Eyewear is puzzled. If BP stands to lose 20 billion or more dollars over this disaster-fiasco, why not spend £10 billion now, to invent some remarkable oil-sucking device? Surely, ten billion thrown at some Nobel geniuses as a challenge, could yield a machine to do the trick. I may be naive, but you have a hole a mile down gushing out oil under massive pressure. Okay, that's bad. But they got to the moon, yeah? Why not build a huge dome or cone of some kind, lower it, and completely enclose a large swathe of the seafloor? And send hoovering submersibles to capture the rest. Last time I checked, they had one big pipe down there. Why not put more down? We're talking billions here - rather than waste that on mere pay-outs, spend it now, and get the eggheads to work! Or, hire a hundred thousand people in small boats to each scoop oil up. You could pay them each $10,000.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
This is the response given by one oil engineer to the same proposal as yours:
This is a terrible idea that would kill many people.
If the pipe you suggest could be constructed, and I would love to see your calculations on vortex induced vibration and your anchorage plan, but if it could be constructed it would lead to the following events: The column within the pipe would begin quickly to discharge water from the top as the oil and gas start to displace it. Liquefied gas at the ocean floor rapidly changes state to a gas as it rises and loses pressure. By the time the well fluid reaches about 2000 feet the gas is expanding rapidly and the column weight and therefore the pressure on the BOP starts reducing quickly as the "gas lift" goes into full effect. The reduction in back pressure on the BOP causes the leak to increase dramatically and increases the stress on the BOP's pressure boundary. As the gas and oil mixture approaches the surface it accelerates to extreme velocities as surface ships are showered with seawater. By the time the gas surfaces it is trvelling at nearly the speed of sound and more than 65 million SCFD roar with an earsplitting 150+ dBA rendering anyone within about 100 yards deaf. It won't matter though because static electricity from the surrounding vessels will ignite the mixture into a fireball that engulfs all of the vessels and kills virtually everybody.
Did you not see the rig burn?
Apparently it's not as simple as our poetically minded fanatsist brains would imagine.
Desmond