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."

Comments

How to really motivate them...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Amazing

[MrNaz]

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.

Re:Time to invest in renewable energy?

[vlm]

Well, this accident was sort of the worst case scenario in that every fail-safe mechanism failed.

Its worst case in a hell of a lot of other ways:

1) Timing. Wells kick all the time while drilling, but while you're drilling you've got the mindset and equipment to work around it so you don't get blowouts. Cement jobs fail all the freaking time, but thats OK since you've got a hole full of heavy mud. BOPs, being mechanical devices in the ocean, fail on occasion, but thats OK because four nines of uptime, combined with un-used rate of four nines, means no problem for about eight nines. Too bad it all happened at the precise worst time.

2) Geology. Despite whatever the idiots on TV say, this is a hybrid gas/oil well not an oil well. A leaking oil well is no problemo you just suck up the oil at the source. Can't do that on a hybrid well because the methane hydrates from the gas clog up the works. Also oil gushers rarely catch fire and vaporize the platform, TV movies excepted. A leaking gas well is no problemo for the TV newsies because nothing washes on shore. Turning the GoM into a big methane fizzy drink is not an ecological ideal but its not, relatively, as bad. So, if it were a pure oil well, you'd have an intact platform uncontrolably squirting oil into a supertanker tied up next door, or worst case you'd be able to capture about 99% of the oil at the source. Or if it were a gas well you'd probably still have sunk the platform and killed everyone, if not even worse than it was, but there would be nothing floating ashore. Also the geology of the bottom of the GoM is completely unknown to the newsies so you get idiot ideas from people whom refuse to understand that the bottom of the GoM is a thousand feet of muck. They think its like the "little mermaid" movie where its all solid granite, and all their ideas reflect that inaccurate assumption.