On May 5, 2:28*pm, Frogwatch wrote:
To get rid of the oil spill, why not evaporate it by pointing curved
mirrors on barges onto it. *This would concentrate sunlight, not focus
but "concentrate" causing it to evaporate quickly. *such mirrors could
be made from simple curved sheets of aluminum or even by inflating
cylinders that are silvered on one half and transparent on the other.

The oil eventually goes away via evaporation (sort of), and the
greater volumetric bulk tonnage of all that BP acid stays put (sort
of). Either way, biodiversity and even the physical environment gets
screwed.

BP and others in this Gulf of Mexico have even bigger problems than
mere blowouts and lives lost. This area could soon become the world’s
largest dead zone. Acidic and NOx saturated areas of low oxygen were
bad enough before BP spilled its guts all over the place, whereas
adding the right kinds of bugs to that contaminated area, and then
diatoms could make that Gulf area even better than before, given a few
years and no further artificial leakage or even flaring for the next
decade.

Our recently foiled OCO mission would have refined this following data
by a factor of 100 fold better resolution, as well as having improved
its accuracy, including the capability of identifying natural gaseous
and thermal emissions from those of artificial means (via coal, oil
extractions, various hydrocarbon processing and numerous other mining
that merely vents their bulk of various gaseous elements to
atmosphere). All-inclusive sweet and sour venting plus sweet/sour
flaring on behalf of extracting crude oil, whereas I wouldn’t be at
all surprised to see the global tally of 1e9 m3/day (not including
helium that’s always passed along as vented, inert flared or otherwise
distributed as the slight inert portion of natural gas consumption).

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/idb/struts/...&s=3&d=10,6,11
Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Data Used to Map 2008
Waste Natural Gas Flaring [August 2009]
”National Geophysical Data Center's (NGDC) Christopher Elvidge and co-
authors have published a paper entitled, "A Fifteen Year Record of
Global Natural Gas Flaring Derived from Satellite Data" in the peer
review journal Energies. The paper can be found at http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/3/595.
Co-authors include: Edward Erwin (NGDC), staff from the Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES): Daniel
Ziskin, Kimberly Baugh, Benjamin Tuttle and Tilottama Ghosh, and Dee
Pack of The Aerospace Corporation. The study was based on DMSP
nighttime lights annual cloud-free composites spanning 1994 through
2008. DMSP estimates of flared gas volumes are based on a calibration
developed with a pooled set of reported national gas flaring volumes
and data from individual flares. Flaring efficiency was calculated as
the volume of flared gas per barrel of crude oil produced. Global gas
flaring has remained largely stable over the past fifteen years, in
the range of 140 to 170 billion cubic meters (BCM). Global flaring
efficiency was in the seven to eight cubic meters per barrel from 1994
to 2005 and declined to 5.6 m3 per barrel by 2008. The 2008 gas
flaring estimate of 139 BCM represents 21% of the natural gas
consumption of the United States with a potential retail market value
of $68 billion. The 2008 flaring added more than 278 million metric
tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.”

The cheapest part of this whole sulfur and oily muck deal is their
$75M liability limit (roughly 2.5 hours worth of BP’s corporate annual
revenue)

~ BG