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BP Claims Gulf Well Has Been Stopped
An anonymous reader writes with word that BP has announced the Gulf oil spill has been stopped.
Another reader adds more detail: "The last valve on the new cap has been closed, and the flow of oil and gas into the sea has stopped. That doesn't mean it's over. It is unclear whether the steel casing deep in the well can contain the pressure. The risk is that it could burst, which would eventually cause a rupture on the sea floor that would make things much messier to deal with. However, they're monitoring the pressure buildup carefully and if the pressure holds over the next 48 hours (indicating there is no leak below the sea floor), they'll assess what to do next. If it doesn't hold at the expected readings, then they'll re-attach the pipe used for producing to the surface and start collecting again. Regardless of what happens the relief well still has to be completed to permanently plug the well with cement, which could take a couple more weeks."
All skepticism aside, this is f-ing great news.
Seriously.
How long until Washington starts claiming credit for it?
It does seem that they were very focused on being able to extract the oil rather than just stopping the leak. Now, I'm not an engineer, but could their desire for continued extraction of oil have delayed their plans, made the stack more complex?
In any case, we'll see whether it works. Hopefully it'll at least buy them enough time to drill relief wells.
Now, I'm not an engineer, but could their desire for continued extraction of oil have delayed their plans, made the stack more complex?
Not based on my understanding since they are continuing with the relief well, the purpose of which is to plug the well with cement.
Now that they have the cap in place, if it works I don't see why they don't just turn the well into a producing well. Might as well get something out of the disaster...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
BP is a corporation. Corporations don't have empathy or remorse. They could give a rat's ass about the leak. They only wanted to stop the bad publicity and liability, and secondarily, to start producing oil. If they could somehow have all three on the cheap without stopping the leak, they would have.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The 'extraction' is more that it's easier to funnel some of the leak somewhere, and it has to go somewhere, than it is to actually stop the leak (which IMO isn't a bad plan really). AFAIK basically they've always needed relief wells or nuclear weapons or a working blowout preventer to get stuff to stop. Imagine an outside tap on your house that won't close, sticking something on there which will actually plug the leak, while under pressure is pretty hard. Screwing on a hose is messy, but once it's on at least you're funnelling the (in this case) water wherever you want it, it'll be leaky, but a lot better than nothing. Fitting on a new tap while there is flow is pretty tough, not impossible though, and if you stick a cap on it, and the cap bursts you're probably further behind than if you'd just left the partially connected hose.
The whole thing has been to some degree theatre. Dumping dispersant on light oil is dramatically worse than just letting it get to the surface and evaporate, but they had to be seen to be doing something. Building a cap to hold it in was always, at best a temporary solution, and everything they do risks making the problem worse. Funnelling as best they could until relief wells could be made was probably the only viable choice, at this point whether they can cap the leak for a week or two isn't going to make meaningful impact on the overall size of the spill, a useful learning exercise for the next time something like this happens, but not all that useful now.
The question will be what to do if the relief wells fail in some way, because then the number of options is pretty low.
I doubt the amount of oil they could get hardly justifies worrying about. Even if they're getting 20K barrels of actual oil a day that they can sell at say 80 bucks a barrel, that's only about 1.6 million bucks a day, for a business that's doing ~690 million USD in revenue a day, and spending probably 20 or 30 billion dollars on this, a few hundred million here or there is unlikely to even make notice on a balance sheet, and risk extremely bad press for very little gain.
Back to business as usual then. US government will make noises about it clearly being a British conspiracy to destroy America, demand BP gets sued for quadratrillions, gets banned from US trading, say it wouldn't have happened if it was a good ole US oil company from Texas. Local lawyers sue on behalf of local residents for quintillions, combined wealth of ten planet Earths etc. BP puts lawyers on to the case, forms holding company to take over US operations, carries on drilling, settles for a few million ten years from now. Local fishermen out of jobs, local environment messed up for the next 50 years, local lawyers get rich, politicians get promoted and oil companies carry on drilling and make substantial profits every year, held up by US government as fine examples of free market pioneers who are great examples for the world's entrepreneurs. Rinse and repeat.
Basically, we know that the cementing job is faulty to some degree, if we completely stop the flow then that'll put all the pressure on the casing below the point where we stop it. It is quite likely that it will then just rupture further down, and then we'll back in the same position as before, except it'll be even harder to stop.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
BP is a corporation. Corporations don't have empathy or remorse. They could give a rat's ass about the leak. They only wanted to stop the bad publicity and liability, and secondarily, to start producing oil. If they could somehow have all three on the cheap without stopping the leak, they would have.
Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by people. And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.
You say that with sarcasm, but I don't remember them lying at all.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
I still don't get why this is BP's fault and not the sub-contractor. As a software contractor I have a professional duty to deliver sound good quality code. If not I get sued. At what point is Halliburton or one of the other contractors involved not financially responsible for their poor work.
> Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by profits.
Fixed.
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Wow are you naive. They would have done whatever would make them the most money. The reason is not because they are so horrible, but because blame is so spread around no one feels guilty for the problem.
Now we can disperse the oil into the environment through car engines so we won't pollute so much ...
... oh wait
Yes, we are all trained to think corporations are evil. But have you ever chosen money or convenience over what's best for the environment?
Do you drive a car to work?
Do you buy reusable shopping bags?
Do you throw recyclable materials in the trash?
Do you use air conditioning?
I could go on, but the point is, almost everyone is motivated by cost and convenience.
Thank you for that false equivalency. Destroying a huge region of ecosystem and screwing up hundreds of thousands of lives is not the same thing as not buying reusable shopping bags, and you know it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.
Kind of reminds me of what I told myself about Pfizer when I was working for them: no way would they do unethical things like test their drugs in 3rd world countries without properly informing the test subjects. No way would they have done this just to save a buck or two, or get around stricter regulations in the US. After all, you'd have to be a monster to be okay with that, and additionally to be absolutely horrible at managing PR to risk the parallels to the Tuskegee experiments. And, I told myself, you go into medicine to help people, not hurt them.
I guess I could still tell myself those things, it's not as if anything conclusive has come out about it. Still, I think it's pretty clear that pfizer is not our friend, corporations are in general not our friends, and those individuals who work for large corporations are able to justify, ignore, or rationalize almost anything their company does. After all, I did it, and I was just a lab grunt who had no real stake in the company.
You should not be optimistic about good people being in places of power, since power tends to corrupt. That isn't just true for politicians or religious leaders, it's definitely true for corporations.
Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling. The fact that this well has been gushing for months is simply unacceptable. The keystone cops spectacle of Top-Hat, Hot-Tap, Junk Shot (tm) is strong evidence that BP didn't devote any significant resources to dealing with a deep water blowout. Strong regulation of these rogue corporations is needed. They should not be able to drill without having capping equipment and emergency tankers ready at dock.
sed 's/BP/the oil industry/g'
I didn't see any of the other large multinationals drilling in the area jumping in and offering their solutions. This gung-ho approach is not restricted to BP, it's endemic in the culture of the oil industry, and all the other companies are looking on grateful it wasn't them that got "unlucky".
Just wait until this happens in Alaska or somewhere where it's a trifle more difficult to get to with the relief equipment.
I'm off down to the local planetarium to put a down-payment on a new planet for my kids. They're going to need it.
Isn't the main reason it is so expensive in most of the world is due to taxes, and not the oil companies themselves?
The corporate structure of limited liability creates a climate of diffused responsibility. The emergent behavior of corporations is sociopathic, even if there are no sociopaths in positions of any power.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
heya,
Actually, he's made a damn good point.
I know it's really popular and faux-trendy in the west to chant DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS! DOWN WITH GLOBALISATIONS!, but have you actually stopped and considered how idiotic you actually sound. *sigh*.
Just stop being sheeple for a second and think.
Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like
There are few people these days, in our Western nations that aren't driven by cost/convenience. Yet people are all talk, and no action.
I mean, jeez, look at the whole Buy Australian/Buy American thing.
It was trendy to be all anti-imports, but when it came time for people to put their money where their mouth is...they still buy cheap Chinese imports...lol. (I'm assuming here these people believed in mercantilism over globalisation, or something). They're hypcocrites, plain and simple, as many of these anti-globalisation/environmental trendies are.
You get all these faux-greenies, or anti-globalisation wannabes chanting stupid DOWN WITH BP! slogans. They're a frigging company, run for profit. They're not evil, or good, they're just a legal construct, that does things to make money. You can judge each action they do, on a moral scale, but you can't make blanket statements like COMPANIES ARE EVIL. You might as well say, environmentalists ARE EVIL because of all the terrible things Greenpeace or PETA have done. And believe me, there's a lot.
If you really want to put your money where your mouth is - go, setup a reserve somewhere, grow your own food, make your own textiles/clothing, and abscond modern conveniences like electricity and petroleum. The fact you're on Slashdot makes me think you won't last long. We'll see how long it is before you come back begging to be let back into society.
Cheers,
Victor
heya,
Lol, you're using a strawman fallacy here and completely ignoring the main point - which is that humans, ever since the industrial revolution, have been masssively impacting their environment.
And we consistently choose our own comfort over the environment. It's just most sane people don't actually think it's a bad thing to value our own convenience, within reason.
Look, if you're prepared to go back to a subsistence agricultural kind of lifestyle, by all means.
I bet you use electricity. Actually, you do, you're on Slashdot, for crying out loud. Gee, I wonder where that electricity came from? Even so called "renewable" energy involves manufacturing, and shaping our environment. If you're really as green as you claim, I'd challenge you to give up the modern convenience of electricity. I give it what, a year before you come crawling back to mainstream society.
