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

It's simple really

[f3rret]

Just nuke the damn thing, it's worked before and surely nothing can go wrong.

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:It's simple really

[sonicmerlin]

He's talking about the 5 nukes the Russians used, 4 of which succeeded. Of course the Russian oil wells were surrounded by hard, brittle rock, while the leak in the Gulf is surrounded by mud. Different environment leads to different results.

Re:It's simple really

[ThunderBird89]

Hmmm, good to know.

That aside, there's still a shitload of methane hydrate down there, and it might be in the planet's (and all ships' in the bay area) if BP didn't subject it to the shock of a nuke.

Re:It's simple really

[Mr. Freeman]

"I don't see why C4 or some other high explosive couldn't work"

Because the two explosions are completely different. Nuclear bombs aren't the same thing as a really large amount of TNT or other explosive.

Re:It's simple really

[Kymermosst]

That aside, there's still a shitload of methane hydrate down there, and it might be in the planet's (and all ships' in the bay area) if BP didn't subject it to the shock of a nuke.

I doubt BP has any nukes, so I doubt it would be BP that subjects it to the shock of a nuke.

Re:It's simple really

[roman_mir]

I suggest inviting all of the BP officers and managers and then nuking THAT site from the orbit.

The hole can be plugged by other oil companies and the money must be taking from BP corporate and personal accounts.

Re:It's simple really

[Redlazer]

Then I'm afraid an explanation is needed.

I obviously understand the difference between nuclear and conventional explosives, but why couldn't we use an equivalent amount of C4 to stop the leak? Isn't it about "resetting" the area, or are we talking about the insane heat generated, which will convert the sand to glass? I find that a pretty risky proposition.

Yes, I'm afraid I just don't understand. Citation needed.

Re:It's simple really

[ls671]

Dynamite was used in Kuwait to put out the flames (lack of oxygen caused by the explosion), not to plug the well.

They still had to manually plug the hole after the flames were put out on a live well spitting gazes like crazy. Be careful for sparks and get the big wages ;-)

Nuking is a pretty high risk gamble IMHO.

Re:It's simple really

[ThunderBird89]

Then I'm afraid an explanation is needed.

I obviously understand the difference between nuclear and conventional explosives, but why couldn't we use an equivalent amount of C4 to stop the leak? Isn't it about "resetting" the area, or are we talking about the insane heat generated, which will convert the sand to glass? I find that a pretty risky proposition.

Yes, I'm afraid I just don't understand. Citation needed.

I believe that's the general idea: the heat and pressure from the nuke will glass the bedrock into which the well was drilled, and fuse it shut. Of course, BP would have to sink a new one for another couple million dollars, but at least the leak would be cut. And if they're not careful, a couple of new leaks open up in the hydrate and flood the area with methane, making for a global catastrophe not just local.

Re:It's simple really

[paeanblack]

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?

Yes, the Russians have nuked 5 wells before. The method is to drill a parallel hole and set off an explosion deep underground, crushing the rock around the original well. Deep underground detonations are quite clean.

Four times it worked, one time they were not able to drill close enough because of the gas fires on the surface from the leaking well. "Close enough" means detonating the nuke within 50-60 meters of the original bore for a Hiroshima-size nuke of a few dozen kilotons.

A big drawback to this method, apart from the political ramifications, is that it takes time to drill the shot-hole. Even nukes don't have much of a blast radius under a kilometer of rock...you need to be really precise.

Re:It's simple really

[justin12345]

In this case why would that matter? I believe its the overpressure not the heat (I assume you are referring to the way nuclear weapons release a huge amount of heat over a relatively long period of time) that forces closed the bore. I have no idea if using conventional explosives would be feasible from an engineering standpoint, but if it comes to it, the public would be much more comfortable with a conventional explosive.

Re:It's simple really

[bhtooefr]

Or the fact that for an equivalent size blast, you'd displace a rather large portion of the water with the rather large physical volume of the C4 (and you'd need a whole crapload of C4,) versus the rather small physical volume of the nuke, I suspect.

Re:It's simple really

[dimeglio]

Surrounded by what? The last graphic I saw showed rock. The mud is likely just a few meters deep after which it's the earth crust. Being in the ocean, it's a very hard rock. Maybe it's not too late to nuke it. The damage is as bad but it's going to get a lot worse unless they cap it now.

Re:It's simple really

[Artifakt]

Real explosives don't need ambient oxygen. Internal break down of (usually Nitrogen) bonds releases the energy, not rapid oxidation. A few exotic chemistrys exist, such as getting a normally inert noble gas to combine with a reactive gas (i.e. Xenon Trifloride) to store similar levels of energy, but mostly it's Nitrogen. C-4 isn't really the name of an explosive, but Composition 4 is about 90% RDX, which is the high explosive part (also called cyclonite). The other 9 to 10 % is the plasticizer that makes it putty like. No, C-4 does not require outside Oxygen, although it's probably not the stuff to use here. I'm sure the US Navy has some data on what explosives stay safe under very high seawater pressures and still react quickly, hopefully someone will ask them as needed.

Re:It's simple really

[gamecrusader]

this is just mother earth urinating on the rest of the world

Re:It's simple really

[Goaway]

You know those wacky "kiloton" and "megaton" numbers they use about nukes? That's exactly the weight of the equivalent conventional explosive charge.

Do you have fifteen thousand tons of C4 lying around somewhere?

Re:It's simple really

[f3rret]

The main differences between a nuclear weapon and a conventional one are that conventional weapons rely on chemical energy and usually require an oxidizer of some kind, which may or may not be built into the explosive compound itself.
The main difference though is scale, even a small nuclear weapon in the single kiloton range is so much more powerful than a nuclear weapon with an equivalent yield.

For example to replicate the yield of even a 1kT nuclear blast you would have to move 604.594921 m3 of TNT, which is a lot. Add to this that most nuclear weapons yields of tens if not hundreds of kilotons.

Re:It's simple really

[mano.m]

Since this was clearly a conspiracy by evil Bond villains who enjoy dipping gulls in crude.

Re:It's simple really

[uncqual]

Of course, BP would have to sink a new one for another couple million dollars, but at least the leak would be cut.

First, it costs way more than a "couple million" to sink a new well out there - that will pay for about five day's rent on a drilling rig like the Deepwater Horizon (now sitting at the bottom of the ocean after baking for a while) or the Development Driller II or III (I think the links point to the stats on the rigs being used, but I'm not absolutely sure) which are/will be drilling the relief wells.

Second, BP has publicly stated that they are not going to attempt to ever use the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon.

Somewhat unrelated, but here's a nice graphic on the relief well plans (and, now somewhat outdated, progress).

Re:It's simple really

[Anonymous Coward]

Rock? Sediment? It starts out as sediment, and grades with depth to increasingly lithified (i.e. cemented) rock due to pressure and the effects of fluids depositing minerals. It's not a sharp boundary and individual layers can vary considerably in their physical properties. Many of the Gulf of Mexico oil reservoirs are sandstone that is often quite poorly cemented, especially in areas of high fluid pressure as is the case here (the high fluid pressure suppresses the normal compaction process). On top of that sometimes there are gas hydrates cementing the sediment together in the upper part of the well (before it gets too hot for them to form), which is fine until you melt them, at which point your relatively consolidated sediment becomes the consistency of soup ... and your blowout preventer sinks into it ... and the drill string twists and breaks -- trust me, it's a bad thing.

PS: the people suggesting explosives are the solution, let alone nukes, are being foolish. You stand as much chance of knocking off the blowout preventer and rupturing half the drill string (== subsurface blowout that eventually reaches the surface at goodness knows how many new spots -- without a well head to try to cap). You might think it's bad now. Its nothing compared to that situation.

Re:It's simple really

[Sir_Lewk]

Technically dynamite in Kuwait was just used to put out oil well fires, not stop the flow of oil from wells. The explosion burns out all of the oxygen thus extinguishing the fire, it's a neat trick that has been used for decades actually. After the fires are extinguished the wells were then capped through conventional means (I'm not familiar with that process). Nuking a well and dynamiting a well are meant to solve to separate problems.

Re:It's simple really

[Man On Pink Corner]

With a 4 out of 5 success result, though I really do wonder what happened when it didn't work.

My understanding is that this question will be answered in a 2 1/2-hour special report on ABC tonight.

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:It's simple really

[JustOK]

ejactly!

Re:It's simple really

[plopez]

No, you've got it all wrong. Plug the leak *with* the BP executives.

Re:It's simple really

[roman_mir]

I am quite certain that shit floats, so I don't think your plan holds water.

Re:It's simple really

[Xonstantine]

The main differences between a nuclear weapon and a conventional one are that conventional weapons rely on chemical energy and usually require an oxidizer of some kind, which may or may not be built into the explosive compound itself.

Most explosives "explode" by explosive decomposition. The oxidation is a very small component of the energy release. This is true for just about every nitrated explosive out there.

Now, the fuel slurry in FAEs is a little bit different beast, but FAEs are more properly considered high speed conflagrations.

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:It's simple really

[bunratty]

Just nuke the damn thing, it's worked before and surely nothing can go wrong.

Dude! Don't you watch Lost? That just makes the island sink and sends everyone to purgatory!

Re:It's simple really

[TheLink]

Does it really burn up all the oxygen? I thought it disrupts the reaction similar to the way blowing out a candle disrupts the flame.

Re:It's simple really

[Mindcontrolled]

A few meters is an understatement. This is the zone where the Mississippi sediments are deposited. The mud layer will be hundreds of meters strong, gradually compacting into rock. To collapse the hole, you would have to go through the whole sediment layer - at which point you can as well drill a relief well.

Re:It's simple really

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's actually equivalent mass of TNT, not plastic explosive. But that's a pedantic point ;)

Re:It's simple really

[RockDoctor]

To collapse the hole, you would have to go through the whole sediment layer

Ah. Lusi version 2. That's going to help. Not.

Re:It's simple really

[Goaway]

The difference is never more than a factor of two or so in any direction anyway.

Also, you will notice I sneakily never explicitly mentioned any particular kiloton yield!

Re:It's simple really

[CrimsonAvenger]

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

Actually, the only nuclear waste disposal problems are legal, not technical. The French do just fine with their nuclear waste, since they don't have quite so many people screaming "NOT NEAR MY HOUSE!" as we do.

Re:It's simple really

[Stregano]

Or you could plug it with hundreds of rich, fat cat oil company execs.

Re:It's simple really

[jez9999]

Nuke, baby, nuke!!!

Re:It's simple really

[jez9999]

Isn't the idea that they just need to stop this flow long enough to drill a relief well? How quickly could they suck this oil deposit out with a big relief well, at least enough to reduce the pressure significantly?

Re:It's simple really

[Burning1]

Does C4 require oxygen? I thought it was triggered by an electrical current.

C4 is triggered by heat and pressure, and can only be detonated by a blast cap. In fact, it's stable enough that if you light it with a match, it can be used as a heat-source (that releases some nasty chemicals.)

As far as I know, only fuel explosives (fireballs) rely on external oxidation. Most explosives (such as C4) will explode in almost any environment.

The difference between an explosion and a burn is that all the energy of the explosive is released over a very small period of time. Something that burns (like a camp-fire) releases the same amount of energy, but it's rate of release is limited by the exposure of the material to fresh oxygen.

For instance, gasoline normally just burns. But in a car engine, it's aresolized (atomized) and compressed, permitting the mixture to ignite quickly and completely. If you were to pour raw gasoline into an engine, the gas would not explode, and the engine would stop (this condition is known as flooding an engine.)

