50 years.
The 2010 elections thus become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back into the Federal Government.
______________
Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico, as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.
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Ron Cram said:
June 1, 2010 at 10:36 pm
And please, I’m not saying Obama is not inexperienced or incompetent. I am only saying that even an experienced and competent president would not do any better with this current problem in the Gulf.
I believe your post was mostly mostly right. I have my problems with Obama’s political beliefs and the direction our country is headed, but he is not to blame any more than Bush, Clinton, Bush etc etc etc. The federal govt. has for decades been nothing more than a wealth and power grabbing entity that is bent on limiting our freedoms and destroying the Constitution. Both sides of the aisle are guilty. Everyone who has voted for more regulations instead of actually enforcing the laws that are already on the books is to blame.
All that being said, though, Mr. Obama and his cronies have done next to nothing to help in any way. There are many things that could have and should have been done to help reduce the impact of the oil gusher that for some reason are still not being done. Is that all Obama’s fault? No. That’s why I included his cronies. My personal belief is that they are using this (like every other situation they encounter) for political gain. The longer they let it go on while the sympathetic media turns a blind eye to their non-involvement, the more they can scream baout the dangers of oil and fossil fuels in general. This then leads to tighter control of all energy and therefore wealth. Control the energy and the money and pretty soon all liberty and justice is gone.
Some have complained that this site has now become nothing more than a conservative think tank and a liberal bashing, politically motivated sounding board. So, I will oblige with my rant.
As a true Libertarian who is ultra conservative on some issues and ultra liberal on others, I can say that I see plenty from both sides on this blog, but no where near the levels at many other sites. The only reason this issue has become so politically charged is that the Republicans and Democrats are both playing politics with it instead of working together for solutions. As I said earlier, both sides of the aisle are to blame and have been for a very long time now.
Wake up, people, and use your right to vote for competent people who can do the job, not the most popular or the most eloquent speaker. Yes it involves actually paying attention and learning about candidates BEFORE you vote. Anyone who votes without knowing what someone stands for is as much to blame for this as Bush and/or Obama or any of their cronies and business allies.
The Deepwater Horizon fiasco is a foretelling of relying on a non-manned spaceflight too.
Michael Dunn:
So, anyone, why won’t Michael Dunn’s liquid N work? The problems I can see are keeping the Liquid N liquid while being pushed through 5000 ft of whatever temperature water around the pipe to get down to the problem and the pressure required to push it down there while it is still liquid?
When I was flying and fighting fire, as an Airtanker crewman, there were a couple of times where the Aircraft was in serious trouble. One, due to an apparent downburst,
as we were about to drop on a fire. Here, both training and instinct took over and it was the crew that got the aircraft back safely. The other was when something important (The Rudder) became unusable due to a hit by a flying limb off a fire. There was no control if we had lost an engine (one of four) or flying on two on opposite sides was iffy at best. Now comes the decision. We had USFS Dispatch call the main office, the USFS lead plane gave us a thorough going over,and it was determined that the Rudder was now devoid of fabric cover and damaged. We elected to fly back 200 mi to home base. We did. But it was through the co-operative effort of the Company
Forest service personnel that made our decision the right one. While hardly Apollo 13, it dos illustrate co-operation and independent thinking can lead to desirable outcomes.-As in not crashing.- What this situation calls for is independent thinking
and co-operation not the bony finger of accusation and name calling….
Started OK, then overreached.
[snip]
We have a National Incident Management System and a very practical and effective Incident Command System set of procedures. Those procedures have are in daily use throughout the USA and are familiar to essentially every emergency response person down to and including rural volunteer fire crews. Where is the gulf spill Incident Command Center and who is the Incident Scene Commander? If there are no answers to those questions, you can bet nobody is really running that incident. It is just a bunch of uncoordinated groups doing the best they can with what resources they can muster on their own.
