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BP's Final "Top Kill" Procedure For Gulf Oil Spill
eldavojohn writes "So far every attempted fix has resulted in failure to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with the exception of the riser insertion method that appears to be little more than a mile-long tube sucking up oil. After attempting many options to allow the continued collection of crude oil, BP is finally considering a 'top kill' option that will kill the well. A vessel at the surface will use 30,000 horsepower pumps to slam kill mud and clay into the well's bent riser, allowing them to cap the well off with two relief wells (which won't be ready for several months). If that fails, the vessel will move on to a 'junk shot' that involves spewing larger debris like shredded rubber and golf balls into the lines to gum up the flow and stop it. Government officials acknowledge that while this may provide a solution, it may also worsen the situation if the resulting pressure causes the lines to blow or fail at other points. While this is likely one of the worst environmental disasters to hit the gulf, BP's debacle has caused Shell to pre-build cofferdams into seven wells that it is currently drilling in the gulf. These would drop into place in the event of such a catastrophic failure of a riser under the well."
How long will the American government keep allowing BP to blunder its way into not fixing this problem?
Maybe the government should step in and put and end to this situation themselves.
Why didn't they just do this in the first place? Why muck about with wholly unproven methods? They should have sealed this thing up weeks ago. They greed and attempts to keep the well usable are a fucking disgrace.
Living With a Nerd
I wonder if BP has a WMD at their disposal.
A Ross Matthews once said, that sounds like a great new drink name at a gay bay. But seriously, since when did "dump a bunch of shit on it and hope that plugs it up" become a formal strategy?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The question is, though, will the government be able to do any better? I say let a disinterested (disinterested in the collection of the oil, that is) tackle the problem. Get BP out of the equation completely (aside from paying for the 3rd-parties services).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Everybody wants to blame the need for oil, or greedy corporations, or a slew of other things for this disaster. Not once do they acknowledge that (a) this is an unprecidented engineering failure, (b) there were multiple safeguards, (c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
BP is doing everything possible to fix the problem, while we sit on the sidelines and debate their ineffectiveness. I don't think that's really fair -- if we get into a car accident, we're quick to shrug it off as just that: an accident. Nobody's fault. We pick up the pieces and move on.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should. They're holding themselves to the same standard the average person would.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
3rd-party's*
stupid grammar.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I would speculate that if these two things don't work, we'll send in the Navy. I'm pretty sure that there's an exploratory minisub that can go down that far without trouble -- Tom Clancy says there is, anyway. :-)
Couple satchel charges, and we're done.
An argument could certainly be made that we should have done that 2 weeks ago... but do you really want to make it *here*? :-)
Why do these ideas sound like they were loosely organized by a 5th grader?
1) Why are they poring dispersants on the oil spill instead of coagulants?
2) Good on Shell for being proactive, to bad it took a major disaster to get a more comprehensive disaster plan.
The mud or junk will not be inserted through the riser pipe.
There are access pipes on the BOP itself for this kind of stuff.
The mud or junk will therefore be inserted BEFORE the riser pipe.
Blocking the riser would be useless given it's bent, cracked at the BOP and could potentially rip off due to the blockage.
Privatized profits. Socialize losses!
BP wont ever end up paying much of the real cost involved in this. Any fines they do face will be a tiny percent of their yearly profit.
And they will go on to do this again in the future.. Saving a buck or two on safety to make some money. Just like they did 20 years ago for their last major disaster.
Yeah know, we really need the oil.. But i'd say we need someplace to live way way more.
Someday we're really going to have to hold corporations accountable in a REAL way for the lives and things they destroy.
Major oil spill cuz you skiped on some safety that we have invented already? Shoot the CEO in the head.
Sooner or later companys will stop doing things that endanger the environment or peoples lives... Or we'll run out of CEO's. either way... it would be an improvement.
Do you know WHY governmental regulation has been so bad in the last dozen or so years? It's because presidential administrations and Congress have NOT ALLOWED it to be good. They have purposefully put people in those political jobs knowing that they weren't going to regulate on purpose. The Bush administration did this more than anyone else. The Clinton administration was 2nd only to Bush, and Bush, Sr. was a close 3rd.
Do you think government can't get the experts it needs to professionally oversee these companies? Are you kidding? They could in a second. It's that the politicos don't want to put competent people without conflicts of interest in these positions. And we're paying the price for it now and he gulf cost will be paying the price for the next century or so....
You don't need a manned mini sub to handle satchel charges - the ROVs could do it just fine. While I realize the male Geek driven drive to Just Blow Things Up is quite strong, it doesn't always work that way. Engineering takes time and reality is quite often quirky, bitchy and hard.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I posted this once before, but here is a good link to an ArcGIS 'Message in a Bottle' plotter. Now I know the dynamics of an oil spill and the dynamics of a floating bottle are apples and oranges, but it still provides an inkling of the possible ramifications of this goop spreading. Click a couple points around the perimeter of the spill, and just watch the areas that will be affected due to lack of early containment.
I understand they are a business, but dammit if they didn't do everything in their power to eek money out of it, even after it was deemed a catastrophe. Yes, I understand they are an oil company and that killing the well is your least favorite option because it doesn't make your money, but well, I believe intentions are a bit 'questionable' at best when it comes to the order of control methodologies.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
You're actually arguing that the solution to a leaking well is to make the hole bigger?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Lameness Filter is stupid. I have to add a bunch of regular characters to add "code characters" to a technical page? LAME.
We actually already have one of the most competent armed services/governmental agencies on the job: the Coast Guard. They have one of the widest areas of responsibility in government and they actually do quite a good job with it. This was such a clusterfark in terms of things that went wrong, though, it will take even the best minds a long time to figure it all out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Refinery_explosion
Damn near felt it over here.
The top kill is what happens when the oil gets to the surface. These desperate (and failing) attempts to contain the spill should have inspired the government to take control of the situation earlier. It's clear that BP doesn't know what the hell they're doing.
I hope everyone who chanted "drill baby drill!" during the last election cycle is willing to go down to the gulf coast and help with the cleanup. What a mess!
Facts have a liberal bias.
While you can come up with all kinds of theoretical methods for dealing with something like this, it isn't the sort of thing you can test. I mean it is unfeasible (not to mention irresponsible) to build an oil rig and then break it just to test and see how fixes might work. So pretty much everything is unproven, untested and you just have to try shit and see what works.
Now this isn't to say BP is blameless here, there are remediation measures they should have taken, but didn't. The biggest would be having enough booms ready to contain a well disaster (it would take a lot, but really not cost all that much) and training their people in proper booming. That is a proven method for reducing the spread.
However it is just to help deal with the spread, it doesn't actually fix the problem. The problem fixes, well you just don't know since it cannot be tested until an actual disaster happens.
Heck the SIPHONING 5,000 a day from the line they put into the one breach! And that isn't even getting everything coming out of that breach, and there is ANOTHER breach on the line which is gushing oil. The 5,000 a day value is an out and out LIE, and needs to be published as such. The estimates of 20,000-50,000 seem a lot more realistic, which would mean that this would already be the worst spill in history (620,000 - 1,550,000 barrels). And even those seem small considering the rig itself was producing 300,000 - 500,000 barrels a day.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Actually explosives are often used to stop rampant wells oil wells, usually though it's intended to out a fire in a well.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
"Shredded rubber and golf balls, huh? Oh hell, why not???!!!"
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
As others in this thread have mentioned, several aspects of this accident are unprecedented, and although the oil industry should be faulted for pushing too hard too quickly, this accident may simply have to serve as a learning experience, given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
We will solve this horrible situation by dumping shredded tires and golf balls into the ocean until the problem is solved!
"But perhaps...
I said until it was solved!
Maybe the government should step in and put and end to this situation themselves.
So long as they send the bill to BP and not the taxpayers, I'm for it.
Reply to That ||
Designed? Possibly. Certain safety standards that are mandatory for offshore drilling near other countries were not used on this rig. Certified? Not really. If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything. How many reports of safety precautions and features being overlooked, ignored, or just plain not done properly do we need before we can consider that this well was not being built with adequate safety precautions?
Yeah... you might want to read up on that some... it is quite clear to anyone who has read any of the reports out there that safety protocols and industry best practices were not followed.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Except that the government makes more off taxes on oil and it's downstream products than companies like BP make in profit on oil.
I don't have the tax numbers at my fingertips, but it seems that BP posted $93,000,000 USD profits per day for the first quarter of 2010.
Reply to That ||
Maybe the government should step in and put and end to this situation themselves.
How?
I was watching a documentary on this Sunday. They interviewed one of the rig survivors. According to the survivor, pieces of the blowout prevention device had come up the pipe weeks before. They didn't bother to fix the BOP. When one of the controllers on the BOP failed, again, weeks before the accident, they didn't bother to fix the BOP. When Transocean wanted to put 3 cement plugs in the well, sandwiching the heavy drilling fluid, the BP managers said "No, use 2 plugs," so that it would take BP less time to unseal the well when they hooked up the pumping rig. According to the survivor, it was when they took the pressure off the well, with only two plugs, that the plugs failed.
This is people putting money before safety. This isn't an "accident". I would consider an earthquake ripping the BOP off the well an accident. I would consider a jet crashing on the rig and somehow managing to destroy the BOP an accident. This was people cutting corners and getting caught.
(Note well: This assumes the survivor was telling the truth.)
True, though why did we allow them a month of spilling millions of gallons of oil into the bay while attempting to save the well in a way that it could be re-used? Maybe I'm just old and jaded, but rescuing the bay should have been priority 1 over rescuing the financial investment.
Also, shrimp has been terrible for the past month. Thanks, BP!
The ______ Agenda
or better yet, 3rd parties'. There may be more than one 3rd party.
And this is more stylistic than grammatical, but one usually spells out numbers up to and including ten, so it should be "third parties'", or "their 25th attempt to fix the problem failed, too".
Just saying, if you're going to be pedantic, do it right.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Personally, I think it's amazing that one of our solutions for these spills is still to "burn it off" from the surface of the ocean. Then another alternative involves dumping bacteria into the water that will "eat" the oil.
Why haven't we done more to build devices to collect up the oil that's spilled (since oil and water don't mix anyway, you'd think their separation wouldn't be a huge technological hurdle), vs. wasting a natural resource we've already gone to such great lengths to collect in the first place?
Seems to me the best course of action would have been to plug up the well ASAP, followed by recovering as much oil as possible that leaked to the surface, BEFORE it had days or weeks to float all over the place with the changing currents.....
