Leaking oil and gas wells are going to be the future’s asbestos crisis and lead paint rolled up in one.
It’s beginning to become obvious to any idiot (or, at least, this one) that the government completely dropped the ball on regulating post-extraction clean-up. We all kept motoring along, without figuring out what happens to an oil well that is no longer producing. It’s no longer producing, right? That’s good enough, right? Wrong. Especially underwater wells – the oil still seeps out as water presses down into the former well, so usually it’s capped off somehow but who maintains that? Often, the company that did the drilling went out of business or was bought by another business – it’s shell companies all the way down – and unfortunately, physical reality doesn’t care much about human corporate shelters.
Deconstructing an offshore platform
Decommissioning an oil platform is a huge undertaking, commensurate with building it in the first place, but it’s not productive or profitable – it’s just an expense. So decommissioning tends to focus on retrieving the expensive parts for future use or recycling for materials. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has a good article about some of the actions necessary. [asme] These are big things and we’re talking on the scale of 25,000 tons of concrete and rebar to remove.
Offshore oil and gas platforms are among the largest structures humanity has ever built. There are more than 7,500 of them towering up from seas all over the world, according to some recent estimates. As wells dry up and pumping equipment wears down, many of those structures are growing obsolete.
But producers cannot just walk away from their creations. Those oil wells will have to be decommissioned and capped off and the platforms taken down. It will be a vast effort. In Europe’s North Sea, where production has declined to 1.5 million barrels per day from 6 million barrels per day in its prime, decommissioning could cost producers $150 billion, according to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
You know that $150 billion is going to come against profits for the extraction companies, and they’re not going to like that. Again, reality doesn’t care about what’s convenient for companies.
I’m willing to bet that the endgame, here, is that the companies will declare bankruptcy and the money they put into the remediation pool (drilling companies are supposed to escrow money for cleanup but the escrow is systemically under-funded because the estimates for cost are horribly optimistic) won’t be enough. The taxpayers will be asked to pay for it, in the end. And there will be huge politics around the issue, because the department of defense needs money and there’s somehow never money for necessary infrastructure. Right?
For example, certain structures in Shell’s Brent field, located in the East Shetland Basin of the North Sea, weigh 330,000 tons. That is the equivalent of the Empire State Building, according to Duncan Manning, decommissioning manager for Royal Dutch Shell’s Brent field.
Taking down something that large is a massive engineering project that requires state-of-the-art equipment.
Humanity’s ability to plan ahead is seriously in doubt. And I suppose it’d cost more to somehow re-purpose it for undersea hydroelectric power or something like that. And, of course, all this stuff was build back in the time when the energy companies were cheerfully lying about the consequences of fossil fuel exhaust – none of what is going to happen was ever considered, because the information was suppressed.
Establishment sockpuppet The New York Times has a pretty interesting article about how leaks in oil rigs are being tracked via satellite. [nyt] Unfortunately, the context is post- hurricane Ida. Apparently the hurricane did enough damage to the various wells and capped off wells that there’s considerable leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
I don’t want to invite this thread into being mired in a pro-nuclear rant by the Gerrardian, but it’s important to remember that fossil fuels have byproducts that are as nasty as the byproducts from nuclear energy? I don’t know if “as nasty” is the right way to put it – I don’t want to get into an argument about what form of nasty is nastier – it’s all nasty. There are also the nasty combustion byproducts of coal, which are another problem. But, let’s stay focused for now on all those leaking oil wells.
Using satellite imagery, NOAA typically reports about 250 to 300 spills a year in American waters, including the Atlantic, Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, a pace of about 25 spills a month. In the two weeks before Ida, NOAA spotted just five potential oil slicks in the Gulf. The program, the National Environmental Satellite and Data Information Service, uses satellite technology to detect important but hard-to-see events, like methane leaks, signs of deforestation and others, that affect the climate and environment.”
I’m surprised the republicans haven’t de-funded NOAA yet. Shooting the messenger is not an effective strategy but it remains popular.
On Aug. 30, even as the thick slicks spread their way across the water, the Biden administration moved to lease more than 80 million acres in the Gulf for new oil and gas production. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management expects those leases to produce up to 1.12 billion barrels of oil, and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, over the next 50 years.