Likewise, flower (as in, stuff ground from wheat) can explode like a gasoline fireball in the right concentrations.

Generally, something that requires external oxidation will burn but not explode outside of specific conditions. Conversely, anything that can burn can produce a fireball if exposed to enough oxygen, either by using pure oxygen, or by finely grinding the flammable material and dispersing it in the air.

Fireballs are generally produced by strapping explosives (such as C4) to buckets of gasoline. The explosives aerosolize the gasoline, and ignite it, producing a fireball.

This is also part of the reason you should never pour water on a grease fire. The grease is so hot that the water will instantly convert into steam. The steam will throw the oil all over the room, and the fire will ignite it, producing a huge fireball.

Keep in mind that while fireballs are generally considered explosions, they are incredibly slow explosions. A real explosive releases it's energy much faster.

Re:It's simple really

[yyxx]

Actually, the only nuclear waste disposal problems are legal, not technical.

Actually, they are technical: nobody knows how to dispose of the waste safely. No, not even the French.

Re:It's simple really

[Tassach]

the public would be much more comfortable with a conventional explosive

To put it bluntly, the public are a bunch of uneducated morons. When it comes to resolving an (inter)national crisis, their opinions and comfort levels are irrelevant. Unless you have a PhD in geophysics and an extensive experience in deep-water drilling, you really don't have anything significant to contribute to the discussion. STFU and let the experts do their jobs.

One of the things education and experience gives you is an understanding of the limits of your knowledge. I'm a very good engineer, in my own specialty. Outside of that specialty, I'll defer to experts in that field.

Re:It's simple really

[meustrus]

http://xkcd.com/285/

Dubble Bubble

[rueger]

At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas - well, aside from a nuke - so maybe chewing gum is the next option?

You know, If I was drilling oil via a pipe that went 5000 ft straight down into the water I'd have made sure there was a pretty much foolproof way to shut the damned thing down before beginning.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"You know, If I was drilling oil via a pipe that went 5000 ft straight down into the water I'd have made sure there was a pretty much foolproof way to shut the damned thing down before beginning."

That way is called a blowout preventer (BOP).

It failed.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[melikamp]

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

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the blowout preventer does exactly that. When it has not been swapped out for a test fixture and damaged (known at the time) known leaking hydraulic fluid.

The bad cement job was also known to be bad before they replaced the drill mud with salt water.

There were so many things done wrong. All of them had to be bad for this to happen. B.P. knew these were all wrong and went ahead anyway.

They belong in prison and sued out of existence.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[rfuilrez]

It didn't fail on it's own though. An employee broke it and BP senior execs didn't think it was important enough to delay further to fix it.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[sleeping143]

[citation needed]

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Kenoli]

BP probably doesn't have too many nukes handy.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Hurricane78]

so maybe chewing gum is the next option?

Actually, it is. Just that it’s itself made from oil. (= rubber parts)

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7129225.ece

"According to a survivor’s account... blowout preventer...was punctured in the weeks before the blast but nothing was done to fix it.

"a crewman accidentally nudged a joystick, which sent 15ft of the oil pipe through the closed device"

"Mr Williams added that a crewman “discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid”. He thought that it was important enough to 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’

"two control pods that operate the blowout preventer had lost some of its function weeks before the explosion, and the batteries on the device were weak. With the schedule slipping, Mr Williams said that a BP manager ordered a quicker pace. The faster drilling had caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools. “There’s always pressure [on the crew], but yes, the pressure was increased,” he said. "

Re:Dubble Bubble

[rueger]

Wow - modded flamebait AND redundant! Why do I think that BP has some people following this discussion! I'm so proud!

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've also heard news reports have said one of the seals might have been screwed up from BP / Transocean mistreating it. Alternatively maybe the BOP was defective from the start but the problem went undetected. We don't know for sure yet, but I'm sure the lawsuits will settle it many years from now.

Regardless, the implication that oil companies don't work with multiple redundant ways to close off the well when things go wrong is simply false. Spikes in well pressure happen all the time. First the drillers try increasing the drilling mud weight, then the BOP does it's job if that doesn't work. It *is* the backup when other things go wrong. A typical BOP has multiple valves and types of valves, and multiple ways to trigger them from the surface. There are thousands of wells drilled around the world without incident every year with BOPs doing their job properly. There's nothing in the papers about it because it's a non-event. Unfortunately there is no piece of equipment that is truly foolproof. If BP / Transocean did screw up the BOP then this will be a lesson in not letting your failsafes go bad: you stop drilling or doing any other well operations and fix the problem before proceeding, like you're supposed to. Time will tell whether it was mismanagement of the situation or an unforeseeable technical problem.

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!

Re:Dubble Bubble

[JustOK]

True. They probably have them in some warehouse out in the country because rent is cheaper, but the roads are worse, so it takes longer to get them.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[moosesocks]

Not to play pedantics, but wouldn't that actually have been Halliburton and Transocean's fault?

Re:Dubble Bubble

[ScrewMaster]

sorry but i've played this game before. the operators of that drill rig know damn well the heat is on them, and in classic form that are looking to blame management of BP because they know chumps like you will buy into it.

Who is more the fool ... the fool, or the fool who hires him?

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Halliburton does not have the responsibility of doing checks to ensure the cementing is not faulty. A job like that will always have the risk of being faulty thus tests should be conducted.

There were actually BP employees on the rig telling Transocean to change their plans in order to speed up the process, so they're not without responsibility here. Investigations will likely need to be made to determine how much blame each deserve.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[L4t3r4lu5]

No dice; They can afford better lawyers than anyone else. Failing that, they can afford Judges.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[MacWiz]

At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas...

This is what the ACs who are tired of hearing about this seem to miss.

Seems like BP has spent more time and effort trying to prevent people from seeing what they've done than actually doing something about it. They'd prefer no one talks about it either.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[SleazyRidr]

It may have been Halliburton and Transocean doing the drilling, but ultimately it was a BP project, so the buck has to stop with them when it comes to making sure this kind of thing doesn't happen.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Ant P.]

This is all very reminiscent of the events leading up to the Titanic disaster.

"Er... you're heading straight into an ice field ther-"
"LOL FUK OFF NOOB!!1 /mode +m"

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Tassach]

Who is more the fool ... the fool, or the fool who hires him?

I would say the fool who hires him, and then ignores his advice because it would be too expensive to implement.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[chikanamakalaka]

Cleverer? Sounds like you meant "more clever" if not it would be like a word like "funner"

Really...

[fewnorms]

What could go wrong? All that can happen is that it doesn't work, and then they'll not be much worse off than they are now, besides having exhausted yet another option.
Or in the case of success with the pipes actually plugged, all that might happen is that the part of the riser (or part of the pipe lower down even) NOT plugged could rupture from built up pressure lower down ...
Oh wait ...

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?

[Daetrin]

I'm not going to claim that BP (and the other oil companies) haven't done anything wrong in this situation, but how exactly do you propose that they have tested any solutions prior to this? Their failure is that the safeguards they had in place weren't sufficient to stop the problem from happening in the first place, not that they didn't intentionally cause such a disaster earlier so they could do testing to determine the best way of stopping it after the fact.

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?

[amorsen]

There are set, tested plans. They are a) let the blow-out-preventer do its job so that the whole event ends up at the bottom of page 19 and b) if the blow-out-preventer fails, drill a relief well. Well they did a) and it failed spectacularly, so now they're doing b) which takes 3 months. They are also doing a lot of crazy things from c) through z) which weren't ever planned, but that's better than everyone thinking they are doing nothing at all.

Re:Really?

[phoenixwade]

Their failure is that the safeguards they had in place weren't sufficient to stop the problem from happening in the first place

That appears to be a bit of disingenuous spin. You might be right, the safeguards that were SUPPOSED to be in place might have been insufficient, but we'll never know, since even the safeguards that were supposed to be in place were not, and they knew that and continued anyway.

Re:Really?

[RicktheBrick]

How about building the structure that they have at the bottom on land out of clay. Than place a very large box(say 100ftx100ftx40ft) over that model. Than fill box with cement. Lift box off model and take and cover leak with the box. It should be a very tight fit than cover box with lots of heavy rocks.

Re:Really?

[maxume]

Then all they have to do is maneuver 15,000 tons with better than 1 foot precision at the end of a 1 mile cable.

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]

I understand your view, but realize just how many times before now Oil has been spilled into oceans, onto lands etc.

So what has really been done by any regulations so far? Seems that nothing has been done. I am a libertarian for purely practical reasons, of-course my position is ideological, but I do not see another way to fix economy at all. No amount of regulation can do it, and it only makes it worse by growing the government further, which needs to shrink instead.

Problem with regulations is that it creates a point of entry for the private interest. You set up a regulatory body, I'll show you the place to concentrate private interest their corruption efforts and I'll show you the place for the unscrupulous (*of which there are always enough*) to enter the game only to make money, not to do any actual work, AND I will show you another government spending point that did not need to exist.

There were so many spills, so many catastrophes by now, so where is all that regulation that changed anything? Anything at all? Why did the country need to wait until something so close and huge to the shore now to do anything?

Do you believe that anything will change? Will anybody be punished? Will anybody's money be taken away? Will anyone Who Matters actually spend time in jail?

I think we both know the answer.

So yes, this is a humorously unbearable problem, but did it have to become this bad?

No, I believe that by allowing corporations' management to get away with limited personal responsibility caused this. Obviously personal responsibility was removed and instead the regulations were installed, but both of this events created a huge moral hazard, which hurts the society and economy in enormous ways.

By getting rid of regulations and applying the law to sue, take money away, jaili those responsible the real changes can be achieved.

1. There will be more possibility of competition. Regulations are great if they work, but if a company does follow all the necessary precautions that are possible at all then a regulatory body is only a point of cost to the economy and it is really not needed and makes government cheaper and less prone to corruption and makes it possible to run a business that is actually doing all that is possible to run safely while escaping the costs of getting all of the licenses, and YES escaping the costs of bribing the government :)

2. There will be actual changes in the way businesses operate if it was understood that the Government is Coming after the guilty in both ways: money and prison time.

Shooting someone in the head? Well, it's a possibility, but that's up to the limits of the law as a punishment for any kind of crime.

Re:Really?

[Trepidity]

So what has really been done by any regulations so far? Seems that nothing has been done.

Well, it's a counterfactual, so rather hard to prove, but I'd guess that what's been done is prevent many additional spills that would've happened. Look at how frequent spills were in the early-20th-c before the industry got more heavily regulated, sometimes even devolving into rivers of oil on land. There's a reason wildcat drilling, i.e. unregulated drilling, has a bad reputation, and nobody wants to return to those wild-west days.

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?

[Trepidity]

Hmm, with oil it seems that might work, if it's all large companies, which is an interesting possibility.

The usual problem with liability (after the fact) instead of regulation (before the fact) for catastrophic situations is that the company will just go bankrupt at much lower levels of liability, so large liabilities don't really provide an economic incentive to avoid catastrophic failures. Say a company with $100m in assets has two unlikely but major failure scenarios: one causes $1b of damages, and the other causes $50b of damage. They have no real reason to avoid the second one any more than the first, because they'll be bankrupt in either case.

Now if you add personal criminal liability for the directors or management, that does change the stakes interestingly. I suppose the main thing would be to come up with a way of making the right people personally liable, so it doesn't result in perverse incentives and scapegoats, or, worse, just end up with everyone doing a lot of cover-your-ass paperwork with no real change.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

thank you, I don't like it when ACs read my comments.

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?

[roman_mir]

People covering their asses and all that other jazz is happening today everywhere, with all the regulations.