Have I been reading Slashdot too much or did anyone else think that "top kill" meant they were going to nuke it from orbit?
What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.
Worst in history was ~3.5 million barrels (IXTOC 1). So even with the most pessimistic numbers it is not in the top few spills.
It's pretty clear at this point that the 5k barrels/day number is too low by at least a factor of 2, and 50k barrels/day is too high.
By passing a bill outlawing oil spills, naturally.
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong
Yes we do. BP chose to use two instead of three plugs, purely to save time to get at the oil, and against Transocean's advice. BP blamed everyone else, but at the end of the day, they had an argument about these plugs and protocol, and as the bill payers, they made the final decision to proceed against the profession and safety advice.
What needs to happen now is name the names, and get them into the public news instead of allowing them to cower behind the corporate image. At the end of the day, greedy people fucked up and caused this. Name and shame time.
not exactly sure how much experience the us government has running and fixing oil wells.
not that they could fuck it up more than BP, but it aint like the navy runs a crew of underwater wildcatter frogmen. frogcats?
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
There's at least one survivor who claims that the BOP was punctured weeks before the blast, but that they were pressured in continuing operations regardless because they were running behind schedule and "time is money".
Donate free food here
How was it producing 300,000 - 500,000 barrels a day when I thought it was an exploratory rig?
I know you're just trying to make a point ... but seriously, it's pretty doubtful the CEO had any real clue about the shortcuts that were taken that compromised safety in this situation.
CEO's usually worry about the high level decisions. Someone's decision to remove one of the lock-down devices on part of a containment cap and replace it with a dummy version to make demo tests easier? Probably NOT something that was ever kicked up to him to sign off on.....
The bigger the company, in fact, the LESS likely a CEO is informed of day-to-day changes in operations. Holding a corporation financially accountable for screw-ups? Absolutely! But pinning blame on one person, because he's the one who got elected to serve as the head of the company? Not really logical. (He or she is already going to be punished by that whole "financially accountable" part -- since that's the performance metric his/her job performance is usually judged by.)
Uh, yes we do. The BOP failed because the gasket that was in it sheared off and came back up the pipe. Despite this, BP executives told them to push on and not worry about it because they were already behind.
"...during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.
"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'"
And there you have it. They were being pushed too hard, and made huge mistakes. BP needs to pay dearly for this, maybe even be put out of business completely, so that all the other companies can witness what happens to them if they do the same thing.
Let them factor that in to their actuarial tables..a big fat "closed for business" if a mistake like this takes place.
Yet...
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
you brought up the "car accident" and from what I've seen of so many of lifes failures, the people or businesses are not allowed to clean up the mess once the accident occurs. In the case of a car accident, the police, fire department, and healthcare systems are brought in and those involved and those around are removed from any further control of the situation. Fires are the same way, the police and fire department take over.
But in cases like this, it is left to the corporations who failed to do the work to limit the failure and as we've seen, they are not open with what they are doing, what's going on, etc. This has been leaking for way too long and IMO, there should be a 3rd party or committee which is made of technicians and engineers with the power to hire, collect data, access all corporate assets and have a 51% command over what is going on. Leaks like this are devastating to huge areas yet those who screwed up are left to try and clean up?
When I heard they were sticking a 6" pipe into the 21" riser pipe gushing oil at high pressure I could not figure out how the animations could show the leak would be stopped. Sure enough, we find out that only about 20% of the leaking is making it to the surface ship. Wouldn't it not be smart to measure the flow and pressure before resorting to guesses at what might or might not work to stop the flow? Some engineering types have tried to use estimates based on guesses at what kinds of pressures are involved and they've come up with far closer estimations on the flow rate than BP let on. I think they are now collecting more barrels per day through that 6" pipe sucking up 20% of one leak than they said the max end of the leak was.
Billions of dollars, livelihoods spanning generations, and entire ecosystems are at stake yet BP is left to stop this? WTF is this different from other emergencies where those who caused the "accident" are removed from the job of cleanup and recovery ASAP? What's that saying, "Putting the fox in charge of the hen house is not a good idea".
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And what exactly do you expect the Government to be able to magically do? BP has far more experience at this kind of problem than any 10 government agencies combined.
Just yesterday the EPA decided to intervene by ordering BP to stop using the dispersant which has been effective in reducing the impact because they think it might do some damage to the environment. As opposed to just letting the Millions of gallons of oil to just sit and spread. And that is all any government agency can do. Interfere.
Maybe some other Oil Co might be able to help but certainly not the Government.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
It's now been ~30 days since the start of the oil spill, and at 70k barrels/day (one of the numbers I've seen thrown around), this would be at 2.1m barrels (3rd worst not including the Gulf War wells).
It'd pass IXTOC 1 in just two weeks, which isn't long given that there's been almost no progress to capping the well so far.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I still say all their first attempts were salvage operations, *not* plug it up operations. Those are two different things entirely. And they might still be. That's what it looks like to me.
From the article:
"BP's riser insertion operation marks its first real technology success after a string of high-profile failures. One early effort to suck up spilling crude--a 100-ton steel box lowered over the wellhead--jammed within hours with a frozen slurry of natural gas and seawater."
So, it jammed, plugged it up, so they *removed it* to try the next scheme, which was the "tophat", the smaller container, WITH the pipe opening, because they couldn't keep sucking the oil and natgas from it.
That's a salvage operation attempt dang it! They removed it because they couldn't keep pumping with that first heavy steel box, the box built with the tube sticking out of it, nor the second. It "jammed" up with frozen methane stuff. Well, well, well...
That's the point, to stop the flow as fast as possible, not try to delay stopping the flow so they can go back to running the well, and now a month later they are reluctantly gonna try to jam it up with kill mud and golf balls? They already had it jammed up!! They admit it! All this past month looks like salvage operations to me, not plugging it up.
That is the real scandal, IMO, and I am not seeing them getting called on it either, because their PR spin, using that little word ploy, not calling it what it really is, has obfuscated it, and the government seems to have helped with that obfuscation.
Now, I admit I just don't know, and this is speculation, but it is based on exactly what they have admitted to. I have not read one way or the other what happened in those few hours after the big box was lowered over it, and then the outlet plug got jammed with the frozen methane. Did the leak actually stop or slow down considerably, or did it continue unabated, like oozing out from underneath the sides? If it stopped or slowed down considerably, they could have just kept adding weight to the original box, just dumped a huge containment mass of whatever was handy, a second larger box perhaps, much much heavier. That's what they did at Chernobyl with a bad leak, they just entombed it until it stopped being a problem, load after load after load dumped over it.
I dunno, but if I had to guess, maybe it had something to do with the people at the Mineral and Management Services snorting meth off of a toaster oven and (literally) fucking industry representatives?
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything.
Certifying a process and making sure the process is performed are two very separate acts. I would investigate how much of each were to blame before going nuts.
From what I can tell, there are hugely involved and expensive processes in place to prevent this sort of disaster. Could the procedures be better? Probably. Were the procedures followed to the letter? I seriously doubt it.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
According to this 60 minutes report, the BOP was possibly damaged weeks before the incident but not fixed and one of the two control modules of the BOP wasn't functioning properly but this condition was not investigated fully and corrected.
Also Transocean wanted to finish the well by inserting 3 concrete plugs with finishing mud in between them to close off the pipe. BP didn't want the mud. This would sped up the next phase of production but it removed some of the effectiveness of the plugs to seal the pipe. BP got it's way.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The estimates of 20,000-50,000 seem a lot more realistic
It seems most of the estimates are kinda just thrown out there.
And who is still saying 5k barrels a day?
And apparently, more recently, they aren't siphoning ~5k/day anymore.
Well, the government already put together a plan for this kind of disaster some fifteen years ago-- then they didn't bother to buy and maintain the equipment in order to execute it. They really don't have anything that BP doesn't, except a bunch of blowhards and self-interested cretins. Maybe they could fire a few congressmen into the breach.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Why we don't put a containment chamber around the wellhead before we start drilling?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Or, to rephrase... Explosives are often used to put out oil well fires on land. Then, utilizing the remaining wellhead (and possibly Christmas tree) structure (which, fortunately, weren't all vaporized by cowboys who think "if some explosives are good, more are better"), crews cap the well using mechanical means (such as installing a new valve).
It seems to me that the last thing that one would want to do in this case is blow up the BOP - it's routing, and apparently choking off much of, the flow. If a failed explosive attempt were to destroy/disconnect the BOP yet not seal the well I think we would be looking back at the current flow nostalgically. Given the apparent lack of experience using explosives to deal with a situation like this it seems likely too risky to attempt -- given that the relief wells are eventually expected to solve the problem.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
From what I can tell, there are hugely involved and expensive processes in place to prevent this sort of disaster.
In the last three months of 2009, BP posted $3.45 billion in profits. That isn't gross income, that's PROFIT.
I think they can afford a few million to make sure their shit is set up correctly and safely.
Living With a Nerd
Then taxing gasoline, which cost will be passed on to the middle class.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
i'm curious..
Is we be liken' BP? Shit nah! Dos limey cracka's be some of da furst du run da plantations, bitch. Na get yo cracka ass to work, I is be needed yo money fo my gubmnet check.
On what basis do you claim that the dispersant has been effective in reducing the impact? I have to say I trust the judgment of the EPA on that more than I trust J. Random Slashdotter or BP, but I'm willing to look at expert opinion if you can cite some.
When corporate criminals are fouling the planet, I'm all for government agencies interfering with them.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why do you think they are/were trying to "save the well"?
From the early days of the disaster, BP has (I think) said they were going to permanently cap the well with "concrete" via the relief wells. They started drilling the first relief well very quickly - I was surprised how soon they had a drill rig out there, those things aren't stocked on the shelf at WalMart.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
If I was charged with responsibility to stop this leak I'm pretty sure I'd try something every day or maybe every other not every week or so. I'd have a whole freaking flock of boats scoping this up and cleaning it. I feel BP isn't really doing much. He let's build a box, let's build another box this time smaller, let's fill it with junk (like our stock certificates). I'm not going to feel sorry when the lawsuits start and if I lived on the coast or were taking a vacation on the coast or even planned to serve shrimp at a party I'd be lining up to sue. It's going to be a shame when congress caps the penalty BP get's of with a slap on the financial wrist.
leave it to BP to come up with the idea to use a big-ass straw to recover oil from the spill, recovering a small part of the oil that they're leaking into the gulf. the leak is now noted to be 14x bigger than they originally reported, and the catastrophic effect on the ocean, flora & fauna will be terrific over the next decade or more. maybe we should protest or something.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I'm almost afraid to say this, for fear of a flame war. Really I'm not trying to make a statement for or against a political figure, I'm making a comment about the fickleness of the Americans:
I am no fan of G.W. Bush, but you can bet if he were in charge, he would be getting reamed up and down over this. I am astonished, flabbergasted, that I haven't seen Obama held accountable at the same level that Bush would have been (and was, on similar disasters).