The US government’s strategy on climate change is that we’re going to trigger an extinction event that includes humanity. They keep talking about reducing use of fossil fuels but their reductions are mostly scheduled to start sometime after 2050. The US government has gone on record saying that it expects CO2 emissions to continue to increase through 2050, when I suppose Jesus will return in all his glory and drop plans for a cheap CO2 extractor system and fusion powerplants or something goofy like that.
Imagine a junkie who is told “that heroin is going to kill you” but replies, “OK, I’m quitting. Starting in 2050 I’ll start reducing how much I use. Until then I’ll be increasing my dose, naturally.” I almost wrote: imagine a 70-year-old junkie, except there aren’t that many of those. Anyhow, our junkie continues to insist “I’ve quit.”
The people in charge were the accelerationists all along. Is this surprising? No, but I get tired of the reflexive accusations of “Accelerationist!” by smug centrist assholes who seem perfectly content with doing nothing about global warming.
Decommissioning is always an issue, and not just for oil/gas wells, and not just at sea. Kids fall down wells, mines on mountains ooze streams of toxic acidified water, trash dumps abandoned and buried decades ago emit methane, toxic gasses, and pollute groundwater. Long after the last dollar of profit has been extracted things have to be put to bed. Situation need to be monitored indefinitely. Remediation may have to be performed repeatedly.
I was involved in a minor case as an electrician where the owner of a big-box store built in the 60s wanted to upgrade to the much more efficient electronic ballasts for fluorescent lighting. A good move as he could see a 30% reduction in his direct lighting costs, and, being Florida, see a substantial reduction in costs for A/C. He asked for an estimate to replace something like 200 ballasts.
The kicker was that these ballasts were from the 60swhen PCBs were considered a really great idea. So we included an at-cost item to properly dispose of the estimated, if I remember right, close to 4000 pounds of, ballasts. We were not the lowest bid and didn’t get the job.
We talked to the contractor who got the job and found out they removed the ballasts from the fixtures and simply left them in the ceiling space. As things happened the lighting job was done but there was a downturn in the economy so the empty shell of the store was left fallow for several years. These things happen. The other thing that happens is homeless people start residing in abandoned stores for shelter on cold nights. And one of them, possibly with mental issues, lit a fire that burned down the store.
Then things get complicated. A fire inspector finds a partially burned ballast and sees the markings that declare that it has PCBs. He finds several more burned ballasts. He calls the guys in the bunny suits. They have the burn remains of the site and building tested and lo-and-behold the entire site is quickly fenced in and swathed in caution tape. It has become a toxic waste site and a hazard to groundwater, the general environment and anyone who gets too close.
And then the lawyers with long-knives emerge. Everyone gets sued. The electrical contractor who left the ballasts onsite gets sued and sunk. The owner of the building gets sued and dies on a heart attack. The downtown redevelopment corporation and project gets sued and goes broke. The contractor I worked for feels he dodged a bullet.
Over a year later, everyone touching the project having been run out of business and bankrupted, the state took over and the remains were hauled off and a portable groundwater remediation unit would remain there for a decade top scrounge up any leftovers.
It is the nature of man to be entrepreneurial. You want something, A know how to get it, I get it for you, for a price. I want the transaction to stay simple and end there. People outside the deal don’t necessarily see externalities as external. Oil slicks, streams of toxic acid, PCBs, where little or none of the cleanup costs can be billed to a responsible party, are still causing harm. And they will continue to for scores, if not hundreds of years, in the future. Capitalism doesn’t function as well when things are less than cash and carry simple. The last thing all those “responsible” businessmen want is to be held responsible for the cradle-to-grave costs of the stuff they sell.
The good news is that a certain amount of oil leakage is natural. I talked to an old-time wildcat driller in the gulf about his work and how much things had changes. He told me before there were geologists involved they would know where to drill by looking for natural seeps. The environment has some capacity for cleaning up oil. This capacity is far below what might be lost but at least we needn’t strain at gnats seeking perfection.
I don’t know that there is any answer. Perhaps this is one of those persuasive reasons for the existence of governments. And yes, as always, it seems a little horse sense like knowing to ‘clean up after yourself’ could eliminate much of the problem. This should be intuitively obvious. Like ‘don’t shit where you get your water’. And yet, if you don’t make it a law, and don’t enforce the law, more than a few will do just that. Even when made law the simple fact is that one or two will do it anyway and, because idiots tend to be very poor or very rich, it will fall to the state to clean up the mess.
> I don’t know that there is any answer.
Make shareholders responsible. When you own the company, you own the profits but also the problems.
