ANOTHER THOUGHT FOR MY READERS

June 20/2010-9:31-AM EST
   By : Isaac

    Well, I'm happy to report that I found intelligent life on the yahoo finance board, I'll let my home planet know about it later....they'll be stoked.....anyway..

 Here is how the conversation has gone so far, I hope he can continue to answer my questions, I'm very curious...

                ORIGINAL QUESTION POSED BY A YAHOO'ER:

 "  Has anyone proven the SPR facilities aren't leaking  ? "

                NEXT ANSWER, LOL :

             spr ?  ----anonymous blond on Yahoo...lol...,

                MY ANSWER :

S.trategic P.etroleum R.eserves

Oil and various hydrocarbon gas products like hydrogen, methane, ethane, propane hexane, etc, etc. under pressure, are stored in fragile underground artificially produced salt dome caverns on the Gulf coast. Natural gas is force-injected under great pressure into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, aquifers, and salt caverns for future use.Here is a link to a page with many technical papers showing how much leaking happens, as well as how it is responsible for causing earthquakes..

With such interesting titles as : Deep Mobile Gases/Relation to Earthquakes / Earthquake Predictions Based on Gas Flux / Content of Hydrocarbons from drilling mud as a function of tectonic activity.....go read them.

http://eti-geochemistry.com/flux/index.h...


So , all these underground leaky caverns in the area that is known to be seismically long over-due for a movement The New Madrid faultline. Another absolutely brilliant strategy

Why are they mined on the coast ?

They are mined on the coast in the hopes that when they leak, and they do, quite often, they will only be leaking right back into the natural hydrocarbon pathways that line our continental shelf. .
Construction of each cavern takes approximately two years. In a process called solution mining, they drill a well deep into a natural salt dome and begin injecting water into the well, where it circulates and dissolves the salt. They remove the very salty water, called brine, often by forcing high-pressure natural gas into the cavern to displace the liquid into the water table.Next option is to reinject it through another well into existing salt water reservoirs located in porous or fractured rocks about a mile deep, well below the base of the area’s drinking water table or release it in an under-sea " brine diffuser " in the Gulf.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is an emergency fuel store of oil maintained by the United States Department of Energy. The US SPR is the largest emergency supply in the world with the current capacity to hold up to 727 million barrels The current inventory is displayed on the SPR's website. As of August 31, 2009, the current inventory was 724 million barrels .

Every single bit of it is stored in caverns that have been " mined " out of the natural salt domes found everywhere on the G.o.M. coast. They are mined using high pressure water and then the brine is forced-injected either, into the water table, or at sea in the G.o.M. in sub-sea " brine diffusers " There are also many inland storage sites. Additionally, there are massive amounts of compressed gases being stored . Apparently, various companies have been hollowing out the salt dome deposits in the ground on the Gulf Coast for some time.

A few specific examples.. one such structure is a salt dome structure that begins 3,700 feet beneath the ground and extends to a depth of 14,000 feet. Beginning 500 feet below the top of the salt dome, there are two caverns that each have a diameter of 265 feet and depth of 1,300 feet. In Erath, La, there are two caverns 7.5 Billion cubic feet working gas capacity.


                           YAHOO'ER RESPONSE :

  " Strategic Petroleum Reserve - I can believe SPR theft is a possibility, but not from this distance."

                            MY NEXT QUESTION :

have you ever seen a map of the hydrocarbon pathways under the southeast US.....?

They extend from 100's of miles inland all the way to the deep gulf....and salt dome storage leaks are a huge problem, there are many D.O.E. papers out there to read that talk about it..

They've been using underground salt cavern storage for 60 years.

" A relatively large number of salt caverns are used for fluid hydrocarbon storage, including an extensive set of facilities in the Gulf Coast salt domes for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) Program. My attention is focused on the SPR caverns because of available histories that detail events involving loss and damage of the hanging string casing. The total number of events is limited, making the database statistically sparse. The occurrence of the events is not evenly distributed, with some facilities, and some caverns, more susceptible than others......."

Look at this way....

Liquefied gas deep underground is held in a liquid state under pressure.

Liquids follow the path of least resistance

The hydrocarbon pathways on the G.o.M. extend from several hundred miles inland..to the deep Gulf.

Liquefied natural gas in a salt cavern deep underground will follow the path of least resistance when it encounters cracks. It will go where it can.....which is into the natural hydrocarbon flows. The laws of thermodynamics state it. When gas under pressure meets these flows, it joins them...resistance is futile.

                  MY NEW FRIENDS ANSWER, (THANK YOU, NEW FRIEND )

  " Light hydrocarbons rise to the top and are unlikely to travel downward, so wouldn't contribute to gas pockets in the ocean substrate. The gas pockets floating on top of the oil in the substrate are a result of biological activity from the original deposits."

                         MY NEXT QUESTION :

  "  Yes , but salt dome storage gases are held at the bottom of the caverns by denser gases injected into the caverns on top, or so the docs I've read say........they are 18,000' deep+ for a lot of these caverns....that doesn't make a difference in how they flow when they meet hydrocarbon flows ? ...I mean admittedly, my knowledge of chemistry is lacking ...explain this to me please, I'm not trying to be a jerk....I just don't understand....and I want to know.. "

                                    RESPONSE :

Methane is the lightest of the species, it will travel to the top even if the vapor pressure is high enough to keep it in liquid form due to partial pressures.

Here's a starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_pre...