Have I just been missing it (because I don't watch Fox News), or am I right?
And is this a statement of the fickleness of the Americans? or is this a statement of how effective Obama's team is at deflecting blame? or is there still a halo around him?
Please, don't let this evolve into a "GWB suxors" or "One Big A$$ Mistake, America" argument. I'm curious if I'm right or wrong on my assessment, not if you think Obama sucks or rocks. I DO think that the president should be held accountable to protect us from "all threats, both foreign and domestic", but I don't think that the "reaming" of the president is necessarily in order. I'm more interested in consistency of accountability.
Link
Criminal Negligence.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I guess that answers that.
Related link from Harpers.org April 2009:
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) repeatedly violated environmental requirements when approving oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, ignoring and overruling scientists who noted the risk of potentially catastrophic spills. In the April 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Bryant Urstadt discussed the “culture of ethical failure” at the MMS and its wasteful Royalty-in-Kind program.
It's not very long (a few pages), but a shocking read.
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
You can't just put a cork in the damaged pipes - the pressures are on the scale of being unbelivable. I believe it is around 150,000 PSI. Virtually nothing is going to withstand that sort of pressure without a lot of help.
Similarly, I keep seeing posts about how TransOcean should have "fixed" the blowout preventer when it was apparent that some seals were breaking down. Or when one of the redundant controllers failed. The problem is, it was a mile underwater. I do not believe anyone in the area had a means of working at that depth. Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
On land, you could (possibly) remove everything from the well head and accept the massive leak that would occur. I do not believe there are many land-based wells where the outflow pressure is anywhere near 150,000 PSI. So changing the blowout preventor is nasty, going to spew oil everywhere but is at least possible. At 5000+ feet of water and with the entire Gulf squeezing the oil out through that pipe changing the blowout preventer is simply not possible.
You folks do understand that the weight of the water above the well is what is causing this problem, right?
Another silly point people seem to be hung up on is that BP is working on this and the government isn't. Well, the government as a regulator has some involvement but about all they can do is make rules. There is no government oil well rescue service. The facilities do not exist within the US government, and probably for good reason - it doesn't happen all that much. The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this. The problem with that idea is that a lot of other companies, oil and otherwise, would take this as an immediate indication that any US presence was no longer safe. The same thing happened in a lot of Central and South American countries upon nationalizing companies. The reason a lot of companies are in the US is because it is convenient to be close to a large market and a well educated labor force. Make noises like assets aren't safe from being nationalized and a lot of companies will take their assets elsewhere.
You folks also understand that this well is in international waters, right? The US can drill there or any other country. The US has attempted to claim 200 mile nautical boundaries before, but that is pretty much a joke today. The fact that the oil is there means it will be taken out by someone. We get to choose whether it is the US or someone else. I'd say Venezuela or Mexico are likely candidates if we abandon drilling in the Gulf. At this point I would say complete abandonment of US offshore drilling is likely, regardless of the economic consequences.
...is something of a misnomer. A lot of what passes for "engineering" is actually processes proven empirically, through years of experience, rather than grounded in solid theory. Petroleum engineering is taught based upon what has worked for 80+ years. And petroleum engineers sit in office cubicles, not the rigs. Rigs are supervised by workers who are very experienced at what they do, but really have no way to handle situations "outside the box" because there isn't a drilling manual to consult when things go wrong. Rig workers depend upon the initial calculations of the engineers, and their own experiences of successful drilling operations. I suspect things on the BP rig happened so quickly, and were so outside the norm of crew experience, that there wasn't much chance of recovery. Like they used to teach us in the oilfield, if the mud comes out of the hole, you've got a problem. If the mud disappears in the hole, just wait: you've got an even bigger problem.
And yes, IAAPE.
The summary:
The article:
The kill line is part of the BOP. Nothing is being forced back down the riser (the bent, broken, patched, leaking mile long pipe now laying on the ocean floor).
Here's nice graphic showing what they seem to be trying to do.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Agreed. But when the process that was certified does meet the industry best practices (such as acoustic triggers), there is a problem with the certification.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There should have been many more safeguards put in place. Counting on 1 or 2 safeguards is foolhardy. The fact that BP didn't cap the well right after the event should be handled just like the FTC handles major ISP's issues. For every hour that an ISP, that provides a major backbone network, with a Service Level Agreement goes past a set repair deadline, the ISP gets fined $10,000/hour. The same should be done for environmental disasters like this. For ever hour that they try to "recover" from a disaster instead of just capping the well and closing it off, they should get fined $1,000,000/hr. Give them a grace period/deadline... maybe 3 days or so. But, if they can't manage the recovery effort, they should get fined $1,000,000 for every hour past the deadline. That'll give them an incentive to do what is right. The fact that they didn't have backup measures in place for this is absolutely ludicrous.
As someone else pointed out above, it seems the well was damaged weeks before the explosion - and it was the explosion safety equipment that was damaged. Despite this, TransOcean (working for BP), decided to carry on with the drilling.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7129225.ece
If this is true, then BP is to blame for not watching over TransOcean sufficiently but TransOcean should be charged with criminal misconduct or whatever the equivalent legal term would be.
The reason: its worth gambling something bad won't happen to ensure the company makes more money. Something bad happened, and now the citizens of those countries boarding on the ocean region the well is in get to pay the price.
Corporations have no inherent morality, nor any incentive to behave morally. Profits are the only motive. This is an excellent indication of this.
Its time to change this I think. The world can no longer afford these large corporations and the destruction they wreak on our environment. Of course, we need to learn to do with fewer luxuries if the environment can't afford them too.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Can anyone tell me why we haven't sent a big fat bunker buster down there? An explosion of that type would cause the hole to collapse in on itself wouldnt it?
Most of us are to blame, since we all want cheap gasoline to put in our cars so we can drive long distances on subsidized roads paved with oil products. The problem extends far beyond the right wingers demanding more drilling.
All of us that refuse to change our lifestyle to reduce oil consumption and instead bitch to the government when it gets expensive are to blame.
IMHO there is little to no difference between using other “weapons of mass destruction” and this one. It’s just that there aren’t 10,000 people affected, but it’s spread over millions of people. It’s still mass destruction of a giant area. Imagine this happening on land. Inside the USA. They’d roll in the army and shoot everyone in sight (e.g. BP officials), before stopping it.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
As others in this thread have mentioned, several aspects of this accident are unprecedented, and although the oil industry should be faulted for pushing too hard too quickly, this accident may simply have to serve as a learning experience, given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
It's not the BOP. It's the Cementing job that was borked.
To give a car analogy, The Cement job is like your normal brakes. The BOP is like the Ebrake. Sure it might stop the car, but when both fail you really should be asking why the main brakes failed, not why the ebrake was only half effective.
So, once again the design wasn't really that bad. It was the humans running the equipment that screwed it up. Hearing stuff like this, especially when you bring up rubber seals, reminds me of the Challenger disaster.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"After attempting many options to allow the continued collection of crude oil, BP is finally considering a 'top kill' option that will kill the well."
Why are people coming up with this fantasy that BP wants to keep the hole viable, and wants to continue collecting or be able in the future to collect oil from this hole? Some people have developed the misconception that the only reason BP hasn't tried to plug the hole is that they want the oil to flow -- i.e. $$$$$$. It's total nonsense. Why?
A) the hole at depth and the equipment on top of it is damaged. It would be foolhardy and inconsistent with industry practice in a situation like this -- especially if instability in the hole due to melting hydrates is an issue at depth in the well -- to try to keep the hole operational. The plan was, and always will be, to stop the flow from the hole and then cement and abandon this hole once it is stopped. To produce this field they will have to drill new holes. That was and always will be the case, and BP said that was the case from the start;
B) they deployed various collection devices earlier because they are faster to deploy and do not depend on being certain about the state of the deeper borehole or the blowout preventer (BOP), both of which had to be thoroughly assessed before attempting techniques that would plug the well, especially when it was known that the BOP failed to perform the way it was supposed to and the hole was unstable. You don't fiddle with things like this when they are in an "unknown state". If they proceeded to try a "top kill" without that assessment they would run the risk of making things worse if a subsurface blowout occurred when pressures built up (i.e. the pipe failed below the sea bottom) or something failed in the BOP;
C) the oil coming out (even with upward-revised numbers) is a piddling amount compared to normal oil production rates in these types of wells when they are working properly, and the value of the oil is dwarfed by the costs of collecting it like this. Even if it were flowing at 10000 barrels a day and they collected it all, that's a "mere" $700000/day (10000 * ~$70 USD/barrel), which wouldn't cover half the daily costs of all the vessels and other gear they have on-site trying to fix the problem ($500k/day is routine for ONE rig when you add in all the materials, personnel, and support. Here are costs for just the rig contract alone -- the Semisub 4000'+ WD is the relevant one at $411k/day). Usually a rig or subsea production system in this setting will be producing from multiple holes simultaneously -- that's the only way it is economic. It would be economically stupid to try to produce from the well in its current state and with the setup they have on site. Get a clue, people!
Anyone who thinks the delay in resorting to a "top kill" solution is due to some kind of ulterior financial motive on the part of BP doesn't understand the technical challenges of doing any of this stuff at extreme depths or what the real economic situation is. They're resorting to a "top kill" now because they've finished the X-ray and gamma-ray studies of the damaged BOP that give them confidence the whole thing isn't going to blow up in their face when they try to plug it. The other techniques were worth trying in the interim. That's the whole explanation for what they've done. It's nothing nefarious.
Hold BP and other oil companies responsible for accidents. Remember that they are drilling at the ends of the Earth to satisfy *your* demand for this resource, so perhaps try to cut back a bit. Beef up safety regulations and inspections. Diligently work on alternative energy sources. But for god's green Earth's sake, leave the stupid conspiracy theories out of it. This "they haven't plugged it because they want the oil to flow so they can make money" one doesn't make a speck of technical or economic sense.