The Incident Command System is designed and has been proven to scale from a lowly dumpster fire to a statewide forest fire to even a multi-state hurricane disaster. The gulf oil blowout is precisely the kind of disaster the ICS was intended to handle.
REPLY: and how well is it handling it? Louisiana can’t even get permission to build protective sandbars ?? -A
Fly in after 11 days, show concern,* vamoose.
Continue blaming. Stop all drilling.
That about it?
[What the stage-managed public was spoon fed*.]
“President Obama on the other hand feels that gutting the US space program and leaving the Moon to India and China is a fabulous idea. I would trust Harrison Schmitt over the teleprompter reader in chief any day.”
We should, at the very least, be staking our claim at one of the poles, where H2O likely exists. Perhaps a permanently manned station.
A lightweight, peizoelectricly optomized reflector telescope would have a constant view of earth and the observable universe. Not to mention the mining opportunities mentioned by Dr. Schmitt.
It might be hard, but there was a time, not so long ago, when America chose “to do the hard things.”
The current administration appears satisfied to merely flutter in the winds of the day.
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has something relevant to this today. Seems like the EPA may not be meeting it’s obligations under the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan Regualtions
Attaching a cutoff valve would require either welding to the existing pipe or threading the outside of the pipe, which would probably require constructing and testing specialized deep water pipe threader. Given the problems they’re having with a simple saw, this seems dicey.
The liquid nitrogen idea probably wouldn’t work because the nitrogen would immediately boil in contact with water, causing a massive gas pressure bubble which would blow the delivery hose out of the pipe, like a liquid air cannon.
If the flow was too great for top-kill to work with golf balls then perhaps tungsten balls would work. The army has a large supply of 3/8″ inch tungsten balls for the M1A1 Abrams’ anti-personnel canister cartridge, each of which contains about 1100 balls. Of course they might just sink to the bottom of the well pipe, but it should still provide some extra resistance to the flow.
Another crazy method might be to pump “enteric coated” cesium or rubidium balls down the pipe and hope they sink deep before violently exploding in reaction with water.
Read Pierre Boulle’s “Planet of the Apes.” The progressives have forgotten the origin of the technology they use. In the novel the Apes imitated their predecessors, resulting in a gradual decline due to imperfect imitation, and lack of understanding of underlying principles. What is truly frightening is the contempt progressives show for the very technology that they need to survive. At least the apes understood they needed it, even if they did not understand it.
To Paul: “Why we can’t drop large boulders…”
At least 1200 Atmospheres of outward pressure from the well is why! This blows aside boulders like they were exp. polystyrene.
This was a very well-written essay. It was a bit easy on BP, I think, but then plenty of others have already pilloried the company.
Last night I tuned in on some of Obama’s posturing, and was once again reminded why I can’t stand to watch the man in action.
Stop Global Dumbing Now says (June 1, 2010 at 10:28 pm): “Just as I finished reading this wonderful essay, I looked up at the news. There was a story that a group of scientists asked James Cameron to add his expertise during a brainstorming session on how to stop the spill! WOW!!”
Heh. I still remember a couple of decades ago, during a “farm crisis”, when Congress invited testimony from actresses Sally Field, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, because they had played farmers in the movies. We may not have the government we deserve, but we definitely have the government we’ve earned.
“Senator Schmitt gets at what is wrong with the entire system on a deeper level.
If only there were more politicians like him…”
… and yet…
His speech is analogous to a cheering the The Androgynous Docking Mechanism.
That’s what politics brought to the space science table for discussion.
Senator Schmitt isn’t going to do diddly about any oil except exploit a crisis for his benefit like every politician in history nobody sees fit to learn anything from.
The real problem is people like Senator Schmitt who offer hope and change which is institutionally impossible to deliver. There’s your mother of all frauds, of which the climate franchise is but a small part. Deeper than one can find the true believers who pay to externalize all personal responsibility so they can righteously blame some stranger for their daily personal abdication from a basic task of human existence: judgement. The buck stopped with you. You gave it up. You lose.
