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BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed
MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."
Okay, plugging the leak is important, but why aren't BP also doing something like this to contain the effect of the leaked oil: use 'empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.' Instead, they're just rolling out containment booms and sending people out to mop up beaches, never mind trying to initially insist that the crude was red tide, dishwashing-liquid runoff, or mud. Oh wait, the supertanker idea costs a lot of money. Sorry, sorry, my bad.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
... because your BP shares are going to be worth a lot less ;-)
Seriously though this accident has thrown up a lot of interesting information - such as how the US imports vastly more oil than it produces on its own territories, and I can only imagine regulation around oil drilling will become more strict rather than less after this has all been sorted out. Given that the USA does love to consume energy I would have thought that the silver lining might be increased investment in alternative energy sources; you've got a huge country with a lot of space for generating wind/solar/wave power. Now might be a time to explore more than pilot projects? Possibly an increased nuclear power plant program as well though I am not too sure about whether this is in political favour at the moment?
One thing amazes me about the present fiasco is that we don't hear of more accidents like this, how many offshore oilrigs are there round the world? I guess the oil industry is either pretty careful or pretty lucky when it comes to oil extraction (or good on PR cover-ups...)
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There are alternatives to all of those products. If the oil industry wasn't so heavily involved in politics, the absurd regulatory structure that makes oil the best way to do just about anything would not exist, and alternative methods of producing many goods would come about.
Have a look through the dormant patents held by oil companies for a taste of how things could be, but aren't thanks to businesses run amok.
I hate printers.
Really? How exactly do you test solutions for catastrophe of unknown nature a mile underwater, working with wells of unknown pressure filled with oil and gas of unknown composition? You do understand this was an exploratory well right; the point of this thing was largely to find out what is down there.
If you have a solution to this problem of being able to prove catastrophic failure modes can be solved by doing X with all the other unknowns you are clearly way smarted than the rest of us and I welcome our new over lord; otherwise you just another arm chair quarterback here.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Do you really think that Shell, Exxon or Texaco or any other oil company would handle this better, or is prepared for a problem like this?
No, but those companies probably wouldn't have had this problem in the first place. You see, BP has the worst safety/regulatory compliance of any of the major oil companies by far. They've got 760 citations for "egregious, willful safety violations" from OSHA; their nearest competitor in the oil industry, Sunoco, has 8 (Exxon, the last poster-child for oil-industry irresponsibility, has only 1.) Their regulatory compliance for EPA issues is just as bad in comparison to their cohort. And I'm sure if you look at people supplying hookers and blow to the MMS, they're right at the top, too. Bottom line, BP is "the worst of the worst" when it comes to playing by the rules despite it's pretty green and yellow logo. They deserve to have all leases terminated and no more granted in perpetuity. Maybe then they'd get their act together.
That is all.