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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."
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.
Because having set, tested plans costs money.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
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.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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:
When there are risks to the public, regulation is necessary to keep companies from taking those risks.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"