The difference in what I am proposing is that they are finally personally liable for actions they take, for damage they cause. Today they are not, which completely negates the ability of regulations to work.

I understand that there is another possibility, the kind of possibility that a totalitarian regime would take: punish everyone personally if they screw up but still have all of those regulations, pretend that regulations work. This would be done just to have a larger government, which in a totalitarian regime is a bonus I suppose, not for the people of-course, but for the rulers, who do not care about economy and the people.

So my proposal goes only if both sides of the equation are satisfied: personal responsibility + severe punitive damages + paying to fix the problems cause, but on the other side of the equation must be the reduction of government in terms of regulatory power.

I would Imagine that in a system like that it would be best for survival of corporations to share their knowledge of best industry standards, however it would also mean that some corporations could be better of than others, because they would have the knowledge of how to do business in a safer way, while others may not posses this knowledge. Possibly one more thing is needed: knowledge must be transferable, shared between corporations on the best practices.

Of-course this will help the society, this will help the corporations who are sharing the knowledge, because it would make it impossible for those with less knowledge to claim that they just did not have the knowledge and thus could not have applied it and to get away with consequences of not having this knowledge. This would hurt those companies, who get the knowledge late in the game from the producers of knowledge.

The interesting possible unintended consequence is an 'arms race' in trying to find new ways of doing business better, I actually think this is the most interesting unintended consequence in terms of development of economy ever.

Re:Really?

[Sir_Lewk]

How about you learn to flap your arms fast enough to fly, and train yourself to piss concrete. Then you can fly over the Gulf and plug the leak with nothing but your pecker. Simple!

Re:Really?

[omglolbah]

Unfortunately there is no easy way to test ways to fix this kind of issue. It just has not come up as an issue yet.
The research happens when a case like this -does- happen. You can be sure they will sell the solution in the future (BP that is...).

What one should really ask is: Why the fuck did it happen in the first place... What you do afterwards is not the important bit with regard to this happening again...

Re:Really?

[rrohbeck]

Quantifying the cost of what is now externalities (the "commons" like the environment, health of people and animals, natural resources) wold have to be the first step to make that work. The market approach only works if there are no externalities. Otherwise the commons could be exploited with impunity.
What's the price tag on one Gulf of Mexico environment?

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

I agree with you. The cost of the ocean cannot be defined in anything meaningful, but the cost of Damage can be somewhat calculated.

However that is my position that there must be a fine for the costs that Can be calculated, but due to the difficulties in such calculations, the law must provide ability to invoke punitive damages that are multiples of the calculated damages. This is why I am talking about x10, x100, x1000 punitive damages on top of the actual damages that can be calculated.

We can calculate damages to some degree. We can show variables from things like income of fisheries and even possibly increases of costs of running restaurants that serve fish. We can show costs to the hospitality business. Things like that are not too hard to calculate and to apply as long as the laws allow it.

There are more complicated questions, like the cost of this part of the Ocean in principle. So we could then talk about the depletion of oxygen in the polluted area, the dead zones caused by it, which is direct damage to the environment. The destruction of air producing and cleaning organisms that will be dying off now if not dead already. The amount of time it may take for oil to degrade in the beach sand and on the ocean floor, if that even will happen.

We do need to set costs associated with losing part of environment, I think it is an interesting subject in itself, I am not an expert in this of-course, otherwise I would give numbers. However estimates can be provided by people who understand something about regeneration of air/water/creatures. How can they estimate cost of that? We can say put a cost on it based on our, human ability to do the same thing that the polluted environment would have done.

What would it cost people to produce all that Oxygen that is going to be lost now due to oil mixing in water + due to death of Oxygen producing organisms? What would it cost to husband all that fish and other creatures for us in the same quantities that are killed off?

We can do this, it's possible and probably a very good exercise in understanding consequences of our behavior anyway.

Re:Really?

[fermion]

When dipping into my libertarian strand, I see the function of government is to create a fair court system, which keeps things as local as possible. For instance, every business that has lost should be allowed to go to court, in a timely manner, with a jury. The government should not be allowed to pass laws that limit damages or powerful people to use laws to keep less powerful people out of court. It is simple. My business has decreased 50% from last year, and every cancelation is citing the spill. I go to court, sue BP, and a jury awards me money. The only reason this does not work is because the federal government is biased against awarding average people money when rich people try to kill them. A libertarian view clearly solves this by allowing the local courts to award money. Activist federal judges should be warned not to mess with the system. For instance, the activist judge in the McDonald's coffee spill case should have been summarily removed for using his appointed position to usurp the power of the people.

Second, the government should insure that assets are not transfered prevent the people from gaining recompense. In a libertarian wold in which we each pay for our mistakes and compensate others who we injure, every asset of BP should be at stake. It should not be the governments concern to cap of define these injuries. Only the people can do that, and, as mentioned, we have a system that does this very well. The jury. There is no need for government experts to tell me that the coast is ruined. Any damn fool can see that. The only thing I want to know is how much a jury will award me because my summer vacations are going to be ruined for the next 10 years. Or how much I can get because I can no longer go bird-watching. I a jury says nothing, fine. But I don't want a bureaucrat telling me that.

But the biggest mistake the government has done is by creating the notion of a corporation. In the beginning, in the wisdom of our founding fathers, corporations had limited licenses that could be revoked if they violated the law. Owners were still responsible for criminals acts, and could not hide behind their own incompetence. These limitations have continously been reduced by an activist supreme court, most recently when the court said that god was not the only one would could create a person, but that governement, the equal of god, could create persons as well. This activist part of the court that fully supported the promotion to personhood of a non-human entity consisted of kennedy(appointed by reagan), acalia(appointed by reagan), Alito(appointed by Bush), Stevens(appointed by ford) Ginsberg(clinton) and beyer(clinton). Since most of the activist judges were appointed by republican adminstations, it seems the only hope for those of us that want to limited the power of big government is to not pu republicans in power. How are we, the people, to have any power when the Republican government says the arm chair has the same rights as a starving child?

The people are nothing if the rights of single person is held in less regard than the rights of copy machine. If the rights of an old women is held in less regard that rights of a laminated yellow table. And since the Paul family, the faceman of the libertarian movement, seem to think it is unamerican to take a tough stance with BP, I really don't think that mainstream libertarianism is going to do anything, as it seems, despite the claim to be christian, they believe that the rights of an oil well is greater than the rights of a human being.

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?

[ScrewMaster]

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.

They do! Hordes of lobbyists descending upon Washington the instant the accident hits the five o'clock news.

Re:Really?

[hobo sapiens]

Liquidate the corporation's resources and its stock. If that proves insufficient to cover the costs, then you go after those who own the corporation. All shareholders lose this way, but who cares? Don't invest in this type of company. If you choose to, then you have to absorb the losses. That would also cut down on some of the types of abuses on Wall Street, since people would DEMAND transparency before investing in, say, a mutual fund.

If you have legal guardianship of a person (such as a child) then you are legally responsible for its actions. If a corporation is viewed as and gets the same rights as an individual, then the individuals who own the corporation should be held financially responsible. That's called accountability, and it's what is missing.

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?

[yyxx]

You state as fact that all of this is due to unexpected, low-probability failures. However, from news reports, it appears that BP deliberately disregarded protocols for cementing and pumping mud, and that they continued despite the fact that the blowout preventer may have been damaged. And that is consistent with their past disregard for safety.

The best guess at this point is that the disaster is due to deliberate negligence on the part of BP. That's not legal proof, but it's a good basis to keep in mind as the response goes forward. I hope they are being closely watched now...

Re:Really?

[Pence128]

IIRC, one of the lower estimates is 25,000 barrels, or one million gallons per day.

Re:Really?

[duffbeer703]

Reality has a nasty habit of ruining plans. Amazon.com suffered an outage a few weeks ago due to a car accident that interrupted street power. An implementation error for the system that switched over to the alternate power source basically shut the data center down.

Does that mean that Amazon data center IT doesn't understand "concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery"? No, clearly it doesn't. It means that someone screwed up some aspect of the installation of the power system.

I've been burnt by things like this in the past. My employer spent millions on a super-redundant, high-performance, high-availability storage solution -- which failed when a vendor technician replaced a bad disk. (a problem that should never happen) We tested that procedure dozens of times, tested back-out strategies, and still ended up stymied by a firmware error made by some faceless engineer somewhere.

I don't know the details of what happened enough to condemn BP for the failure. The company previously had a good safety record, and I presume that the crew on the rig wouldn't make a decision that ran a risk of killing some/all of them. (Which it did)

Re:Really?

[Attila Dimedici]

How do you test a plan to deal with this sort of catastrophe without risking this very catastrophe? The next time something like this happens they will have a tested plan to fix it, the one they use to fix this one.

Re:Really?

[oddTodd123]

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.

In many cases of environmental damage or damage to people/property, the individuals and corporations responsible very easily cause substantially more damage than they could ever pay for or be punished for.

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]

I agree that this is a problem, but looking at what has been happening for the past 100 years with Oil/coal/gas extraction you can notice that the same or a similar problem exists with all of the regulations that also exist but the difference is nobody is personally liable and there are not enough teeth in any punishment to do much of anything real to prevent future events like that.

As I mentioned, the government's regulations are always a step (or more) behind and the costs to keep regulations up to date an the cost of checking everyone for all regulation compliance would be something we haven't really seen before (because it was never really done.)

So then the same thing I throw back at your post: if government had resources to police every player in every industry and was up to date on all developments in industries and corporations then they could probably prevent all practices that lead to disasters. What are the chances and then what would be the costs of that?

However I hate not providing a solution to a problem and only posing a question, so in response to this problem I would suggest that while the changes were written into Law about changing the limited status of liability for the managers of a corporations, the other changes would include modifying the process of running a corporation, so that at all shareholder meetings they would have to look at the practices of the company in terms of damage control and they would have to study any court case (if there are) pertinent to the kinds of control they need to implement.

So I see that there is a possibility someone is missing some information, this would encourage them to actively seek it.

I also think that in fact this system would give advantage to those corporations, who would invest into researching and developing new practices to keep their work safer. I think it may cause an actual increases of research by corporations and would encourage exchange of information because if one company finds ways to do work with less possible damage, then there is incentive for this company to implement it to secure its business more, but there is also an incentive for this company to share this knowledge with others because there are always costs associated with changes to business and if one company was incurring such costs, then it would want the other players in the industry to incur them as well. Since I propose that industry is the source of regulations in the first place, it means that any new developments set a new standard for what is expected from all players in the industry.

Of-course the other possibility is that all research stops dead and everyone actively tries to avoid doing any research to make their work potentially less dangerous, but in that case, any disaster would have to be punished severely anyway and personal responsibility would have to be applied. I see that as a push for the industries not to stagnate but to try and prevent this because I think most people really don't want to spend time in prison.

The last point is that if someone does not care about prison time (which does not happen currently) then some regulation violation would not be a consideration for them either. In my proposal I give a way to get rid of these people but placing them where they belong. In the current system those people are not punished but Rewarded and the next company would be only too happy to have them on their staff of managers.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

I think that your premise is a bit off, in a system with no government involvement into economics and where government does not stifle competition with regulations, the huge monopolies would be much less common if could exist at all. However in case of BP right now, they can pay for everything, their net worth is large enough, if it must all be liquidate, fine.

The most important part is of-course personal responsibility, confiscation of property from the responsible and jail time.

Re:Really?

[gtall]

Your prescriptions are all reactive; the damage will already have been done before any of your sad solutions can take effect. There will always be companies and individuals who will cut corners, coming in after the fact and screwing them won't stop the problems they are causing. On the other hand, it would be a full-employment program for lawyers, that much maligned and under-employed segment of American society.

