Last week I went briefly through the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Even though that tragedy — rightfully — got tons of national media attention, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many industrial power generation accidents happening throughout the world.
Why, not that long ago there was a pretty big scare out in the British North Sea, though there weren’t 24/7 news updates about it.
One of the bigger natural gas drilling wells suffered a significant setback when it sprung a natural gas leak. All of the drilling platforms for a several mile radius had to be evacuated due to worries about possible explosions triggering similar disasters to the one from the Gulf of Mexico.
Unlike 2010’s Gulf tragedy, this North Sea leak has to do with a steady leak of natural gas rather than oil. Though, as we saw last week, gas leaks can quickly lead to massive complications.
One of the large concerns with this industrial power generation accident is that a steady natural gas leak will be extremely hazardous for the environment. Natural gas is a potent greenhouse gas, significantly worse than carbon dioxide. This leak has sprung up just as natural gas has seen a resurgence. The AP recently reported that there’s actually a giant surplus of natural gas, saying, “So much natural gas is being produced that soon there may be nowhere left to put the country’s swelling surplus.” And in the UK, where this recent leak occurred, Britain is in the midst of passing a $4.8 billion tax break to dismantle oil platforms and create natural gas wells.
So far, the leak is just a (rather large) cause for concern rather than a full-blown tragedy. But it will be interesting to see when reports come out as to the leak’s exact causes. Industrial power generation is not for the careless or unfortunate.
In the end, a big leak or explosion would, of course, be terrible. But it could be even worse. I recently came across the strange case of Derweze, also known as the "Door to Hell" (pictured at the top of this post). It resulted from a 1970 Soviet drilling accident in a tiny village in Turkmenistan. When a drilling rig accidentally created a huge hole in the ground that swallowed up the platform, the drillers set the hole on fire to burn off any excess gas. Well, it turns out there's a lot of excess gas, since the hole is still burning today. It is over 230 feet around. No one knows when or if it will stop burning.
