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Good news from the Persian Gulf: the war is going so well that the sea itself has joined the fight. While Washington’s experts debate missile counts and the price of oil (around $115 for Brent on Friday, in case anyone in the White House is still checking), Karl Miller, who is actually on the ground in the Gulf, sent me a note this week that nobody in the briefing rooms seems to have read. Don’t underestimate the damage to the world’s crude tanker fleet, he wrote, and don’t underestimate the pollution now spreading through the Gulf and down the coast of Oman. “It’s an Exxon Valdez on steroids,” he told me. “This is a catastrophe in its own right.”
But I’m sure it’s fine. Let’s look at the numbers, just for fun.
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Eight Valdezes to a ship
A little arithmetic for the folks at the Pentagon. The Exxon Valdez spilled about 257,000 barrels of oil into Prince William Sound in 1989, and Americans are still talking about it. A single VLCC carries about two million barrels. So every supertanker sitting in the Gulf is roughly eight Exxon Valdezes waiting for a drone. And the Gulf is a shallow, nearly enclosed bathtub with lousy circulation. Whatever goes in, stays in. Steroids, indeed.
We’re already enjoying the preview. This week the UAE closed the beaches of Umm Al Quwain after a slick more than 22 miles long and more than 60 square miles in area washed ashore on the Khor Al Beidah peninsula. The UAE said, with admirable understatement, that the oil was “likely coming from a VLCC struck earlier in the month.” Fishermen have been advised to stay away from the fish.
Down the coast, Oman is hosting the Caroline Bezengi, a tanker carrying about 800,000 barrels that suffered a mysterious explosion on June 8, was abandoned by its crew and then drifted aground in, of all places, a marine nature reserve near Qibliyah Island, home to humpback whales and Socotra cormorants. It started leaking at the end of June. By August the slick covered hundreds of square miles. The whales were not consulted. Across the water, Iran is mopping up its own crude spill off Qeshm Island. Everyone gets a souvenir.
But who needs drinking water?
Here’s the fun part that the war planners seem to have skipped. The Arab Gulf states don’t just pump oil out of the sea. They drink the sea. Desalination supplies about 99 percent of Qatar’s drinking water, more than 90 percent of Bahrain’s, about 90 percent of Kuwait’s, 86 percent of Oman’s, 70 percent of Saudi Arabia’s and 42 percent of the UAE’s, according to figures compiled by CSIS and the Atlantic Council. The six Gulf states run about 3,400 desalination plants, a third of the world’s capacity, and more than 90 percent of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 of them. What could possibly go wrong?
Desalination plants have a small design quirk: they need clean seawater. When an oil slick reaches an intake, the plant has to shut down or risk wrecking its membranes and filters.
Read full article at link below:
https://sonar21.com/relax-its-only-an-exxon-valdez-on-steroids/
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