Re:Really?

[sonicmerlin]

Look, you're a braindead idiot who knows nothing about human psychology. Get off your high-horse and smell the real world grass.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

Finally, a constructive argument.

Re:Really?

[An dochasac]

Good comment but this't really solve the problem. Our business leaders tried desperately to emulate the "work-to-death" aspect of Japanese corpoculture, but have carefully avoided emulating their more sensible CEO wage scales and the sense of responsibility that has lead to suicides of Japanese leaders who felt responsible for shattered lives, environmental disasters or deaths.

As a previous post mentioned, there aren't enough BP officials to plug this hole. But if we were to force anyone to repay the economic and environmental reparations, who would that be? Certainly the leaders and stockholders of BP, but also its customers who believe it is their god-given right to drive whatever gas hog they intend to and if that causes blood to be spilled in the middle east or props up despots in Venezuela and Nigeria or lays waste to thousands of miles of coastline and the primary source of U.S. seafood, punt the blame to Obama or another late-arriving scapegoat.

As for the parent question, the simple reason why no one knows how deep water oil behaves or how to clean it up is that there isn't any 90 day time horizon GAP profit in basic science. Sometime around the Reagan years with the SEC reforms (sic) that helped bring on the banking crisis, we've lost sight of the idea that anything can be useful for something beyond what will show a GAP profit within the next 90 days. Until we fix that basic flaw in our system, everyone will be able to point to the U.S. as an example of where capitalism fails. But calling this sham and bribe system we have in place capitalism is akin to calling slavery 'capitalism.'

Re:Really?

[drinkypoo]

You know what I really can't understand ? Why wouldn't there at least be tested methods for this sort of thing?

There are tested methods for every step of this endeavor. But instead, the drilling method was changed, the plugging method was changed, Halliburton used a new kind of concrete they've never tested, and finally, BP doesn't have enough Booming (the oil shore curtains) to cover the affected area, even though they are legally required to, and claimed that they did. So now the booming is being done wrong (you need two parallel zigzag curtains which direct oil to pits on the beach; they have a single curtain that in many places has washed up on the beach, and zero removal pits) by both BP and the Coast Guard.

Re:Really?

[vlm]

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

I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.

Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally. Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.

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

Yeah in retrospect pumping out the oil based drill mud to "save the environment" sounds like a good idea, but this time it didn't turn out so well for the environment. Maybe in the future we'll have a rule to keep a kill pill of mud in closed off wells just in case. Which will probably make the cement people pretty lazy, since they'll have a backup, which will work pretty well until a cement job fails and the heavy mud leaks out. So thats how the next disaster will occur, by trusting the safety procedures too much, not by disregarding them.

Also once the well started coming in, it was heroic of them to stay and try to save it, but in retrospect the 11 folks whom died should probably have just started running. They must have been good hands because they stayed to fight, and unfortunately those are the exact folks whom die in disasters like this. Those rules might change too. So the next disaster will turn out to be everyone followed the rules and ran for it, when just one dude with a pipe wrench could have saved the worlds oceans or whatever. Again, not disregarding safety, just trusting the written procedures too much.

Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.

Re:Really?

[ZekoMal]

I think everyone's a bit more pissy about the fact that instead of plugging the well "right away", they tried a few other methods to suck up more oil for themselves. Y'know, instead of fixing the problem, they tried to glean more profit. No one (well, except for the extremely ignorant) expected a fix in a few hours. We kinda expected them to have a plug or two waiting in the wings, or to know what to do when things went wrong. This is taking longer than thought because of profiteers, and it's at the expense of millions of humans. Americans, too, and we're bending over backwards to give BP excuses?

It's like opening a theme park above a volcano, and when the paths break and trap all of the people above the volcano with random pieces falling in and killing people, the theme park owner decides to sell the remaining customers some soda...just so they can squeeze a few more dollars out of a disaster.

Re:Really?

[roman_mir]

1. My argument is that responsibility for prevention belongs with the corporation but the punishment responsibility is on the government if damage can be shown.

2. Governmental oversight is demonstrably corrupt and flawed and prohibitively expensive.

3. You got me, I got mine, so this is a devious plot by me to make sure nobody ever gets anything again.

Re:Really?

[X0563511]

Remember:

Booming is for pussies!

Re:Really?

[DocSavage64109]

I haven't really been following this whole event, but wasn't there a dead battery in one of the control systems? In fact, I found this quote after a quick google search: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/AR2010051202190_pf.html

In Washington, Stupak said the committee investigators had uncovered a document prepared in 2001 by Transocean, the drilling rig operator, that said there were 260 "failure modes" that could require removal of the blowout preventer. "How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" Stupak asked.

Re:Really?

[Rakishi]

Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.

Hahahahaha, congratulations on using the single worst example ever to try and prove your point. The Bhopal was the result of a massive series of outright safety breaches, cost cutting design decisions and the cost saving disabling of multiple safety systems. The vent tower was, for example, underdesigned and even if it had worked would not have stopped the disaster.

So no, the Bhopal disaster happened because of such things as: lack of skilled operators due to the staffing policy; reduction of safety management due to reducing the staff; insufficient maintenance of the plant; lack of emergency response plans; choosing a dangerous method of manufacturing pesticides; large-scale storage of MIC before processing; location close to a densely populated area; under-dimensioning of the safety features; dependence on manual operations.

Exactly like the BP well, the safety mechanisms were broken and ignored in the name of profit. Failure analysis is a decently well understood field, neither BP or Union Carbine had any excuse for not knowing what turning of all those safety features could cause.

Re:Really?

[Rakishi]

I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.

There are various allegations of long term safety problems such as schematics that were not up to date. The pressure in the well was not kept track of. The BOP was not designed to cut through roughly 10% of the pipe as it was too thick. Probably other such long term issues that lower the chance of multiple failures from "astronomical" to just "unlikely."

Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally.

There are claims that the BOP rubber seal was damaged a few weeks before and the damage was ignored.

Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.

The claim is that the cement was a new untested mix which means it wasn't a safety system. Again more of a long term safety issue but one that they should have been aware of.

Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.

They had two options. Cap and then pump out mud, or pump out mud and then cap. The later is faster and thus more profitable. The former is safer. They chose the later. They considered the choice, not just blindly picked the usual choice. The well had previous problems with gas but they figured the concrete already there would contain things.

Re:Really?

[Daetrin]

I'm not sure where you came up with that angle. It's not spin, it's just differentiating between where BP (or the rig owners, or Haliburton, or whoever) screwed up and where they didn't. I don't know the details about what safeguards they were supposed to have in place beforehand and what safeguards they actually had in place beforehand, but that's clearly the part that they @#$%ed up. Yell at, sue, or imprison everyone involved for that as you wish.

To the best of my (admittedly imperfect) knowledge however, now that the spill has already happened there is no "magic bullet" method that has been tested and proven to work before for spills of this magnitude at this depth. If that is indeed true then complaining that they're trying untested solutions when there are no tested solutions is just stupid. They can either take a gamble with new solutions (or solutions that haven't been used under these conditions before) or they can sit there with their thumb up their ass. As much as i want the people responsible for the spill to be held accountable i _also_ want them to stop the spill as quickly as possible, and unless i can suggest something better griping about the "untested" methods they're trying is pointless.

Re:Really?

[the eric conspiracy]

You completely missed my point. Backup and redundancy features fail too. Your illustration listed a whole bunch of ways they can fail.

All backups do is reduce the likelihood of failure. There is no such thing as fail-proof.

Re:Really?

[Rakishi]

There's a difference between backups and redundancies failing, and backups and redundancies effectively not existing. The later is not an unexpected failure. You cannot claim to have backups and redundancies in that case.

An airplane hitting the WTC is an unexpected failure that goes beyond any sane planning. Not checking your batteries and letting the fuel rot in the tank for 20 years is a lack of backups and redundancies.

Re:Really?

[Maxo-Texas]

In a libertarian world, every dime of salary and stock over a fixed amount would also be lost by the employees and executives.

Corporate protection would be limited (say $1million inflation adjusted). So you can get some protection from the corporation but if the company does damage, the executives and employees are on the hook (mistake, intentional, doesn't matter).

Re:Really?

[vlm]

I haven't really been following this whole event, but wasn't there a dead battery in one of the control systems?

Which is why they have two of them. And carefully maintaining a single battery, when you have two, neither requires maintenance, because they can back each other up. Or something like that.

Re:Really?

[yyxx]

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

You drill three holes. One is for production. The other two you don't drill all the way through; you use them as a safety for the production hole. You know, like if you had drilled the relief holes they are drilling now 99% to completion.

will they pay ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

i just want to see how long, or _if_, it's gonna take for the authorities to stick a huge, multi-billion dolar fine on BP.

but it's not going to happen, right ?

the way these corporations learned to manipulate the legal system, the way they're in bed with politicians, is just sickening.

Re:will they pay ?

[fewnorms]

They will and are already paying.
As they should....

Re:will they pay ?

[vlm]

They will and are already paying.
As they should....

Correction, "they" are not paying. They simply sell gas to us at a higher cost. "we" are paying.

Re:will they pay ?

[dimeglio]

BP is a corporation. What's the point of suing them or making them pay? All that's going to happen is an increase in your petrol prices (orchestrated together by all oil companies). I think charging BP/subcontractors of criminal negligence is more likely to be a deterrent.

Re:will they pay ?

[welcher]

I dont think that BP can unilaterally raise the price of gas given that some competition exists.

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:will they pay ?

[Pulzar]

Correction, "they" are not paying. They simply sell gas to us at a higher cost. "we" are paying.

How do you figure? BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?

The whole "they will just pass the cost to the consumer" argument only works when every company in an industry is hit by something...

Re:will they pay ?

[IdolizingStewie]

The way things are done in the oil industry BP is at fault. Period. No matter what turns out to have happened, short of deliberate sabotage by someone else's employee. If BP did not do it personally, they either ordered it done or failed to have the appropriate procedures and supervision in place to prevent it.

Furthermore, I'm wondering why you think that fining Halliburton or Transocean will not result in them charging their customers more, who will then make up the money by charging the consumer more. All that does is increase the number of steps.

Re:will they pay ?

[Jaysyn]

And therein lies the punishment. Just because they have to charge more, doesn't mean their competitors such as Citgo & ExxonMobil have to charge more, thereby putting BP at a global disadvantage.

Re:will they pay ?

[omnicron13]

They will and are already paying. As they should....

Correction, "they" are not paying. They simply sell gas to us at a higher cost. "we" are paying.

That's not how markets work. Prices are not simply set by the financial needs of the seller, they are set by market forces. In this case, there are other companies from which we can by gas/oil. Sure, prices will go up across the board because of the reduced supply cause by this incident, but they won't go up because BP tries to recoup the cleanup expenditure.

Re:will they pay ?

[seanadams.com]

All that's going to happen is an increase in your petrol prices (orchestrated together by all oil companies)

I for one would rather pay for my gas per volume at the pump, rather than in income taxes, budget deficits, and inflation. Just add up all the wars, toxic waste cleanups, corporate welfare, the whole fucking nine yards and bill it right there at the pump instead of on my tax return. While you're at it, throw in road maintenance.

Then let's see how we feel about conserving oil.

Re:will they pay ?

[furbyhater]

BP is a corporation. What's the point of suing them or making them pay? All that's going to happen is an increase in your petrol prices (orchestrated together by all oil companies). I think charging BP/subcontractors of criminal negligence is more likely to be a deterrent.

