The Day After

The Day After

by Jim Reynolds

The Gusher in the Gulf remains unplugged. The "top kill" didn't work. I hope, for all of us, that the next attempt at choking it off will solve the problem but there are still plenty of things that can go wrong. If it works, it will mean that we dodged the bullet—or at least part of the bullet—this time.

There are still the tremendous problems of all of the oil floating on the Gulf surface and all of the oil floating well below the surface that need to be addressed. In a typical western, industrialized-nation style, we are expending huge amounts of energy lassoing tiny bits of the megaslick and then igniting the contained puddle, to release clouds of CO₂ and CH₄ (methane), among other gases, into our atmosphere. Of course this release would eventually happen anyhow with the gradual evaporation of the slick or by the refined petroleum being burned in the engine of our cars. At least in our autos a fraction of the energy is put to use rather than being completely wasted. It’s a “use it or lose it” situation.

If we are going to expend large amounts of energy on the clean-up, let’s apply forethought to do it efficiently and with deep concern for environmental sensitivity. Native Americans and other aboriginal cultures in tune with their environment would probably come up with a different solution to clean up the mess. I suspect their solution would involve much more energy but much less work. Unlike the western solution, most of the energy in the more aboriginal solution is part of a natural flow. It is going where it is going anyway. It’s a different type of “use it or lose it” situation: nature could care less if we use it.

I used to live on the Tuckaseigee River in Jackson County, North Carolina. About three kilometers downstream, an old Cherokee rock weir still sits in the river. It was built hundreds of years ago to funnel some of the water toward the downstream opening where the two sides of the V-shaped weir meet in the middle of the river. Some fish swimming downriver would take the easy ride of the current rather than struggling to swim between or over the rocks in the weir wall. The Cherokee placed a large basket at the mouth of the weir and collected fish for dinner. This technique worked well for pre-industrial people all over the world for millennia.

The Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico harbors more energy than most of us can imagine. It enters the Gulf, after exiting the Caribbean, through the broad Yucatan Channel between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the western tip of Cuba. It slowly sweeps around the Gulf Coast in a clockwise direction, eventually merging with itself, back along the Yucatan Coast, to close the loop. Since a lot of water enters the Gulf, a lot must leave it too. The only place that surface water exits the Gulf is where a portion of the Loop Current breaks off and flows through the Straits of Florida between the Florida Keys and the north coast of Cuba. The current then bifurcates at the Cay Sal Bank, between Elbow Cay and Cay Sal. Most of the water continues through the Straits of Florida between Florida’s east coast and the Bahamas to join the Gulf Stream. The rest follows the Cuban coast and merges with the Gulf Stream through channels cutting between islands in the eastern Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands. The Straits of Florida and its distributaries are the only place we can hope to recover the petroleum to prevent it from being distributed throughout the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

The United States throws away millions of tons of plastic every year. Plastic is made from petroleum, much of it imported from the Middle East, so, it floats! By constructing a series of plastic booms, an eastward-pointing, V-shaped weir, composed of short (5-10 km), angled, anchored, floating booms will direct the floating petroleum toward a collection point where the current naturally splits at Cay Sal Bank. Anchor points, starting in the Dry Tortugas and west of Havana and moving outward on the shelves toward the east, will provide maximum beach protection on both sides of the straits (see figure below).

At the V of the weir, a large, floating, walled catchment “basin” could collect the surface water/petroleum mix. I say “basin” because the “basin” would have no bottom. The petroleum would float to the top. The water would be pumped out below the sidewalls. As the catchment fills with petroleum, other pumps would lift the reconcentrated petroleum onto tankers to be carried to refineries and then into our gas tanks. Although this may seem elaborate, it is not nearly as complicated as trying to drill a well in deep water from a floating platform.

A series of short booms, starting where the Loop Current enters the Straits of Florida will direct the floating petroleum toward a collection point where the petroleum can be loaded onto tankers. Note that this system takes advantage of current energy flowing this way anyhow. (Imagery modified from Google Earth)

Until the booms are constructed, our efforts should be dedicated to keeping as much petroleum as we can circulating in the Loop Current, away from our shorelines, diverting it back into the current with the shorter booms now being used to lasso it. Once the booms are in place, the lassos can be used to direct more of the floating goo toward the Straits of Florida for capture. It’s all going to go there eventually, anyhow.

The system certainly won’t be perfect, at first, but it will probably take several years for most of the petroleum to find its way out of the Gulf. Undoubtedly, many clever engineering modifications will be made to maximize collection efficiency and protect it from seasonal storms and hurricanes. The important thing is that we, at least partially, averted an environmental catastrophe set in motion by our fossil fuel addiction.

Or did we?

In “Disaster in Slow Motion” I outlined a doom and gloom worst case scenario where the petroleum slick accelerates the melting of the Arctic Ocean sea ice and triggers a return to ice age conditions. In truth, most climate scientists now say that the Arctic Ocean will experience ice-free summers by 2020, if not sooner, even without the Deepwater Horizon disaster. At most, plugging the leak and recapturing the surface petroleum buys us 10 years. These are 10 years that we already had for free but no one was listening to the warnings of imminent climatic crisis. Now we've bought those 10 years at an outrageous environmental cost. What we do with that time will determine the future for many generations.

Our addiction to fossil fuels uses only a small fraction of the energy expended when they combust. Unlike not using all of the natural energy flowing by, there is a litany of environmental consequences to this inefficiency that does serious destruction to our air, soil, water, and oceans. We need to break our addiction to fossil fuels in 10 years or face dire climatic consequences. This can only be done with a conversion to natural energy. It has to be natural energy, not nuclear power. We could start building a hundred new nuclear plants tomorrow and would still not receive a single watt from any of them in 10 years, maybe 20 years. Or, for a lesser price, we could start building a hundred offshore wind farms tomorrow and have them operating at full capacity in 3-4 years. Such abundant electricity and rising petroleum prices would hasten the conversion to all-electric vehicles and relegate fossil fuels and nuclear power to minor players in a new era of abundant clean energy. Perhaps the silver lining in the Deepwater Horizon disaster is that it will initiate a paradigm shift, in earnest, to a world run on green energy.

If I am completely wrong about a coming climatic change, have we really lost anything by converting to a society that lives off of the natural energy in its local environment?

Will this paradigm shift come in time to avert serious climatic consequences? I don’t know. This is the real disaster in slow motion. I know I would live in constant regret if we did nothing over the next 10 years and then the climate waged its wrath on us.