Why do you think they are/were trying to "save the well"?
From the early days of the disaster, BP has (I think) said they were going to permanently cap the well with "concrete" via the relief wells. They started drilling the first relief well very quickly - I was surprised how soon they had a drill rig out there, those things aren't stocked on the shelf at WalMart.
For the right price I can have a semi-sub anywhere in the world tomorrow. do you realize how many rigs are already in the gulf?
Lot of people talking about who's to blame, but i have yet to see anyone stand up and admit the real problem. I would like to be first. I apologise to my fellow humans for my complete reliance on the petro checmical industry. If I was not so completly dependent on products made from fossil fuels, perhaps this would not have happend. If we really want this sort of thing never to happen, we have to stop giving it our tacit appoval. Everyone is to blame for allowing this addiction to continue, BP this time, someone else next time for as long as the drilling goes on.
A change of scale doesn't change the ethics.
That's right, it doesn't change the nature of the ethics
Not taking every reasonable action to prevent disaster is unethical. Not acknowledging warnings that your negligence is going to cause disaster is unethical.
That doesn't change with scale.
However how unethical your lack of responsibility is does scale directly with the size of disaster you are tasked with preventing.
More importantly, how readily we forgive ethical lapses does and should scale with the consequences of that lack!
Your argument basically boils down to: Because we are likely to forgive someone who accidentally dents our rear bumper due to neglecting their brake problem, we should be equally likely to forgive someone for accidentally destroying the planet earth because they neglected to check that they weren't pushing an asteroid directly into it!
That's either the most retarded "ethics" argument I've ever heard for being essentially "all ethical decisions should be considered trivial", or the most Randian corporate-apologist argument I've ever heard. But I repeat myself.
If you don't consider the scale of outcomes when judging your own ethical performance, then I say you lack ethics to begin with.
The enemies of Democracy are
You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, it's not a bay. It's the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, no attempt was made to "save the well". If you knew anything about drilling (or even if you'd even of bothered to read the freaking summary) you'd know that the reason drastic measures like injecting a plug into the well have not been tried is that there's a very real possibility this might do further damage to the well and make the spill significantly worse, possibly to the point of not being able to stop the leak at all. Every step of this process (from remotely activating the blowout preventer, placing the "dome" on top of the break, and syphoning off the oil as it comes up) has been done with meticulous care specifically to prevent making the situation worse, as we still don't even know why it happened!
Do you know why we don't have "disinterested" parties regulating this industry or overseeing the cleanup? Because they're people like you, who don't know what the hell they're talking about but are perfectly happy to act like the solutions are obvious and simple.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Why we don't stop drilling, eliminate oil, and embrace environmentally friendly technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal to generate energy? Oh, and why not encourage people to start walking or riding bikes to their in-town destinations?
OK, so the US Supreme Court recently ruled in the most forceful way possible in favor of corporate personhood, the idea that a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law. Fine, let's run with that. Is there any question that, had an individual person committed something like BP clearly has done in the Gulf, whether purposefully or via negligence, they'd be put in jail?
Throw the book at these idiots. Make them pay criminally, not merely by docking their profits a wee bit. Throw chief executives in jail and let them rot. Better yet, give them work release jobs- cleaning up their own mess.
Morons.
-Z
I have no mod points left to moderate your post *and* if I did I can't mod it ironic...
I see we have humorless moderators today. Well, to reiterate the purely factual part of my post, the government already put together a plan for this kind of disaster some fifteen years ago-- then they didn't bother to buy and maintain the equipment in order to execute it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The government thought BP would fix it eventually and didn't want to get involved in the fix in case they screwed it up. I don't think they realized just how badly BP could screw it up. None of the damage has really been realized yet, but I think this will be the end of this administration. Their fault or not, the impact of this is going to make Katrina look like a strong breeze. The loss in tax revenue from all the failing coastal business's may even bankrupt the states.
The failure of the well can be placed as widely as credulity will allow, but if RFK, Jr. is truthful in this article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html) then Bush & Cheney's efforts to roll the dice with equipment requirements for drilling were largely responsible. They allowed a culture of oil industry turned government regulators to permit drilling without a shutoff valve that is mandatory elsewhere. And, because I live in Texas and know some oilmen, I heard that the valve failure was predicted by an engineer in his letter of resignation from the manufacturer over his firm belief that the valve was underdesigned. Whether scruples or something else, there is a paper trail. BP has had more than its share of refinery explosions in Houston in the last 5 years. May be time to rebrand, mates.
GWB suxors
and
After Bush and Obama, this is just Another Big A$$ Mistake, America.
(vote libertarian)
You can't handle the truth.
Doh. Typo.
s/does/doesn't above.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Sure, if you take the largest number thrown around (backed by a random associate professor of mech eng, who looked at a video and estimated velocities)... it may be the 3rd or 4th worst.
That is slightly different from the original poster's "already... the worst spill in history".
I'm not saying the situation is not bad; it's just not unprecedented. A lot of the hyperbole annoys me-- for instance, people talking about the lack of an acoustic shutoff device on the BOP (as would be required in European jurisdictions). There doesn't appear to be a problem with BOP control-- it has been activated-- but rather problems with the BOP actually stopping the flow for as-yet undetermined reasons. I am also annoyed with people complaining about BP's engineering staff and effort: this stuff takes time, and from what I've seen the attempts have been heroic.
Can I get the source for that? It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that based on your quote BP isn't at fault, as the supervisor on the rig made the call... And people keep conveniently forgetting that this wasn't BP's rig.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I'll second that, even though I'm an Anonymous Coward!
(vote libertarian)
So we can get folks Rand Paul into office? No thanks. Bad enough his father already holds office, now we got his son in there too, and it would appear the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
I like the Civil Rights Act as is.
I can't believe you people. You whine about the economy, and then the entire gulf coast gets flooded with millions of gallons of free oil, and you complain about that too. What does it take to satisfy you anyway? You losers want to ignore this manna from heaven, that's fine by me. I'm gathering up all the containers I can find and going to collect - big time!
"And now, Frank N. Furter, your time has come. Say 'goodbye' to all of this, and 'hello'... to oblivion!"
Probable not so incredibly easy to cap a gushing high pressure well over 5000 ft below the surface of the ocean.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
What exactly has BP done wrong since the spill? I'm curious.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
GWB got his campaign paid for by the oil industry. With Obama, there is at least a reasonable doubt.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Wut? U think that da Statute of Libertary could plug up da oil leak?
/. really needs a preview button.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If by "design" you mean, a plan they did not adopt. By that rational, pretty much all design is good.
I wasn't talking about the drilling methodologies or techniques used (these are coming under fire, and rightfully so).
I was specifically referring to the BOP, which as far as I'm aware was installed correctly, and should have prevented a continuous spill, regardless of whatever nonsense took place at the surface. It was a last-resort failsafe that was supposed to have been rock-solid.
There's also the possibility that the accident would have occurred even if they were following proper protocols. This one's harder to know for sure, although the scale of the accident is unprecedented at so many levels that it seems entirely possible.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I live in the US. Was born here. Believe me, the US government CAN fuck it up more than BP.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Ok you said anywhere in the world, here's $100M ($1B? How much money does it to violate the rules of physics and logistics?). I want a semi-submersible drill rig 10 miles off the coast of Oahu. Oh, and it has to be able to drill to depths of 5000 feet. And I need it there tomorrow. The clock starts now!
But even within the gulf, how are you going to relocate a 50,000 ton drill rig overnight? Especially if there's not a suitable idle rig waiting around, then you've got to safely shut down current drilling operations, pack everything up, *then* relocate it.
That does not even address the legal and contractual issues -- no one is going to give you a $500M drill rig on a handshake, and even if you had $500M in the bank, you're not likely to negotiate terms of sale overnight. Not even if you tell the lawyers that you're losing $10M/day.
(vote libertarian)
Obviously. If it weren't for government regulation, the free market would have already capped that oil well!
I keep seeing this attitude again, and again, and again, and again, and again everywhere. It's like people think that BP is just trying to ignore the problem and never fix it.
BP is not a Captain Planet villain
BP is saddled with the cleanup bill. It's not like BP woke up one day and thought, "What should I do, today.... I know, let's have an oil spill! I think a $3.5 billion cleanup bill would be great for our fiscal year!"
Whether or not BP was irresponsible in causing the oil spill or not is irrelevant to the plugging and cleanup of the spill. BP does not have any interest dilly-dallying around and waiting for the oil spill to get bigger. They are trying -- and failing, but nevertheless trying -- to stop the spill, and they have zero interest in prolonging the leak (unless they really want to pay the govt billions more, which they probably don't).
Nobody wants an oil spill, and that includes BP.
"likely one of the worst environmental disasters to hit the gulf"
After one month and counting, this is still looking like it could be the worst environmental accident ever. Yes, worse than Chernobyl, because Chernobyl is still mostly a localized problem.
GWB got his campaign paid for by the oil industry. With Obama, there is at least a reasonable doubt.
Well, NEITHER candidate could legally accept contributions from oil corporations, but Obama's denial is a little slick according to FactCheck. (And Hillary Clinton called him out on it.)
No reasonable doubt there.
[Citation Needed]
Obama isn't being reamed on this because of ideology. It's the Republican ideology of "Drill Baby Drill!" and it's the Democrats who have been against off-shore drilling. This disaster could only have helped Obama.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Obama is getting a pass because the other side uses "Drill, Baby, Drill" to taunt him for his lack of enthusiasm for domestic oil production. His position on offshore drilling was pretty moderate: allow it after some environmental impact studies. But that wasn't enough for the right. This makes it a little awkward for them now, and I think they'd rather pretend the whole thing has gone away.
And, yes, Fox News was pushing the "this is Obama's Katrina" meme for a while.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I am an expert in the field of government agencies and their ability to fuck shit up. The EPA is shit. There is a better than 50% chance that when they say something about a situation that is fully understood they will be off by 180 degs. On something like this the chance that the EPA has this figured out correctly is 147.3 billion to 1.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It is *not* easy to gather up the oil in the water and it is definitely *not* easy to just stick a cap in the tube.
Also, you speak of waste (and other people speak of BP being greedy and wanting solutions that gather the oil rather than stop it)...I saw evidence somewhere that the total amount of oil expected to spill was on the order of magnitude of 7.5 minutes worth of the worlds consumption. Believe me, this is not significant waste and certainly not a significant financial loss to BP (in terms of the oil value)--they want this thing shut quickly and cheaply just as much as you do.
