Stuff You Should Know - How do you clean up an oil spill?

Episode Date: June 1, 2010

The modern world runs on fossil fuel, and offshore oil drilling powers a large part of the global economy. But what do we do when disaster strikes? Join Josh and Chuck as they take a look at the techniques used to clean up oil spills in this podcast. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck Bryant is seated across from me, sorting through papers, taking a last second look at the information. His sponge-like brain is absorbing. Like an absorbent might soak up oil floating on top of the Gulf of Mexico. Did you plan that?

Oh, wow. I know. I'm getting too good at this. I'm like the Robert Uric of podcasting. I'm just an old pro by now. I think it's like the third or fourth time we've said Robert Uric in the show. Has it ever been recorded before? What? I've never mentioned a Robert Uric.

Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Recorded and released, my friend. This podcast is going to bum people out, especially if you have any hardness for the environment. Pelicans, sand. Shrimp. Plankton.

Shrimpers. Yeah, this is the- Local economies? We've been, we probably should have done this weeks ago, but we took our time getting around to it because Josh was a B in all Japanese. So oil spills, it's high time we tackle this. It's high tide. Or oil spill cleanup, rather.

Yeah. I actually wrote an article about it back in 2006. There was a spill in San Francisco Bay. And our boss was like, hey, go write something on this right now. I was like, okay. So I wrote it. And I was happy to see that pretty much nothing's changed since the,

then in four years the technology hasn't advanced. And we're actually using some really primitive techniques. No kidding. But Chuck, let's first start by talking about how the Gulf oil spill started in the first place, right? Yeah. The deep water horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, right? Yeah, did they call this a spill? I guess they're calling it a spill, aren't they?

Yeah, I think anytime it's introduced into, yeah, water, it's a spill. Because that generally- And I don't even think it has to be water. I think anytime oil gets out of whatever containment system is supposed to be holding it, it's a spill. So my old Plymouth Valiant that I had in Los Angeles- Oil spill. Oil spill all over my driveway. Yeah, I bet.

I got charged for that by my renter, or by my landlord. Did you really? Yeah. You're like, look at all these oil spots. That's like 10 bucks a piece. That's a wear and tear. That's what I said. You know something cool I just thought of, dude?

When you Google Earth my house, you could see my car in my driveway. My L.A. house. Really? And the oil spill. Can you really? That's crazy. Anyway. You can also Google Earth the oil spill in the Gulf right now, as far as I know.

Yeah, all those pictures that are coming out are just awful. Yeah, we have a Facebook page, Stuff You Should Know page, and we posted and tweeted on our Twitter account, too, a link to this PBS blog that had a live feed video of the oil under the Gulf of Mexico. I think a mile down, right? It was the most depressing thing I've ever seen in my life. It's just shooting out plumes of oil. And there's a really big discussion.

Anyway, the Deepwater Horizon exploded. The BP was capping a well to come back and drill later, because they wanted to go and start another drill, or another well, by March, and they were running behind. From what I understand, it's starting to emerge that there may have been something of a rush job in capping this well. Some gas built up in the well, it exploded in this pipe that went from the rig to the well cap, killed 11 people, and sunk the rig, burst the pipe in at least three places, and now we have these plumes of oil that are being introduced into the Gulf of Mexico.

At first, they thought it was, what, 1,000 barrels a day, right? Yeah, 1,000 barrels a day. You know, BP's numbers aren't quite lining up with the numbers from the experts. No, and the government said, well, we're going to figure this ourselves, but we're going to use an equation that is specifically recommended to not be used for calculating oil release underwater. Not recommended by oil companies? Not recommended by experts.

Okay. So they came up with 5,000 barrels a day. Some experts, like some people who know, have said, it's probably about four to five times that. Yeah. So what we're talking about is as much as 25,000 barrels, and there's 42 gallons in a barrel, 25,000 barrels a day. If that's the case, then as of this podcast recording, the Gulf oil spill, the BP Gulf

oil spill that's going on right now has released the amount the Exxon Valdez dropped eight times over. Wow. Yeah. Well, they just actually, on CNN, just released like two hours ago, they're officially calling it the worst oil spill in U.S. history. In U.S. history, but it's not the worst ever, is it, Chuckers? No.