Senators weep crocodile tears and cash their paychecks. Even the credibility of science itself can be in doubt but never them.
If Senator Schmitt were looking at a deeper level, he’d never have become part of the problem too taboo to name. To look deeply, one can not praise a stock eulogy to common sense as profound thinking.
@RACookPE1978 June 2, 2010 at 1:35 am:
Thanks. It was THIS story! I did have a look around your site, though. Consider it bookmarked.
@Gail Combs Gail Combs June 2, 2010 at 9:19 am:
You mean you actually read and understood what I wrote? I’m relieved! I was in rant-mode and after I hit send (happens to us all, I’m sure) and re-read it, I was in regret mode.
Anyway, ah… the usual suspects, the giant vampire squids! Yeah, I’ve tried to understand the story from that angle, but frankly I’m so terrible with names, dates, places, etc, that I’m forced to stick with my area of focus, which is markets and investment , hence the seemingly different “flavor”.
And just wondering. By any chance, do you read ‘The Daily Bell’? For some reason, I think so, but just want to quell my curiosity 🙂
Note to Anthony: Sorry to use your forum to rant and banter like that. I feel that I have disrepected Dr. Schmitt in my somewhat O/T “sound off” post. I should have said up front that I agree with the overall outlook and sentiment, though (obviously) disagree with some of the facts and focus. My apologies to Dr Schmitt, Anthony, and forum readers for not first saying so.
John in L du B says:
June 2, 2010 at 10:41 am
“Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has something relevant to this today. Seems like the EPA may not be meeting it’s obligations under the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan Regualtions”
I thought it rather apparent the Environmental Protection Agency was absolutely failing in its mandate in regards to the oil blowout.
About the Incident Command System and the gulf. My point is that the ICS is NOT in use. The underlying principle of ICS is local control, government assistance. Local scene commanders tell the Incident Commander what they need and when. The Incident Commander’s job is to collect and disseminate information about the incident (the technical term is ‘intelegence’ but somehow that seems inappropriate in this context :-), coordinate response activities, and obtain and dispatch resources, including personnel and supplies.
California does not need an Environmental Impact Report to fight a wildfire. The folks in the recent Texas hurricane incident knew how to use the system. They got what they needed for preparation and later to start recovery. Local ordinances were about trespass and property destruction were abandoned as needed to protect life and the health of the community. Of course, what happens with the overall recovery after the emergency response incident is done becomes a political issue. (By the way, the Katrina hurricane incident dramatically showed what happens if states don’t make use of the National Incident Management System. Bush had to have ham radio operators locate the governor of Louisiana after the hurricane hit New Orleans to get her permission to send in federal assistance. – remember, there is that state sovereignty thing that keeps feds from just running amuck in a state without their permission – She should have made that call on her own before the hurricane struck.)
With a real Incident Command structure in place, if dikes were needed, the right folks would have been made available to design them and appropriate resources would have been employed. The decisions would have been made based upon protecting the coasts, not on how to wiggle around regulations not intended to cover disaster situations like the Core of Engineers was forced to do. The Core of Engineers would have become a resource, not a hindrance.
Anyway, that is how I see it.
I used to work in Santa Barbara for Morton Associates publishing oil spill response manuals, which included the research of the facilities. These 5000 page books were very detailed, and I cannot imagine that nowadays in a drilling operation, such pre-planning and foreknowledge of “what can go wrong” has been put aside in favor of ad-hoc ineptness.
In this case, apparently some pencilneck (as Dena says “with many diplomas”) manager decided to cut 2 corners due to the fact that he wanted the well pumping oil ASAP.
Utter negligence!
So, here we have it, once again, the dollar signs flashed in this guy’s head, and the gulf gets axed.
Profit vs. Nature.
It’s time we learn a bit from star trek. They don’t use cash there, they have evolved.
Money and profit is no longer their driving force. They have converted from an economy of “scarcity” to an era of abundance. How ? simple, machines produce all food and energy, and people contribute to progress by gaining “levels” (like ranks in the military).
