Slashdot Mirror
How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill?
Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.
We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.
Yet we still need oil, so we'll keep pumping. Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs, and we complain when we need to pay more for gas. Well, we can't have it both ways. If we want to live 25 miles from where we work, we're going to have to pay for it. If we don't pay for it at the pump, then we'll have to pay for it when a shared resource, like the ocean, is destroyed.
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
And how are they going to raise rates when none of their competitors face a multi-billion dollar charge?
I think they take a charge and their shareholders eat much of the cost this time. No way around it.
Then if anything comes out regarding culpability for the disaster, the shareholders can sue the executives for breach of fiduciary duty.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Oh, we're far from facing the death of the oceans. Even acidification and warming and ocean current changes won't do that.
What the added oil is is another stressor to the system.
Instead we'll see a slow collapse of traditional fisheries, meaning lots of people going poor and hungry, and Red Lobster offering all-you-can-eat Giant Squid and tilapia dinners.
That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.
* * *
One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.
Not BP's equipment, nor BP's procedures.
They're pretty much being forced to take responsibility for the accident, but I have to question whether they deserve the opprobrium being heaped upon them.
It is very similar to the Ixtoc pemex 'spill' of 1980. It flowed for almost a year before they got it closed. It ruined the Texas coast for years, You couldn't even walk on the beach without taking a can of kerosene to wash the tar off your feet. That leak was at less than 200 feet. This one is at 5000.
I knew it was a huge disaster when it was reported as such with the addendum of at least 30 days to fix. At least. How would they even fix something like that? Has anything like this been attempted before?
Same kind of disaster happened last August 21 out by Australia.
> apocalypse
Well, if uncapped it is bound to start burning at some time, isn't?
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
When we first saw the images of the rig burning and collapsing is when we should have started our response (if not sooner). Instead we sat around saying "oh, that's too bad". Why didn't we get ships out there immediately with containment booms to hold back the slick? Was it really that outlandish to expect an oil leak to come from this?
Sure, containment booms (like we used for the Exxon Valdez) wouldn't have solved the problem on their own - and likely wouldn't have been able to contain all the oil coming up from 5,000+ feet down - but it would have at least been able to keep a good portion of it from spreading out.
This response has been pathetic, to be kind. Why we thought that the oil companies could honestly handle this on their own is beyond me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The spill has been described as a volcano at the ocean floor. I haven't read anywhere that anybody knows how to cap it.
My understanding is that since oil is not water soluble and floats that a capture device could be places over the "leak", the buoyant oil channeled to a surface collector and pumped out. That may be simpler than a cap that attempts to plug the "leak".
--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
Actually, it's been modified to Drill, after assuring that the requisite safety systems that were already supposed to be installed, are installed, baby Drill. This wasn't so much of a problem because of the rig itself blowing up as the safety systems which were supposed to have been installed at the drill site itself not being there.
Also, everybody notes the schtick about BP being forced to pay for this, but I'm pretty sure that won't suss out legally.
Here's my question: How come something like this hasn't happened before naturally, as the result of an earthquake or something? (Or has it, and we just weren't paying attention that century?)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Generally that channeling mechanism is a pipe of some sort, you can't just hope that the oil will float predictably upwards to a set location through a mile thick medium of salt water that has its own currents.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Oil is a supply constrained commodity. If everyone tries to buy from the other sources, the price will go up.
BP will find someone to sell to.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
mt
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?
It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.
It's swung so far in the direction of statism that "left" and "right" have become devoid of any real meaning. Both used to mean a set of political principles. Now they're just two different approaches to the same goal of expanding government. What is now called "right" wants to expand government for the purposes of defense and national security. What is now called "left" wants to expand government for the purposes of social engineering and entitlements. The result is the same and the two ideologies are little more than excuses or justifications.
The two-party system has done to politics what a reasonable person would expect a duopoly to do to a market. The former fails to serve the interests of the voter just like the latter fails to serve the interests of the customer. In both scenarios the voter and the customer are viewed as a means of maintaining power.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price.
...as we all learned in Econ 101. For those who went on to Econ 102, things are not so simple. There, they tought us about oligopoly, where markets are dominated by a small number of large players who can collude with each other to achieve results different than a perfectly competitive commodity market would achieve.
Most likely, prices will rise whether or not supplies are pinched. Why? Because every oil company knows that this crisis is a "cue" to restrict supplies in concert, and the public will accept the crisis as the obvious cause of increased prices.