I don't know if you have different info, but 1991 Persian Gulf War, 240 million gallons off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Is that what you got? Yeah. So now we've got about 88 million at, if it's 25,000 barrels a day, we've had about 88 million. That's 240 million barrels or gallons. 240 million gallons.

Yeah. That's enormous. I don't think we'll ever top that. Yeah. And the Valdez was 11 million gallons. Yeah. And the second worst spill also took place in the Gulf of Mexico, but it was off the coast of Mexico, right?

Right. And that one was, I think, like 140 million gallons, something like that. I think so. 140 million gallons. It was the Ishtok 1, Ihtak. I know X in Mexican dialect Aztec, maybe, is what you're talking about, something like that. Like Oaxaca.

You're right. Yeah. Yeah. There's an X in there. Yeah. So it's the Ihtak 1. Somebody will let us know, won't they? Yes.

And from June of 1979 to February of 1980, it just kept going, and that was 140 million gallons, right? I got three more stats if we're doing stats and people are taking shots. Every year, 100 million US gallons of oil spill. Every year is what they say. There's stat number one. The United States uses 710 million gallons of oil per day. And in fact, every 22 minutes, Josh, the US uses up what was spilled in the Exxon Valdez

spill. Every 22 minutes. I know. Isn't that weird? It's weird. It's disturbing. But that also accounts for why oil spills are so massive. It's actually kind of wondrous that more oil doesn't spill.

Right. Apparently, the US Coast Guard reported that after the Exxon Valdez accident, there was a lot of tightening and restrictions. It was just such a very public accident, and it happened in the US, so it mattered. So all of a sudden, there's all these restrictions on tanker design, like you need to have double holes, and then other regulations that made restrictions tighter. And I think spillage dropped by like 58% between 1989 and 2004. Yeah.

You know, Maddie Frederick of Coolest Stuff on the Planet, have you ever seen his Facebook stuff? No. He's just like, you need a Facebook friend personally. He's like the liberal crusader of all time. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like four times a day.

He sends out, I bet you didn't know this. Right. He gets it right. It's hilarious. He came by the other day and told me about a, basically every country in the world that does offshore drilling has this process in place that when there's a situation like just happened, an implosion happens, is triggered immediately to implode and seal everything up at the source.

And he said the US is the only country that recently, like several years ago, said, oh, we don't need this because it costs a lot of money. Yeah. We're the only country. That's great. Pretty cool. And then with our minerals management service, which apparently has had a pretty cozy relationship with energy companies, right?

Yeah. If you think about that though, Chuck, this oil spill in the Gulf coupled with the mine explosion in West Virginia, like those two accidents coming that close together can actually completely change energy policy. Yeah. And it probably will. For the better, obviously. It's pretty interesting.

Yeah. All right, so Chuck, let's say that you had just gotten your hair cut. I did, in fact. All right. Let's say you said, you know what? I want my hair to go to matter of trust because it's going to be used to clean up this oil spill. Right?

Remember, we got a bunch of emails about this. Like, you guys mentioned this. Mention this. Yeah. If you send your hair to the Gulf, like it will be used to clean up the oil spill. Is that hair being used? No. That was the initial idea and hair can be used, in fact.

Yeah. For smaller spills. For smaller spills. But they say, I read in The New York Times today, they said that there is not deemed feasible after a technical evaluation. No. BP's like, hey, that's a really good idea, but we are actually going to use real sorbents. Right.

Real stuff, right? And like you said, hair can be used. It's used on a much smaller scale. But the people, I guess, who have really kind of started this initiative, I think it's matter of trust out of San Francisco, they said, oh yeah, well, you asked for it initially. So we're going to send it to you and it's up to you to figure out what to do with it. And they sent the hair in here. So all the hair is being sent to BP anyway.

