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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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: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.

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: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.

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:Oil Spill??

[rrohbeck]

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

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?