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."

Comments

Whew

[Kell Bengal]

Thank god they got it closed before it became an ecological disaster.

Oh wait...

Re:Whew

[kvezach]

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.

Re:Whew

[Low Ranked Craig]

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...

Re:Whew

[snowraver1]

If they could have just stopped the leak, they would have one the first day. In fact, they tried that, but the BOP was broken... That is what this whole issue is about.

The collection of oil was to prevent that oil from going into the water, and also gave them something positive to report on.

In addition, the collection effort required some stops that made the capping of the well possible at all. As part of the capping process the cut the riser of the well (and eventually removed the riser cap) which is where this cap is installed.

I'm sure that no one wanted to stop this well leak more than BP.

Re:Whew

[spun]

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.

Re:Whew

[countertrolling]

I'm sure that no one wanted to stop the news leaks more than BP.

You're welcome...

Re:Whew

[Monkeedude1212]

Try not to think of it as an ecological disaster. Think of it as unproactive redistribution of wealth by giving some of the worlds unwealthiest wildlife a large sum of one of the worlds most sought after resources. They should be able to increase their underwater infrastructure a great deal if they use it all wisely.

Re:Whew

[maxume]

The primary reason it took a long time is that they had no contingency plan for BOP failure. They had to invent the plan, invent the needed equipment and then build the equipment.

(They had a notion that they would build a relief well if it blew, but that isn't a short term containment plan, it is a hole in the ground plugging plan).

So if you want to be outraged, be outraged that they were drilling outside of their technical depth (they clearly did not have a reasonable contingency plan in place, nor a sufficient amount of equipment), there is no need to foment anger about their motivations since the blowout.

Re:Whew

[Sir_Sri]

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.

Re:Whew

[SleazyRidr]

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.

Re:Whew

[SleazyRidr]

The scary thing is that basically everyone out there is assuming that the BOP will never fail and they don't need any contingency plans. I've done one or two studies with these people (not BP) and whenever anyone raises the question, "What if the BOP fails?" the answer is always, "it won't."

Re:Whew

[RoFLKOPTr]

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.

Re:Whew

[ArsonSmith]

they are unwealthy wildlife because they have proven themselves unable to use it wisely.

Re:Whew

[Omega Hacker]

> Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by profits.

Fixed.

Re:Whew

[Rakishi]

The well was a write off from the moment the thing started leaking. Everyone knew that. I mean seriously, they can barely cap the thing, how in god's name do you expect them to repair all the damage that was done to it?

It's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just drill another well, they're not some magical things that suddenly shows up in the middle of the ocean, we can make more of them.

Re:Whew

[x_IamSpartacus_x]

You know, I was going to lament the waste that it seems it will be to pump the relief well and seal off this oil well because of the vastness of the reserve and how much oil and natural gas they could get from it since they can collect it now with the cap on it.

Before I did that though, I did a little digging to find out how many other projects BP has in the Gulf of Mexico just to see if maybe they have a high percentage rate of success and this is just one of hundreds or something,
It turns out BP has only 9 (admittedly huge) projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Source
(count the number of projects in the ride hand column)

I had to find that in the way back machine because BP took down the page listing their Gulf of Mexico projects. They even still link
to it (again, look at the column on the right "Gulf of Mexico Facilities) but they broke the link. It's funny, when I peruse that page (via the way back machine) BP brags about their "new and untested" tech that they use to go to "unprecedented depths". It looks like their a little ashamed of it now.

Anyway, after seeing that they only have 9 facilities in the Gulf maybe this well is better sealed off. I went looking for a reason to trust BP with reopening this well and getting the oil and gas they went there for but a 1 in 9 failure rate is not impressive. Seal that sucker off.

Re:Whew

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:Whew

[spun]

I never said everyone at BP was a sociopath. The problem with corporations is diffusion of responsibility. No single employee or officer has to be sociopathic in order for the emergent behavior of the corporation to be sociopathic.

Re:Whew

[Abstrackt]

And they'll still charge us $3 a gallon for it.

Haha I wish.

Signed,
The rest of the world

Re:Whew

[cjb658]

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.

Re:Whew

[Bemopolis]

And giving them more oil just encourages them to lay about. Just look at those lazy bastards, floating sideways on the surface.

Re:Whew

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Whew

[superdave80]

Isn't the main reason it is so expensive in most of the world is due to taxes, and not the oil companies themselves?

Re:Whew

[ZosX]

More than that. Blow out preventers have something like a 40% failure rate according to recent statistics released.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100713/ts_csm/313442

(I honestly don't know if it has the 40% figure, but dig for it, it was all over the news if you need a citation that badly)

Common practice is to have a backup BOP to eliminate the single point of failure. The BOP is not nearly as reliable as oil companies would like to make it out to be.

