BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug Well

shmG excerpts from the International Business Times: "Government and BP officials are hopeful after extensive preparations, but are not guaranteeing that a complex attempt early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico will be successful. The so-called 'top kill' procedure that oil major BP is tentatively scheduled to attempt on Tuesday involves plugging up the well by pumping thick 'drilling mud' and cement into it. While it had been attempted on above-ground wells, it has never been tried at the depths involved with this spill, nearly 5,000 feet below the surface."

Comments

Really?

[ProdigyPuNk]

You know what I really can't understand ? Why wouldn't there at least be tested methods for this sort of thing? I can't believe that industries are allowed to do things like drill for oil underwater (which is complex and when failure can cost billions USD and human lives) without having set, tested plans in place in case of this sort of catastrophe.

Re:Really?

[DeadPixels]

Because having set, tested plans costs money.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

Because nobody ever gets punished.

There is no need for any government regulations, I am a libertarian/objectivist/minarchist, that's my point of view, I am not here to discuss it.

My point is that given the myriad of things that can go wrong in any business, in any industry at any time, the real issue is this: is the private business aware that there will be consequences for its actions, should it cause any damage to private property of others, public property, environment in general or any people.

Government should do one thing: punish severely people and firms that those who cause damage to public property, to environment or to people.

Punishing is the second step, first step of-course must be establishing damage. To do that, Government must use the Justice Department. Government needs to run the Justice Department and the Department of Defense but not to run wars, only really to defend the country.

So the Justice Department must be the main tool to fight against criminals, either persons or businesses. In case of damage to environment and public property, government must start Class Action Lawsuits on behalf of the people, who the Government is supposed to represent.

The Class Action Lawsuits must be started to show that there is damage to public property and environment, and these are all about fines, clean up costs, liability. I believe that corporations are rational machines and if it was known that transgressions are punished by taking away money enough to fix the damage + x10 or x100 or x1000 the amount of damages in liability and punitive damages AND if there was also criminal investigations that would in fact lead to personal responsibility assignment, then corporations would have to behave on both, the system (corporate) level and on personal level. Personal responsibility must include possibility of personal fines, confiscation of money, property and jail time.

A system that ran this way would not need to have government dictated regulations. I understand that many people believe this is unachievable, that only government can set regulations correctly, however I believe this is a misunderstanding.

Government normally does not come up with regulations all by itself in vacuum, most if not all regulations actually come out of best industry practices and standards. So the industry itself Knows how to do its business in ways that minimizes damage but it Chooses not to do so very often.

The reasons for choosing one practice over another is obviously cost.

So it must be made cost prohibitive to run a business in a way, that would allow it to continue operations that are knowingly and/or negligently harming either individuals and/or public property and/or environment.

In such a system the Government's role would be that of a judge/executioner but not that of a regulatory body, as we see that regulations are constantly abused, regulatory bodies are corrupted, regulations are most of the time out of date because the industry moves so fast, it is very costly if possible at all to keep up.

We can use the Internet, the Drug Manufacturing corporations, the Food Manufacturing corporations, the Energy producing corporations, the Tech Corporations of almost any kind as examples of how the government is always behind the current events and how yesterdays regulations are already obsolete by today or tomorrow. The cost and time of running a government that actually is on top of all developments in all industries and for all the players would be bigger than the industries themselves, it is extremely prohibitive and abusive to the Economy.

Of-course the Government would not like or endorse this idea because it would actually mean that the Government would not really get any pie in this action. It would actually have to do its job, it is much easier to observe work of One Government Department than of so many separate regulatory bodies, who knew that MMS was literally fucking with BP staff, taking drugs and money and alcohol and gifts? Well, we cou

Re:Really?

[vlm]

without having set, tested plans in place in case of this sort of catastrophe.

Oh, they have plans. They're working like an anthill stirred up with a stick. Seriously.

What you meant to ask, but didn't, is why they don't have set, tested plans to fix this kind of thing "instantly" or "within hours" or at least sooner than its going to take.

Well, that's because no such technology exists. So you simply make failure impossible via paperwork. You need a perfect cement bond job, so you require one. You need a perfect and tested BOP so you require one. The odds of both failing at the same time are astronomical. Which, as you can see, does not mean its impossible, just very rare. I suspect we'll never see an identical failure, its just too unusual. Oh we'll see other failures, just not exactly like this.