Sounds like you just want to go after the smaller fish. The party organizing, planning and supervising the whole operation and making the largest part of investment and profit (BP) holds the greatest responsibility in this case.

This Spill is something that has to be prevented in the future at all costs, so if the oil companies want to continue their drilling operations, they should be forced to have a water-tight backup scenario in case the same problem arises.

Re:will they pay ?

[tuomoks]

Correct! But seeing the /. people start thinking instead of just repeating what they read in Internet, in their own party / religious / "technical advisory" / vendor / manufacturer / etc sites or in TV, would be a great day! Ambulance chaser culture, "root cause" ideology, and so on - but not even one(?) idea why these happen, how to fix the real root causes, how to prepare to disasters which eventually always happen, etc! Sometimes wonder where the corporations and governments even could find good people if the /. is any example of better than average (assumed) educated? Bias, emotions, politics, greed, whatever has no place in these issues. As you said, ethnics and morals at its finest!

Re:will they pay ?

[IdolizingStewie]

As of yet there is no reduced supply. If the major ports start getting backed up due to hull cleaning operations, we may see some reduced supply, but the well that blew out wasn't producing yet, and as far as I've heard, a grand total of 5 platforms have shut in as a preventative measure due to being surrounded by oil, which is a negligible amount of the Gulf production.

Re:will they pay ?

[qbrick]

Rubbish, this company behaves like a ruthless criminal. BP is already paying residents money to shut up and do nothing against them! http://vodpod.com/watch/3544599-bp-offering-5000-dollars-to-gulf-residents-if-they-agree-not-to-sue

Re:will they pay ?

[sonicmerlin]

Fining the families of the 11 dead men?! Are you insane? What kind of a sociopath are you you freak? Your defense of BP is inexcusable and sickening, and your strawman arguments are nonsensical.

Re:will they pay ?

[vlm]

How do you figure? BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?

How do you figure they're getting their money? Pull their cashflow accounting one page summary, look to income sources, what do you find? They don't exactly have a private mint...

They COULD reduce expenses, raising some money, but cutting some safety corners. After all, lightning never strikes twice, so if they just had the "worst oil spill evar(tm)" or whatever, they could save some dough that way.

Can't reduce salaries, then in your free market, no one would work there...

Less payoffs to congressmen? Thats not going to fly.

So, if the money doesn't come from us at the pumps, then where, exactly?

BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?

The other oil companies are going to raise their prices to get a higher profit, because they can. What's BP going to do about it, undercut them? ha ha ha they have a multi billion dollar bill to pay, of course they'll play along. Thats why all of us will pay, not just BP customers.

Re:will they pay ?

[vlm]

Prices are not simply set by the financial needs of the seller, they are set by market forces

I agree with you completely. Previously their competitors could not raise their prices because BP would simply undercut them and gain market share, assuming that makes them a higher profit. If you send BP an immense bill, I don't think they're going to undercut their competitors new higher price.

You've got a graph of units sold on the y and price on the x. Its a downward ski slope. It just took a sudden kick to the right because BP can no longer undercut their competitors. What happens to the market clearing price? Goes up.

...prices ... won't go up because BP tries to recoup the cleanup expenditure.

Why? Their competitors are not charities. They're leaving profit on the table and failing their financial responsibilities to their shareholders by not increasing their price...

Re:will they pay ?

[ZekoMal]

Which is why there's been oil companies that stayed down at $.99 a gallon, right? Because not all of them were drilling in the middle east, right? Because not all of them had the same costs and risks, right?

Greed trumps all else. When you have a product that people can't live without, you can dick around with the cost day and night, so long as you pay off the government.

Re:will they pay ?

[Chowderbags]

I'll believe that they'll pay $x billion when I actually see it. And not just on capping the well, but cleaning up what might be a crap ton of shore damage and ecological impact (nevermind that most of that can't effectively be fixed once broken) for the next 20/30/50/100 years. Prince William Sound still hasn't recovered from the Exxon Valdez, a spill that was an order of magnitude smaller than this one.

Oil Spill??

[this great guy]

There is an oil spill in the Gulf?

Re:Oil Spill??

[magsol]

I was going to mod you +1 Funny, then I saw your sig and decided against it.

Re:Oil Spill??

[cosm]

Not really a spill, but more of an oil "menstruating hemorrhage" by the earth (man induced). Perhaps Tampax can step in, they do have some experience in the absorption arena.

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.

Re:Oil Spill??

[StormReaver]

No, there isn't an oil spill in the Gulf. There is a slight water spill in the Gulf oil pit.

Re:Oil Spill??

[rrohbeck]

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

Re:Oil Spill??

[WillDraven]

We have a word for man induced menstruations, so I guess we could call this an "oil abortion."

is it just me or...

[Rooked_One]

does this seem really stupid? They should have smart people working on this kind of thing - the types of people who would be able to take the known variables, plug them into a computer, and predict the results. I'm guessing they didn't do this the first time because the government wasn't all over them, and they didn't want to lose a large reserve. However, this could make the leak much worse.

@This great guy... are you serious? You don't know about the oil leak in the gulf o mexico? If they don't stop it soon, its going to ravage the whole surrounding area.

Re:is it just me or...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

does this seem really stupid?

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!"

It reminds me of when in a soccer (football) match when a player commits a serious foul. What is the first thing he does? He puts his hands up in the air and shakes his head at the referee, with a look, like, "I ain't done nuthin'!"

Small children, and large corporations are excellent at this. They say "It's not my fault!" and "It's not my problem!"

BP needs to change their company slogan to: "Most of the time we're somebody's else's problem."

Hey, accidents can happen, but when they do, it is not the right time to sit around with your head up your ass, trying to avoid blame.

Re:is it just me or...

[cdrguru]

So you are suggesting that someone with experience with this create a computer model so that various approaches can be tested out before doing something to the wellhead itself?

Sounds like a really good idea. There is one minor problem with that idea though. Nothing like this has ever happened. Nobody has any idea of what the real conditions are at the wellhead other than with a few measurements and visual observation. A model could be constructed based on what is known, but that would be a very incomplete model indeed.

Nobody really knows anything about this situation and the only way anyone is going to learn about it is to try out some stuff that sounds like it might work. It is quite true that there may be conditions at the wellhead that make this "top kill" approach completely unviable. But the problem is that nobody has any idea what those conditions might be until they try it and see what happens.

The pressures involved are completely beyond the experience of almost everyone. It is also very, very cold down there which is why the first containment failed rather unexpectedly.

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:is it just me or...

[GrumblyStuff]

I also remember hearing that it was only 5000 barrels a day. Now that's the amount they're sucking up through one of the leaks.

Re:is it just me or...

[duffbeer703]

You're confusing liability for the incident with the testimony given in congressional hearings supposedly intended to find out what happened.

Re:is it just me or...

[Rooked_One]

Indeed. My father worked on designing deep sea rigs like this, and always wondered what would happen if something like this happened. Now we know - but he said they had a lot stricter guidelines to follow before his co got bought out by BP.

Re:is it just me or...

[gtall]

Yeah, yer right. How come no one thought to program a computer with all the possible missteps and simply read off the result: thou shalt not drill this well. Gosh, you should go to work for the oil industry, I'm sure with your intellect you'd set them straight in no time.

Re:is it just me or...

[thegarbz]

5000 barrels a day? You mean the number derived by the Coast Guard? Or was it the number quoted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)?

I don't mean to troll but all of BP's press releases are available at BP's website. They may have quoted the NOAA but they never stated that 5000 barrels of oil per day was the leak rate was their estimate. Actually only last week were we not attacking them for not helping estimate the leak?

Re:is it just me or...

[tdc_vga]

You're dead wrong (see: Transocean's limitation of liability filing). There is a little known clause, outside of admiralty law practitioners, that allows parties to limit their liability to the value of the vessel after the wreck. For reference, that generally isn't a low of money and it appears from their filing that it's roughly $26M. They are correct that it doesn't protect claims from the Oil Pollution Act but I'd wonder how many incidentals that'll apply to.

So, yes, yes, Transocean and BP, as a successor to liability, are actively working to limit to the claims as much as possible. I won't speculate on the outcome but I'll throw in that I'm glad I never did buy property on the Gulf side of Florida.

For reference: Explaination of the law. There are better sources but that one is publicly available.

Cheers,
    T

P.S. Yes, IAAL and Exxon still hasn't paid for the Valdez accident --consider it...
P.S.S. Sorry for the repost --didn't realized I wasn't logged in.

Re:is it just me or...

[GrumblyStuff]

Fair point. I would like to counter with this where they say that there's no reliable way to measure the flow of oil and that they dispute the large 3rd party estimates while relying CG and NOAA estimates.

Here's a better article that brings up some good points: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14oil.html

After the rig went down, it was 1000 barrels a day. When SkyTruth published their estimates (low end was 5000), the government raised the publicly stated figure (over BP's objections) to... 5000 a day!

All this while dispersants are being pumped into the oil stream under water, limiting the amount that reaches the surface. I'd say BP damn well knew they had a huge fuck up and have been shown fighting every step into admitting it so you'll have to excuse me if I doubt the sincerity of their promise to not hide behind loopholes.

Let's wish them luck

[ls671]

Let's wish them luck.

The top kill procedure is well known in the oil fields. Pumping mud and cement is what oil drilling is all about.

Of course, at this depth, things may be more difficult. I read TFA and it makes sense except maybe for this part, which sound too much politically correct:

His agency has been working closely with BP staff to "ensure that procedures are conducted in a safe, environmentally sensitive manner and reduce any risk of additional impact," he told reporters in a conference call on Thursday.

Although he used the term "reduce the risk". There is always risk but this procedure seems the most logical one so far for all I know about oil well drilling. So I wouldn't say that "At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas".

In fact, they probably tried to save money with the previous procedures they used ;-)

Re:Let's wish them luck

[vlm]

Although he used the term "reduce the risk". There is always risk but this procedure seems the most logical one so far for all I know about oil well drilling.

1) Research the formation pressure vs the burst strength of the casing. They are way too close for comfort. Statically they're technically OK, before you collapse a drilling rig on top of them and have a month long blowout scour them from the inside out. Bad Slashdot Analogy : Its like using a racing engine, after its been in a crash, to power a fire truck. Its not like the theoretical burst pressure limit of the casing is a factor of 100x the internal pressure... They're cutting it close, maybe too close.

2) Contemplate that the root cause of the blowout was a cement bond failure... And cement is crazy weak in tension. So hooking up ultra high pressure pumps to push down extra hard, is not exactly the ideal situation.

So, the relief well is about 1/3 of the way done. It'll work no problemo. Top kill has a modest chance of working, a modest chance of failing without damage, and a modest chance of splitting the casing wide open like a sausage on the grill.

So its a simple game theory exercise:

Solution 1 has a 100% success rate but takes three months. PR folks will vaporize themselves waiting.

Solution 2 has a, lets say, 1/3 chance of doing nothing, 1/3 chance of success, and 1/3 chance of splitting the casing like an overcooked bratwurst, thus increasing the oil squirt rate by a factor of maybe 3. So leak rate is going to zero, stay the same, or increase perhaps a factor of 3, all equally likely.

Meanwhile the longer you wait, the lower formation pressure/leak rate drops. While at the same time sandstone is scraping out the inside of the BOP and casing making the leak larger. And both effects are very non-linear. So, it starts out very slow, gets very big, and gradually declines.

Some supercomputer or whatever calculated the optimum solution is : Wait until the relief well is about 1/3 of the way there.
I have no idea if anyone in slashdot-land can replicate the game theory math that lead to that answer.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[Mindcontrolled]

I generally agree with your point here - just one minor nitpick: How does the tensile strength of cement matter here? From all I learned about the situation, the cement would be subject to lots of pressure, but not to tension. Did I miss something there?

