COMMENT FROM A FORMER EMPLOYEE OF SHELL OIL USA
I read the Huffington Post article about a hypothetical oil spill from a Shell well ‘under the ice’.
I have a couple of facts for you about the oil at Prudhoe Bay the author neglected to look up that make that story implausible. Any well drilled by Shell will have pretty much the same reservoir temperature, and the oil should have similar properties.
At Prudhoe Bay the reservoir temperature is about 225 degrees F, or about 110 degrees C. That is above the boiling point of water. The point here is that oil from any blowout under sea ice will be HOT and will melt through the sea ice to form a large pool of oil. The other point I would like to make is that the ‘pour point’ of Prudhoe Bay oil is around 0 degrees C, that is 32 degrees F. Pour point is the temperature at which the oil solidifies. Prudhoe Bay crude has a gravity somewhere around 21 API, and has about 10% asphaltines. As the name implies, that is the stuff tar and asphalt are made of.