Drill Baby Drill: Valdez Oil Still Causing Problems 20 Years Later

4:29 pm EST January 17th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments

I’m no big environmental person, but the idea that we should keep drilling and powering our society with this stuff is a lunatic idea

An engineering professor has figured out why oil remains trapped along miles of gravel beaches more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound.

An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude remain in Prince William Sound, even though oil remaining after the nearly 11-million-gallon spill had been expected to biodegrade and wash away within a few years.

The problem: The gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound are trapping the oil between two layers of rock, with larger rocks on top and finer gravel underneath, according to Michel C. Boufadel, chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Temple University. His study appeared Sunday in Nature Geoscience’s online publication and will be published in the journal later.

Topic: ,

Related Posts

«
»

5 Responses to “Drill Baby Drill: Valdez Oil Still Causing Problems 20 Years Later”

  1. Amused Observer says:
    January 17, 2010 at 6:11 pm

    Yes Oliver, gas stations are a lunatic idea. All Congress needs to do is pass a law to make cars run on liberal bullshit and we’d have no more energy problems.

  2. Anon says:
    January 18, 2010 at 1:32 am

    You are so wrong. Americans are desperate for that oil we so crave and need, in order to grow our economy, that Americans are thirsting for. Can’t you see this?

    If you don’t believe me, just consider one of the top experts in the country on this matter, who makes the solid argument, essentially, that:

    The way to get off of fossil fuels that are finite, dirty, environmentally destructive, national security compromising, and greenhouse gas producing, [is] to attack almost every other idea with random, unsupported and misleading assertions, and work and spend money to produce more fossil fuels.

    Plus, not to mention, any coverage at all by an otherwise obviously quite exceptional media on science issues, that actually covers science and energy, is really just:

    The personality-driven political gossip of the day

    . Rather than focusing on the resources that “God created right underfoot on American soil.” And if in 20 years we are actually able to increase our domestic production of oil by the three percent that the EIA predicts that we may be able- which will do wonders for moving the market off of oil — then the 60 percent that we import will naturally disappear.

    Know why? Because that, unlike developing smarter energy alternatives, will allow us to “control our energy supply and our environment.” See, if we use more coal and oil, that allows us to control our environment.

  3. Zython says:
    January 18, 2010 at 3:16 am

    Or, you know, invest into alternative energy sources. But hey, if you want to spend $12 a gallon to line the pockets of Saudi princes, be my guess.

    Poor AO, why do you hate America so much?

  4. durablend says:
    January 18, 2010 at 10:55 am

    Because he/she/it is annoyed that he can’t have it like the Leave It To Beaver ideals of the 1950s that never really existed.

  5. Duros62 says:
    January 18, 2010 at 12:16 pm

    If we could get cars to run on c9onservative batshit insanity, our cars would be able to fly and go 400 mph.