Re:Really?

[sl149q]

Testing backup plans for a well leak at 5000 feet pretty much would involve a leaking oil well at 5000 feet somewhere..

It would be interesting to try and get permission to setup and run such a test never mind the cost involved.

Re:Really?

[GrumblyStuff]

Government should do one thing: punish severely people and firms that those who cause damage to public property, to environment or to people.

I would prefer some degree of prevention particularly when the price of failure is so uh... what's that word? Ah, yes, so outrageously fucking huge.

I agree wholeheartedly that the gov is lacking in the punishment department. However, giving the fucking MMS was doing with BP, I see using only punishment as a solitary net to catch offenders. What would stop the likes of BP from fucking and bribing their way out of punishment?

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty but, you know, maybe China is onto something.

Re:Really?

[SvnLyrBrto]

I think the point is that there should be a whole series of set and tested escalating responses *between* "bottom of page 19" and "finally cut off the flow after three months of spilling tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the gulf, doing untold damage to the ecosystem and peoples' livelihoods.".

Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?

Even the smallest IT outfit knows... even the most entry-level certifications teach... that you never EVER design with a single point of failure. Certianly a behemoth of a multinational corporation like BP has *someone* on the payroll who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery. Any CCNA could explain the concepts to them. Or to put it another way; I once worked for a company that guaranteed our clients three-nines, usually delivered four, and had a three-year plan to get up to five. How many nines has BP delivered on this well?

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

please, don't say you think that in anything I said I meant to propose to return to the days, when people did not care about what they did to public property and environment and people.

I am talking about punishment that severe in both, economic sense and personal punishment in the sense of prison time.

I am not a proponent of wild west where anything goes without any consequences.

I am not for socializing the damage while privatizing the profits.

Just saying.

Re:Really?

[the eric conspiracy]

Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?

Maybe because that would double the likelihood you would get a blowout?

who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery.

You are assuming a level of incompetency the flat out doesn't exist. Even with fail overs and redundancy there will be events that overwhelm the planning. Failovers fail. Backup power dies when you can't deliver diesel fuel to the generators because two airliners were crashed into nearby skyscrapers. (I had servers located at a datacenter in Manhattan on 9/11). Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.

All failovers and so on do is reduce the failure rate. They don't guarantee there won't ever be a failure.

There was redundancy in this system at multiple levels. For example the blowout protector had multiple triggering mechanisms, fail safes and cutoff valves. The cutoffs were triggered and went into action even after an explosion and fire that wrecked the platform they were connected to.

The problem is that they didn't cut off the flow. All they did is restrict it somewhat. BP's X-Rays showed that they cutoffs partially cut off the flow, but not completely. Nobody will know why they failed until the valve is taken to the surface and disassembled.

Re:Really?

[Jeremi]

I am talking about punishment that severe in both, economic sense and personal punishment in the sense of prison time.

Punishment alone won't solve the problem. It might if every company had perfect knowledge of all of the risks and was an economically rational actor, that's simply not the case in the real world. What inevitably happens without regulation is this:

1. Some company makes a mess, and is punished severely
2. Other companies take note and self-regulate for a while
3. A few years pass, memories of the disaster start to get hazy
4. Some company notices that by cutting just a few corners, they can get a competitive edge on the other companies, with no apparent downside
5. All the other competing companies are now forced to cut the same corners, or get undercut on price and go out of business
6. Repeat the previous two steps until some company cuts one corner too many, and things go pear-shaped. Then goto the top and start the whole process over again

When there are risks to the public, regulation is necessary to keep companies from taking those risks.

Re:Really?

[yyxx]

The odds of both failing at the same time are astronomical.

They are not astronomical if you continue operations despite knowing that some of your safeties have already failed.

I suspect we'll never see an identical failure, its just too unusual. Oh we'll see other failures, just not exactly like this.

This wasn't a "failure", it appears to have been blatant disregard for safety procedures.

Re:Really?

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Worse than that... The libertarian view of self-regulation due to penalties is missing a really obvious factor:

The willingness of people to take risks in exchange for profit.