The liability fight will probably not be quite what most expect. By statute, a rig owner's out-of-pocket liability for a spill is capped at around $75 million. In exchange, they pay a tax of about $0.08/barrel into a common fund which will be used to pay for claims beyond the cap. At the moment, the fund stands at about $1.6 billion. (Though the per incident payout from this fund is capped at $1 billion.)
The benefit of this system is, of course, that oil companies aren't exposed to devastating liability; instead, the liability is spread across he entire oil industry. This is also the problem: no individual oil company has an adequate economic incentive to avoid risky behavior.
caritj.org
Please believe me when I say BP isn't exactly lining up along every shore to take care of what's quite possibly about to make landfall.
Believe me, BP still needs to pay dearly -- but which would you rather do, wait until they get off their rears to mitigate the disaster, quite possibly permitting an awful lot of damage in the process, or step in to try to ensure its mitigation? Should people simply sit on their hands and wait for BP, or should they do what they can?
Me, I'm collecting toothbrushes and old bedsheets, to start. Sorry if that doesn't play into your plans!
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
I remember that leak-- as a child, every summer I used to go swimming off Padre Island (near Corpus Christi), and one time I came back from swimming with hot, sticky tar clumped all over my body. Put me off oceans for years.
Put another way, all this finger-pointing at BP by the politicians is a smokescreen so that we don't hold them accountable. "Drill, baby, drill", indeed.
Typical tanker capacity in WW2 was about 140,000 barrels per tanker.
This particular problem has been dumping oil out at a rate of about 5000 (not 50,000) barrels per day (so far).
So, sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean as this is expected to dump per month.
148 oil tankers were sunk during WW2. There was no ecological collapse as a result.
You do the math....
Note, for reference, that one barrel of oil is about 0.16 m^3. This particular incident (not sure whether explosion was cause or effect, and if cause, what cause of explosion was) translates to about 800 m^3 per day into the oceans. Or an oil slick 0.8 mm (yes, millimeter) thick over 1 square km of ocean per day.
If this goes on at this rate for two years, we're talking about a circle about 30km across having 0.8 mm (yes, millimeter) thick oil slick on it.
In other words, while this pretty much sucks for the Gulf Coast (where I live), the chances of this causing a worldwide collapse of ocean ecosystems is about ZERO.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
For the GP: Here's a thought. Drive a car? Heat your house with Oil? Ride a Train? Use Plastics?
Guess what, your hands are just as dirty as BP.
Um no. The GP did not set up a for profit company that didn't have safeguards against this, and it is not his personal responsibiity (or even within his power) to do so.
Responsibility rests with the company and the government. So stop handing the whips out and asking people to repent. It's not useful.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Geez, calm down. I'm just trying to get some perspective.
Yes, that much oil is enough to cause the extinction of humanity, if it finds its way into our bloodstreams.
Ocean currents are, fortunately, not that selective.
This botched well is shaping up to be a terrible mess but it will, if anything, destroy America's best beaches, and its most valuable wetlands. It won't destroy the ocean. I am just advocating for directing your concerns in the right direction, not for shrugging them off.
mt
I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."
There is something wrong with a lot of people that prevents them from accepting that we are mortal beings and the world, in many ways, is a dangerous place. It's like they want to live a modern lifestyle directly or indirectly involving such things as cars, other heavy machinery, electricity, oil, prepared foods, medicine, aviation and lots of other things but do not want to acknowledge the non-zero risk associated with them. Unfortunate events like this oil spill are considered newsworthy because they are so rare despite the vast multitude of things that can potentially go wrong, which is nothing other than an engineering triumph.
On a mundane level, we need and want oil so it's a question of where it will come from, not whether we will have it. Apparently it's more acceptable to some to pay foreigners to do the drilling for us than it is to also use our own resources. It's as though birds and fish in oceans in other parts of the world wouldn't suffer from an oil spill as much as the animals affected by this one, as though foreign oil workers killed by an explosion wouldn't be just as dead as our domestic oil workers who were killed by this one.
On a more philosophical level, we are mortal. One can deal with that by fearing every little thing that might bring harm. In that case, you should not drive and you probably shouldn't stay home either since many accidents happen there. Good luck having any real quality of life if you spend such a great deal of time worrying about the end of life. Or one can deal with this by taking reasonable precautions and then viewing mortality in a different light, as an incentive to taste life to the dregs and enjoy every moment you have and every person you know as much as possible during the time you have. The problem with media sensationalism and politics is that fear sells and there is little profit and political power to be had by seeing it this way. The one strong advantage this gives is that anyone who holds this viewpoint does it genuinely as an individual choice since it's exactly the opposite of what we are daily encouraged to believe.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Except Bobby "Volcano-Monitoring-Is-A-Waste-Of-Money" Jindal actively works to promote the downsizing of the federal government.