They're rolling it in a big hair ball from San Francisco. It's like the size of a car. There you go. So Chuck, why would you use hair or a better question is, how would you use hair to clean up oil? Well, I guess hair would be a sorbent, right? I think so. So basically, a sorbent is something that acts as a giant sponge to, I mean, it's so

primitive sounding, but it literally just soaks up the oil from the water. And it can do this because oil sits about, it forms a layer on top of water, especially salt water, about a millimeter thick, isn't that right? Sometimes a little more. It depends. Especially at first. Right. Right?

So it's thickest in the first couple hours. Which is when you really want to get to it. If you get to it initially, you can contain it by using these buoyant booms and they float on the water and there's a skirt that hangs down into the water and it basically keeps it from spreading. Right. So that's what you want to do. It's like an oil pen.

And then you come along with some skimmers that may use centripetal, which is not centrifugal. Centripetal force is when you spin something and it's the force that pulls you to the center. So because oil is lighter than water, it will be pulled more easily. Right. Or the water will be pulled more easily, one of the two. But it separates them. You can also just scrape it up. And they also have conveyor belt systems, skimmers, where like you just basically, like it just

pulls the oil up right off of the water. Yeah. You know what I didn't find in any of this is if they can, because they soak up this oil and put it in a containment tanker. Can they use this oil? Yes. You know what I mean, huh? You knew this?

I did. Wow. I actually ran across it in research that they're, yeah, they, they, when you soak it up and you use like, say, hair or some other kind of sorbent and you can use natural stuff like pine bark. Yeah. Banana fibers. Actually, I don't know if they still use that, but that was one for a while.

Right. So there is, there are some naturally occurring materials that will soak up oil more than it soaks up water, right? But you can squeeze it out and there's your oil, because really nothing's happened to it. It hasn't had the chance to mix with water yet, right? You just literally like, they have a dude that's got an oily rag and you just squeezed it into a little container and says, here's your oil.

So that's you. That's your job. You can also burn it. And actually this is the most efficient means of taking care of an oil slick. Yeah. Because it sits on top, you can burn it away, but that's clearly not a very good thing to do because when you burn oil, it creates some pretty not just fumes for the environment. It does.

It's about 95 to 98% efficient though. Again, you want to do it away. It's called in situ burning. You want to do it when the slick is away from the shore, from say coral colonies, that kind of stuff. Right. If it's just out in the deep ocean, then, and it hasn't gotten to be a big problem to where it has traveled towards civilization, then you can just burn it, right?

Yeah. The other weird thing I thought that you pointed out, not weird, but I found it odd was that sometimes if it's far enough out, they'll just leave it alone and oil eventually will evaporate because the sun and the waves and the weather, and they'll just say, let the earth take care of it. Right. The wave action. I can't remember what it's called when sunlight breaks something, a photo degradation maybe?

Maybe. I can't remember when we did the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yeah, yeah. We were talking about how the wave action and the sun breaks down plastic even in the little globules. Oh, yeah. Same thing happens to oil because plastic is petroleum based, right? Right.

You can also hasten the breakdown by adding microbes to it, right? Yeah. The biological agents? Yeah. Yeah. That's when a fertilizer, a phosphorus, and nitrogen, you'll spread it all over it and it'll actually foster the growth of microorganisms and that'll help break it down into fatty acids.

