Bob Hayes Online

How much better off would we be if we were drilling in ANWR or similar areas, rather than in deepwater?

We don’t yet know how bad the Deepwater Horizon spill will end up being. Let’s go super-worst case, and say that it reaches the level of the worst-ever oil spill: the 1991 deliberate spill in the Persian Gulf. The high end estimate of that spill is 520 million gallons. Let’s say it’s twice that bad – 1000 million gallons, a nice round billion. Worst. spill. ever.

We know what that looks like in water. It’s bad. How does it look on land?

A gallon is 0.13 cubic feet. (I know, it looks like more than that when you hold a gallon jug of milk, but a cubic foot is actually a fairly hefty volume of space.)

Thus, a billion gallons is 130 million cubic feet. Holy cow – we’d flood Alaska!

Or would we? The nice thing about an oil disaster on land is that it is relatively easy to throw up a berm to stop the spill from spreading. (In fact it’s so much easier to stop a spill on land that there would never be a billion gallons spilled – there wouldn’t even be a million gallons spilled. Check that list – of the top 12 spills, only one was on land, and that one happened when just such a berm collapsed after eight months of the spill being neglected. But let’s assume for the moment that we’re going to have to contain the entire billion gallons.)

Berms vary in height, but let’s not wait for the Corps of Engineers to show up. We want to protect the Alaskan wilderness, after all, before the tide of black gold drowns Governor Palin and Mr. McGinnis and all the little Alaskan bunny rabbits. Let’s limit ourselves to a berm 10 feet high. That’s something that yahoos in pickup trucks can manage, let alone serious civil engineers. How big a circular berm do we need to contain our spill?

At a height of ten feet, to encompass 130 million square feet, we need a radius of 2034 feet. Now, that’s not a tiny berm. Our rednecks in pickup trucks are going to need some friends. (Of course, they have months to build it, given the spill RATE is “only” a few hundred thousand gallons a day at most.) It’s a circle about 4/5 of a mile across. Not trivial, by any means – not a weekend project. Still, even if throwing up the berm costs $1000 a linear foot (and it wouldn’t, not nearly), we’re looking at $12,779,000 for the whole project – chump change. (And hell, the billion gallons of oil in the berm is worth about $2.4 billion on the open market, so you might even make a little profit on the deal.)

How much Alaska would be wiped out? Less than a single square mile.

THAT is why we should be drilling in Alaska (and Canada and a few other places), rather than out in deepwater.

Interesting to think what would be happening right now if the old USSR still existed. Suddenly, for a period of several days – maybe longer – jet airplanes are useless over Europe. The overwhelming western advantage in airpower is suddenly neutralized. They could be in the south of France in a week. Would they go for it?

As it is I wonder what that crafty Putin might be planning.

Because it’s not like we need alternative energy sources, or anything.

Idiots.

I’m not much of a green, but even I can see how this enormous floating plastic dump is problematic. I don’t see why they say we can’t do anything about it, though. 3.5 million tons of plastic has an enormous market value, and the nature of the currents are such that more feedstock comes in every day. It must be worth someone’s time to set up a retrieval and recycling operation.

(H/T You Guessed It)

It’s a bit early for that, but this is interesting.

(H/T Althouse.)

Bob Zubrin has an absolutely brilliant idea: require new vehicles to be equipped to run flex-fuel, i.e., from either alcohol fuels or regular gasoline. The technology seems to be proven and the cars are a small segment of the market today – so small, unfortunately, that most gas station owners don’t want to put in pumps for alcohol fuels that almost nobody can use. If new cars can use either pump, drivers can choose ethanol or methanol or other biofuels – making them instantly economically viable across the country. But never mind my blathering – go read the whole piece, it’s excellent.

Normally I am opposed to direct government mandates on technology. But this is one that I think the car companies would like. And if the car companies don’t like it, in this case I’m willing to put pure capitalism behind economic nationalism. And, it f**** OPEC, and I’m pretty much in favor of anything that does that.