Why would the feds even figure into his complaint? Shouldn't he be complaining that BP wasn't adequately prepared and isn't doing all they could be?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Really? By that logic,
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nope, responsibility gets diluted like oil.
It makes no sense that riding a bike 3 miles and owning a hummer stuck in traffic 30 minutes every day are anywhere near each other in oil consumption. And even the H3 owners have less responsibility than the rig owners and operators themselves.
Using less or incorporating the cost of externalities into the price of oil (thus derivative products as well) is pretty unpopular though.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
FWIW, land based oil spills tend to stay in approximately the same place. Ocean based oil spills tend to circulate around the globe. The scales of disaster aren't commensurate. ... And also don't scale equally. E.g., at sea a small oil spill will be diluted so much that bacteria can degrade it to nothing before it's of any significance, but on land even relatively minor spills need to be attended to. But on land most of a large oil spill can be recovered at relatively minor cost, but in the ocean...there really isn't any way of recovering from a major spill, only of minimizing the damage.
OTOH, we're running out of locations to drill land based wells. And the ones that are left are either in remote areas (creating dangerous foreign dependencies) or otherwise undesirable (e.g., in a designated wilderness area).
The clearly best approach is to find an alternative. Or several alternatives. (Probably a mix of wind, water, solar, and nuclear will be optimal. [Do note both that I put nuclear in last place, and that I included it. Both are significant. And I left out some, like geothermal, because they are location specific. Water is intended to include both hydroelectric and tidal generators {and perhaps wave generators too}.])
P.S.: When listing alternate energy sources solar should, perhaps, be given more importance. I can't decide. And a lot depends on what turns up as a ballast. What do you do when it's overcast for a week in winter, and everyone turns on their heater? If you're dependent on solar, you better have a **LOT** of storage.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/01/nation/la-na-oil-spill-investigation-20100501
Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
sure... a nuke a few miles off the coast of Louisiana wouldn't do any environmental harm... /sarcasm
You're absolutely right. I'm Irish and to me, the Democrats are, at best, moderate and at worst, on the hard right compared to my left wing politics. In fact, the former American Ambassador to Ireland, Tom Foley, once called me "an out and out Marxist". Now I'm no Marxist, hell, I'm not even communist, but considering his politics and the huge swing to the right that Americans have had since Reagan, I took it as being that I was simply one of the few true left wingers that he had encountered in those early days of his tenure in Ireland!
There is no -1 disagree
Difference being, FEMA was nowhere to be seen right after Katrina, while the Obama government was the first responder, here, and BP had to be dragged out of its hovel to see what it had done.
I.e., Blanco was right, Jindal is wrong.
I don't think Kathleen Blanco sponsored a bill that asked for a hurricane to hit Louisiana, while Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act. He asked for it.
The Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act is discussed here. I like the following section on the safety of offshore drilling.
Myth: Drilling poses great risks of oil spills. The last major offshore oil spill in America occurred off of Santa Barbara in 1969. Critics of offshore drilling still refer to this incident, but much has changed in the interim. Drilling technology has greatly advanced in recent decades, and any new drilling will have to comply with strict safeguards that did not exist then.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, "[I]mproved production technology and safety training of personnel have dramatically reduced both blowouts and daily operational spills." Currently, only 1 percent of oil in North American waters came from offshore oil wells, far less than that attributable to natural seepage from the sea floor. Hurricane Katrina provided another reminder that fears of oil spills are overblown and anachronistic: Despite 170-mile-per-hour winds and massive waves striking many platforms, there was not a single significant offshore oil spill.
Thing I don't get is why every car today is still running on oil based fuels.
30 years ago, the LA times truck that pulled up each week to offload the "Calendar" sections we put in the Sunday papers. On the back, it had a sign which said "this truck is running on clean natural gas". I thought, "cool, no more smog!" If they are already using on LA times trucks, it can't too long before some cars have it too. No more Arab oil embargoes, etc.
In about 2004 or 2005, the Washington area metro converted its entire fleet of buses to natural gas in about a year. I work near a major Metro station and could see the first few buses and was excited. Within a year, it was rare to see an old diesel bus. No more smelly diesel fumes!. If an agency as incompetent as Washington Metro can convert its entire bus fleet in a year, how hard can it be?
