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Oil Spills
Questions related to the causes and effects of an oil spill, and ways of cleaning them up should be asked here.
1,162 Questions
How do oil spills in the ocean cleans up?
Recovery of oil is possible at the surface of the water by using skimmers. It is a slow process, and skimming has not been able to keep up with the volumes being spilled. Wave action can make skimming difficult. Oil can be removed through controlled burns if there is sufficient oil to burn (near the location where oil is leaving the well). Dispersants do not remove oil, but help the oil breakdown.
Once an oil spill has reached land, the efforts to remove oil becomes more difficult. They have been able to net out some of the oil in the marshes, but a lot of effort is going into removing turtles that have come in contact with the oil. Oil as it washes up on beaches may be scooped up and placed in plastic trash bags. It should not be touched. BP and the government are working on special protective berms, which should be able to filter some of the oil out, to help protect the marine life in marsh areas.
See related link.
What can be done to help to get rid of oil floating on the sea and washed up on beaches?
Depends on the amounts and where it's happened. If it gets noticed enough, someone may be dispatched to clear it up. There's the Coast Guard, Fire department and various volunteer organisations that can and might deal with that.
What oil company has had an oil spill?
I don't remember the name of the person who caused it but I know he must of forgot to fix a little problem in the pipes. The problem caused the oil to get to the engines of the station causing it to explode.
An oil spill is when a pump or boat carrying oil breaks and makes a hole or break which releases mass amounts of oil into seas (depending on how big the hole is). This causes what people call an oil spill.
when oil is spilled in seas and it causes water pollution and makes many animals die.
How do you prevent oil spills from happening again in the future?
- Seafood Sensory Training- in an effort to detect oil in seafood, Inspectors and regulators are being trained to to sniff out seafood tainted by oil in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure the product reaching consumers is safe to eat.
- Secondary containment - methods to prevent releases of oil or hydrocarbons into environment.
- Oil Spill Prevention Containment and Countermeasures (SPCC) program by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
- Double-hulling - build double hulls into vessels, which reduces the risk and severity of a spill in case of a collision or grounding. Existing single-hull vessels can also be rebuilt to have a double hull.
What are the effects of April 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?
It affected plant life as well as aquatic/marine life. Sad right?
What kind of bacteria eat up oil spill?
high pressure cold water treatments, mechanical clean up, and bioremediation. Hot water treatments were used until they discovered it was killing organisms.
Answer:
Clean-up of oil spills with bacteria is limited to spills of oil on soil.
Although there has been some work to develop tailored bacteria for this purpose, naturally occurring soil bacteria are capable of using oil as a food. There is a need to work the soil to ensure aerobic conditions, all nutrients loke nitrogen (nitrates) and monitor drainage to contain any oil that leaches out. Thet soil contains many species of bacteria - when an oil spill occurs some of the bacteria can use the new energy source and become the most numerous, there even may be some evolution of other bacteria that allows recessive oil eating ability to become more dominant. Some clean-up experts like to dose the area to be treated with activated ssludge (concentrated bacterial colonies) from industrial waste water treatment systems that have been treating oily waste to get a jump start on this process of having the right types in place.
How is an oil spill cleaned up?
There are several steps:
- The source is eliminated (leaks are stopped)
- The escaped oil is contained with booms in water, with dams and dykes on land
- The oil is removed:
- On land by vacuuming followed by excavation of contaminated soil
- At sea by vacuuming with or without absorbants materials, or by collection with skimmers, or by emulsification, or by weathering
Another method is being used with some success where there are enough people and material to sop up the oil in special mats and booms made of natural fibers, like hair. But it is a slow and labor-intensive process that relies mostly on volunteers.
You can help with this type of clean up, too. See the link in the related links section below for information about donations of natural fibers and hair to use in clean up. The web address will take you to the volunteer organization that is coordinating the donations of hair, wool, feathers, and nylons (hosiery), etc. to be used to help make barrier booms and to use in the clean up of beaches, birds, and animals that get oil soaked. The non-profit group will take money for buying the special netting they use in the construction of the booms, or your donations of that netting, too. You can have a "Boom B Q". A boom making party with a Bar B Q.
The site explains and shows how the fiber mats and booms work. It includes a link to a YouTube video on how to make the booms, too.
How do you clean up a large laundry detergent spill from garage floor?
kitty litter
then wash it down with dishwashing detergent
How often do oil trucks spill?
