780 million liters of crude oil spilled / Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Failure

Modern life would not be possible without liquid hydrocarbons fuels derived from crude oil by petrochemical refining, alkylation, catalytic cracking, isomerization, fractional column distillation & other processes utilized at oil refineries.

Think gasoline, diesel, propane, natural gas, liquified petroleum gas & similar combinations of carbon & hydrogen in chains or strings of different lengths. Crude oil contains thousands of different chemical compounds & many chemical elements other than carbon & hydrogen.

All the easy gold & oil have already been mined. Today we have electric vehicles with rechargeable batteries from Tesla in California & others trending as the technology to replace the 2.0L turbo gasoline engine that's most popular with the world's automakers today!

Combustion of Hydrocarbons (ideal impractical example for study & learning)

Let us take Methane, a hydrocarbon gas CH4 as a simple example. When pure methane combusted with pure oxygen O2, the production of CO2 & H20 (gas) + heat & pressure & light energy are released

2 CH4 (gas) + 2O2 (gas) = 2 CO2 9 (gas) + 2 H2O (gas) + Delta T || ideal reaction not in real world

Air in Earth's atmosphere contains mostly nitrogen 78% & oxygen 21% & argon 1%, so when the engine sucks in a mixture of air & fuel into its intake & then compresses it with its piston & ignites the close to stochiometric (ideal mix ratio of air & fuel) mixture when the piston just past top dead center such that the expanding combustion pressure generating flame front pushes down on the crank shaft to transmit rotational torque through the transmission to the wheel & tires so they can produce traction acceleration of the vehicle. I skipped the valves & ECU & other parts; we are only explaining that engines convert the chemical energy of the gasoline mixed with air the oxidizer to produce heat & pressure to perform work that's translated to vehicular motion.

An engine rotates between many hundreds to many thousands of revolutions per minute. A symphony of mechanical elegance blended with electronics, the modern 2.0 L 4 cylinder turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine makes use of exhaust gas heat pressure recovery to empower the turbocharger to create intake boost pressure to shove more air into the engine where the gasoline direct injectors squirt a finely atomized droplet pattern with improved combustion efficiency, more power & lower emissions, where the exhaust gases are then passed through a catalytic noble metal enhanced catalytic converter that converts toxic exhaust gases into nontoxic gases.

Due to the fact that gasoline contains impurities, the engines contain flaws & not always operating as the best speed or in ideal conditions & air mostly nitrogen with some oxygen, exhaust products of combustion contain unburned fuel called HC or hydrocarbon / fuel vapors or fumes, oxides of nitrogen or NOX that form from reactions between nitrogen gas with the combustion reaction & other pollutants like SOX or sulfur oxides. Most of the pollutants are present in exhaust a tiny fraction of trace emissions, like PM 2.5 very toxic to human lung cells, as most of the exhaust products are just carbon dioxide & water vapor.

CO2 emissions are big political topic worldwide in the context of Climate Change due to the fact that 8 billion people burning wood, coal, oil & gas & other forms of carbon are releasing billions of tons of CO2 where it goes into the atmosphere to capture more of the Sun's energy input to Earth as a greenhouse gas. Air pollutants are a serious public health problem because they sicken people with a range of different preventable diseases & disorders like COPD & lung cancer, while also causing brain & kidney damage & other health problems.

Speaking of problems, mining oil from Earth's crust no easy feat anymore, like it was back when Edwin Laurentine Drake, also known as Colonel Drake, the first American to successfully drill for oil was out doing oil exploration. In the late 1800's & previously, crude oil seams were present at surface locations & people used it to waterproof materials & for other low volume local niche applications.

Early gasoline was very low quality by comparison to common E10 87 octane lead free gasoline sold widely in millions of gas stations in America today. Early engines had terrible compression so not much of the fuel energy could be extracted to power the vehicle. My 321 cc Yamaha MT-03 engine makes more power output that early car engines at the beginning of the 1900's. Back then low speed electric vehicles were vastly superior in most respects that gasoline engines vehicles.

Over time, the engines were improved faster than batteries for electric cars, so gasoline cars & trucks became faster & that made crude oil a valuable resource to empower the second industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution was powered by coal & steam engines & steam engine vehicles in the later 1800's were a luxury item that only the wealthiest ownership class could afford.