Images like a criminal pimp driving the latest 2 million dollar car (schlong), while for that money you could save 2000 sudanese lives, will be no more.
And the gulf will shine again.
From CA :
Thanks for taking the time to express your views. I hope your missive grows legs. A realistic view of the spill and its results is nice to have out there.
I actually think that the commercialization of space will be the best thing that ever happened to space usage. Plus we will have a new group of Haliburtons to be dismissive of. Getting the government out of deciding what is what is nothing but good news.
Re: Jim G (10:07 AM)
The LN2 would have to be brought down in (large) tanks via remote submersible or steered hydrostat.
But, my apologies: I just now have recollected that the critical pressure for LN2 is about 34 atmospheres, equivalent to about 1100 feet of depth. Below that depth, there would be no more LN2; it becomes a high-density compressible fluid. It could well be that there is no available heat of evaporation under those conditions.
The alternative concept would be to use a refrigeration cycle with helium gas as the working fluid. In other words, use a heat pump to chill down the pipe.
For problems in extreme conditions, it is probably true that there are no “simple” solutions.
Crimping sounds like such an obvious solution. If they can cut off that pipe as they apparently have done in the last day or so, why could they not have crimped it? I would think the technical demands of crimping are about half that of cutting under those conditions. Surely a small press capable of this trick could have been rigged up in a few days, if it is not already available.
They have tried lowering passive collection devices to try to redirect much of the leak to waiting tankers. But have they tried vacuuming? There’s the old wisdom that, if you can’t stop a man from advancing, get behind and push him so that he falls down. This is something along that line: It’s hard to stop this leak because of the pressure behind it, so why not make use of that pressure, or work with it? Fit a pipe loosely over the outlet and pump it so that a light vacuum is created. The oil will flow in the path of least resistance, namely into the collector. The pump, of course, must be extremely high-powered as it has to exceed the rate of flow from the well. To improve efficiency, the connection should be sealed, or one will also be pumping up a lot of seawater. But the negative pressure from the pump should ensure collection of the vast majority of the oil. At the surface it should be collected in a massive sealed chamber (which is what the pump evacuates, rather than trying to pump oil/water directly through the pump itself. If there are two such chambers, one can be filled while the other is drained into a tanker — or perhaps a tanker storage tank can be sealed to the point that it could be used this way, saving a step.
As for the sand barriers, its a good idea because oil sticks to sand, which has a high surface-area-to-volume ratio. But here’s another idea that may or may not have unforeseen ecological consequences, but I think it’s worth considering:
Blow sand dust over the oil sheets in the open ocean. The finer the dust the better. There’s probably some level that’s ideal. The dust will collect on the oil and the oil will form globules around them, and “clump”. Once there is sufficient sand on the oil it will be dense enough to drop to the bottom, where over months bacteria action will take care of it.
This method could be used to keep oil from entering extremely sensitive ecological shore areas. The downside might come in the effects of submerged oil — some damage to bottom ecology is sure to happen but I imagine that it would not be permanent. Similarly, marine life in the pathway would be likely to ingest some of the globules, and there may be a massive die-off. But there are always trade-offs in averting such disasters, and one has to select the lesser of evils.
All I’ve read and seen from MOST SOURCES have only managed to punctuate just how clueless the media outlets, the general public and that paradigm of knee jerk ignorance the politico truly are. Anyone else working the resource sector EVER seen an inspection by OHS or the equivalent where there wasn’t months to put a band-aid on things? The very idea that its “safety first” is all PR and head office noise. Just wait! As always the dead will be blamed for everything. Buy yourselves a vowel folks.
There is also no reason to call it an ‘Oil Spill’ as it is nothing like a spill at all.
Whatever happened to the Russian suggestion, back on about day 2, of using a low-yield nuke to plug the top of the hole with….glass I guess? And no, I’m not kidding.