Let's say you got $1 million invested. You see an opportunity to increase the value of your company to $20 million, but there's a catch. There is a 10% risk that everything goes to hell; 10.000 farmers downstream will lose their job and you lose everything and spend 10 years in prison.

Libertarians for some reason think no one would take that risk. Those of us who aren't completely braindead know differently.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

Finally, a constructive argument.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

But you're clearly much cleverer than they are. Either that or perhaps you should stfu if you don't actually know anything about the subject.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[melikamp]

Yeah, but would you have any cash left to spare for coke and hookers? Didn't thinks so...

Re:It's simple really

[ThunderBird89]

Did they try nuking a well before? I know they used dynamite back in Kuwait, but surely not nukes were used for this purpose, no?

Besides, nuking a well in the Mexico bay, less than a 100 kms off the coast of the US, is not going to provoke any sort of negative PR and response...
Not to mention the load of methane hydrate sitting there on the bay floor, just waiting for a shock, like, you know, a nuke going off, to release a metric @55load of methane and turn the entire area into a nautical hell-hole, plus catapult the greenhouse effect a couple of years forward in the space of a few minutes.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[sleeping143]

[citation needed]

Re:is it just me or...

[vlm]

Unfortunately, BP is doing something very intelligent . . . they are wiping their hands from the affair and trying to disassociate themselves from the whole disaster. "What?!?! Liability?!?! Not us!"

Seriously? All I've heard from them, over and over, was they're not going to hide behind the legal liability limit. If you can provide any actual quotes that their position is now to do the exact opposite, that would be very insightful.

Re:Oil Spill??

[Garble Snarky]

From the summary, since nobody seems to get it:

... early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico ...

Those of us familiar with English grammar might expect definite articles, in a sentence describing a well-reported current event. Or, maybe I'm the one who doesn't get it.

Why is this taking so long?

[Turzyx]

Pretty much everyone has condemned the way BP has tried to 'save' the well during their attempts to 'solve' the problem, instead of taking a more direct approach, but it cannot be stressed enough. The oil rig explosion was on the 20th April. It's now the 23rd of May. For a company which is in control of, basically a WMD, there should have been contingency after contingency lined up.

No dice on the blow off valve? Next day try the cap, next day try the plug, then the current 'top kill' method; we'd be at the current progress within a week. At the moment it seems BP is making it up as they go along, that may be all they can do at the moment, but it is unacceptable that there was no preparation or protocol for a worse case scenario, which even this isn't. A tanker full of cement and rubber could have been there within a few hours, this is a disgrace.

It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico, I hope that time is spent drafting up legislation that sets up some sort of oil spill crisis management that has direct authority to intervene immediately when something like this happens. This sort of task absolutely should not be in the hands of people who have such a blatant conflict of interest.

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[the eric conspiracy]

No dice on the blow off valve? Next day try the cap, next day try the plug, then the current 'top kill' method; we'd be at the current progress within a week.

Even if the equipment to do all this is available on site ready to go you could not move that rapidly. For example with the "Top Kill" BP is having to carefully X-Ray the existing valve structure at a depth of 1 mile using robot subs to determine if the structure can withstand the pressure of pumping mud through the system. They have working on determining the risks of this process for at least two weeks. Just rushing ahead without careful consideration of the side effects could do a hell of a lot more harm than good.

The BP well is the deepest well to ever blow out. It is not surprising that there is difficulty getting it under control. In fact things are moving far more quickly than in the case of the IXTOC-1 blowout which was also in the Gulf but at a depth of only 165 ft. That took nearly 10 months to cap. Total oil released by IXTOC-1 was about 3,000,000 barrels.

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[timmarhy]

dude, this isn't fixing a leaking tap at the mcdonalds you work at. this is a massive high pressure leak of flamable liquid 5000 feet down on the sea bed floor, miles out in the ocean.

"A tanker full of cement and rubber could have been there within a few hours" - clearly by your comment I can see you have zero grasp on the logistics of this. where is the tanker going to come from, who's going to make a tanker's worth of cement in a few hours? hows it going to get loaded onto the tanker in a few hours? how do you plan on keeping the concrete from hardening on the way there, because it'll take more then a few hours for the tanker to get to site? whats your plan to get it into the well from the tanker, hitting that 5 foot hole from 5000 feet above on the rolling ocean?

this is just the issues i can think of, and i'm sure it'd be a LOT harder once it came to doing it.

