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Oil spill- could void left by oil create a secondary disaster?
Has anyone considered what is going to fill the gap left by the oil? Once the oil is gone, there will be a big void. As oil is flowing out of the ground, it doesn't seem as if it is being replaced by water because of the pressure/bouancy of the oil. So, either a giant sink-hole, or crater when the floor caves in, or who knows what? 100,000 gallons a day is a LOT of displacement to consider. If this has been going on all this time at a fairly steady rate, when it caves if it's not stopped, couldn't it create a shockwave?
Maybe an earthquake? Or was that coincidence?
It appears that the worst thing that could happen, would be for them to screw up and make the leak worse by hitting the pipe with a robot... This is worse than the BP spilling coffee thing on Youtube!
3 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
There will NOT be a giant open cavern beneath the surface. Oil reservoirs are depicted this way on the news, where people are idiots, and in poor textbooks. In reality an oil reservoir is a matrix of porous rock within sedimentary sequences. The oil exists within these interconnected pores. When oil leaves the reservoir, pressure is lowered, but the rock continues to support itself.
Further, no reservoir even gets close to evacuating all of its petroleum. Petroleum does not like to flow, all it wants to do is equalize pressure. Oil companies inject high-pressure fluids (usually something as simple as seawater) to force the oil toward the production wells.
The *worst* thing that could happen, and is still unlikely to happen is some subsidence of the seabed above the reservoir. Subsidence is when the surface drops -- slowly -- a few feet or tens of feet in really horrible situations. It does not happen quickly, and it is not enough to create an earthquake, or tsunami, or anything else that we'd car about. For an example of subsidence, look at the Tuscon area of Arizona, where they're pumping too much water from their aquifer.
Nothing bad, geologically speaking, can come from the oil exiting the reservoir.
Source(s): Engineering geologist - lunaticLv 71 decade ago
If they never get the leak capped, the oil will continue to flow out until the pressure across the well head equalizes. That will leave the oil reservoir full but not at a pressure great enough to overcome sea pressure at the bottom of the Gulf at that depth.
- pzifissshLv 71 decade ago
Lunatic said, "...That will leave the oil reservoir full but not at a pressure great enough to overcome sea pressure at the bottom of the Gulf..."
The contents of the resevoir are liquid*, therefore incompressible. In order for the liquid to flow out on its own, something must be squeezing it out. The sea bed is---must be---settling, slowly, as the oil leaks out of the well. The oil resevoir is several miles beneath the sea floor, so the settling is going to be *WAY* spread out. Might be hard for anybody to detect who is not a trained geologist using sensitive instruments.
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*Even the "gas" is liquid under such pressure.
