Comments on Solving the Gulf Oil Spill with Hay / Straw

Gary Schafer, 24 May 2010

A couple of guys from ??? have devised a solution to cleaning up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It was even featured on a short commentary by Bill Nye "the Science Guy", who did a short stint working on oil clean-up boats. How much expertise does that give him to comment on the solutions proposed? Don't know. But one of the things that struck me was that he said the problem with many of these solutions is that they won't "scale". What that means is that the solutions look good when tried in buckets, fish tanks, and large salad bowls, but it will be much more difficult to make them work on a oil slick that is "10 nautical miles by 20 nautical miles", as Bill Nye stated.

My problem with Bill Nye's response is that I don't know that he really backed up his statement well. I'm not certain I'll do much better, but I'm going to try.

To start, the problem is numbers. How much oil has escaped and is currently in the Gulf? How much oil did the two guys in the video pour into the bowls? And how much straw or hay did they put in? I'll make some assumptions. I'm guessing that the two guys in the "oil spill solution" video poured about 1 pint (1/8th of a gallon) into each bowl. The guy on the right then put a handful of hay or straw into each bowl. How much is a "handful"? I'm going to take a SWAG (Google that if you don't know what it means.) that a "handful" is about 1/4 of a pound. That leaves the question of, "How much oil has gotten out of the broken pipe?" I'll go with this article that says somewhere between 6 - 11 million gallons. I'll use the smaller number of 6 million gallons. That's 48 million pints. Given that our "handful" was 1/4 pound of hay or straw, that means we'll need (48 million)*(1/4) = 12 million pounds of hay or straw in order to clean up the majority of the oil. How much of our production is that?

Well, despite my best efforts, the web designers at the Department of Agriculture have made certain that I cannot get the hay data production numbers of the latest years. So, I'll use another web site. It says that, for all of 2002, total hay production for the United States was 152.6 million tons. That's (152.6 million)*(2000 pounds/ton) = 305.2 billion pounds. Therefore, if my numbers are accurate, then we'd need on the order of (12)/(305200) = 3.93x10^-5 or 0.00393 % of the total US hay production to make it work. Even if my numbers are off by two orders of magnitude, we're talking only 0.4% of the entire US hay production. For an emergency like this, I could see setting that much aside. To me, the volume of hay required would not be an issue. Perhaps it would be a boon to the hay and straw farmers.

Which begs the next question, "How would it be dispersed?" You've got 12 million pounds of hay and you need to disperse it over 200 nautical miles of ocean. Part of the problem is that you can't just send a boat into the slick. Boats will only work on the perimeter of the oil. Helicopters? The Mil-26 has capacity of 88,000 pounds. Subtract the weight needed for the equipment to actually carry the hay and we'll round it out to 80,000 pounds. Let's also assume that we would need helicopters to spread 90%, or 10.8 million pounds of hay. The ships on the perimeter would do the rest. That would mean that it would require (10.8 million)/(80 thousand) = 135 sorties to disperse the straw. Hmmm. That's doable, I believe. So it appears to me that dispersing the hay would work if we can actually get the helicopters needed.

One of the things I noticed in the video was that the guy was constantly stirring the hay with a large sifter. I don't know how that would work. I can't even imagine Mike Rowe jumping on that task. Otherwise, you'd be hoping the hay and oil would come into contact with each other. That would work for the oil that's on the surface, but what about the majority of the oil underneath the surface? Also, did you notice how a lot of oil went off to the side? It was dispersing. This is another problem that I don't see being addressed in the video. Getting the oil and hay into contact, which the guys in the video did by stirring, is an issue.

Finally, picking up the oil-soaked hay. The guys suggested things like fishing vessels. I'm not certain how well that would go over. Would you want the same boat from which your steamed clams and fried shrimp originated to be used to clean up crude oil? Me neither. So picking up the oil, considering that we're now talking about 12 million pounds + (6 million gallons)*(7 pounds per gallon) = 54 million pounds or 27 thousand tons of oil-soaked hay is not a straightforward problem. The big questions then are (a) how do you pick up the oil-soaked hay and (b) how do you transport it?