Re:will they pay ?

[vlm]

The funny part is watching people desperate to fine BP... Apparently, because they have the most money. Ambulance chaser culture at its finest.

No one mentions fining Haliburton the cement company, no one mentions fining the owners of the drilling platform, no one mentions fining the govt inspectors whom may have not done their job. No one mentions fining the families of the 11 dead men, whom might have been the cause. Just, suspiciously, fining the company that happens to be the richest. While carefully avoiding the two issues of whom exactly screwed up (its possible BP did nothing wrong), and the issue of whom will pay (that being us, the gas station consumers, of course). Ethics and morality at its finest, I guess.

Re:will they pay ?

[Trepidity]

Although this old pseudolibertarian meme seems to always come up, that's not actually how markets work. BP is a corporation with a variable rate of profit, in a competitive market in which they have almost no pricing power (oil prices are set in a global market whose price is controlled much more by OPEC than by western oil corporations). The most likely outcome is that BP's shareholders will be the ones to ultimately pay, through lower profits.

Re:And how would you do that?

[EdIII]

So what do you do at that point?

You fucking plug the well and stop. The last thing you do is act like social psychopaths in search of money at any cost and continue. They KNEW what the consequences were to the environment, the economies of the coastal states in the US, not to mention other countries.

But what the fuck does a BP executive care about a hard working family in Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi that depends on the ocean for their livelihood? That's right nothing. Saying that is not hyperbole either. If the executives knew of the fragile state of the BOP and continued, they should be put in Prison. Plain and Simple.

Dear God Almighty man. The last thing you do is hope for the best and continue when the consequences of your actions can affect so many many other lives for decades to come. Your plain assertion that they really had no choice in their actions is appallingly offensive.

Of course they had a choice. They could have stopped.

Re:It's simple really

[uncqual]

9) wait a few days/weeks/months/years until high pressure oil & gas seeps through fractures and silt near surface of seabed and begins to leak out around cap already created.

10) expand area to be capped.

11) repeat starting at step 2 until seabed of entire Gulf of Mexico has been cemented over.

12) maintain crews and equipment forever (well, at least for a couple billion years) plugging the inevitable cracks that in the concrete parking lot at the bottom of the GOM.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of this response. I've read it all over the internet...

Regular Person A: How dare they not have 50 contigency plans lined up for this? They should....
Seemingly-familiar-with-situation-person-B: How dare you, person who doesn't even work in this industry, try to say BP isn't doing all they can to fix this issue. Could you fix it? Or do you even have the knowledge to fix it? No? Then STFU.

Well Person B, BP should be releasing every single iota of information they have to the public so that perhaps we can crowd-source a solution. Next, I admit that I'm tired of everyone playing monday morning quarterback for every situation that goes wrong and yes, humans are not perfect, mistakes happen. However, if BP, almost a month later has failed to fix this issue, they should be spending every dime they have to fix this issue, and if they aren't, the government should be forcing them to do it. You want to make the big bucks in oil? Cool, sounds good! But you gotta accept the risks, and the risks are that if you fuck up, you pay, and you pay through the teeth. So STFU, the goal is to fix the fucking problem, and who gives a fuck if you or I know more than person A or B, lets STFU and work together to fix the god damn issue!

Fix it, jail them, move on

[billcopc]

At this point, and I am talking out of my ass here, I think it's time public funds were applied to fix this, once and for all. Prosecute any and every executive related to this incident, jail them, seize ALL their assets to recover the public expenses, and call it a day.

They fucked up, they neglected to install proper failsafes, and completely failed to plan and execute a proper cleanup. When you screw up this badly, you don't deserve to ever play the business game again. Do not pass go, do not start a new oil scam, go directly to jail and then die.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[billcopc]

Corporations are operated by people.

If I create software that (somehow) gets a person killed, through an error of my own doing and not the user's, am I not responsible for it ? Pretend EULA's don't apply, just for the sake of argument.

If a group of executives create a corporation, whose actions cause great harm and financial distress to millions of people (forget the wildlife for now), don't you think the people behind the corporation should be held responsible ? I think it's high time the concept of incorporation was revisited. Corporations don't ruin society, people do.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[ScrewMaster]

If I create software that (somehow) gets a person killed, through an error of my own doing and not the user's, am I not responsible for it ? Pretend EULA's don't apply, just for the sake of argument.

