The story Woodtick linked to is nearly three years old. The $6.2 billion Murphy Oil expansion in Superior isn't really in the works anymore.
Prospects for Murphy Oil expansion dim
Murphy Oil needed a partner to provide the crude and never found it.
I am looking forward to Red Lobster's new menu items like "BP Shrimp, marinated and grilled to perfection in a 'secret recipe' glaze," or perhaps "Oysters on the half crude."
If there were any commercial fishermen hanging on after Katrina, this ought to make their operations completely obsolete. BP should pay all their wages, and the wages of all the restaurant owners and wait staff that serve regional seafood until the situation is 100% restored (20 years?).
I suppose BP's "limited liability" insurance policy will prevent them from suffering nearly as much as the people who relied (past tense) on the gulf waters for a living.
I keep hearing this is the "worst oil spill in U.S. history." Does anybody remember a worse spill on the worldwide stage? I don't recall one specifically in my 40 years on the planet.
E., 378 million gallons were spilled by Iraqis retreating from Kuwait in 1991.
Check out this link for a history of major oil spills graphic.
A History of Major Oil Spills
Yep. My understanding is that Murphy will continue to refine oil from the old pipelines. The oil in the Alberta Clipper connects in Superior to Enbridge Energy Partners' mainline facilities and is piped from there to the Chicago area. That is, as far as I know. Despite what Mevdev might think, I do not know everything.
I heard South Dakota's Byron Dorgan on MPR today saying how important his state will become as an oil producer since the BP mess. Could Murphy get their crude from SD? I suppose it would have to be trucked. Is any oil transported on the great lakes?
Tony D: I was born in ND so know of Byron's great influence on the state. Way back in the day he was a young guy who was very active in the ND Jaycees, and has always been a very hard worker for the state. Glad he is a senator, he is really a nice guy and admired by lots of people. ND is already a prosperous and smart state, in spite of its reputation (the movie Fargo, etc.). I think lots of farmers just laugh all the way to the bank and when they sit for a "little lunch" they watch the oil pumpers go up and down, up and down. You betcha' Go ND!!
Thanks Paul.
Reading Mark Morford's comments re: the BP oil blowout (cuz it ain't no spill or leak): says rather than this being 'Obama's Katrina' it will be 'Big Oil's Chernobyl'. We will see...
Behold our dark, magnificent horror
Murphy Oil provides a lot of good jobs for this area. I hear they cook the books on environmental aspects of the job though having demoted people that are honest.
The oil slick would take up a large amount of surface area, but not as much as you might think. I have a friend that does software engineering for NOAA, and says that's a very limited guess as to what it would look like.
Think of it this way. The volume of oil at its largest estimation is about 45 million gallons, or 7.7 times 10^6 m^3. The volume of Lake Superior, using data from Wikipedia, is around 1.2 times 10^14 m^3. That is a magnitude of 7 times greater, note, "magnitude".
If we assume it all sits on the surface, which most of it probably would, and since the surface area of the lake is 8.24 times 10^10, the percentage is (7.7*10^6)/(8.24*10^10).
Which is only about 0.009% of the lake surface.
The catch, of course is the fact it would disperse, but the math for that is hard to do, and oceans have tides that affect the dispersion differing it from the lake.
Even though that paper napkin math suggests otherwise, I actually think that the effects would be much worse on Lake Superior's ecology than on the gulf's.
Off by a factor of 4. It would be more like 9% of the lake surface not including dispersion, but more importantly it would be more stagnant even with the water flow through the lake compared to the ocean. I'll remember to check my work :-)
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