Emendation

Since I posted several items--the list of 7 whoppers I'd seen attributed to Matt Simmons--in respect of Matt's reputation and overall body of work, and simply in the effort to be intellectually fair, I hunted through some YouTube, CNBC and MSNBC video archives to hear and see for myself what Matt was saying this spring and summer.

I will say, I turned up some interesting conspiracies. There's plenty of junk on YouTube--a nice microcosm of the internet in general--and to be fair, Simmons wasn't saying things one one-hundredth as moronic as some of these other geniuses. My favorite was how the Gulf blowout was really the start of a volcano, controlled by a rapacious, advanced intergalactic race of predators known as the Gorgons, spoken of in several ancient myths worldwide. Those who do not believe in the Gorgons' presence only hasten their takeover.

It didn't sound like Matt saying these things, and I was relieved to hear the speaker's name was something else (I don't remember it, and didn't want to waste more time listening).

But there was plenty of Matt Simmons' actual words, on TV and radio interviews, to pay attention to. And it was dismaying to hear such a respected person launch into borderline incoherence, talking in circles and being eagerly led on by smallminded interviewers. He spent a full hour on a radio show called TruNews, self-advertised as the only news program counting down the time to the second coming of our lord! (Small surprise the host spoke with a drawl.)

Poor Matt was led into some pretty dumb statements by this guy (fire? volcanoes? methane eruptions?), but the truth is that he didn't need very much help. A list of the things I heard Matt say, and it's not very different from my list of yesterday's post:

1) There's a lake of oil below the surface of the Gulf, either (a) 120 miles wide and 4-500 feet deep, or (b) covering 40% of the Gulf, or (c) somehow both.
2) There is only one blowout, but the real source of oil is an open hole 10 miles away from the reported site. BP has no idea where the blowout preventer is, and all ROV images are only of the dribble of oil from the riser (pipe) which had connected the well to the Deepwater Horizon rig;
3) 120,000 barrels of oil are spilling from the well;
4) The well site is a "cauldron" spewing oil and flames (underwater!);
5) The well might have pierced the earth's crust and created a volcano (as prompted by the millennarian host);
6) Methane is more poisonous than mustard gas;
7) A hurricane would drive the methane ashore and poison the entire Gulf Coast region. Evacuations were necessary;
8) 40% of the Gulf had become anoxic.

Some are not as bad, some are even worse than what I'd read.

Of all those statements, #3, the 120,000 barrels/day claim, I give some credence to. I dismissed out of hand the 150,000 barrels/day estimate in my first writing, but there have been wells (mostly in the mideast) which have produced over 100,000 barrels/day, and they were much shallower. This well is under 5,000 feet of water, and 13,000 more feet of rock below that--in other words, an awful lot of pressure (estimated at roughly 11,000 atmospheres). So if allowed to flow freely, at the initial stages, the oil could well be coming up at a horrifically high rate like 120,000 bbl/day. But the well wouldn't sustain that output. The MC252 reservoir is not Ghawar, giant among giants, in Saudi Arabia. (If it were, other wells in the area would've tapped it earlier. Ghawar is over 100 miles long.) So there's a strong element of truth in that claim, in my opinion.

As for the "lake" of oil...not enough oil had spilled to create a pure oil lake of that size (certainly not covering 40% of the Gulf!). Dispersed particles, possibly...a steady stream of oil from the well, flowing for weeks on end, would create a stream of particulate oil stretching closer to 200 miles in length...not so much in width, however. And it wouldn't be a pure stream of oil, it would be particles suspended within the water. Not all that close to Simmons' outlandish claims.

The rest of the statements are too foolish to consider. I will, however, address one thing the host added on, as encouragement to Matt when he was rambling on about the methane. The host mentioned a lake in Cameroon--Lake Nyos--which killed 1800 lakeshore inhabitants with a methane/carbon dioxide eruption several years ago. And this is, in fact, the case. Lake Nyos is one of several central African "exploding lakes", known for the fact that they grow saturated with gas (carbon dioxide and/or methane) over time. Think of a bottle of soda, filled with carbon dioxide. Then shake it up.

That's what happens to these lakes--they fill with gas, most likely from volcanic seeps below the surface. Then a seismic shock--landslide, earthquake, volcano--can destabilize the gas/water suspension, and cause the gas to come rushing out exactly like the carbon dioxide bubbles and bursts out of a shaken-up soda bottle. Only, there's not one single, gigantic bubble that comes floating out--it's more like a violent fizzing all over the lake. And enough gas emerges, apparently, to slaughter thousands of humans.

Now there's no evidence that the Gulf of Mexico has become similarly saturated with gas--the water is moving around constantly, and can hold a pretty huge volume. One of the issues with those lakes is that they're smaller than the ocean (obviously), and they don't turn over seasonally, since the seasons in that part of the world aren't as severely contrasting as, say, in North America. So, the gas can slowly build up inside the water, and it's never exposed to the air, and so the gas never vents slowly and peacefully (the equivalent, in my analogy, to gently cracking the bottle and letting the carbon dioxide seep off without foaming over). Of all the scientific alarm--genuinely well-founded scientific alarm--I've read and heard about this summer, the Gulf of Mexico becoming an exploding gulf isn't an element.

Simmons gave all of these interviews from his house in Maine, and he didn't quite sound like the firm, authoritative speaker I'd heard in other venues (speaking on peak oil in previous years, for example). He dithered, dwelled on inanities and engaged in some pointless hyperbole ("the finest oceanographic vessel ever built, the Thomas Jefferson"--it's a fine ship, but that's pushing it). Matt's every claim--from the real well being 10 miles away, to the gigantic lake of oil, to the methane bubble--was placed sqarely on the shoulders of ther TJ crew. And their official report (which he cited) doesn't support a single thing he said.

A sad demise to a proud career. I fell apart in college--I have no intention, especially now that I have a family to look out for, of doing so again, whether in the noon or the twilight of my own career.

One more thing: a shot of me, passed out from seasickness at my workstation in the control van. Thanks a ton, Grant.