From: Wanda Ballentine <wandab@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Date: 31 Aug 92 23:16 PDT
Subject: Biggest bomb (#335) revisited
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1466601747:000:6024
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!wandab    Aug 31 23:16:00 1992


I found Joe Vialls' article, "The Biggest Bomb on Earth" very
alarming, considering that it looks like war could erupt in the
Middle East again any time.  So I sent it off to various
government officials.  Here is what I received from Senator
Packwood's office.  Any comments?

Review of Joe Vialls' Article
"The Biggest Bomb on Earth"

by William Happer
Director of Energy Research
Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of Energy
August 18, 1992

This is a ridiculous scare story about the supposed danger
of a massive fuel air explosion that could be triggered by
new U.S. air strikes near Kuwait. The author has strung
together a number of erroneous suppositions to reach his
false conclusions.

Fuel-air explosions (FAE's) occur when just the right amount
of a combustible gas like hydrogen or methane is thoroughly
mixed with air such that it will detonate rather than burn
when ignited. A detonation is a chemical reaction which
propagates into the unreacted medium at supersonic speeds,
while an ordinary burning front propagates at subsonic
speeds. A detonation produces a much more violent explosion
than burning. For example, when the spark plug of an
automobile engine ignites the fuel-air mixture in the
cylinder, the mixture is supposed to burn instead of
detonate. If the octane rating of the fuel is too low,
however, the fuel-air mixture in the cylinder will detonate
and the engine will "knock." It is very hard to get just the
right amount of fuel mixed with air to ensure detonation
instead of burning - or instead of no ignition at all.
Methane explosions in mines or dust explosions in grain
silos are usually burning processes rather than true
detonations, and much of their violence is due to the
confined space in which they occur.

Vialls states "As the Bush Administration girds itself for
another onslaught on Iraq, the increasing ambient air
temperatures in the Middle East ensure the silent release of
an ever increasing amount of gas from the lakes to the
atmosphere, steadily forming a gas cloud of truly mammoth
proportions" Getting the right fuel air mixture for
detonation in the cylinder of a gasoline engine is hard
enough but getting it right in large volumes of open air so
unpredictable that FAE's were never deemed militarily
useful. This is because the atmosphere itself is very
uncooperative. Most of the time the atmosphere causes either
too much or too little mixing even if a source of fuel gas
is present - which is not the case in Kuwait. During day
time when the sun is shining, the atmosphere rapidly
develops convection cells in which parcels of air, heated by
contact with the hot ground, rise like hot air balloons to
great altitudes. The air parcels cool as they rise because
they use up energy expanding into the lower-pressure
surrounding air. When the tops of the air parcels rise to
sufficient altitudes clouds form because of the cooling.
This convective mixing would dilute any gas released from
oil pools. Winds normally cause further mixing and dilution
of any gaseous fuel. The other extreme is a calm clear night
when the ground cools rapidly due to radiation into the
night sky. These are the conditions in which dew and frost
are formed, even in the desert. They are also the conditions
in which temperature inversions form. A layer of cooler air
hugs the ground and does not mix with warmer air many meters
above. Such a "stable" atmosphere also hinders mixing of
fuel and air. To think that the minuscule natural outgassing
of oil pools left over from the Gulf war would produce just
the right fuel-air mixture, not too lean, not too rich, is
fantasy.

Vialls states that "the crude oil can hold up to 25% gas."
First, let us be clear that the gas dissolved in the oil
rapidly escapes, much as carbon dioxide escapes into the air
from champagne, beer or Coke, which lose their fizz and go
stale if they sit in the open air for a few hours. Within a
few days, most of the volatile components of the oil are
released to the air and blown away. Furthermore, ultraviolet
light from the sun breaks chemical bonds in the molecules of
liquid oil. As the bonds reconnect, a complicated,
crosslinked polymer, similar to the bitumen of a blacktop
road, is formed and produces a tough skin over any liquid
oil below. The skin eventually becomes strong enough for a
man to walk across. Neither gas nor liquid petroleum is then
able to escape to the surface from any residual pools
beneath the skin. I am told that foolhardy people walking on
the skin of petroleum lakes sometimes fall through and are
thoroughly soaked in oil.

Vialls implies that oil is still escaping at the Rumaila
field: It is within this top security area that the oil
lakes have formed, partly because of the awesome pressure -
and thus the oil and gas outputs - feeding them continually
with more volume." This is nonsense. All damaged wells have
long since been capped, including those in the Rumaila
field. If Greenpeace observers were really denied access to
the Rumaila field, I would suspect that the reason had to do
with concerns about border security and public relations.
The Rumaila field is on the Iraqi border with most of the
field lying in Iraq. For years before the gulf war the
Iraqis have accused the Kuwaitis of excess pumping from
their small corner of the Rumaila field to siphon off oil
that rightly belonged to Iraq. The Iraqis have a point, and
the Kuwaitis might not care to draw attention to it. In
large oil and gas fields in the United States, wells are
drilled on either side of property lines as owners of
adjacent land parcels try to get the most benefit from a
common pool. You can trace the property lines by following
the wells.

In summary, Vialls is horribly confused because of his
almost complete ignorance of oil, gas, oil fields,
atmospheric dynamics, burning, detonation, the long history
of futile military attempts to use fuel-air explosives and
the reasons for the failures. "The Biggest Bomb on Earth" is
poorly researched science fiction.