Right. And CO2, I think, right? Yes. Yes. You can actually foster the growth of these microbes by adding, what did you say? Phosphorus and nitrogen. Right. And when you do add these things, there's a danger of actually going out to the open

ocean and creating an algae bloom, which creates a dead zone, which is not good. So if you're going to use phosphorus and nitrogen to hasten the growth of microbes, you want to do it in like a marshland that's outside of the tidal movement. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, there's also dispersants. You probably heard this on the news a lot with the BP accident. And in tropical areas, they handle it with dispersants and these are chemicals that break

the oil down into, that basically breaks the oil slick apart into little oil droplets, which can be absorbed into the aquatic system quickly. Right. But this is not necessarily the best. No. No. It turns out in 2007, an Israeli study found that the combination of chemical dispersants and partially broken down oil is actually more harmful to a coral ecosystem than just

crude oil itself. Yeah. It actually didn't, the EPA get on BP and say, wait a minute, this dispersant you're using you can't use. Go find another one like now. Probably. I could see that. I think that happened.

I think everybody's taken a shot at BP so far. Yeah, seriously. They're kind of gentle as a lamb right now. But Chuck, that study, that Israeli study kind of reveals something that's easy to forget because it's so gross looking, but oil is natural. It's a naturally occurring substance. Yeah, true. Right.

One of the problems with it is when it becomes broken down, it can be, it enters the food cycle. Yeah. The food chain. It equals the seafood chain, right? Which enters our food chain because we eat seafood, which is why the shrimpers are out of business right now. And it also becomes, it can adhere to sand, pebbles, that kind of stuff.

And through wave action, turns into little tar balls. Right. They're solid on the outside, but they're like soft and gooey in the middle. Yeah. And things like to eat them and choke on them and die. And they sink. Right. They said though, I mean, they said, you said, you're the one that wrote it.

You said that they're not as dangerous sometimes to the environment as a flat out oil problem, but it's still not great obviously. Right. Because they're broken up and they're separated rather than, you know, this big huge slick. But you know, if a fish is eating a tar ball and dies and it's not good, same with like a pelican or a bird. And then the other problem with an oil slick for wildlife is that it gets on, it breaks down the water resistance of mammal fur and birds, aquatic birds.

Which end up getting gooped up with this stuff. Right. So beavers and sea otters and pelicans. And they get soaked or they poison themselves by trying to lick themselves clean. I can't look at those pictures. This picture? Yeah. Notice I didn't print that out.

I can't even, I just can't even go there, heartbreaking. There is also the beach cleanup, right? So we talked about marsh cleanup. You can add nitrogen and phosphorus and bioremediate it, right? Right. But you also have beaches. You got tar balls on beaches. You have pelicans walking around like, why me?

You know? Right. And you have to clean up this beach. And apparently on Prince William Sound, right? That was the word that Valdez spelled in Alaska? Yes. They said, you know what? We want to make the beach look clean again.

So we're going to use high pressure hoses, like spray everything off. It doesn't really do anything. It pushes the oil down and actually screws things up worse. Pushing it into the sand? Uh-huh. Yeah. But the beach looks clean at least. Right.

And they've been doing that. They did that in Alaska. And I don't know if they have plans to do it in Louisiana or not, but it's going to be bad. Right. The other thing you pointed out, which I thought was interesting, because I had this thought too, that all this, just the cleanup act itself would probably be really bad for the wildlife.

And you said that they use sort of like scarecrows and dummies and balloons to scare off animals that are near these boats that are trying to contain and clean up. Yeah. Like get out of here. We're coming through to try and help. Yeah. And again, another, when you mentioned just leaving it, that's a viable option. Right.

But why is it? Because within about 24 to 48 hours, most of the volatile organic compounds found in oil, the most toxic stuff evaporates. Yeah. True. So when you have an oil spill, it loses its most toxicity within two days. Which is good. It is good.

But the problem is, with a spill like we have now, any oil that's losing its most toxic aspects are being replaced by new oil constantly. Right. So it's a big problem that's going on right now. I mean, you can just look at the underwater camera feed and tell it's a big problem. But once you have a few more of the facts, it's a really big problem. Yeah. Actually today is Thursday, May what, 28th?

27th. 27th. And I've been clicking literally by the minute to see if this top kill thing is worth their BP's latest effort to stop this five-week-old underwater geyser is working. And initial reports, I mean, this will clearly be known by Tuesday when this comes out. But they're saying, oh, we think it might be working. Even though shooting mud and cement down in there sounds sort of weird, it might be working. And our big thing that we lowered down on top of it.