@rsmith
But since the people who are making the decisions are themselves shareholders, how likely is that? Coming up with solutions is easy; the problem is that nobody capable of implementing them want to do so.
@rsmith:
Company Not My Problem Ltd sells the well in need of decommissioning to Well 42314 Decommissioning Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Externalities-R-Us Ltd, which promptly runs out of money and ceases trading. You own the profits and someone else (fictitious and now dead) owns the problems. The whole concept of corporation-as-person is problematic.
@cvoinescu
The solution to that particular dodge is simple – the environmental liability attaches to any corporation or person who owned or operated the site at any time that it was being built or under production, and is an exception to the otherwise limited liabilty enjoyed by the owners of corporations. It is both a liability to the corporation and to the owner’s personal assets. The only limit to personal liability would be some reasonable multiple of the total income received from the toxic asset – say no person can be forced to personally disgorge more than twice the total gross amount of income they received as a result of owning the asset.
It should also attach to directors and/or the ‘operating minds’ behind any company that owned them. The liability should be ‘joint and several’, in that the government recoups the cleanup costs from whichever person or entity it can most easily get them from, and the parties who caused the mess can fight with each other in court over who should bear the ultimate cost.
Employees too – the electricians who left those ballasts in the building in Lorn’s example – if they were notified that the things were hazmat, should be personally liable for cleanup costs as well.
The law would need to be strict, and strictly enforced – because you want every person involved in every industry to constantly have two things foremost in their minds – from project design through to operation – #1 is safety of employees and the community, and #2 is long-term environmental consequences. Since people cannot be counted on to do either one out of the goodness of their heart – strict civil (and criminal) penalties seem the only way to make a change.
With that said, it’ll never happen. The owners and ultimate beneficiaries of most heavy extraction and industrial projects own too many politicians ever to face any kind of meaningful accountability.
cvoinescu@#5:
Company Not My Problem Ltd sells the well in need of decommissioning to Well 42314 Decommissioning Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Externalities-R-Us Ltd, which promptly runs out of money and ceases trading. You own the profits and someone else (fictitious and now dead) owns the problems.
For a while I thought maybe it’d be a good business to go into – being a company that exists solely to stand around holding the bag, getting sued, and going bankrupt, then phoenix-like arising from the ashes. “Hi we are sueme.com 2.0!” except I like to imagine I have some pride in my actions.
>Gerrardian
Fine. No rant. How about one question? How many people have ever been harmed by nuclear waste? Spoiler: it’s zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
I said nuclear waste, e.g. from a nuclear power plant. A radioactive source for radioactive medicine treatment does not qualify. Try again.
Also, note the death count: 4. Coal kills that many every minute worldwide from airborne particulates. And I haven’t even started on climate change.
Anyone who wishes to equate the dangers of nuclear waste and the dangers of fossil fuels is extremely and dangerous misinformed.
It was nuclear, and it was waste. Not the only instance, either.
But sure, if you want to restrict it thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
So, again, not related to nuclear power. We’re talking about plutonium nuclear weapons manufacture, which is a very different chemical and nuclear process. Still zero deaths from spent fuel rods or other nuclear waste from the actual civilian nuclear power program.
PS: Death count is 50. If you’re trying to argue for the incredible safety of nuclear technology in general, then you’re wildly succeeding.
Um, did you even read the article?
“a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant”
(my emphasis).
How you can claim that’s not related to nuclear power is beyond me.
You did write “I said nuclear waste”, and all my examples are of nuclear waste.
Also, it’s a bit rich that you adduce statistical cases from chemical pollution (“Coal kills that many [4] every minute worldwide from airborne particulates.”), but don’t accept any deaths (you originally wrote “harmed by nuclear waste”, my emphasis again) statistically derived from waste.
I’m pointing out that your claim of “zero” harm from nuclear waste is, to be generous, misleading. Rather successfully, since you keep trying to shift the goalposts.
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It’s remarkable that you’ve often railed against the supposedly excessive costs imposed on building, safeing, maintaining, monitoring and decommissioning nuclear plants, yet those are the very things that have prevented many more incidents hitherto, to the extent you make ridiculous claims about the incredible (literally!) safety of nuclear power plants.
Did you even read beyond the first sentence?
This reprocessing had very little to do with nuclear power and everything to do with nuclear weapons.
The reactors were primarily for nuclear weapons material manufacture with power production as a byproduct.