Re:Whew

[victorhooi]

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

Re:Whew

[bit9]

Wow, how many ways can you be wrong in a single post???

First, you're wrong about this being the first ever BOP failure. As another poster has already noted, the IXTOC disaster in 1979 was also (at least partially) the result of a BOP failure. Furthermore, BOP failures are evidently not such a rare event. Apparently, they fail frequently enough during routine tests that at least a couple studies have been done on BOP failure. From this article:

Indeed, more than a year before Pleasant's frantic efforts to stop an inferno, a large study of BOP reliability in the Gulf of Mexico had warned industry experts and federal safety officials that balky control systems were by far the most common cause of BOP failure – and apparently getting worse. Altogether, 63 percent of blowout preventer test failures cited in that 2009 study, a joint effort by the industry and the regulatory US Minerals Management Service (MMS), involved control systems. By contrast, a similar study a decade earlier had found control systems were responsible for 51 percent of BOP failures.

And from this article:

Hard data about the reliability of blowout preventers is hard to come by. But back in 2002, West Engineering conducted a test of seven BOPs "at the most demanding conditions to be expected." Five were successful in sealing the pipes, but two failed.

So although BOP failures may indeed be rare events, and full-blown catastrophes resulting from BOP failures may be even rarer, they still do fail frequently enough to merit some serious consideration, especially given the possible consequences when one does fail.

The probability of a massive catastrophe caused by a BOP failure is dozens of orders of magnitude greater than the probability of North America sinking into the ocean. It's much more akin to the probability that your house will burn down, and although having one's house burn down is an extremely rare event, it happens frequently enough, and the consequences are severe enough, that it absolutely justifies taking preventative measures and having contingency plans. That's why most of us have smoke alarms and at least one fire extinguisher in our homes.

Anecdotally speaking, I'm 37 years old, and my house has never burned down (or even caught fire), but in that same time there have been TWO major catastrophic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BOP failures.

Having a real contingency plan (complete with actual equipment, materials and personnel in place) when you're drilling 5000 ft. under the ocean is not like trying to plan for North America sinking into the ocean. It's a necessary and prudent safety measure.

When you're talking about contingency plans for an accident that has the potential to cause large-scale ecological AND economic disaster, it's not a question of whether or not it will be a "smooth operation". Your implication is that if we don't have a contingency plan that is guaranteed to go off without a hitch, then we shouldn't bother having one at all. That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day.

Re:Whew

[TubeSteak]

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

Re:Whew

[WNight]

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.

Re:Whew

[superdave80]

Yes, because the surest way to get oil prices to drop is to start a war in the middle east...

Re:Whew

[schmiddy]

Speak to your government about the enormous taxes they pile on top of that price.

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.

Great News

[gregrah]

All skepticism aside, this is f-ing great news.

Seriously.

What a shame

[Kenoli]

I was getting rather used to it.

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[impaledsunset]

Now that they stopped it, let's Slashdot it from the inside.

Not a permanent solution.

[BitterOak]

Let's hope the fix holds.

Actually, this isn't meant as a permanent fix at all. This cap is a temporary solution to prevent excessive leakage in the event that a hurricane prevents them from collecting the oil that does escape. They are still going ahead with the relief valves which are intended to be the permanent solution. That said, I do hope the cap holds the oil for as long as necessary.

Re:Not a permanent solution.

[lmnfrs]

Not even close to permanent. The current plan is to monitor "for up to 48 hours before reopening the cap while they decide what to do".

Re:Not a permanent solution.

[blair1q]

here's what I heard:

1. they capped it.
2. they closed the cap
2a. if the pressure suddenly drops, they know the pipe is ruptured below and they are forcing oil into the sea floor, where it will seep up into the sea, meaning the cap is not preventing a leak, just shifting it to the rupture. they will open the cap immediately and work to start pumping oil to the surface.
2b. if the pressure is high and holding, they will monitor for up to 48 hours it to determine if it is dropping slowly.
2b(1). if it is, then there is likely a leak below and they will work to start pumping oil to the surface, to keep the pressure in the pipe low while they wait for the relief well to be completed.
2b(2). if it is not, then the pipe is stable and intact
2b(2)(i). they may keep the cap in place and wait for the relief well to be completed
2b(2)(ii). they may work to start pumping oil to the surface while they wait for the relief well to be completed.
3. when the relief well is completed, they will open the cap, or remove the pumps, and pump concrete into the pipe to cap this wellhead permanently. the relief well will in any case be the production wellhead for this shaft.