Oil spills occur, everyday! Somewhere in the world just now, an oil spill is happening. :O
Can people swim in the ocean where there is an oil spill washing ashore?
yes if you want to die a slow death
Who are the people who are responsible for the oil spill in the gulf?
BP is responsible for the oil spill in the gulf
How does an oil rig stand on the sea bed?
They are fabricated on land. Typically they mobilized (moved) to location by barges. A jackup rig may be assembled in pieces, with the jacket or the rig structure being installed first, and then the topsides (all housing and equipment that rests on the structure) is installed second, by large cranes. See related link.
A semi-submersible, like the Deepwater Horizon, may be towed by tugboats to its location. See second related link.
How do you extract oil from the sea?
I am by no means a qualified expert in the oilfield. I do provide instrumentation on drilling rigs though and here alot about all aspects. I can some it up quickly I believe.....Oil is generally locked up in sand type material. This is carbon remains from very old life years ago. Drilling rigs are contracted by operators such as your favorite gasoline company. The drilling rig is told how they wish to drill a hole into the ground at usually around $100k per day here in the Gulf. There are MANY people involved in this process requiring real time data on their holes activity. Many job related specialists are on location inspecting drilling fluids and rock formations underground. Once they reach to belive their target depth there are tests performed to see is their "hole" is production worthy. Many holes are not, leaving the operator with millions of dollars to account for an empty hole....it is nothing more than an empty hole. The holes here on the east (GulfCoast north to New York) run from 4000 feet to 26000 feet depending on location. Production pipe is run from the well to a storage well or production facility. There are many storage wells capable of holding tremendous amounts of oil and gas underground....probably near where you live. Its a fascinating job at times.....sorry I pasted a wall and didnt truly answer your question.
The oil spill was due to a well blow out. Obviously, people died when the rig caught fire, so well blow-outs can be deadly to rig workers. Now, an oil spill on the ocean is generally avoided by the public, so it is more harmful to marine life than humans. Large oil and gasoline spills can ignite under the right conditions, so yes, one can die from being in an area where there is an oil spill. A blown out well can also give off hydrogen sulfide, which can be deadly within close proximity to the well.
How many barrels does a Texas oil well produce?
I have provided an answer based on my assumption that you would like to know how much oil a well produces on a daily basis. It is very hard to generalize. Oil production is measured in barrels per day. A barrel is 42 gallons. Well production is highly variable and depends on many factors. There are many wells in the US producing less than 10 barrels of oil per day and are considered "stripper wells."
The high side of oil production from a single wellbore can be as high as 10,000 barrels/day. The production normally declines as reservoir pressure declines. An increase in gas and/or water can result in declining production.
How many people lost the jobs because of the bp oil spill 2010?
This is a very difficult to estimate.
The most directly impacted was the fishing industry. This includes commercial and recreational fishing. I could not find an estimate of how many workers were laid off. Wikipedia gives an estimated economic impact. Many in the fishing industry were hired by BP to use their boats to skim oil, making it difficult to determine the number of lost jobs.
The tourist industry was impacted. People cancelled vacations because beaches were closed. Restaurants reported people feared eating seafood. The number of jobs lost is not easy to calculate, because the country was in an economic recession, and so many tourist spots were going to see fewer customers because of the economy.
Also, the numbers of lost jobs is difficult to determine, because temporary jobs were created to clean up beaches and in other areas.
Finally, jobs were lost as the US Federal Government refused to permit deepwater exploratory drilling. I don't consider this a direct result of the spill, but what the government thought was necessary to avoid further accidents. Some of these jobs will be lost for a long period, as rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico to drill in other locations.
A lot of estimates of the economic impact of the spill on the economy, have been printed in the media, typically in the tens of billions of dollars range. See related link.
How do oil spills kill marine life?
Oil collects on their fur and damages its water proof-ness and insulating value causing them to waste more energy trying to keep warm. In addition in trying to clean the oil from their fur they ingest (eat) some of the oil which may be toxic or at the least upset their digestive systems.
What was the Ixtoc I oil spill?
The Ixtoc I oil spill was a spill resulting from the drilling of an exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico in the Bay of Campeche, on June 3, 1979. The blowout lead to the third largest oil spill in history, (currently larger in volume than the BP Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010).
Where did the gulf oil spill occur?
The BP oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Gulf War oil spill occurred in the Persian Gulf in Kuwait.
Do birds die from drinking oil contamination?
Yes and so would you. The reason most birds will die from oil contaminated water is from swimming in it and the feathers are normally an insulation for the bird and once oil sticks to the feathers the bird no longer has that insulation and some cases will drown.