Bottles.
Obama hasn't "taken charge" because he knows that BP is going to catch the blame when none of these other "fixes" work. That's smart. Contrast this with the actual Katrina: there were known things that could have been done to relieve the disaster situation in New Orleans, that were actually the responsibility of the Federal government to do, that did not get done. Bush actually failed to act when there was work to be done, whereas there is not much here for Obama to do.
Sadly, spilled oil is such a hazard that burning it has been standard practice for awhile. There was a fuel-oil spill on a highway in southern Massachusetts a couple years ago where they employed this technique-- it was the first I had heard of it. Will post link if I find it...
But I agree with you. Horrible waste. Oil spills are disasters from many perspectives. Hopefully, this will give even critics some pause to think about energy alternatives.
Maybe they could fire a few congressmen into the breach.
Or all of them.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Ah, nevermind.
Yeah, for people complaining about how BP's initial responses were to try and salvage the well, or to stick a hose to keep collecting oil:
Salvage operations, if they worked, would have been a clean solution that probably would have stopped the leak a lot faster. BP's been talking about the top kill for quite a while, as they prepare to do it right, because doing it wrong could be WAY more catastrophic.
The hose is actively reducing the amount of oil that's leaking by an immense amount. Don't knock it.
Aside from fixing broken government practices when they're discovered, what else could a president do? Despite the fact that I was very much a critic of the Bush administration, I don't see what the difference would have been had this happened to them instead. The U.S. is a big country, with lots of people doing risky things in it all the time. It's not like the President can use his laser eyes to cauterize the well.
What this spill does do is lend a lot of legitimacy to telling the "Drill, Baby, Drill" douchebags to STFU already. If Obama fails to do that, then I will loudly criticize him.
Humans tend to fuck up. A design that doesn't fail safe in that case, IS bad. You gotta take that factor into account.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They already are collecting up the oil, but the spill is over such a huge area that they are barely making a dent. Oil-water separation is the easy part, collecting oil over hundreds of square miles of open ocean is hard.
Furthermore, the oil is spewing from a breach 5000 feet below the surface, so it's not coming up in one place, it's spread over a huge area, making it impossible to put a boom around the rising oil to contain it.
They are still working on the "plug up the well ASAP" part of your plan -- they didn't do it initially because there's a risk of making the spill worse -- when they try to inject the mud or junk, they run the risk of causing a larger leak in the riser... or maybe even a new leak in or around in the BOP. Anything they inject has to be done at a high pressure (to overcome the pressure of the oil), so there's gonna be a big pressure spike in the BOP and riser when they do the injection.
It's simple. Everyone who knows how to deal with oil wells at this depth works for the oil companies.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
I honestly think that this is one of Jon Stewart's best routines ever. First there was TOP HAT. Then there was the HOT TAP. Hmmmmm.....
Enjoy
The May 13th Episode
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It seems to me that Obama's responsibilities here were: a) prevention, b) quick detection of the spill, c) stop the spill, and d) minimize the cost of it happening again (or really, balancing probabilistic cost of threat vs. cost of prevention.)
If this is truly the disaster Obama claims it to be, then it seems to me the Federal Government should have this as a potential threat on their "probable threat chart". How did they miss this? This is EITHER a federal government failure (and the buck stops at the president), or it was recognized in advance as a potential disaster whose costs of prevention out-weighed the probabilistic benefit of prevention. Either way, it appears that our federal government, led by Obama, let us down.
Regarding quick detection and action - it seemed that it was spilling more than a week before Obama did anything public, and then all he did was give a "Wag The Dog" speech in the rain at the airport.
A leader COULD (perhaps SHOULD) formulate a task-force of the top experts and mobilize them and lead them toward getting the best ideas on the table day 1. Maybe he privately did that. He sure didn't make that public. And avoiding "taking charge", as you said, is no way to lead!
The third item, stop the darn thing, he's clearly failed on.
We've yet to see what preventative steps will come out of this.
Here's some food for thought on whether the process used to ensure operability of the BOP is proper. Seems to me like there are some issues with the certification process -- there are papers going back to 2001 that address fundamental unreliability of operating BOPs -- and it's my belief that oversight and certification processes are severely lacking.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Oil spill cleanup technology hasn't advanced much. The equipment in use today is pretty much the same as in 1989. The advance in technology has occurred in preventing the oil spills in the first place. Impossible to determine how many spills have been prevented by improving systems over the past 20 years, the feats of engineering involved here will never get any credit. The failures that result in disaster on the other hand will be what we remember. That's the way the world works.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
The only technology that would take care of that the gov't has that the oil patch doesn't is nuclear bombs that could be exploded on the seafloor.
My guess is it would be a tossup at this point as to which would make a bigger mess.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What needs to happen now is name the names, and get them into the public news instead of allowing them to cower behind the corporate image. At the end of the day, greedy people fucked up and caused this. Name and shame time.
Kind of defeats the purpose of corporations, if the people who are running it can be exposed and held accountable.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
The pressures involved are around 15,000 PSI, not 150,000 PSI.
What middle class?
I drank what? -- Socrates
In just a few days from this posting, BP and or a subcontractor are going to try something they've never done before.
http://digg.com/general_sciences/Is_BP_rushing_the_Junk_Shot_and_Top_Kill_solution
Fine. It's trivial to find citations for this, since it was all over the news for a few weeks, but here you go, lazy one:
Brazil, Canada, and Norway require acoustic triggers as backup for BOPs.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What needs to happen now is name the names, and get them into the public news instead of allowing them to cower behind the corporate image. At the end of the day, greedy people fucked up and caused this. Name and shame time.
Kind of defeats the purpose of corporations, if the people who are running it can be exposed and held accountable.
We do it all the time, for fraudulent and criminal organizations. What is the mob, but a corporation? If a corporation commits a crime, the corporate veil is pierced and the individuals are held accountable. I don't think you even understand what 'limited liability' means. It does not mean 'you can not be held accountable for your actions as a corporate officer.' That would be ludicrous. It means 'If the firm goes bankrupt, you are only financially liable for the amount you invested.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Many people on the right are trying to brand this event as "Obama's Katrina", just as you suggest should be happening.
Also, Katrina resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more, while this spill doesn't even rank in the top 50 oil spills in history.
There is more than one Mike in them there links.
Mike Mason, the guy in the photo there and Mike Williams, the guy in the CBS' 60 Minutes". The "electrical engineer".
BTW, those two Mikes talk about different cases of negligence by BP.
Also, the first link in the GPP is an analysis report by another guy called Glenn Stehle, an engineer with "extensive experience in drilling operations".
Then there is Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, who got the job to analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident.
That is like.. four guys and a couple of cases of "cutting corners when it came to oil rig safety" already.
Then there are couple of more guys in that second link.
So like... Do I now get my +5 Informative or a +5 Insightful?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just start selling Hummers to all the fish- they'll use up all that oil in no time.
My webcomic
Unless we prove they were criminally negligent, the most BP will pay is $75 million. Those are the laws we passed when we opened the Gulf up to drilling. Because, you know, oil companies make so little profit off of all this, there's no way they could afford to pay for their mistakes. And this is America, land of the free! We don't hold corporations accountable for their mistakes here, that would be infringing on their FREEDOMS!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Good, the people who use a resource should pay for the damages the use of that resource causes. It's funny how quickly the idea of personal responsibility gets thrown out the window when it's you that will be accountable.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Whole thing is terrible, I can't believe we drill w/o a way to fix pipes down there or deal with a blowout. This was bound to happen.
And there you have hit the nail entirely on the head. The entire process is way too politicized yet your solution is to bring in yet more government? Can you see the problem there?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
alright (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
They have one. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
So let me see:
- This disaster happened during Obama's 2nd year in office, but somehow the fault lies with Bush, even though Bush's people are now Obama's people.
- Does that mean we can blame the Katrina debacle on the previous president as well (Clinton)? No, no that would be too consistent.
.
IMHO if Bush is blamed for Katrina, then Obama should equally be blamed for his own gulf disaster. It took his administration 8 days to rally any kind of response (i.e. get a cleanup ship to burn off the oil). THAT would be consistent. Assign blame to whoever is currently in charge. (But of course people won't do that.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Eight months into Bush's first term, terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people. Do you know what the public reaction was to that? Bush was a Hero.
If Obama had Bush's public relations team, he'd use this crisis as an opportunity to invade Venezuela. And in eight months, he'd land a helicopter on an oil derrick off the coast of Alaska and give his "Mission Accomplished" speech.
A few concerns with your proposed assessment of liability:
First, WHY did the supervisor make the call he did? Could it have been because the company awards timely performance without regard to safety? This is like having somebody chop off their hands in a machine, and the company saying that it was their fault for not wearing the provided and required gloves (of course, the company doesn't mention that nobody wears gloves because every week the three slowest workers are fired and gloves slow you down considerably, and nobody is punished for not wearing the gloves).
Second, I'm not a big fan of outsourcing being a way to escape liability. The cheapest people to outsource to will be the ones who don't bother to buy insurance. The outsourcer can pay out dividends any time they make a dime, and then if they lose big they just declare bankruptcy. Companies need to have incentives to outsource to reputable companies, and not just the ones with the cheapest price - otherwise we just have a big race for the bottom. Suppose I buy a set of brakes for my car from flybynite.com for $1.99 (when they normally sell for $50), and then I crash into another car due to brake failure and kill somebody - should I escape liability?
Don't forget that a production rig and a semi-submersible drilling rig are not the same. There's a reason BP never planned to leave the Deepwater Horizon sitting there pumping oil - that's not what it's for. Similarly production rigs are not made for optimal(?) drilling.
The Development Driller III is the semi submersible that BP brought in to drill the first relief well. This was already under contract to BP - but it may have been in use (probably making the contract issues easier, but possibly requiring shutting down another drilling operation safely). Note this is not your "fathers" drilling rig. It was on site on April 27 - about five days after the rig collapsed on April 22. Unless it was close by and not in use (and, obviously, these things are not bought/leased to sit around idle), that's pretty good in my book. Note that, unsurprisingly, BP doesn't have a lot of suitable idle rigs in the Gulf (note that the Mad Dog, for example, isn't suitable -- if nothing else because its rated water depth is inadequate).