Re:Let's wish them luck

[timmarhy]

i love all the people commenting on this that don't work in the resource sector, and have no idea about drilling.

the reason top kill is only being used now is because it took longer to implement. BP moved in order of swiftness to fix and safety, not cost.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[GrumblyStuff]

Well if you have a tube of concrete and you increase the pressure within that tube....

Re:Let's wish them luck

[uncqual]

Agreed...

To me it is inconceivable that at this point BP is worried about the additional cost required to stop the flow more quickly. The political and PR cost of leaving it leaking for just one more day is enormous to both BP and to the industry (remember what happened to the nuclear power industry after TMI -- and the actual technical "non political" impact of TMI was nearly zero).

For example, they are paying to drill TWO relief wells. The second well is just a contingency in case the first well has a delay or problem. That doesn't sound like "cutting corners" to me.

It sure sounds like they cut corners to get into this mess, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they are doing now. However, they almost certainly want to be very careful with unproven techniques because making the spill worse until the relief wells can cap the spill will be even more costly. If they make the problem worse, all the politicians and /.ers who apparently have never had to make cost/benefit/risk tradeoffs will attack with 20/20 hindsight.

(If anyone can explain the technology that makes intersecting a seven inch bore with a relief well bore 18,000 feet down possible, that would be an interesting read.)

And, a bit offtopic, but the best description I've seen of the "sucker tube" (a.k.a. the Riser Insertion Tube), albeit what appears to be an early description so the actual implementation may have ended up different, is here.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[ls671]

Just to be more specific, I have worked in the field in another life. I don't consider myself as an expert but I am surely above average when comes the time to discuss oil well drilling.

It doesn't mean my opinion is the best although. Some more knowledgeable /. user has posted an interesting reply and this is always what I try to cause on /. to happen:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1662156&cid=32317082

IMHO, of course BP tried the most likely quick fix solution and it would have been great if it worked. Unfortunately, those solutions had the least chances of success and when reading about those I just couldn't believe my eyes but who am I to know ?

Let's wish them luck with the next one ! ;-)
 

Re:Let's wish them luck

[ls671]

Hey ! Thanks for that ;-)

Very interesting indeed. I am re-reading your post again and I discover very interesting arguments every time.

I have worked in the fields in another life so I am familiar with the terms.

Thanks again for enlightening me, that's what I expected from /. and I do get it most of the time.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[ls671]

Exactly I would say, but my background on the topic is 20 years old.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[ls671]

At what dept were they, let's say depth from the well head, when the incident occurred ?

Re:Let's wish them luck

[Mindcontrolled]

Sure, but I was under the impression that the casing is under compression, as the inside gas/oil pressure would be more than offset by the pressure the rock exerts on the pipe. Even if not, the hole is not just cemented, but lined with a steel casing, so the tensile strength of the steel would be the limiting factor. Over the ocean floor, yeah, there you got a pressure differential from inside to out, but there you are only dealing with steel tubing.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[GrumblyStuff]

IANAME (I am not an materials engineer) but I'm pretty sure the steel would expand as pressure started to exceed its limits whereas concrete would just fail. Surround rock is something I hadn't thought of though. Hopefully the rock, concrete, and steel can all handle the pressure and this geyser is capped.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[vlm]

How does the tensile strength of cement matter here?

Cement is like an order of magnitude, at least, stronger in compression than tension. (formation pressure minus seawater pressure) crushed it in compression. Now we're going to squirt downhole hard enough to push mud down rather than let oil flow up, in other words harder than formation pressure. Except it already crumbled in compression at less, and has been out of control eroded for like a month. And its tensile strength is going to be like 1/10 its compression strength. Therefore, they're probably going to lose circulation like mad. Which is probably why I read they're stockpiling some insane quantity of drilling mud for this attempt.

I forget the exact numbers but I remember the delta was 0.3 ppg between losing circulation and the well kicking. Something like 14.4 ppg mud and they lose circulation, pumping mud into fractures in the rocks. Something like 14.1 ppg mud and the well started to kick. Its not flawless granite down there.

This is all based on the extremely widely held belief that the blowout was due to a bad cement job between the two smallest diameter casings.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[Rambone.ftw]

"the game" theory math that lead to that answer.

The Game.

FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!

Duct tape

[magsol]

Fixes everything.

Re:Duct tape

[reboot246]

Duct tape + baling wire + a sledge hammer = my all-purpose repair kit. :)

Re:And how would you do that?

[ColdWetDog]

You can't test this kind of shit. It appears that there was a failsafe for this, but it didn't work. Should it have been better? Apparently, but that wasn't known and there wasn't a way to test it.

Then you do what you know how to do and you do it correctly

You keep your batteries charged in the BOP.
You tighten ALL the fittings and TEST them.
You double check everything and write it down, check it again. Stop when you find out you've missed something.
You don't send the crew with the test equipment home before they even start.
You have adequate mitigation strategies and you deploy them correctly.
You ask yourself 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' and you try to answer the question. You keep the suits well away from engineering decisions.

Just like most man made disasters, multiple fuckups had to happen before the Shit Hits the Fan. This one is just another example of hubris.

Re:And how would you do that?

[PRMan]

And according to 60 Minutes, when broken pieces of rubber come up which are obviously pieces of the blowout preventer's seal, you don't ignore it and continue, hoping you'll never need your blowout preventer.

Stop fracking around

[Boandlgrama]

And just nuke the damn thing...
A smal tactical nuke should do the trick...

Re:Stop fracking around

[fnj]

Both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombs were detonated 2000 feet above the surface in a calculated decision to trade off a smaller area of utter destruction for a larger area of very severe destruction. That's why stronger structures were not completely destroyed. From underground tests we know you get a big vaporized hole. Rock, concrete, steel, anything in the immediate area would be REMOVED. That should take out the buried pipe completely for some distance. Whether the underground hole would seal effectively is an entirely different question. I don't think it would work to a high degree of confidence, but not for the reason you give.

Re:And how would you do that?

[cdrguru]

So what do you do at that point? Remember, the blowout preventer is 5,000 feet down in an evironment where people can't work and there is over 100,000 PSI of pressure on it. Changing it out for a new one is not an option. Neither is disassembling the blowout preventer when it is connected to the wellhead.

So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best. Because the alternatives are damned few at that point. There is no valve to turn off, mostly because the blowout preventer is the valve. When it was damaged about the only thing that could be hoped for was that a blowout didn't happen because that hope is about all you have.

Which it sounds like is what did happen.

Re:Nuke the site from orbit!

[phoenixwade]

So, are you suggesting we shove Paul Riser into the well head first?

Are there any submariners here?

[nido]

The U.S. Navy used to have a research submarine that could go down to 2500 feet: NR-1 engineering and research submarine. This sub was recently deactivated, presumably because they've got something better, probably classified.

What kind of resources does the USN have that they could use in this situation? It's certainly more than what BP can call into service...

Leave BP in charge of drilling the relief well. The Navy should direct efforts to stop the gusher, and bill BP for the services rendered. BP will never be able to afford the total bill to New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Cuba, so the company should be sent into receivership now.

Re:Are there any submariners here?

[treeves]

2500 feet is only halfway there.
The Navy has no experience in oil drilling.
A side note, the engineering officer on the boat I was on (USS Kamehameha SSBN 642) went to be the CO (IIRC) on the NR-1 back around 1992.
Didn't know they decommissioned her. Too bad. I don't think they have anything "better" now. That one was unique.

Re:Are there any submariners here?

[IdolizingStewie]

The Navy offered its ROVs, but the industry had better ones.

Re:Are there any submariners here?

[meringuoid]

USS Kamehameha SSBN 642

Cool name for a ship with that kind of firepower. I have a mental image of the captain powering up for five episodes or so before he turns the 'nuke half the planet' key.

Re:And how would you do that?

[crymeph0]

So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.

Wrong. You stop drilling and eat the $10 million you've dropped on the well so far. If that's not acceptable to you, don't drill off my damn coast.

They need to work harder

[thetoadwarrior]

How about instead of wasting resources giving the world a streaming feed of them polluting the ocean they spend that time and money on actually stopping it.

BTW, the feed for those that like to see loads of oil pumping into the ocean. http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

Re:They need to work harder

[timmarhy]

they've spent 700 million trying to stop it so far. they have 20,000 people on the ground.

only the clueless would suggest they aren't trying.

Re:They need to work harder

[the eric conspiracy]

I am sure that BP wouldn't be working on feeds if it weren't for idiot Congressmen trying to get their names in the news.

Personally I'd rather have streaming feeds of what my Congressmen were up to at all times - and double that when they are meeting with lobbyists.

Re:They need to work harder

[Blakey Rat]

How about instead of wasting resources giving the world a streaming feed of them polluting the ocean they spend that time and money on actually stopping it.

Because obviously those two things are mutually-exclusive.

Re:They need to work harder

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm sure they have been trying while at the same time probably trying to ensure they can easily get back and pump it out again rather than being concerned with just sealing it off.

Re:And how would you do that?

[LurkerXXX]

Really? That's what you do? Ignore it all, continue and hope for the best? That must be why oil companies all over the place are now making emergency containment vessels to place over their undersea wellheads. Ignoring it was the wrong thing to do. It might be what YOU would do, but it's certainly not what I would do.

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?

[Ron Bennett]

BP is taking "a more direct approach" of drilling relief wells, but that takes months to accomplish...

In the meantime, BP is trying all sorts of things, in hopes maybe one or more will work, but mainly to placate the public - most people, understandably, would be very upset, if BP looked to be doing nothing for the next few months while waiting on the relief wells to be drilled.

Ron

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[smellsofbikes]

It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico,

The moment gas goes up over $5/gallon in the US, the new drilling permits will start flowing like oil from a ruptured well. Americans have short memories and empty wallets, and nobody outside the gulf coast states will even remember this happened in two years.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Contingency plans!? But, deep sea drilling is like, so experimental... It's like landing on the moon! Who needs contingency plans when your doing something so progressive and cool as that?

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[phantomfive]

It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico,

Why do you think that? Did the oil companies fail to pay their politician dues?

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[gillbates]

It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico...

Which, I believe, is BP's intent. Without new wells being drilled, the cost of oil certainly won't go down - who knows, it might even go up?! Granted, they might not have intended to spill, but...

1. Their first attempt was to salvage the well. That's understandable, but...
2. By the time that attempt failed, they were already on the hook for a massive cleanup effort anyway. It looks like at this point, BP stands nothing to gain by the expeditious closure of the well, especially in light of the fact that they're liability is *statutorily limited* by federal law, a limit which they've probably hit already.
3. If they drag their heels to the point where public opinion turns against allowing new wells, well, all the better. Without more competition, they'll be able to raise the price of oil anyway, or at least have a *plausible* reason for doing so.
4. BP isn't going to pay for this. BP's customers will. Hardly makes any sense for them to do anything about it now, don't you think?

Honestly, if you were the CEO, why would you want to take such a massive loss this quarter when July is rapidly approaching? Why not defer the cost of cleanup a little so the shareholders don't take it in the shorts? I mean, the well and platform are already lost.

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[Xyrus]

Well, here's the problem. Under normal circumstances you could try all those in rapid succession. However, due to the monumental series of clusterfucks driven by corporate profits, it's not that simple.