Actually, no, you probably would not be. Put it like this: if engineers were to be held accountable for every mistake, nobody would be an engineer. Sure, if there were malicious intent on your part, you'd be in trouble, but if an engineer does make a mistake (we all do, nobody's perfect) and that mistake makes it out into the field, it's the organization, it's policies, and it's leadership that failed, and should be held responsible. The same thing applies to BP ... their technical people did their jobs, but management failed bigtime.

If a group of executives create a corporation, whose actions cause great harm and financial distress to millions of people (forget the wildlife for now), don't you think the people behind the corporation should be held responsible?

Sure, and contrary to popular belief the defense afforded by the corporate veil is not absolute. In cases like this, it can and will be penetrated and there will be some jail time involved. The people at the top, unfortunately, can afford the best lawyers and usually find some technical people or middle management to take the fall for them. Sometimes they don't though ... witness Enron.

Re:Oil Spill??

[rrohbeck]

No, that's all just liberal propaganda to harm poor BP.

Re:It's simple really

[yyxx]

The Russians nuked gas wells; different thing. The failure was failure to extinguish. Stopping a big, burning gas leak is different from stopping an oil flow. I suspect stopping the oil flow is easier; it's a tiny hole through 3 miles of rock; it shouldn't take much to block it.

However, experts should make the call. I just hope they do so based on geology and other science and engineering, without being swayed by anti-nuclear hysteria.

(FWIW, am generally against nuclear energy because nuclear waste disposal hasn't been solved).

Re:It's simple really

[yyxx]

I think you overestimate the size and effect of underground nukes. The Gulf is geologically active; there are a lot bigger earthquakes than a small nuke.

Re:BP's money is the same color as everybody else'

[drinkypoo]

If you fine (or tax) a corporation, it just means the customers and stockholders get shafted. The corporation just passes the cost on.

Shafted? That's nonsense. There's no easy way to say this, so I'm going to just lay it out for you. If you buy stock in murder, you are a murderer. Those who held IBM stock during the holocaust have to take their share of the blame, because IBM built the concentration camp management systems. Those who work for BP must take their share of the blame; every employee of BP shares in the profits, therefore all of them must share the blame. Why should BP's stockholders be any different?

If it is a bad enough hit, or if they can't pass it on, they go bankrupt.

Good.

That'll really help the situation ... NOT.

Your snarky sarcasm doesn't change the truth; permitting the same cast of characters to do the same nefarious shit again and again is the alternative. We must invoke the corporate death penalty on those corporations which deserve it. The people the corporations are made up of have a choice — they elected to go to work for a planet-raping corporations too irresponsible to even clean up its own messes, and they deserve no quarter from any right-thinking person. Every shareholder is just as guilty as every BP executive, no more, and no less.

And if you think stockholders mean a bunch of greedy billionaires, think again. There are countless little guys with 401K and IRA funds in that stock.

Greed is greed regardless of scale, and investing in a corporation known to do truly disgusting levels of damage to the ecosystem is just another expression of greed. There's plenty of nature-friendly investments they could make. Might they make less money? Sure. If that means they have to settle for a truck camper instead of a diesel pusher RV for their retirement, so be it. But if your argument is that people in rich countries should face no penalty for investing in the destruction of our ecosystem, you're making a morally bankrupt argument. When you invest, you're putting your money to work, and you have a responsibility to make that investment... responsibly.

But yes, the corruptocracy which is a collusion between government, bureaucracy, and megacorporations is sickening.

Corporations and governments are made up of people. Without those people they don't exist. Shareholders are critical to a public company and without them the corporation loses its ability to do evil. Ditto for employees. Therefore, the shareholders and employees of BP are evil. There's no two ways about it. If you work for big oil, you're fucking scum, even if you're one of the people who is there to contain spills, or prevent accidents. I don't care if you have to feed your family. If the price of your family's continuance is oil spills which have severe repercussions for the continuance of the entire human race, then it is both illogical and immoral to keep them going. You do not have an inherent right to life; we all die. Why should oil companies be permitted, however, to hasten that for all?