The first leak of radioactive material into the surrounding environment was literally because they were running river / lake water directly through the core and back out into the river / lake as part of the design. First, it was a medical application, and not a power production application. Second, how you can interpret a lost medical source as “nuclear waste” is beyond me.
The second leak is when improperly disposed-of weapons manufacture waste exploded. Yes, you might think that I moved the goalposts when I redefined “nuclear waste” to mean “nuclear waste from civilian power production”, and I don’t care. We’re arguing about nuclear power, and not about some clandestine nuclear weapons program, and this difference matters because we’re talking about very different processes, chemically and nuclear-ly. Spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors are a solid, and they’re not going anywhere, unlike the many liquid wastes from nuclear weapons manufacturing.
I say again, spent fuel rods and other nuclear waste from civilian power production plants have never hurt anyone, and likely never will.
Well, whoops, “First, it was a medical application, and not a power production application.” was completely in the wrong context. Let me try again.
The first example of a lost medical isotope cannot be reasonably interpreted as nuclear waste, and it does not apply to the conversation that we should be having about nuclear waste from nuclear power as opposed to other sources. Talking about medical waste is a non-sequitir.
The second example of running river/lake water directly through the core and out again cannot be reasonably interpreted as nuclear waste. Another non-sequitir.
Finally, the third example of improperly disposed nuclear waste from nuclear weapons manufacture does not apply to the conversation that we should be having about nuclear waste from power production. And again non-sequitir.
You know what’s a non sequitur?
The insinuation that, because it hitherto has been reasonably and expensively well-managed (other than the piles of the stuff sitting around, waiting for actual proper disposal), it is somehow not dangerous stuff.
Hey, do you know about the kitty litter incident? ;)
Everything is dangerous to some degree or something. I haven’t denied that. The importance is the relative degree of danger. A hydro dam is more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. Coal ash and airborne particulates from a coal power plant are more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. This are objective facts.
Tell you what. I’ll eat a spoonful of coal ash if you eat a spoonful of nuclear waste.
(After all, I’ll be in more danger, no?)
I did a bunch of research. Coal ash is not as toxic as I thought when ingested. The biggest danger seems to be from arsenic.
The upper end for arsenic concentrations in coal ash appears to be 324 mg/L.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ees.2017.0347The LD50 of arsenic is about 13 mg/kg.
The typical human weight is about 62 kg.
That means it would take about the following amount of coal ash to reach the LD50.
(62 kg) (13 mg / 1 kg) (1 L / 324 mg) = about 2.5 liters, or about 168 US tablesppons.
On to nuclear waste. That’s such a broad category. How about if I do pure plutonium? Let’s talk about pure Pu-239 and also a typical isotopic mix from a nuclear reactor.
Because I had this source handy, I’m not going to do an apples to apples comparison. Sorry. Too lazy. For the sake of argument, let’s calculate how much plutonium one would need to eat to have a “100% chance” of causing cancer according to traditional models. See:
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/plutonium-bernard-cohen.htmlSo, somewhere between 1 and 6.5 g of plutonium would need to be ingested. That definitely fits in a spoon. 0.003 US tablespoons and 0.02 US tablespoons, respectively.
So, pure plutonium is much more harmful compared to coal ash for ingestion. No surprise there.
But let’s put that in comparison. Quote from the above paper:
I mean, yea. Plutonium is dangerous in certain situations, but so is caffeine. Context is needed.
The key part is still the relative quantities.
About 80 gram of coal ash / 1 KWh electricity from coal.
About 0.00015 gram of spent nuclear fuel / 1 KWh of electricity from nuclear power. That doesn’t include the fuel rod container itself, but it also includes the unburnt uranium, and so I could argue either way of the number being too high or too low.
Or, to put that another way, to power my entire life at industrialized Western standard of living, including all of my direct and indirect energy uses, including transport, industry, agriculture, etc., with a fuel efficient reactor, I need a tennis ball of uranium and thus also spent nuclear fuel also the size of a tennis ball. For coal, I would leave about a million times more coal ash, something like 500 metric tons of coal ash.
If there was equal chance of leakage from disposal, the coal ash would be more dangerous. However, leakage rates will not be equal. It’s much easier to properly dispose of the small amount of nuclear waste, meaning that the chances and amounts of any nuclear waste leak will be orders of magnitude smaller than equivalent leakage of toxins from coal ash disposal. Thus, nuclear waste – already the better option – is even better still. The number of deaths that we should suspect from feasible coal ash disposal is many orders of magnitude higher than nuclear waste disposal.
