What is Oil??

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What is Oil??

• Collection of hydrocarbon materials in
  sedimentary deposits
• Residues left behind from transformed marine
  microfossil sediments
• Diatoms, forams radiolaria
• Sediments are compressed and heated to create oil

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What is Oil??
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Geological Oil Traps
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Coal Oil Point Geology
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Oil in the Marine Environment

• Gas oil leases are 2nd biggest source of
  revenue for the U.S. (1 income tax)
• Leases are held by state inshore of 3 nm by the
  feds between 3 200 nm
• History goes back about 100 years or so

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Oil Fields in CA Current
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Oil Fields in CA Current
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Oil Platforms
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What do oil platforms do?
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Drilling
Drilling brings up muds Muds are dirt
fluid Muds settle to seafloor Operational
platforms bring up oil produced water (5 to 20X
oil!!)
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What does the So Cal Bight Get?
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Seeps?
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Seeps?
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Coal Oil Point Seeps
Acoustic backscatter of rising bubbles from Coal
Oil Point seeps
Seep vent image from submersible
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Oil Pollution?
World wide Millions of gallons per year
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Oil in the Marine Environment

• Adverse effects
• Ingested by marine organisms, birds, shell fish
• Leads to elevated mortality rates
• Possible long-term effects
• Covers feathers and fur of birds mammals

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Oil Toxicity

• Crude Oil
• effects limited in time
• more biodegradable
• Refined Oil
• refining concentrates the more biologically
  active components of oil
• more damaging

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Year Accident Location Amt. comments
1969 Oil well S. Barbara 700,000 gal washed ashore
1976 Argo Merch. Nantucket 7.6 mill gal
1979 IXTOC I, blowout G. Mexico, June 3, 1979-Mar 23, 1980 140 mill gal plugged well with steel balls, finally capped it w/steel sombrero
1989 Exxon Valdez Prince William Sound, Alaska 11 mill gal killed 30,000 birds, 100 eagles, 900 sea otters
90-91 Gulf War Persian Gulf gt126 mill gal Intentional
2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico 4.9 mill barrels 205 mill gal Blow out/explosion Killed 11 men
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What happens to oil?
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Oil Cleanup
Mr. Clean
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Cleaning up Oil Spills in Ocean

• Dispersants
• breaks down oil chemically
• works on fresh, small oil spills.
• Booms
• floating skirt suspended down in the water
• stops the oil from passing intodelicate areas
• Slick-lickers
• conveyor belt of oil absorbing material
• sucks oil squeezes it out

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Cleaning up Beaches

• Most oil clean-ups on the beach actually do more
  harm than good
• Can harm surviving organisms
• Mobilizes the oil
• Not one method works the best

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Cleaning up Beaches

• High Pressure Water
• "spray" surfaces clear of oil
• harms surviving plants animals
• Dispersants
• Chemical agents to break up oil
• Useless on sand or pebble beaches
• Removal
• Remove contaminated sand or pebbles
• Straw or other cut vegetation
• Use straw absorbs oil

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Deepwater Horizon Spill
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Deepwater Horizon Spill
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Fig. 1 (A) Locations of the sampling stations
relative to the well head, overlaid on a Google
Earth image of the site.
D L Valentine et al. Science 2010330208-211
Published by AAAS
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Fig. 1 (A) Sampling stations overlaid on a Google
Earth image highlighting the area of the
intrusion.
J D Kessler et al. Science 2011331312-315
Published by AAAS
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Fig. 3 Model results from a one-dimensional
time-dependent model of (?) average DO anomaly
from CH4 respiration (µM reduction in the
intrusion layer), (?) average CH4 concentration
(µM), and () first-order CH4 oxidation rate
constants (days-1) in the intrusion layers.
J D Kessler et al. Science 2011331312-315
Published by AAAS
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Fig. 3 (A) Comparison of the oxygen anomaly
derived from Winkler titrations with normalized
hydrocarbon anomalies derived from variation in
CH4/C2H6 and CH4/C3H8.
D L Valentine et al. Science 2010330208-211
Published by AAAS
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Oil in CA Current

• Big business (govt business)
• Formation extraction
• Coal Oil Point Seeps
• Oil spills their importance
• How to clean this up