Saturday, May 8, 2010

One potential solution to the oil leak

I mentioned something like this before but I think I deleted this. I'll try not to delete this one because it just might work.

Basically, what was tried was a way to salvage the wellhead to recover oil and so far that didn't work. However, if you had a 2 to 4 foot thick flat slab of concrete in a rectangle or circle that would have enough weight to crush the equipment on the seafloor and seal the leak it might be a solution.

Though almost all metals will rust eventually even the re-bar in reinforced concrete that would be needed to prevent the concrete from breaking apart when it hit the seafloor, the concrete won't rust because it becomes literally rock. So if you sent down a heavy enough slab of concrete to literally crush the equipment and flatten it into the seafloor it might stop off the oil rising just sort of like a cork on a champagne bottle. This wouldn't take long to make. The real problem would be a crane to move this much weight at sea. If it were 50 feet square or even 50 foot in diameter and round and two to four feet thick if it worked it would end this problem for good and other wells could eventually be dug when it was legal again to do. But if this goes on much longer and the whole Gulf of Mexico is filled with tar balls and oil, offshore drilling might never be done much ever again anywhere on earth.

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