PS: Did you know about the natural uranium reactor at Oklo, Gabon? A few billion years ago when U-235 concentration was higher, there was a natural uranium fission reactor with periods of sustained fission reaction in a certain place underground in Oklo, Gabon. This allows us the unique opportunity to see what happens to nuclear waste millions and billions of years after disposal. You know what we observed? The nuclear waste barely moved a few feet in a water rich environment. There is absolutely nothing to worry about here.
Heh. Point being, it’s not safe stuff. Not harmless.
(I was thinking more of cesium-137 or strontium-90, but sure, plutonium works)
Therefore, no need for any safety precautions (and concomitant expense) whatsoever.
Gotcha.
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In passing, the common uneducated person worries about the stuff that stays radioactive for thousands of years. Me, I worry about the stuff that stays radioactive for mere years or decades (such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, or (ouch!) iodine-131).
Not that worried about incidents millions and billions of years hence, that is.
I never said any such thing, and that’s a ridiculous reading of what I wrote. I wrote the exact opposite with phrases like “properly disposed”. Stop that dishonesty please.
Extremely reasonable. Why would you ever be worried about nuclear waste disposal then? Your concerns should be entirely on reactor accidents, just like me actually. Why are you talking so much about the supposed dangers of nuclear waste?
Well, one doesn’t need to properly dispose of stuff that’s not worrisome otherwise.
But sure, I grant that, with proper precautions, proper monitoring, and proper disposal the worry should be minimal. But that’s what makes it expensive, and even then risks nonetheless exist.
So… “absolutely nothing to worry about” is not exactly truthful, is it?.
(BTW, as we write these comments, there is yet to exist a facility that safely sequesters nuclear waste. Right now, it’s piled up in its many thousands of tons in various repositories worldwide. But hey, any day now!)
Well, not being a total naif, I am also aware of the potential of deliberate sabotage, or of terrorist action, not to mention carelessness or cost-cutting or profit-making which could also lead to incidents.
Heh. You perceive me talking overmuch about these “supposed” dangers, whereas in reality I am disputing your claim that it’s perfectly safe and nothing to worry about.
I mean, sure, it’s manageable if one devotes sufficient attention and resources to the issue, but that’s not the same it being somehow intrinsically safe.
Risks always exist. Saying that the risk exists without context is nonsense and fearmongering.
Pick one: Are you only worried about the short half life wastes like the cesium and strontium, or are you worried about the longer half life stuff? Because once it’s in dry cask storage, the cesium and strontium isn’t going to hurt anyone. No need for “expensive” deep geologic disposal if that’s all we’re worried about.
What’s a terrorist gonna do? A dirty bomb? The radioactivity from a dirty bomb will barely hurt anyone. Even the NRC says that more people would be hurt from the conventional explosive effect of a dirty bomb compared to the radiation. The radioactive stuff would be dispersed in a small area and relatively easily cleaned up. Dirty bombs are basically non-events from a science-based medical health perspective.
So what if they cut costs? Yes, they could cut costs, or it could leak, but you’re still not asking the rights questions. So what if it leaks? What’s the worst case scenario that you could imagine? For me, most of the worst case scenarios involve zero human deaths. Even Fukushima didn’t kill anyone. You think a minor leak from a nuclear waste repository after a few hundred years of decay is going to hurt anyone? Of course it’s not.
You’re more likely to be eaten by a shark or struck by lightning than you are to be killed by nuclear waste. Is that precise enough for you?
It’s nowhere near as expensive as you think, and again that’s because there’s so little of it, and because it’s not as dangerous as you think it is. It’s only about as dangerous as caffeine. Again, suppose we disposed of a thousand tons of caffeine underground, and news got out that it was “leaking”. Would you be worried? I wouldn’t be.
John, please, read this document. It’s only a few short pages.
https://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
Also, I again strongly encourage you to read the specifics about the natural reactor in Oklo. We know what happens when these things leak, and the answer is nothing.
In other words, the dose makes the poison, and homeopathy is not real. Because of the incredibly small amounts that we’re dealing with, any leak is also going to be small and highly diluted, meaning that it’s going to be harmless. I’m not assuming that it won’t leak. I’m assuming that it will leak and arguing that it still won’t do anything on the basis that homeopathy is not real and on the basis of the evidence from the Oklo natural reactor.