By the time Henry Ford offered the Model T at about $5000 USD2021eq, the price of his Model T made it affordable for normal working people to own a car & that ushered in the early Automotive Era in American history, back in the 1940-50-60's significantly. Oil consumption became so vast in America that importing oil from the middle east & elsewhere became profitable, so global oil trade kicked off.
This is crass summarization of the history of oil, gasoline & automobiles but sufficient for this posting to convey the main idea. There is no free lunch in physics & now that all the easy crude gone & gasoline & diesel vehicles have been popularized globally, the quest to solve the unsolved problem of climate change shines a dim light on the future of carbon combustion energy, even though its very dominate in terrestrial vehicle applications today.

On April 20th 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, BP operated Macondo Prospect created the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, surpassing the Ixtoc I oil spill by 3 to 31%. The US federal government estimates that 4.9 Mbbl or 210 million US gallons) were discharged into the ocean waters, creating an enormous environmental disaster for marine wildlife in a popular fishing zone; regarded as one of the largest industrial environmental disasters in American history.

Being one of the wealthiest countries in history allowed America to launch an extensive massive response to attempt to protect beaches, wetlands & estuaries with skimmer ships, floating booms, controlled burns & millions of US gallons of oil dispersant. Lasting months, extensive damage to marine & wildlife habitats & related fishing & tourism industry occurred. Nearly 5 million lbs o oil material removed from beaches in Louisiana in 2013, double the efforts in 2012. 89km or 55 miles of shoreline were remediated loosely. 

Marine wildlife continues to suffer from the toxic effects of the oil spill & chemical waste & residue that contaminated ecosystems affected as of Dec 2021. Some animals dying at 6x their normal rate, reproduction inhibited by the rapid death of their offspring, the indirect costs of this oil spill will exceed the value of the oil lost. Numerous extensive investigations explored the causes of the explosion & record setting oil spill. 

Ultimately BP or British Petroleum was blamed for exacerbated cost cutting measure in pursuit of profit & neglect of health & safety of the workers & environment where they were operating the deep-water horizon oil rig. The rig operator Transocean & contractor Halliburton were also blamed. Inadequate safety systems, improper concrete mixes, undersized blowoff cutoff devices, & systemic root causes because of a lack of reforms in the industry practices & government policies around oil exploration.

BP pleaded to 11 counts of manslaughter, two misdemeanors & felony count of lying to congress. Agreeing to 4 years of government monitoring of the safety practices & ethics, the EPA announced that BP would be temporarily banned from new contracts with the US Government & the Department of Justice exacted a record setting fine of $4.525 billion in cash & other payments. The cleanup efforts & other damages, which are still ongoing today in 2021 have cost in excess of $65 billion. In April 2016 BP agreed to pay 20.8 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in US history.

I have to disclose a few personal facts & biases related to crude oil & petroleum. While I hold a Bachelor of Science of Environmental Science degree UW 2008, I am also an investor in different petroleum businesses. I also really like gasoline fuel, pure E0 gas distributed by CENEX via the Grange in Issaquah in my purchasing case, it provides power to my pressure washer, backup generator, both Toyota Prius cars, megs Honda PCX150 scooter & our 2021 Yamaha MT-03 motorcycle. I also own a 4 stroke gasoline weedwhacker & add fuel stabilizer to my gas cans & cycle gasoline through them quarterly to keep fresh fuel.

I also burn propane sporadically to melt aluminum cans in a 10lb hobby metal smelter with about 34kw of performance, much better than the 1500-1800 watt far more expensive electric hobby furnaces for melting scrap & recycled metal & they have a hard time melting scrap copper which I also do. I also have a wood burning camping stove & really like butane lighters & torches. I love engines & turbocharger & supercharging & turbines & anything energetic, chemical reactions, anything that burns as combustion of matches & other materials one of the only visible chemical reactions that normal people encounter. 

Furthermore, without oil, we could not even make electric vehicles, the batteries & electrolyte, the high-performance wire insulators, dash materials, airbags, pharmaceutical drugs, dye, adhesive, lubricants & all sorts of other things made from oil. Crude oil is a liquid black gold in many ways & created the largest most profitable industry by far in the history of human life on Earth. I also love nuclear reactors, solar PV modules, hydro damns, wind power, geothermal power & other renewables & sustainable energy & promote all these alternative energy sources especially for electricity production on my Twitter handle @cosmicinglewood! or on HAM radio networks as KJ7IOF