Like it or not, we humans damage our environment. We can try to mitigate that, and we should, but we're hypocrites and liars if we try and claim that we'd gladly put the environment over our own needs.
Cheers,
Victor
Haha I wish.
Signed,
The rest of the world
Dear the rest of the world;
BP & others are selling refined gasoline at significantly less than $3/gallon.
Speak to your government about the enormous taxes they pile on top of that price.
Signed,
The USA
P.S. Since I'm in the USA, here's the NY spot price for gasoline
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Isn't the main reason it is so expensive in most of the world is due to taxes, and not the oil companies themselves?
Firstly, oil is not expensive anywhere in the world, it's incredibly cheap.
Secondly, even in the most expensive places in the world, you're not paying the true cost of oil. The cost of disasters like this, oil-related wars, etc, are not figured into the price of oil or gasoline. It's highly subsidized by society. We all pay the cost for you filling up your tank, whether we actually drive a car or not.
... and then they built the supercollider.
it's also an outright lie to say BP haven't invested significant resources in dealing with the blowout. they have spent over 3 billion and deployed 22,000 people to try contain the spill, and they are still up for billions more. i'm not sure what circles you travel in but i'd consider billions of dollars significant.
Straw man much? I didn't say that BP hadn't invested any money in fixing this. I said that BP hadn't invested significant resources BEFORE the blowout.
having emergency tankers "ready" at the dock (whatever that is supposed to be) is a useless idea. whats the tanker supposed to do after it arrives? not to mention that it'll take days for a tanker to get there at best anyway.
What I actually said/meant was that there should be tankers AND equipment to straddle a broken pipe, the same type of equipment that they have just finished building and installing. My point is that this shouldn't be trial and error. As a condition of drilling, they should have already invested in recovery methods before they begin. As for your comment about it taking days for the emergency tankers to arrive, oil has been gushing for 3 months! Even if the tankers were docked in Europe, it would only take a couple of weeks or so at full steam to arrive at the gulf. That is significantly less than 3 months.
Your post doesn't make sense, and you will forgive me if I write you off as a corporate drone.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS! DOWN WITH GLOBALISATIONS!, but have you actually stopped and considered how idiotic you actually sound. *sigh*.
Wow, that's a particularly stupid strawman you're beating there.
Silly me, I thought paying taxes to fund the government to pass regulations for drilling/industry was supposed to reduce risk, letting me buy shopping bags without dooming the planet. Evidently we should have tolerated the drilling for all non-consumer reasons (fuel for war) and yet have known not to ask for luxuries. Bad consumers. Bad. Those bags are what's killed us, not decades of industry lobbying and government corruption and lies.
Had it been clear how badly the government has handled the issue before the spill (despite attempted citizen oversight) or how lax BP's safety procedures were, asking for that shopping bag would have been unreasonable. But we were continually assured, by the government and industry, that reasonable steps were being taken - which we now know to be a lie.
Yes, because the surest way to get oil prices to drop is to start a war in the middle east...
I don't see why it' so terrible to pay gasoline taxes. We are dumping pollutants into the air with our cars, using the roads which our government funds, causing obnoxious noise and traffic jams...
I was just in Cuenca, Ecuador, where gas is $1.50 / gallon. The pollution from cars and buses in the city is unbearable: you can barely stand to walk around the city. Of course, hardly anyone walks anywhere, since a taxi anywhere within the city is a flat $2. The pollution is a real shame, since the city is situated in a picturesque valley tucked in the Andes mountains.
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Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like.
You missed the fact that people placed in a corporate environment like that of BPs will adjust their behavior to "fit" within the culture -- the latter having degenerated over the decades. I've personally seen people's whole segments of morality alter almost by 180 degrees simply by spending a decade at a global multinational. It's spooky.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
BP built the initial chamber that was lowered onto the well from scratch. And it failed, because it was an experiment. They built the top hat system from scratch, and it failed because it was an experiment. They have tried numerous methods to fix this gusher and they have failed. Finally we are starting to see a more robust system being put in place. But even this system was almost certainly built from scratch.
My point is that coming up with the processes to fix a gushing well from scratch while the oil is flowing is not a good approach. There should have been in place devices and systems to deal with such a disaster. They should have been designed, built and ready, before the disaster. Given the repeated failure of their initial attempts, it seems very likely that they did not devote significant thought (BEFORE THE EXPLOSION) to what would happen if their blowout preventer failed in such a disastrous fashion. That is unforgivable.
Oh, and in my original post, I specifically used the phrase "...before they started drilling..." in the first sentence. The next phrase "... BP didn't devote any significant resources..." is clearly referring to the same "before explosion" period. I even put "before" in italics.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)