Also, getting a less capable rig in two days earlier, for example, would make no sense if that rig would require four days more to drill the relief well (because, for example, it used 93-foot-long stands of pipe rather than 135-foot-long stands of pipe or had longer setup time).
And, how exactly, would you get a semi-sub "anywhere in the world" in 24 hours? The Discoverer Enterprise (which I believe is being used to drill the second relief well) weighs more than 75 million pounds, is 835 feet long, and 418 feet tall. The only way I know to move ANYTHING halfway around the world in less than 24 hours is by air -- and I'm pretty sure this beast won't fit in a First Class seat, let alone a Coach seat. Come to think about it, even the Antonov An-225 comes up a bit short (by about 74.5 million pounds in weight capacity, about 414 feet in height, and at least 560 feet in length). Oh, and since there would be insufficient time to deliver it from land via traditional oceangoing tugs and the An-225 can't land in the ocean (well, at least not more than once), one would have to do an airdrop. Building the world's largest (to put it mildly) parachute to set this the Discoverer Enterprise down at the right place would be challenging to say the least. And, I don't know of any existing rockets that could be successfully used to slow its descent.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'm sure to get shit for this but I'll say it anyway...This disaster was random and unpredictable. Sure they could have used three plugs instead of two. Sure, they could have kept their eyeballs on the joystick. Sure, the bosses could have said, "Take as much time as you want." But, the fact remains that if it didn't happen here, it (or something similar) would have happened somewhere else.
This is a textbook case of a Black Swan Event -- An event that by it's nature seems perfectly predictable (and thus preventable) in hindsight, but wasn't by virtue of the fact that, only in hindsight could any of this have been predicted.
It is impossible to build a system that is perfectly fault tolerant. It is likewise impossible to completely rule out human error. And, it is unreasonable to expect executives to abandon the corporate mantra; "Do more with less." Sometimes, unfortunately, these elements come together to create a perfect recipe for disaster.
It is the job of bosses to spur on their workers, and it is the responsibility of workers to explain to their bosses why they should incur extra cost to mitigate risks. In a perfect world, this would never fail, but we don't live in the utopia of mediocristan. In the real world, random disasters do occur, and we need to see them as such. All the tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who think this was all part of some diabolical plan need to get real. No one wanted this to happen. BP and other companies like Shell are doing everything possible to mitigate the damage and prevent similar disasters in the future.
No one is going easy on BP, and they will surely pay for this far into the future, maybe even to the point of being driven out of business. And that's fine, because ultimately, someone has to pay the price. But let's not resort to the extremist attitude that all large business is evil and must be punished.
Maybe the proper course of action should be to revoke BP's corporate charter, charge all stockholders with a felony then arrest them, all seize all of BP's assets and cash. Of course I also feel we should embrace communism but that will never happen woith allof the fucktarded sheeple who love capitalism.
BTW, in case it's not obvious, I meant to say "random and unpreventable"
And the amazing thing is that you didn't doubt for a moment that that was a serious proposition.
It's like entire nations suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
Certified by whom? BP?
It doesn't matter WHY the damn thing failed, the point is that it's fucking broken. BP has been attempting these solutions in order to recover oil such that they still maintain their bottom line. It's time the government stepped in and let the US Army/Navy/Air Force engineers solve this shit. Cap the well through any means necessary, even if it means that BP will not be able to make money from this well.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Mad props to whoever made me go lookup "goblin punch" on urbandictionary.com! Thanks for the laugh.
It's the Republican ideology of "Drill Baby Drill!" and it's the Democrats who have been against off-shore drilling. This disaster could only have helped Obama.
How soon we forget.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Many people on the right are trying to brand this event as "Obama's Katrina"
Why are you blaming that on "people on the right"? The first time I saw the "Obama's Katrina?" headline, it was on MSNBC. It's just the usual 24 hour news cycle media hype bullshit. It has nothing to do with a left or right wing bias.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
they were pressured in continuing operations regardless because they were running behind schedule and "time is money".
In another post, someone mentioned that BP is making about a billion dollars per month in profit.
Somehow I doubt this one well would have made a big difference in their overall take. And truth be told, they lost the whole thing, and took a big hit to their rep as well.
Funny thing about greed, it's when you actually lose sight of the bottom line.
May be time to rebrand, mates.
Ironically they are in the middle of a "beyond petroleum" ad campaign. I'm almost glad this happened because the ads are shameless.
Joe Everyman: "Oil is cool, but you know what else? Solar and wind and geothermal are also cool."
Jane Goodytwo: "I have no relevant experience, but I think natural gas should be part of our Energy Mix. It's just what I've heard."
Steve American: "Five or six different energy sources in the same commercial makes me feel better about my crappy job waiting tables in L.A."
Sometimes you do get cosmic justice.
One statistic I haven't heard mentioned is the amount of recoverable oil in that well. What percentage has leaked?
Maybe this is the real problem. Upper middle class people can afford gasoline at any cost. Look at what they drive...SUVs and sports sedans.
Lower middle class people cannot. This includes the indirect cost when truckers pay more, causing food to get more expensive.
If you want to talk "class warfare," you can start at the gas pump.
I'm giggling.
Heh, the joke on statements like yours is that they're essentially accurate. The oil was either going to sink deeper into the crust and be destroyed, or "this" would have happened.
Note that you read that sentence correctly : this was bound to happen whether or not BP drilled there.
Giant oil spills into the ocean are not all that rare (huge pressure on a liquid with cracks in rocks leading towards a place with merely large pressures ... you don't need a nobel prize to understand what's going to happen). Granted "usually" the leaks are slower and deeper into the ocean, but not always.
So what happens to all that oil that leaks every year ? Why, bacteria use it for energy. They build entire colonies around these leaks and with the energy in them. Just like we do.
BTW, in case it's not obvious, I meant to say "random and unpreventable"
I agreed more with your first version. "Black Swan Events" are random and unpredictable, but not unpreventable or unmitigable. BP's overly optimistic and/or delusional views about the risks involved and their abilities to respond to a massive spill created unnecessary exposure to a calamitous event. Cf. BP's own exploration plan. or download the entire PDF direct from the Minerals Management Service. Note sections 2.7, 7.1 and 7.2 in particular.
It boils down to risk vs. reward (or profit and loss if you prefer,) and unfortunately for the people, flora and fauna in and around the Gulf of Mexico we ended up on the wrong side of the equation. And if nothing can be truly done to prevent accidents of this scale, is it worth uncorking the genie from the bottle given the amount of destruction it unleashes?
To give a car analogy, The Cement job is like your normal brakes. The BOP is like the Ebrake. Sure it might stop the car, but when both fail you really should be asking why the main brakes failed, not why the ebrake was only half effective.
And if we actually knew what we were drilling into and which -gaseous, liquid and solid- flows we'd encounter, we wouldn't even need one.
The real source of the problem is obviously some random (and quite unexpected) gas pocket in the oil field, or along the drill hole, that somehow was located in an extremely inconvenient spot. There does not exist such a thing as a device that will keep arbitrarily high-pressure gas under control.
To use your analogy, the main brakes failed because somone had greased the road. The BOP failed because the car was going fast downhill on a greased road. So the whole thing crashed.
It's time the government stepped in and let the US Army/Navy/Air Force engineers solve this shit. Cap the well through any means necessary
Yeah the people who know what they're doing are not doing so well. So let's just send in people with zero experience, and bombs. (this is not a comment denouncing army engineers, in fact they're to be admired. But they have zero experience doing this, they're not going to do well at all)
This is a high-pressure "geiser" that's blowing the oil out into the sea, blowing at a pressure that is much more than heavy steel can handle. And that's not the worst of it. Doubtless the gas pocket that caused the first accident was not the only one of it's kind.
What could possibly go wrong ?
You must be a democrat. The government, with zero experience and barely half a clue what they're even trying to do, will surely outperform a company that's been doing this for over a century. Perhaps you should go and check how that works in practice, say by comparing north & south korea : same people, same smarts, same universities, same religion, same everything. Only in one of them everything is done by the "capable" government, in the other everything's done by the private sector.
If there was even a modicum of fairness in the world that would be the middle east. You know, the ones profiting of the oil.
That's how increased costs result in lives lost.
Unfortunately as long as those "lower middle class" and other unwashed masses do their dying out of view, the "more government, now ! Just take this guy's money" doesn't care at all.
Or maybe because he really didn't think it was a problem and the tests on the blowout preventer checked out? Now even if that's true, that doesn't absolve him from criminal negligence. Being an idiot in a position of command is negligence, in my opinion...
I didn't mean to say BP should be absolved of all liability. My point was that people keep pointing at BP like they're the sole and primary culprit, and that's simply not the case. They were a customer.
I'm sorry, but even for a car analogy that's terrible. You're mixing your actors and actions here--having the customer also be the primary actor.
A more correct analogy would be that you hired a delivery driver who's rates are below the market average to haul your hazardous waste and the driver crashed the truck into an orphanage or something. Yeah you bear some of the responsibility here, but if the driver presented you with a proper CDL with hazardous materials endorsements and proof of insurance, are you really the one who's primarily responsible?
Now if you knowingly allowed (or even pressured) a driver who didn't have the proper training or coverage into carrying your waste... That's a whole different story.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
With Obama, there is at least a reasonable doubt.
not really
Of course, all intelligent people knew this before he was elected. And yes, for this (and quite a few other) problems McCain was the better candidate.
Yeah, but what really counts is how much
they spent paying off the politicians.
And, did the politicians then ask for
special treatment of BP.
Tim S.
Just blame the other guy has been a blueprint of democrat statement for years now.
Of course that isn't to say it wasn't republican policy before then.
Oh well. In this case it was democrats who made the disaster possible. It was a democrat congress that controlled the safety regulations that failed to prevent the disaster, and a democrat executive that was charged with implementing them. So I guess if they had an ounce of humility they'd order an investigation and proceed from there. But we all know the chance of that happening ...
this spill doesn't even rank in the top 50 oil spills in history.
That's what truly amazes me : this oil "disaster" is actually a relatively minor one. Perhaps it's Obambi's Alynsky "never let a good crisis go to waste" policy in action ?
We all know he needs people's attention away from healthcare.
On land, the oil could simply be accumulated in a small area, and left there for bacteria to eat it, or burned off.
Like any idiot knows perfectly well.
This is a high-pressure oil geiser 5000 ft below the surface (where no human being can survive without massive technological assistance). So it's kind of a bigger problem.