The way the well failed with kink/cracked pipes prevents plugging the pipe directly. With the main pipe weakened the last thing you want to do is risk a full scale rupture. Despite what it looks like on video that flow rate is a reduced flow rate due to bent pipes. There's also damage to the BOP, and elsewhere in the assembly. If the damage is too severe and they try to block the flow, the whole thing will go to hell possibly dumping 2 to 3 times more oil than the current rate. Worse, there would be no way to stop it until a relief well is drilled (or nuke is detonated).

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:Why is this taking so long?

[Sir Holo]

BP must be allowed to fail.

Worst thing would have been for the government to take over right at the beginning. That would give BP an 'out,' where they could say, "We could have fixed it but the gub'mint took it over before we could." This way, there is no question about the blame.

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[timmarhy]

your whole post is just stupid. there is nothing BP gains by delaying fixing this problem.

BP has spent 700 million trying to fix this problem already, show me one sound bite from BP where they are trying to get off the hook for clean up costs or fixing the problem?

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[noidentity]

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.

Then so what? Move on to the next one! This guy has it right; we shouldn't worry about what's actually going on, we should do things quickly so that the general public will feel that the company is doing the best it can. If this results in even worse catastrophe, then so be it; at least we feel that it's the best that can be done. A good example is the government's response to the financial crash. Sure, it's making things worse, but we feel it's avoiding things being even worse, so we're satisfied.

Re:Why is this taking so long?

[the eric conspiracy]

Why wasn't this done during the drilling and cementing process, as part of a fall-back contingency plan?

It wouldn't do any good to have X-Rays of the structure BEFORE the explosion.

Why wasn't the risk profile updated continuously, so that it's available immediately if something did not go according to plan?

Because a risk profile isn't something that can be done instantly. You can't update daily if the assessment takes weeks to do.

Why weren't the side effects planned in advance? Why weren't careful considerations put into the design of this project before the accident?

That is a more reasonable question, and one that should be asked of both BP and its regulators.

In a routine live surgery there over a dozen fall-back plans if something goes wrong, and that does not even count all the sub-options. And that is with a single human life and perhaps a few hundred thousands of dollars of human productivity at risk.

Bad example. Lots of people die in failed surgeries every day.

BP has drilled at an unprecedented depth of 5000 feet, in a known-extremely-risky environment, into a reservoir of oil under a pressure that is 15,000 times that of atmospheric pressure. The mistake has cost a dozen human lives already, has already caused billions of dollars of damage and will cost billions of dollars further damage.

The depth is not unprecedented at all, lots of wells are deeper, down as much as 8,000 feet. And your pressure numbers are high by a factor of 100. And yes billions of dollars of damage were done. But that is counterbalanced by the economic value of of offshore oil production which is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Safety needs to be improved, and especially in the area of making these operations fail safe, and improving the engineering behind some of the safety mechanisms. But you really should spend some time researching the issues here so you understand why things happen the way they do.

Re:Greedy Assholes

[maxume]

They likely started work on the relief well (which is intended to cap it off) when it became clear that the blow out preventer had failed, a day or two after the explosion.

None of their other attempts have hindered that process, it just takes time to do it.

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.

Not THAT 'Top Kill', awwww, shucks!

[Ultimate Heretic]

Rats, When I read they were going to "Top Kill", I thought maybe the US finally was serious about dealing with the BP execs. No such luck, alas.

Re:And how would you do that?

[EdIII]

Can you provide a citation for that? It sounds like you are saying they were trying to plug and abandon the well. From what I understand they were running completely different operations intended to prepare the well for production.

I can blame, and will blame, BP for their piss-poor cost saving, PR oriented, and stupid way that they have attempted containment of this problem, but if they really were capping it in response to problems noted in the BOP, then they are much less of the social psychopaths I thought they were.

Re:And how would you do that?

[IdolizingStewie]

So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.

Umm, I have to say I work on all surface stacks, but if I was the company man in charge - and yes that is my current job for another major (... okay, fine, company person) - we'd shut the pipe rams, bleed the pressure above them, and fix the annular. Changing out an annular preventer on a surface stack is a relatively routine procedure. Close the pipe rams, bleed the pressure off, unbolt the top, remove the annular, cut a new one in half to go around the pipe, replace it, retighten the bolts, retest, and get on with it. I find it hard to believe that they don't have a way to replace the annular with an ROV. The blowout preventer is not a singular piece of equipment. The annular, the pipe rams, and the blinds can all be functioned and replaced separately. If your blinds are messed up, you have to get more complicated and start setting plugs, but anything above that you should be able to change fairly easily.

Re:And how would you do that?

[maxume]

Apparently 'test well' is the wrong description (this is me being sloppy, I have seen such language in other forums and didn't verify it), but they were in the process of capping it off so that they could move the rig:

The cause of the explosion is not yet known, although Transocean executive Adrian Rose said production casing was being run and cemented at the time. The well had been drilled to a depth of 18,000 feet.

Once the cementing was done, it was due to be tested for integrity and a cement plug set to abandon the well for later completion as a subsea producer.

From:

http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article212769.ece

I think as much as anything, I said "They were trying their hardest to stop drilling" in reference to them wanting to move their expensive machine and you read it as a reference to them being concerned about the integrity of the undersea structure (which I did not mean to imply, but they would have had to do the "production casing was being run and cemented at the time" stuff in order to shut down the well, regardless of the reason behind the shut down, which is what I meant.).

Can top kill even work?

[Mathness]

Will top kill work? I don't have the knowledge to know the answer, but http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/21/868490/-Fishgrease:-Booming-the-Top-Kill put an interesting perspective on it.

Re:And how would you do that?

[mindbrane]

I've little to no idea of the procedures and parts you wrote of but I think it speaks eloquently to the Scientific American article that points out BP is the only entity with what is seen as viable technology and the know how to implement it. Any forced change over from BP to U.S. government control of the spill catastrophe might interfere with technical management and solution deployment. I would like to see BP made to comply with total transparency and openness as regards all information requirements necessary to fully understand the entire incident.

Here's why the Top Kill may not work

[SockPuppet_9_5]

There's a few docs online from one of the oil field "auditors" (the ones that value reserves and help measure risk, advise on investing and so are familiar with the science) and it looks to me from those reports that there's a good chance that everyone knows why the well blew out. The BOPs failing is a separate subject. A BOP are like airbags in a car. They help mitigate the damage, and the BOPs didn't. What it looks like is that the cement job failed, and the design of the pipe in the hole didn't allow for a casing hanger. Start with this document: http://www.tudorpickering.com/pdfs/tph.well.slides.pdf Look at Schematic #3. You'll see the 7" x 9 7/8" (tapered) casing is run to surface, through the 9 7/8" lnr (not run to surface) There is a space and the possibility that the blowout happened from poor cement across the oil/gas formation and then between the 7" and 9 7/8" liner. It would have a free run all the way up to the base of the BOP. This also implies the 7" x 9 7/8" casing is still viable and still has cement plugs in place. If all true, then it also means that this well would have blown out with heavy mud in the casing. For the heavy mud to get down in a large 9 7/8" space with the oil flowing is one thing, as it's being engineered for. For that same heavy mud to get into a much smaller space , the space between the 9 7/8" pipe and the 16" casing (again, look at the red line/arrows in the diagram) with the oil and gas "jetting out" is going to be much tougher. What may happen is the heavy mud goes in, and gets rejected out, and _then_ the call goes out to put in the junk, stopping up the flow partially, and then trying more heavy mud. They've got plenty of mud, so they say, so they'll try this to see what happens.

Re:Here's why the Top Kill may not work

[Sir Holo]

The top kill; it's like drinking straws into a drainpipe.

It's not going to work.

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

[Alien1024]

Unfortunately you can't jail corporations, which are the only guilty part in this (no, a corporation and the people who run it are not the same thing). Ah, the joys of incorporating.

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

[scamper_22]

Classic bureacrat here...

You think money is an issue here in BP not fixing this?
You know some things are just hard if not impossible.

As to prosecuting them... the government already took action on this kind of thing a long time ago.
Basically oil companies have been paying a tax on oil for a long time just for such cases... as oil spills have been happening for a while.
The government already has collected the money to be used to clean up the spill.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[ScrewMaster]

Unfortunately you can't jail corporations, which are the only guilty part in this (no, a corporation and the people who run it are not the same thing). Ah, the joys of incorporating.

Depends. What our government can do is disband them, at least the parts and assets which are under our control, and sell off the assets. Furthermore, the corporate veil most certainly can be penetrated when the criminal acts are of sufficient magnitude. RICO if nothing else (BP certainly qualifies as a corrupt organization, so far as I'm concerned, and at $3.08/gallon for gasoline, they're racketeers.) The question is more one of whether there is sufficient political will to pull it off. Given our corporatist Congress, and our corporatist Supreme Court, I'm not holding my breath.

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:Fix it, jail them, move on

[timmarhy]

yes collected it, and used it to bail out wall street.

and they think big oil are crooks...

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[thegarbz]

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.

Multi-national corporation goes bankrupt as a result of government fines. Tens of thousands a jobless, oil becomes far more risky business to be in and gets re-priced at new premium risky rates. This is exactly the kind of legacy that a government wants to leave behind. NOT! Governments around the world bail out companies which have been slowly run face first into the ground for a couple of thousand jobs. You may not like it, I may not like it, but while there will no doubt be a financial impact on BP it'll be brought on by the courts and not the government. Not while America is driven by an oil economy, not while tens of thousands of jobs are at stake.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[xelah]

I doubt that would be especially effective, except at making sure that no-one forward looking or risk averse enters the industry. If 'there's a tiny risk of causing huge environmental damage and vast financial cost to my employer, and tainting or ruining my and my employer's reputation forever' isn't enough, then legal sanctions on top probably won't discourage it much more. Humans don't work well when assessing tiny risks with big penalties.

You need small penalties, frequently applied whenever the risk is taken, not big ones only applied only very occasionally when it goes bad. It won't sate anger in the same way, but it'll be more effective at changing behaviour.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[jez9999]

Or smoking cannabis.

Re:Fix it, jail them, move on

[ScrewMaster]

I believe it is the board of directors that get in trouble, if that veil is pierced. But GP is right. They might get off scott-free if they can afford the best legal defense.

True, but on the other hand Congress may decide that one or more of them has to take the fall (you know, so they can be seen to be doing their jobs.) The current CEO of Enron isn't winning any points in the media right now.

Re:And how would you do that?

[omglolbah]

The cleanup is always a fecking pain in the arse.

That is why you prevent it from happening in the first place... I also work in the oil and gas business and the whole pile of neglect in the current case pisses me off to no end.

Last week Statoil in Norway had a blowout situation at a rig and the first safety barrier failed. If this had been the system in the gulf of mexico we'd be fucked over here too.... BUT there was a -second- barrier which stopped the problem. They locked down the well and there was no spill.

It is causing all manner of hell for Statoil at the moment though... people are quite nervous ;)

Re:And how would you do that?

[rrohbeck]

The last thing you do is act like social psychopaths in search of money at any cost and continue.

Yes! I'd rather they acted like a good capitalist business in search of money at any cost and continue.

I've Got My Fingers Crossed, BP!

[Ferretman]

I devoutly hope this works so we can get to cleaning up the mess and preventing future accidents like this. As an engineer I know what a *bitch* of a job you've got in fixing this mess--good luck!

Re:And how would you do that?

[IdolizingStewie]

That's rather misleading. BP's failure to maintain proper a double barrier is no more routine in the GoM than it is in Norway. Best practices are best practices. I guarantee every well I've been on offshore has had a double barrier policy at all times. Onshore, in well understood fields, I've occasionally gotten variances to have a single barrier for limited duration completion operations, but it involved a several page written explanation of risk management that had to be signed off by my boss's boss. It would never have flown in an exploratory well like this. Then again, I don't work for BP.