                            MY NEXT QUESTION :

as per Wikipedia.. " Gases will dissolve in liquids to an extent that is determined by the equilibrium between the undissolved gas and the gas that has dissolved in the liquid "

As per the D.O.E. on salt dome storage and gas equilibrium underground..

" It is still unknown how long it takes for various products to reach equilibrium with the ground temperature. "

I appreciate the point to the right direction for my research, it's just that I believe from the things I've read , that there is more to the story...

Leakage from Underground Storage Reservoirs
Leakage from an Underground Salt Dome
Leakage from a Mined Propane Storage Cavern
Barometric Relationship to Gas Flux
Migration Timing Related to Pressure Pulse
Injection of Helium Tracer into Cavern
Leakage from an UGC Reactor
Injection of Helium Tracer into UGC Reactor
"Hydrocarbon Spots"
Deep Mobile Gases/Relation to Earthquakes


http://eti-geochemistry.com/flux/index.h...

It just seems that there are deeper ( no pun intended ) forces at play here....

                                   RESPONSE :

All I'm saying is if the leak were at the bottom, that's where the heavier hydrocarbons would likely be due to gravitational separation forces. The species leaking from the storage vessel would depend on where the leak was.

For instance, an N2 duer has both liquid and gaseous taps, the former at the top and the latter at the bottom. If you were to have a gradient of species in the duer, you could separate each depending on where you placed your tap.

It might be helpful to consider the process of thermal or cryogenic distillation, and honorable mention but little off tangent, catalytic separation is very interesting.

                   HE ADDED THIS TO THE ABOVE ABOUT 30 SECONDS LATER.

Here's another subject to help zero in on the dynamics involved:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_poin...

I think it's pretty obvious that BP wasn't anticipating such a large volume of lighter hydrocarbons in the top of this well, and at some point, I'm thinking, the balance point was disrupted causing a rapid change from perhaps solid(crystalline?) state -> liquid state -> gaseous.

                           MY NEXT QUESTION :

Thank you, let me also ask you this since you have a brain and some patience...

Do you think there is a correlation between this :

" We focus on shocks driven by Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs) which heat the solar wind and accelerate particles. This study focuses specifically on the heating of heavy ions caused by these shocks."

http://solar.physics.montana.edu/cgi-bin...

Do you think that DC coupling between a charged ionosphere and the magnetosphere could have any effect on excitation of the electrons that make up covalent bonds....if I am describing it wrong...forgive my ignorance...

It seems that geomagnetic activity is directly tied to solar storms and heavy ions.

                                 RESPONSE :
 
"  Anyway it's late as hell, thank you for helping to educate me. I will read the wiki articles in the morning you got me curious about volumetric expansion. "

                                 HIS RESPONSE :

  " Do you think that DC coupling between a charged ionosphere and the magnetosphere could have any effect on excitation of the electrons that make up covalent bonds..."

Well, you're perhaps describing potential sources of "static" electricity, but I would drop the "DC" terminology as it implies a steady state condition. To build up a charge, the system cannot be completely static.

Reminds me of the space shuttle experiment where they extended a lengthy conductor from the flight path, but I've since forgotten the parameters of the experiment.

                            MY NEXT QUESTION :

Thanks again, for your information, ....as for the DC coupling....Very interesting here, you might get a kick out of reading it....literally,lol.....might be the paper you are referring to.

written by :

Joseph E. Borovsky

Space and Atmospheric Sciences Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico

John Bonnell

Space and Atmospheric Sciences Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico


" The dc electrical coupling of flow vortices and flow channels in the magnetosphere to the resistive ionosphere "

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/19...

It's why I asked you about electron excitation in covalent bonds.

If these solar storms we have been having as of late are bombarding our ionosphere with heavy ions...ulp...does it mean that flux is influenced by the passage of this charge ?

Hopefully I can have the opportunity to pick your brain some more, it's one of the few I found on this board.

Thanks, Isaac,

                           MY LAST STATEMENTS :

A little bit about gravitational separation.

" It is well known that the molecules of a gas or liquid arc- in continual motion and that their average kinetic energy depends only on the temperature, not on the chemical properties of the molecules. Thus in a gas made up of a mixture of two isotopes the average kinetic energy of the light molecules and of the heavy ones is the same. Since the kinetic energy of a molecule is (1/2)mv2, where m is the mass and v the speed of the molecule, it is apparent that on the average the speed of a lighter molecule must be greater than that of a heavier molecule. "

"Obviously there is no feasible way of applying mechanical forces directly to molecules individually; they cannot be poked with a stick or pulled with a string. But they are subject to gravitational fields and, if ionized, may be affected by electric and magnetic fields. Gravitational forces are, of course, proportional to the mass. "

" Besides gravitational or electromagnetic forces, there are, of course, inter-atomic and intermolecular forces. These forces govern the interaction of molecules and thus affect the rates of chemical reactions, evaporation processes, etc. In general, such forces will depend on the outer electrons of the molecules and not on the nuclear masses. "

This is why I ask about the relation between solar flares >to our ionosphere>to our magnetosphere >

Gas flux/electron excitation/gravity separation by way of DC coupling...

It is well known in geomagnetic and electrodynamic studies that that solar winds have great effects on our magnetosphere..

Great interview with Piers Corbyn astrophysicist
for WeatherAction, who specialize in solar wind forecasts, and use their models for climate predictions on the Earth weather system's.

http://sc25.com/index.php?id=10&linkbox=...

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It is my belief that some things are not being reported in the media....what else is new..?

                                              - Isaac N.