This Bloomberg article claims:
But who knows where they got that from, how accurate it is, or how much of it is economically recoverable with current technology at current oil prices.
Of course, to compute a percentage, we know [update: we knew that until today, now BP seems to magically decided maybe it's a bit more] that it's leaking 5,000 BPD so it's leaking 0.01% a day - so it's been about 30 days, meaning it's leaked only 0.3% of the reserves. Nothing to see here, move on.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I would think that the US Navy has some really good sonar. I hope so, I've paid a lot of tax money. All I really know I read in Tom Clancy...but.... oil and water have quite different characteristics. I'd think some sonar pinging would tell you everything you need to know about the plume, the size of the plume, and the speed of the plume. I'd bet you could do this with older stuff, so you could ping away and not give any info to any others listening about the current state of the art. I'd b quite surprised if the USN does not have good information on this. Why are we still getting BP's best corporate spin is another issue. While I don't expect to see sonar traces uploaded to YouTube, where's the official word NOT from Better Pollution ?
Vote for the Pauls and what? "Oil cleanup is a state problem. Not ours. Oh, and black people can suck my dick... but I'm not racist."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Revoking BPs corporate charter, putting the board in jail, nationalizing their assets to keep the workers employed and the oil flowing should be enough. The stockholders will be out the money they invested. Arrest is a bit much, don't you think?
People don't love capitalism. They love contributing to their communities and being part of something. The free market, in it's proper place, helps people do that. But capitalism, also known as the institutionalized sin of usury, helps no one.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The fact that you saw "Obama's Katrina?" on MSNBC seems a little disingenuous, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you just don't watch a lot of TV news. The fact that there's a question mark means it was probably a story about this very topic, with the left-leaning MSNBC trying to discredit such a claim. A little searching finds a clip from The Ed Show on MSNBC doing exactly that.
* There was a leak in the hydraulic system that provides power to the shear rams.
* The BOP had been modified in unexpected ways. The underwater control panel had been disconnected from the bore ram, and instead connected to a test ram. Drawings of the BOP provided by Transocean to BP do not correspond to the structure that is on the ocean bottom.
* The BOP's shear ram is not powerful enough to cut through joints in the well pipe. It is only effective on the body of a drill pipe. Since 10% of the drill pipe is threaded joints, the BOP is expected to succeed on only 90% of the drill pipe.
* Emergency control to the BOP may have failed in multiple ways. Cameron, the BOP's manufacturer, has stated that the explosion may have severed the communication link so the BOP never received the instruction to engage. Before the backup dead man's switch will engage, communications, power and hydraulic lines must all be severed; Cameron, has stated it is possible BOPs hydraulic lines were intact after the explosion, in which case the unit would not engage. Of the two control pods for the deadman switch, the one that has been inspected so far had a dead battery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Investigation
Obviously in your case "as far as I'm aware" isn't very far at all. You have been arguing a false position for multiple posts without bothering to check your facts in even the most cursory way.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The learning experience was that you need a safe way of turning off the flow of oil. Most parts of the world say you have to install some system to do so.
In the US you get an exemption and make sure any laws are weak or just on paper.
The US public got what the share holders wanted, cheap exploration with no 'big' gov.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thirty-thousand horsepower pumps with high pressure drilling "mud", injected into the system, backwards. That is a lot of pressure feeding into ruptured pipes, which they think may be holding back the maximum flow. Could it make it worse? I'd say the possibility exists. It's an unknown.
As I understand it, the system failed on the well sealing process, when a cost savings measure was introduced: Replacement of the drilling "mud"--in the upper third of the column--with water to speed production. (It seems to me that "savings" were the whole idea behind the projects, at the expense of something you cannot put a price tag on.)
I'd say their "mud shot" will be met with failure, as well: Now you are resisting a high pressure flow on a source thousands of feet below the sea floor that has momentum.
Yet, BP has resisted scientific involvement, and even threatened reporters attempting to document the spill with arrest.
BP says there is no way to measure the flow, and that is a lie. We've had doppler radar since 1988, and I know doppler sonar would work; you can hear the difference in engine noise as they drive past. Doctors use the same tech to monitor cardiac conditions non-invasively. Yet they are not allowed in.
I'd say that the failure to release information should fall under Obstruction of Justice. Though I am certainly hoping that the courts are working hard to make an example out of these donkeys.
I blame Obama more for this than I blame Bush for Katrina. Bush was just clueless. Obama is actively colluding with big oil over the interests of small businesses and citizens in my opinion. He proved he was capable of better with Haiti. Where are the Navy subs investigating the leak? Where are the Army Corps of Engineers? Why is the Coast Guard removing reporters from beaches?
Now you'll excuse me if I take a shot at your sig. I can't afford to agree with you too much in one post, you know. Ahem.
Dollars are votes. We the People hold power to bankrupt corporations out of existence. No such power exists over Gov't.
One dollar is one vote, so each does not get an equal say. We the People have the power to bankrupt particular corporations out of existence, but not the corporate system itself. And we the people have the power to change government utterly, to effectively kill it and replace it with its opposite if need be, to expand and contract it at will, using votes that cost us nothing. Signature demolished, I'd say.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There have been a dozen or so variances from best practices found already. What a surprise. Are you working for BP, whose record over the last ten years is HORRRIBLE.
given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols :)
They got a "categorical exclusion" from all environmental reviews under the US National Environmental Policy Act.
The MSS (Mineral Management Service seems to like to hand them out
What happened is unknown - the auto did no work, the manual on the platform failed and the sea floor efforts failed.
One theory is the the quality of the drills ect used is beyond the cut off the systems.
BP and Transocean knew of limits to the cut off systems as they wrote/knew of reports about issues in 2000 and 2008, but we will have to wait.
All that is known is the US has cost saving industry guided laws and seems to have very poor oversight.
The US has all the experts it needs, just locked away in Texas Universities and unable to make sure good, safe oil extracting tech is used.
If they try its seems they are ignored.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
googlers and their ilk spend all day devising imaginative solutions to very complex problems (generally bits not atoms). why in the HELL are they not be begged by the administration to get involved suggesting a true fix??
what a waste.
sonicrick
i now believe that the ceo of bp should be waterboarded in the louisiana wetlands where the oil is now making its way onto shore.
perhaps we should organize a protest, and splash 10w40 on the doors of our local BP stations.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Navy subs with the exception of bathyscaphes are not capable of reaching the depth of the wellhead on the sea floor. Most subs can't go much deeper than 1000 feet or so.
--riverat
Read "chernobyl" by frederik pohl. he points out that the soviets mobilized a massive army to deal with the disaster with absolutely no resistance or bureaucratic finagling. not that we should use the soviet model for our govt, but it just shows that a govt CAN respond if it REALLY wants to. Prez says our country is under attack from an ecological disaster, which could shut down the gulf economy. strongarms congress to declare war on BP (why not, we have a war on terror), declares martial law in all states affected, forces all us based oil companies to utilize all their resources to contain the oil, or stop the well (probably impossible). BP executives rounded up as prisoners of war, and forced to open all their books, and cooperate, under penalty of death. all of bp, halliburton and the third company resources siezed, and any attempts to evade seizure resulting in immediate execution. Dick cheney waterboarded, George W put under house arrest, all the congresspeople who took money from bp forced to resign, airwaves commandeered by the executive branch, rush, hannity, savage, oreilly, beck silenced under threat of execution from sedition... a person can dream, cant they?
So you are saying the Navy has bathyscapes that are capable of reaching 5,000 feet, exactly, where are they?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They ought to change their name to "Biblical Proportions" because that's where this oil disaster is headed.
--riverat
Well, they lied about how bad it was until recently.
--riverat
Military engineers might be able to do better, without the conflicts of interest involved such as when BP says it is leaking 5000 barrels a day and then says their sippy straw that is hardly denting the spill is taking in 5000 barrels a day...
But yeah, the time for the government to be effective on this issue was in the past, when the oil companies were allowed to go deeper and deeper without new regulations. Face it, this is free market capitalism at it's finest. If a company has a choice between using old technology and safety protocols or spending money on new technology and safety protocols, you know which one they are going to choose every time. And it's no surprise the new Republican darling Rand Paul wants you to think it was an accident. As usual, Republicans are all about responsibility except when it's them or their beloved corporations and financial institutions. And just like those corporations, it's always everybody else's fault and never theirs.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
God you're an idiot. Ever since Reagen became President the gap between rich and poor has continually widened. We're on our way to becoming Mexico in terms of divide. Deregulation and a decrease in the progressiveness of taxation has left everyone but the rich worse off than they were 30 years ago.
I disagree with Rand on the Oil spill, it is not supposed to be a position of a libertarian that damage must be socialized while profits privatized, that is not acceptable from point of view of common resources. Obviously public has responsibility to fight against BP, Transocean, Halliburton etc. because if the public chooses to do nothing, soon enough there will be no natural resources left that are still alive/undamaged, thus the public represented by governments should start Class Action Lawsuits against the companies and require that the companies do clean up / pay for it, pay all damages to all parties involved and punitive damages equal to a factor of the actual costs, something like x10 or x100 times the actual damages.
Also when it concerns the Act of 1964, Rand Paul should have said that in the balance of things, the rights of minorities were violated, thus shifting the balance of equal opportunities too much to one side, so were he in government at that time, he should have tried to modify the language but eventually should have voted for the Act.
Now to be clear, I am completely, totally, utterly, uncompromisingly against government creating laws that limit rights and freedoms of anybody. This means I am against the government institutionalizing slavery. I am just as much against the government creating laws that violate people's rights to private property and freedom of speech. Any kind of hate speech laws - I am completely against that. Any kind of violation of the right of individual to private property by government law - I am completely against that. So in my view it is incorrect to force any business or anybody to accept the terms of behavior set by government law. This of-course does not include criminal behavior - murder, beatings, etc.
If I had to vote on that Act of 64, I would have tried to modify it, so that business owners rights were not violated. If I failed at that, I would have still voted for the Act, because as a libertarian, I see that on balance of things, the rights of people to equal start, equal treatment was violated for too long and Free Market suffers from that.
My basic principles are actually those, of an Objectivist, I am more of Ayn Rand supporter than of Rand Paul, so I cannot have Government passing laws on public good.
Just as she came from USSR, only at the start of that country, I came from it at the end of it and I understand that dictatorship by government is the worst part of any society and it always starts with 'good intentions'. I can't have it.
You can't handle the truth.