The design of this well had two barriers at all times - the mud and the BOP at first, and the cement and casing and the BOP later. The problem comes in because the faulty cement job seems to have been known prior to removing the mud, generating the single barrier case. (For those not in the industry - the BOPs were a failed barrier, having presumably passed their last test, but the cement in this particular well cannot be considered a barrier at all because it never tested.)

Re:And how would you do that?

[jbengt]

Not to belittle the problem, but 5,000 ft of water is around 2,200 psi. Cold salty seawater would be heavier, but not "over 100,000 PSI".

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Centrifuge

[IdolizingStewie]

Ummm..... what exactly do you think is happening on the Discoverer Enterprise to the oil/water mix collected by the skimmers and RITT? There's a bit more to it, but it's more or less what you're suggesting.

Re:And how would you do that?

[rrohbeck]

Of course. I'm a taxpayer. That's how the system works. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. Obviously the majority of voters has liked this system for the last couple of decades, otherwise they might have done something about it.

Oh and you may need to have your sarcasm-o-meter recalibrated.

Re:And how would you do that?

[ScrewMaster]

You ask yourself 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' and you try to answer the question. You keep the suits well away from engineering decisions.

Yeah, like NASA during the Apollo era.

Re:And how would you do that?

[yyxx]

So what do you do?

You stop drilling until you have found a way to get a new blowout preventer installed. That may require abandoning this well and drilling a new one.

Maybe that will teach them to take user interface issues more seriously, since the root cause seems to have been that billions of dollars could be lost by just touching a joystick the wrong way, without confirmation.

Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.

Wrong answer.

punishment

[yyxx]

Punishment should come in the form of criminal indictments against the persons responsible.

The fact that they are paying, however, isn't punishment (that would be ineffective), it's simply a reflection of the cost of doing this kind of exploration. If that raises the gas price and causes people to switch to other energy sources, then externalities have been accounted for and economics has done its job.

Re:And how would you do that?

[budgenator]

You pull the drill string out, you do a top-kill with thick mud, like they are trying to do now, you fix the fuck-up seal, and go back to work.

Re:And how would you do that?

[Rakshasa Taisab]

They were preparing the well for production use by removing the drill and capping it. It's _COMPLETELY_ different from "trying their hardest to stop drilling".

Emergency shutdowns do not usually involve removing everything that keeps a well from blowing out, so your description isn't just badly phrased; it's also completely wrong.

Removing the heavy drill fluid is a dangerous operation that depends on the BOP for last defense. They did not have the last defense.

Re:And how would you do that?

[sjames]

The first thing to do was a few steps before that, don't leave the joystick enabled when they are closing the valve for a test. Next is to come up with a way to not bet millions of dollars on a single failure. For something that important, shouldn't there be more than one valve? Then, if one fails, close the other and put in a replacement.

What you do not do is continue and hope for the best, look where that left them.

60 Minutes had a good piece

[dafing]

I listen to American 60 minutes through the podcast audio edition, a quick Search brought up this clip http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6503436n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

What an absolutely harrowing experience. The mention of light bulbs brightened before popping, computer screens blowing out, and then 3 inch thick steel "fire proof" door being blown off its SIX hinges by the sudden explosion...pinning one of the survivors. To escape from this situation, to jump into the water, and risk being burnt by burning oil on the surface...just awful.

It sounds like there were failures on multiple levels, but perhaps all caused by drilling through a rubber seal?

I wish the people working to fix this the best of luck

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

[fnj]

There's a word for people who think a corporation is some kind of bottomless pit from which you can plunder as much wealth as you want. I can't think what it is right now ... no, really ...

If you fine (or tax) a corporation, it just means the customers and stockholders get shafted. The corporation just passes the cost on. If it is a bad enough hit, or if they can't pass it on, they go bankrupt. That'll really help the situation ... NOT. 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.

You can find individual corporate officers guilty of criminal negligence, however. This won't help all that much with paying for the damages, but will make a lot of us feel better.

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

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?

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

[vlm]

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.

So you've killed a paper document. Burned it in effigy, perhaps. Great job. Now, total demand for product remains the same. Other companies are going to need to hire folks to handle the increased volume. Conveniently, there's a handy pool of experienced folks ready to start screwing up their new employer.

You plan has no real world effect whatsoever other than temporarily feeling good, rather like a drug. And some rich lawyers will get richer by shuffling some papers, but thats just business as usual.

Now if you personally ordered the death penalty for those whom were the cause (assuming they're not already dead from other causes, etc), then you'd at least have a measurable positive effect. But environmentalists never quite have the guts to pull the trigger, they always want someone else to do the shooting, and someone else to catch the bullets. Nothing but a call to arms for the nameless and faceless "other" (usually the government) to kill the nameless and faceless "other" (anybody other than me and mine). I'm unimpressed.

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

[drinkypoo]

You plan has no real world effect whatsoever other than temporarily feeling good, rather like a drug. And some rich lawyers will get richer by shuffling some papers, but thats just business as usual.

False. People will think twice about who they go to work for, creating a competitive advantage for more scrupulous companies. I don't think it's a complete solution; we also need to take the money needed for the cleanup away from the companies that made the mess. In this case that seems to mean Halliburton and BP. Make it unprofitable to make this kind of fuckup and the companies will stop doing it. I maintain that destroying corporations and forcing their employees to seek other employment will make employees of other, similar companies more scrupulous. It's the belief that "it can't happen to me" that encourages malfeasance.

Re:And how would you do that?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If the executives knew of the fragile state of the BOP and continued, they should be put in Prison. Plain and Simple.

This about this for a second. The corporate executive officers at BP--even those at quite modest management levels--probably didn't(and still don't) know what a Blow out Preventer even was. I doubt they even really understood what oil is, apart from being a black liquid worth lots of money. If you tried to explain to them what a valve was or what it did, their heads would likely implode.

Ignorance is a great defence in the face of charges of negligence.

Re:Oil Capture

[rla3rd]

Ummm, this was already tried.
Thats what the containment dome as all about.

Re:And how would you do that?

[rotorbudd]

Good post. If I had any mod points you'd go up.

You are right about multiple fuckups, a single failure isn't usually the problem.
I've been an aircraft mechanic for more than 30 years and one thing I learned early was:

Double check everything you do
Get someone else to check after you check
Assume work that someone else has done is wrong
Don't trust ANYTHING a pilot tells you ;)

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

[fnj]

I understand it is pointless to debate a fanatic, but I will just add this for the benefit of people who have an operating sense of proportion.

A guy with a 401K or an IRA is very unlikely to hold stock in BP directly. He holds XYZ mutual fund, which in turn is invested in BP and in dozens or hundreds of other corporations. The guy has better things to do with his time than investigate every one of these corporations in depth and find out which ones some fanatic regards as murderers, and then try to find a new mutual fund which his investment plan allows him access to which includes none of those. You should not be surprised at this.

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

[drinkypoo]

The guy has better things to do with his time than investigate every one of these corporations in depth and find out which ones some fanatic regards as murderers, and then try to find a new mutual fund which his investment plan allows him access to which includes none of those. You should not be surprised at this.

There are such things as socially responsible mutual funds, so this is a bullshit excuse. All it takes is the desire to go find one, and the ability to use a computer. I reiterate: if you hold stock in murder, you are party to murder, no matter how watered-down or abstracted. You are a financier of murder. Voting- or non-voting, whole or fractional, murder is murder. Or, you know, insert_offense_here. If you own Sony stock, you've financed rootkits. If you own Microsoft stock, you've financed anticompetitive practices. Pick your proven corporate offender and put their name into the sentence if you find these examples unpalatable or irrelevant.

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

[fnj]

Yes there are so called socially responsible mutual funds. One man's socially responsible is another man's irresponsible, or even pandering, but that's not the point.

The point is that with a 401K, you are limited to the firm your employer offers you, and the mutual funds that firm offers; and to a lesser extent IRAs are effectively limited too. I am more in tune with your feelings than you might imagine, but this rhetoric is so over the top as to be nonproductive or even counterproductive. Murder? How did we get from an oil well accident to murder?

Re:And how would you do that?

[grep_rocks]

But... But... there was an executive BONUS at stake - if the plugged up the well some poor BP exec wouldn't get his bonus! that is completely unacceptable, better to take their chances that everything would work out.....

Why not drill a secondary well from the start?

[jools33]

My father worked 20 years for BP and is an oil safety expert - after a few conversations with him we come to the following - The only proven solution to a spill at this depth is to drill a secondary well to extract the oil. This unfortunately takes 8 to 9 months. Why not drill the secondary well prior to extracting any oil from the primary well. Then in the event of an accident such as this - you can switch to the secondary immediately and not have slicks for 9 months. The only reason is cost...
BP failed to do any kind of accurate risk assessment with this well, if they had done this they would never have drilled in this location at this depth, then they had a faulty blowout valve, that they knew about - they ignored the risks. They should pay in full. I have no sympathy for BP at all.

Redundancy next time?

[karstdiver]

Next time they should consider placing two blow out preventers, one right after the other, just in case the first one fails.

This has been researched for many years.

[dilvish_the_damned]

Top Kill is the final culmination of research on what was previously known as Mud Bomb and was simulated using sophisticated software code named "Scorched Earth".

Safety Engineering

[edmin]

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.

vlm: You misunderstand how safety engineering should work. It does *not* depend on any one technique being "perfect". Proper engineering would anticipate almost every failure and have a way to deal with it (again not perfect, but maybe 99.9% reliable). I am an electrical engineer (not an expert in drilling), but here is what I would do:

1) Have multiple wellheads already in place in case everything goes wrong with the blowout preventer on the active wellhead. Have an extra riser pipe ready in a nearby warehouse, to connect an alternate wellhead, and relieve the pressure in the damaged wellhead. Note: this does not require drilling multiple wells, just extra piping to the alternate wellheads.

2) Have several emergency cutoff valves at various depths in the well casing. These should be of such simple design that failure is almost unthinkable, and they should be tested at least once a month to ensure that they will work.

3) Re-design the blowout preventer, so there is not a situation where a single failure could make all redundant systems fail simultaneously. That is my understanding of the current failure. It all happened because one bozo pulled the wrong lever at the wrong time and destroyed the one valve that would work with the drill pipe still in the bore.

3) Have independent oversight of all drilling operations to make sure the above precautions are followed, regardless of delayed drilling schedules.

That last item may be the most difficult. It will require an agency free of political control, something like the supreme court, with regulators who have lifetime tenure, and can't be fired by politicians under control of the oil companies. Yes, the politicians and oil companies could still ignore the regulators, but my guess is they wouldn't dare.

once again

[z-j-y]

Obama saved our country.

Good news coverage and discussios at theoildrum

[mrflash818]

I recommending following the news stories and discussions at the news blog http://theoildrum.com/

They have some excellent coverage, in my humble opinion.

Dreams come true

[Max_W]

One should be careful of what he/she dreams, because dreams come true. As in a fairy tale where a man wished to become the richest person in the land, and it was fulfilled by impoverishment of the whole population.

Some wished to get a lot of oil, if my memory does not fail me, and got a lot of oil. It literally came to the shores in abundance.

Nuking was the first idea

[volcan0]

Actually, the idea to use a tactical nuke came from the U.S. Army and was rejected as it would prevent BP from recuperating the rest of the crude available in this area without massive costs. It is also the first idea that came through the oval office. I believe that it is what triggered the public outcry about Obama's in-ability to handle the situation. This came from radio-canada, so no links, sorry.