The top hat. Yeah. That didn't work too good. The golf balls into it didn't work too good. So they didn't even work too well. They don't even say work too well. Work too good. Work and good.

Yeah. The top shot? Junk shot. Top kill. Junk shot. Top hat. Top kill. Junk shot.

Big mess. Yeah. That's what it equals, buddy. Yeah. If you want to know more about cleaning up oil spills, you can read my article on it. Right? There's also articles on offshore drilling and oil spills, not just clean up. Right.

So we should probably cover those at some point, too. So just type in oil, spill, drilling, offshore, there you go. And the handy search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, right? Right. And since I had said handy search bar, it seems like that should trigger something. It would normally trigger listener mail, Josh. What's going on? Well, we have a couple of thank yous quickly, and then our New York announcements.

So everyone knows where to meet up in New York. Quickly though, I want to thank steveclayton.com. They do custom guitar picks. Brian, there's a fan in the show. He wrote in and said, dude, you're in a band, your old man band cover band, El Chippo. You should, do you want some custom guitar picks? You can design it. And I was like, yeah, let me think about that for a second.

So I designed my little El Chippo guitar pick. And they're pretty cool. It's way cool. And he sent me a huge bag of these things. And so I just wanted to say thank you to steveclayton.com. And they're like big time. They do like the Foo Fighters and Tenacious D. Oh, yeah?

And now El Chippo is on their roster. That's really sweet. Yes, pretty cool. Are you on the website? Is your design on the website? Because I saw it and it was very cool. No, it is actually going to be on the website at some point. Okay.

So thanks to Brian. And to Jacob Storm Deathridge, who they do these cool journals made from old library books. So like they'll take the front and back cover an old library book and bind it with some of the first few pages and then the rest of it is blank, you know, journal style. And they sent us some of these. That was really nice. And they're at www.bookjournals.com out of Portland, Oregon.

Super creative. Yeah. Very cool. Thank you to both of those guys, right? Well, thanks to one from me. Thanks to two from Chuck. Yes. Yeah.

And Chuck. Right? Yeah. Yeah. New York City. Look out. New York City. We're coming to New York.

June 7th. We are having a happy hour at the Knitting Factory. Yeah. We'll be wearing nothing but chaps. From 5.30 to 7.30. After that, we're going to put on our shirts and everything. And we are having a trivia night, a bar trivia night at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Yeah.

On Wednesday, June 9th. Doors open at 6.30. Come and rub elbows. Trivia goes from 7 to 9. You can challenge the All-Star team consisting of me and Josh, Joe Randazzo, editor of the Onion newspaper. Yeah. And two or three unannounced mystery celebrity guests that will be on our team.

Unannounced and uncommitted. So the idea is you come and you challenge us. If you think you're smart, you get a trivia team together for Wednesday night and we will smack you down in the name of smarts and house-to-forks. And our egos. Yes. Yes. So there's all that.

And then the co-ed plug. Oh, yeah. Go ahead and hit that one. Well, as you may have heard, if you listen to the Guatemala podcast, Part Uno and Part Dos, we are raising some money as we do from time to time for noble causes like co-ed cooperative for education, which provides textbooks and computer centers in a very sustainable manner to schools in need in Guatemala, which you could just say schools in Guatemala. And you can donate five bucks by typing stuff when you send a text to 20222.

Yep. You're going to get a text back asking you if you're sure, you text back yes, and you just donated five bucks to co-ed. If you want to learn more about co-ed or you live outside of the United States, you can go onto their website at www.coeduc.org. If you live outside of the U.S., you can donate there. If you live inside the U.S., but you need a little more incentive, go look at their website and see the work they do and I'll bet you still donate the five bucks afterward.

Agreed. Yeah. If you want to send us an email, shoot it to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready.

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