What price do you want for putting a 5km-water-depth capable rig, fully stocked for a 8.5km measured-depth well, 50km NE of Scoresbysund (East Greenland) for Sunday evening?
Even if you had the rig, it physically takes time to move the things.
Idiot.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Seriously? 150,000 PSI? And no one has corrected you yet? Further proof that it isn't just the average person that is getting dumber, but everyone as a whole.
Rough pressure estimating: 1 PSI per 2 feet of water, 1 PSI per foot of rock.
5000 feet of ocean = 2500 PSI
Bottom of hole is at 18,350 feet.
18350 - 5000 = 13350 PSI
So thats 2500 PSI to the ocean floor.
and a total pressure of 15600 PSI at the bottom of the well bore, assuming no flow or pressure release. The oil and gas in formation, are at a lower pressure than this (otherwise, they would push the rock up.)
Pressure difference from wellbore at the production zone, to the pressure at the bottom of the gulf of mexico, 5000 feet deep, is LIKELY in the 5000-10000 PSI range... (so, 7500PSI to 12500PSI total pressure on the oil/gas)
I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
We do know: they didn't put in the second concrete cap.
In addition, they should have invested far more in protection: the emergency cutoff had known limitations, and they could have created structures that would have allowed quickly resolving this kind of problem (they are doing it now for new wells).
Nobody can "certify" this stuff because nobody knows what to do.
BP had the engineering capabilities and the responsibility.
Of lately I have Googled for descriptions of how BOP's are constructed. I have found a few verbal descriptions that are useless to me. Does anyone know of a good source? I suppose that the fact that this well is located under a mile of water matters, but I guess it is more important to consider the pressure that needs to be contained.
I have also tried to find a good source for the pressure of the upwelling stuff. Some sources talk about 30-40 thousand PSI. However, it appears to be just an unfounded rumor that is repeated again and again for lack of better source. Another hint I have found is a statement that there is a layer of 11000 foot of granite with density ~2700kg/m^3. Another blogger states its is 18000 foot. The latter blogger may have added, say, 5500 foor water and 11500 foot granite, but I think he was saying it's 18000 foot below the sea floor. Now, the pressure under 11000 foot granite should be (2700kg/m^3)*(g=9.81m/s^2)*(11000 foot) = 88.8 MPa = 12880 psi. I don't know how the pressure can get as high as 40000psi, but perhaps this is possible if part of the oil and gas reservoir is under 33000 foot of granite and communicating with the top part. Is there any better source out there?
In any case, the bop must be anchored so that the oil pressure will not just lift the bop up off the sea floor and tear it off the pipe. How is this done?
Finally, the statement that the causes are not known are just that - statements, and they appear to come from a company that may prefer that the public never gets to know the truth. How comes that a nation so full of "I don't trust government, I don't trust anybody, I want to wear my loaded guns just in case", is so gullible as to accept such statements without requiring that truly and credibly independent bodies do the investigation?
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
I'm not a construction, geological or civil engineer, but one thing has been seriously bothering me ever since BP started with their rather strange schemes to plug the well, and that is, why not bury the well under several million tons of rock and mud? Yes, it would be expensive to excavate so much rock and sand (and place the sand into cloth bags to prevent it from drifting away under water, and yes it would be expensive to transport all that rock and sand to the area, but a)BP's paying (fuckers) and b)this neanderthal method would eventually work, even if one had to cap the well with a 200meter high mountain of rock and sand.
At NASA we had to change out a sensor in a hydraulic line under pressure of the Orbiter while it was at the pad. We ran tubes around the hydraulic lines and pumped Liquid Nitrogen around it to freeze the hydraulic fluid. Then we changed out the sensor and let the fluid warm up. Then we bled the system and it was as good as new. I would think you could do the same thing here. Wrap the blowout preventer with refrigerant lines and freeze the oil into a plug. Then you could cap the thing off eventually and turn off the refrigerators.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I think that there will be time to do blaming AFTER the fucking well has been closed up, you fucking bastard. You and your crazy arse right wing tea-baggers are more concerned with having a black liberal president than saving god knows how many thousands of people's livelihoods from the biggest environmental disaster that the gulf has ever experienced.
All disasters could have been prevented by taking some action, but there is no action we can take to prevent all disasters. That is my fundamental point and the reason I wanted to use stronger language. Risk vs. reward decisions are made every day and unless we want to revert back to the stone age, we must accept that the outcome of some decisions will have massive impact. I'm not saying we shouldn't make efforts to avoid oil spills...I'm saying that we need to keep things in perspective to avoid taking extreme actions based solely on anger or paranoia.
a connotation of incompetence above and beyond the normal standard we expect from politicians, an event that permanently soured the electorate on him
If that's the standard than the Health Care bill was Obama's Katrina......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You might want to review your posting history there spun.
Perhaps that's fair, MSNBC is the democRats unoffical offical mouthpiece.
Fox is right leaning?
Both parties are pretty center after all.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh we know what went wrong. Someone was cheap somewhere, and poking holes in the oil balloon that is our planet has finally backfired.
Why are we not rioting and revolting against BP? BRITISH PETROLEUM SUCKING OUR AMERICAN OIL OUT OF OUR GULF AND FUCKING US? Lets destroy all of BP's property, including their workers as punishment.
"It's not the BOP. It's the Cementing job that was borked."
Wrong. Plus a really bad analogy. The BOP was designed to prevent the well from leaking. It WAS the failsafe.
The cement plugs were only a temporary seal.
If either the plugs or the BOP had worked we would never had heard of this incident. Like many disasters, this one is a chain of incidents, any one of which, if averted, would have prevented the disaster. The problem is that there should never have been ONE of these incidents much less multiple incidents. How many other similar events nearly happened that we never heard about....
The Russians admitted that they used two nuclear bombs to stop the offshore well leaks in their seas. We don't know if it is possible to visit the site where the bombs exploded, but, yes, the leaks were stopped. Perhaps as a result of plugging the Russian leaks, the oil is spewing out from the Gulf. Not something to take in jest.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Yeah, to communist loving fucktards like you. Why don't you go and do as Mr. Hands did and earn yourself a fucking darwin award by downing a tall glass of fucking bleach fucktard.
-commodore64_love
I love the smell of impotent rage in the morning. It smells like... victory.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sorry, it seems that my humorous sarcasm wasn't evident enough.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
Don't sweat it, I was in high dudgeon rant mode, I probably wouldn't have gotten it if you had enclosed it in [sarcasm] tags.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
LMFAO!!! You have made a wonderful point of just how the willfully ignorant GOP and their libertarian lapdogs operate. Their lack of education shows when they go into their little rages while crying communist. I am only shocked by the fact the uneducated follower of Hitler did not cal you either a nigger or a nigger lover. The fact is the conservatives are so upset at Obama succeding enough to wake the voters to see through the petty tactics of the libertarians and their GOP masters.
--
eventu rerum stolidi didicere magistro
“the stupid have no teacher except their own experience"
Revoking BPs corporate charter, putting the board in jail, nationalizing their assets to keep the workers employed and the oil flowing should be enough. The stockholders will be out the money they invested. Arrest is a bit much, don't you think?
No, the stockholders could have sold all of their stocks. Since they chose not to then they are just as guilty as the board. That is why they should be arrested and jailed as well.
People don't love capitalism. They love contributing to their communities and being part of something. The free market, in it's proper place, helps people do that. But capitalism, also known as the institutionalized sin of usury, helps no one.
I agree, people do not love or even like capitalism, but do notice that I wrote sheeple, not people. The fucking sheeple love capitalism and they will not embrace communism as they think its somehow "evil" even though it is fucking capitalism that is evil while communism is far more superior. You can't have the free market without capitalsm.
Not even close. A substantial portion of the country is in favor of some combination of the parts of the bill, and even the bill as a whole was polling at least 40%. How popular and effective it will ultimately be remains to be seen, and isn't something we can truly judge for years... but to compare a controversial bill that you may not politically agree with, either on principle (no expansion of government) or because it may lead to increased taxes or a lower average quality of care, to a staggering amount of incompetence that cost billions of dollars, a large loss of life (I can't put a figure on the death toll caused by incompetence rather than act of god, but suffice it to say that many people needlessly died) and nearly destroyed an iconic American city is nonsense. There are politically unpopular decisions, there are random disasters that happen during a presidential term, and then there's a massive botch attributable to a person, on national television, "heckuva job, Brownie" as we see live feeds of tens of thousands of people huddled in filth in a stadium. There's a human element of suffering on a massive scale (by Americans, which automatically means more to us than seeing Haitians or Asians suffering after a disaster), and a level of sheer personal failure, that you can't simply attach to the successful passage of a bill no matter how much you disagree with it.
Are you a shill? This is so fucking obvious. The annular was damaged!!! Duh.
Social Credit would solve everything...
There are no such thing as sheeple. Only a very rare few people love capitalism, mostly the rich or those who wish they were.
The free market and capitalism are two separate things. You can have a socialist economy and a free market. You don't need to lend for profit to have open trading. For instance, cooperative banks and credit unions can provide the capital, without the need for capitalism.
But you don't really believe any of this. The language, the idiotic misunderstanding of what capitalism, the free market, communism, and socialism actually mean, It's all pretty obvious. You'll have to do a lot better than that.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
WTF? Where did that come from?
I'm not right wing. I find tea-party folks not my cup of tea, although I won't call them derogatory names, as you do.
My concern is that the President should be held accountable for prevention, quick detection, and stopping the leak. He's failed on all these accounts.
Now maybe the President's staff gathered the world's best experts on day one to assess the options, and has a plan in place. But that's not what they are saying.
Sure, you want to wait for the "fucking well" to be closed, do nothing, and then start the blame game? That's the stupidest thing I've read in a LONG time. Seems like a more prudent course of action would be to gather the experts, put a plan in place, and attack the problem.
But I know.. I'm irrational. You're rational. All we need to do is compare our two approaches, and we can see that.
You douchebag.
Please, yes, Katrina was all Bush's fault. He made those people stay where they knew it would be bad, dangerous and stupid to be. It was his fault that the city wasn't prepared. It was all Bush's fault. Not the individual person's fault, not the city, not the county, not the state, definatly skip straight to the top to Bush! What on earth does this have to do with the oil spill? If the government gets its grubby little hands into the middle of this, it will never get fixed. BP is trying everything to stop the leak. Let the people who actually know a little something about drilling fix it, yeah?