Lastly, I'll remark on one of the first things said in the video. That's the idea that these guys would like to "have the job". If by that they mean that their company would like the job, well, I'd have to ask, "How big is your company?" This is going to be a taxxing endeavor. I think it will take more than two guys.

There you have it. Discuss.

Using Gimp to Create a Fadeout in an Image

Figure 1. This is the initial image, a picture of the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, just north of the Rialto Bridge. You can use this image and compare my results with yours, or you can use your own picture. Your choice.

Figure 2. This is Gimp's Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo window.

Figure 3. This shows the context menu that opens when you right-click on a layer in the "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" window.

Figure 4. This is the "Add Layer Mask" window.

Figure 5. "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" window showing the layer with the added layer mask.

Figure 6. "Toolbox" window showing the Foreground and Background colors.

Figure 7. The Blend tool in the Toolbox window.

Figure 8. The Blend tool in the Toolbox window.

Figure 9. The image with a fadeout going horizontally across.

Figure 10. Context menu for layers.

Gary Schafer, 21 May 2010

Gimp is one of the better image processing programs around. The problem is that it does not have a good user interface. To help correct that deficiency in a small way, I'm going to walk you through how to create a fade-out in an image. To start, we'll use a picture I took during a trip to Venice in 2009. I took it as the wife and I were in a gondola in the Grand Canal just north of the Rialto Bridge.

A layer mask is a grayscale cover that fades out the image layer it is tied to. In a layer mask, white means the image is fully visible (opaque); black means the image is fully faded (transparent).

Start by looking at the "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" window. If you click on the "Layers" tab (which appears to be a stack of white sheets of paper at the top of the window), you'll see a layer marked as "Background". If you right-click on that layer, a context menu will show up. One of the options is "Add Layer Mask", as shown in Figure 3. Left-click on that option. When you do, a small window entitled "Add Layer Mask" will open up, as shown in Figure 4.

In the "Add Layer Mask" window, select "White (full opacity", then click "Add" at the bottom of the window. You won't see any change in the picture, but if you look in the "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" window, you'll now see a small, white window next to the small thumbnail of your picture, as shown in Figure 5.

The way that the layer mask works is that it a grayscale to determine how much of the image is faded. The color white is used to show that part of the picture fully. The color black is used to fade it out completely. To create a gradual fadeout, we're going to use the "Blend" tool to create a gradient from black to white (or white to black, as your preference may be).

In a layer mask, white means the image is fully visible (opaque); black means the image is fully faded (transparent).

We'll demonstrate the fadeout feature by having the image fade from right to left. To start, look at the Foreground and Background colors, as shown in Figure 6. What you want is to have black in one color and white in the other color. The color that is completely visible in the Foreground color, meaning the other color is the Background color.

Next, select the Blend tool from the Toolbox window, as shown in Figure 7. In the bottom half of the Toolbox window will be various settings you can use for the Blend tool. For this example, select Mode = "Normal", Opacity = "100%", Gradient = "FG to BG (RGB)", Offset = "0.0", Shape = "Linear", Repeat = "None", and check the box for Dithering. Leave the box for Adaptive Supersampling unchecked.

Move your cursor over the image. Note that it's a cross. Move the cursor to the left side of the image. Somewhere near the left edge and about halfway up, left-click the mouse and hold it. Drag the mouse over to the right edge, keeping it at the same height on the image. This is shown in Figure 8. Now release the mouse. As soon as you do, you'll see that the image is faded on the left and more opaque as you move to the right. This is shown in Figure 9.

To finish this tutorial, right-click on the layer in the "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" window again. The context menu will pop-up again. This time, left-click on the selection for "Apply Layer Mask" as shown in Figure 10. That will apply the layer mask to the image. At this point, you can save the image. However, if you want to save the transparency, you'll need to use an appropriate format that allows transparencies to be saved. My favorite is the PNG (Portable Network Graphics), an open license file format. If you don't care about the transparency, you can save it using the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format. The JPEG format can provide smaller files, though at a cost of more compression.

I hope you've found this tutorial useful. Best of luck to you!

Here's a Random Fact...

The 9/11 Count: