A Brief Note On Hazardous Chemical Research Paper

Ben Warner pd. 6 Hazardous Chemical research paper Our society runs on oil. It powers our cars, planes and trains, it’s used to build our workplaces and homes, even forming the plastics of our children’s toys, cell phones, and even the very laptop that this essay was typed on. But, oil is not an unlimited resource. As our society’s needs for oil keep growing and growing, the need for more of this oil to be extracted from the earth also increases, leading to new and complex ways of extracting oil. Fracking, tar sand extraction, and offshore oil rigs are all technologies developed solely to fuel our society’s ever-growing demand for petroleum products. However, sometimes the pressure of demand is so strong on the developers of these methods†¦show more content†¦The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, often simply called the BP spill, released an estimated 168 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico (EPA), which caused near-irreparable harm to t he ecosystems and organisms around it. In addition, the entire incident could have been prevented had basic safety measures been taken during the rig’s construction. Science was applied to the creation of the rig and the extraction of the oil from the seafloor in many ways, including many alleged safety measures to prevent an ecological disaster such as the one that occurred. First, some background on oil rigs. An oil rig is a buoyant platform connected to the ocean floor by many anchors, and a drill pipe, a long shaft within a shaft that rotates, drilling down through the bedrock layer to extract crude oil and natural gases (Popular Mechanics). An additional mechanism to the rig is the blow out preventer, or BOP, (pictured above) directly above the ocean floor. This machinery is used to prevent any uncontrolled surges of oil from reaching the surface and becoming a potential hazard (Chemical Safety Board). The blow out preventer is made of 3 parts: annular preventers, pipe r ams, and blind shear rams. Pipe rams are large rubber rings that can close around the drill shaft to prevent the flow of oil in the outer pipe, called the annular space (shown above), which carries water and a mixture called drill mud down towards the drilling site