The entire Gulf of Mexico isn’t on fire, just one spot near an oil rig and right over a pipeline with a hole in it. Environmentalists are going totally spastic. The good news is there won’t be an oil spill. They’re calling it the “eye of fire.” No it isn’t an alien invasion or a portal to hell. Just because the ocean is burning is no big cause for alarm, the oil companies say. There will be lots of fish chowder around for a while though.
I know this might sound controversial, but maybe extracting fossil fuels from the seafloor (or anywhere really) is a bad idea pic.twitter.com/J4ur5MNyt1
— Brian Kahn (@blkahn) July 2, 2021
Just another day in the Gulf
The eerily bizarre scene is playing out just to the West of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The Mexican national oil company, Pemex, admits that “a gas leak from an underwater pipeline triggered a blaze.” That sounds harmless enough until you see the viral videos of a burning ocean.
“Tuesday is Soylent Green day,” the liberal left keeps quipping, suggesting the oceans are actually dying or something. The Gulf of Mexico supplies a heck of a lot of oil and natural gas. Once in a while, some of it gets where it’s not supposed to be.
Greenpeace types in their plastic Kayaks are freaking out about the “HUGE, bright orange flames shooting from the surface” of the Gulf. It looks like an erupting volcano they declare.
They also refuse to admit that if it was an all natural volcano, it would be spewing a lot more toxic things than the byproducts of burned natural gas. According to the USGS, “volcanic gases like sulfur dioxide can cause global cooling, while volcanic carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has the potential to promote global warming.”
The oil workers are happy that the blaze, only “150 yards from a drilling platform” has already been put out. “Nitrogen was reportedly used to control the fire.” Not a single injury was reported.
Mexican officials are assuring the Gulf watching environmentalists that “the incident didn’t lead to any oil spill.” Just natural gas that bubbled up, out, and was gone.
Out the same day
Pemex released a statement patting themselves on the back for having the catastrophe under control that same day. The fire in the Gulf started “at 5:15 a.m. local time Friday off the coast of Campeche, west of the Yucatan Peninsula” and was “put out by 10:45 a.m. local time.”
No “injuries or evacuations of the facility have been reported.” The company has already started an investigation into what went wrong.
Company officials admit that they may have a “long record of major industrial accidents” but they shut the valves until the Gulf rig gets fixed.
They hauled Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador out in front of the TV cameras to calm the progressive activists down. “It was an accident. We rule out that it was something intentional.” That’s good to know. “We are going to repair the damage.”
According to El Presidente, “the incident was due to a gas and nitrogen leak in a gas pipeline that exploded with rain, storm and electrical discharges.”
In other words the gas was leaking and bubbling up with nobody noticing until it got hit by lightning. Compared to what the Deepwater Horizon oil spill did to the Gulf of Mexico, this isn’t even a fart in the bathtub, no matter how spectacular it looks.