This looks pretty much like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno, at best. Both the Deepwater Enterprise drill ship and the Q-4000 are shooting out flames of burning natural gas/oil+natural gas, not to mention some other pools of oil being burned at the surface.

You’ve read the stories, but take a look at this to get a real sense of what’s going on down there right now. The ABC video does a good job showing the intensity of activity in the area. Check out especially around 1:40 and 2:13 into the video for a shot of all the ships and flames.

So you understand what you’re seeing, there’s a few pools of oil being burned on the surface after being collected in containment booms. Then the long ship shooting out a relatively thin flame is the Deepwater Enterprise Drill ship, which is processing oil and flaming off the natural gas. Finally you see the squarish platform burning off a big round flame, that’s the Q-4000, which is just burning off oil/gas because it can’t do the separation/processing. Total being burned off, about 21,000 barrels per day. Leaving maybe 10,15 up to 40k barrels per day flowing into the gulf.

They are spraying water on the burning tubes to keep them from overheating, not because they are on fire 😉

Freaky stuff.

Tags: video

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 18:39 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.