API Publ 4691:1999 pdf download.American Petroleum Institute -Environmental, Health, and Safety Mission and Guiding Principles
Consider this scenari..an oil tanker has had an offshore accident and is releasing its cargo. It is your job to recommend response options to protect the sensitive nearshore environment. One of the response op- tions you are considering is chemical dispersants. Although you have worked on oil spills in the past, dealing with these spills is only one facet of your job which has wide ranging responsibilities. You want to have a good understanding of what happens to the oil when it is spilled and how dispersants can change that, but you may not be a biologist or chemist by training, and much of the information you have available is very technical. This scenario is all too common. As a decision-maker involved in oil spill response, you have received extensive on-the-job training, but you don’t live and breathe oil spills and don’t use your oil spill training ev- ery day. Consequently, much of the literature and information available to assist you during planning and actual response operations is too tech- nical, too long, and does not help resolve your questions and concerns. You need short summary reports which accurately but concisely provide the answers you need to help make a decision regarding the use of dispersants during an oil spill. This booklet, the first in a series of three, helps fill that need.
This scale (ranging from essentially O to more than 60; Table 1) can provide insight as to the type of oil spilled and how it will generally react in the environment. In general, the larger the API gravity value, the greater amount of light-weight components an oil or refined product has (Figure 1). With decreasing API gravity values (less than 17.5), which means increasing the amount of medium and heavy-weight com- ponents, the oil or refined product is likely to remain in the system. As an oil or refined product weathers (components are lost to the environ- ment), the API gravity of that oil will decrease. With an oil that has an API gravity at or near 10, additional weathering may result in the oil having an API gravity value less than or equal to the surrounding water. The weathered oil may sink, or it may become neutrally buoyant (nei- ther sink nor float on top, but stay as a unit within the water column) (Scholz et al., 1994).
API Publ 4691:1999 pdf download
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