We have been able to do this easily for at least 30 years. Apparently to convert a regular gas engine to natural gas requires only a few modifications, to the gas tank (obviousely), fuel lines and injectors. As anyone who has been to a Home Depot or most grocery stores knows, the distribution system is also already in place.
Imagine the marketplace if we had 3 different fuel systems for transporation: Oil, Natural Gas, and Electricity. Then as a bad computer analogy, imagine if Windows, Linux, and OS/X each had about a 33% market share.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Oh I agree, and furthermore, if this accident turns out to be as bad as the worst case, then I'd predict that this is probably the end of BP the company. They're probably looking at bankruptcy, and then being broken up into assets that are purchased by their competitors. In the worst case.
Ultimately, BP is responsible for this as they leased the rig and hired the subcontractors. I'm not going to demonize BP. Right now, the cause is all a matter of speculation until they can get the well capped and do a proper investigation. Accidents happen (and yes, I live in a gulf state not too far from the coast), and the truth is, no one is giving up fossil fuels anytime soon, because there simply isn't a really practical replacement right now. Supplements, yes. Replacements... not so much. I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.
If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors, s-type eductors and just plain mops and buckets.
I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.
But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.
The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.
Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.
This thing went *BOOM* in a way it's not supposed to go boom.
[End Of Line]
While your point is funny, it is also important to remember that the sign at the gas station has little to do with who produced that fuel. It is just another brand they license out.
Even though hydrogen is an inefficient carrier of energy, hydrogen isn't stupid if electricity is cheap enough. With enough hydropower (no new technology needed), we'd have enough power to make enough hydrogen to do pretty much whatever we wanted in terms of power. We would at least have a chance of getting the transportation sector (our achilles heel) off of oil.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
OPEC is a cartel of governments, not oil companies.
Notably, BP is NOT an OPEC member and has no official say in OPEC decisionmaking. Unless it's become a sovereign country and joined when I wasn't looking?
depends on whether BP wants to take the short view or the long view. they're probably bound to lose a little on the disaster, but, as someone noted elsewhere, if they want to take a longer view, they can restrict global supply, causing prices to rise... competitors *could* increase output to keep prices down, but higher prices are in their competitors' interest as well...maximizes the profit for any well that is currently producing, so their competitors are likely to capitalize on the higher prices rather than trying to stick-it to BP by increasing production. the problem with the picture as you paint it is that each company is trying to maximize the profit they can make off each well while at the same time getting enough of a share of the market that they can fund continued operations. if prices suddenly rise, it's not in their interest to bring them down...likewise, it's not in their interest to make up for anything but a significant shortfall in production. of course, they are also walking a delicate public-relations and public-policy balancing act, so they have to give a little sometimes in the interest of keeping the customer hooked...but it's certainly not a case of the market working strictly in the customer's favour.
When the industry is an oligopoly, then the reason is more money.
All oil "in" the US is controlled to some extent by 5 different oil companies of which no more then 4 operate in any one state at a time. This is because they own all the refineries and the environmentalist will not let anyone build new ones without billions being spend on court battles and decades of being tied up in courts.
Anyways, BP wouldn't have to collude to fix oil prices. They would just enter the hedge markets as an interest bearing investment to store recovery and cleanup funds and drive the prices up by the creating an artificial demand on oil futures. This would increase the costs of crude for all of the companies but it would stop BP from taking a loss because it would be spread out to others in the market which end up costing you at the pump. Exxon and others would simply look at it as a win-win as they would make the same amount of extra profit.
BTW, don't doubt me on this. The entire hedge situation with oil is part of what lead up to the financial collapse. But more importantly, if you remember, we went from 4 to 5 dollar a gallon fuel to almost 2 dollar a gallon fuel at the pump almost over night when wall street crashed. Demand hadn't changes, production hadn't changed, what changed was the amount of money floating around in the futures.
Enjoy (if you've got the patience to read through 22 pages of comments!)
A couple of highlights -
First radio interview from someone on the rig:
http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article...422&spid=32364
Second - OSHA's website has some of the best diagrams:
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/oilandgas/well_completion/well_completion.html
Third - the specs from this platform/ship:
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17 -- check out "Thrusters: 8 x Kamewa rated 7375 hp each, fixed propeller, full 360 deg azimuth"
JGG