what's really shocking about the whole deal isn't that they had a faulty blowout preventer, it's that they always knew that the pipe and the rock surrounding it were at points not strong enough to contain the pressure in the well. they knew this either before they started drilling or shortly after, and still they drilled all the way to the oil. they knew that there was no way ever to completely cap this well. as soon as they hit the oil, they would have to allow it to flow to keep the pressure low, or it would eventually rupture the pipe and vent the entire oilfield into the seafloor and then to the sea. and, for some reason, they foresaw no reasonable circumstance under which that plan might fail. they believed it not possible that they wouldn't be able to complete the well and pump it continuously, without a problem, without ever having to stop the flow. and they apparently suppressed knowledge of the entire consideration, because anyone looking at the concept would immediately say they were not only courting disaster, but raising it to a high probability of occurring.

frankly, i think it makes the deaths of those 11 men nothing short of murder.

Re:Not a permanent solution.

[TopSpin]

This is correct. The cap WILL be reopened in any case. If the well pressure does not build to about 8000 psi they will reopen the cap because this would indicate a bore containment problem. Even if the pressure does build to the proper level 'they' want to perform seismic tests without pressure in the well bore after 48 hours. Finally, if they then decide the well bore and/or formation does not have sufficient integrity the cap will then remain open permanently, otherwise they'll close it again.

In all cases the cap will be reopened and gush into the Gulf for some period of time, so don't be surprised when it happens. The best case is that the conclusions made from the seismic tests will allow the cap to be closed again relatively quickly.

If the cap cannot remain closed for whatever reason another containment plan is then used; four different ships are attached to the new cap in various configurations (kill lines, floating risers, etc.) to attempt to recover and/or burn the entire flow from the well.

A thoughtful reader may ask; why risk the "shut in" (closing the cap) and possible well bore/formation damage when 'they' can just collect/burn all of the flow without closing the cap? The answer is that ships, even big ships, have to escape hurricanes; if a cane blows through and the collection ships have to leave then the well will, once again, flow into the Gulf until the storm passes and the entire multi-ship apparatus can be reconnected. This could take weeks if the storm is uncooperative.

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[bhlowe]

Link to multiple video feeds.. Looks good to me!

Well...

[Auto_Lykos]

Seeing is believing: http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:45683.asx?bkup=45684 Odds are the feed will cut out after a few seconds with how swamped it is now. Oh and if you're really interested here's one of the bottom of the BOP which is being watched so it doesn't explode. http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:31499.asx?bkup=31500

Re:A low tech solution ....

[spun]

It involved a Dutch boy in a wet suit.

I put my finger in a dyke last night. She didn't seem to appreciate it very much.

Gratuitous conspiracy theory

[poly_pusher]

Pfffft.... Documentation means nothing. Just look at the amazing work done on the faked moon landing!

Re:Thar's oil in them oceans . . .

[Bigjeff5]

They weren't abandoning it, no producer in their right mind would abandon a well that can pump out 60,000+ barrels a day, that's a fucking gusher!

The accident actually occurred while they were capping it with cement - which is done when the exploratory drilling is finished and they want to bring in a production rig.

Granted, it's the exact same procedure to permanently abandon a well (because they never really abandon them permanently), but a well like that they definitely would produce. The average well in the gulf produces something like 1,800 barrels of oil a day, for a comparison.

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[shacky003]

Here's the direct feed link from BP - http://www.bp.com/liveROVFeed
It starts all feeds on load, click on the videos themselves to get a decent fullscreen res look at each..

Re:Thar's oil in them oceans . . .

[ColdWetDog]

I thought I read somewhere that it was an exploratory well that they were planning on abandoning. Just because oil is coming out doesn't mean that it is currently economical to collect it there. If oil exploration continues here, whoever does it would certainly just drill a new well anyway.

That's not really how it works. Yes, the well was 'exploratory' in that they were not sure they could get oil out of that particular place. But what they were doing before they fucked up big time was 'closing' the well: Sealing it off until they could bring out the production crews who would place pipelines to the feeder system (they have to collect it somehow and just spilling it into the ocean appears to have a bunch of problems associated with it) and the various bits and pieces that make up a production well.

But if the relief wells go as planned, they will pump mud down to stop the flow and then cement the thing closed. Theoretically, there isn't anything that would prevent BP (or somebody else) from drilling another well into the same formation and starting the process over, but that seems politically unwise.

Unreadiness for Spills

[catchblue22]

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.

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[cj_nologic]

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.

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[abundance]

"The reasons for why this failed" are not so unknown, since it's known that the welhead's blowout preventer had gone under repair and maintenance works that were identified as inadequate, exposing to the risk of BOP's failure, in a note that a BP's contractor sent to BP management.

There were also internal notes about the probable inadequacy of the wellhead cement casing, and various reports about dangerous shortcuts took in the operations of the drill in the days preceding the incident, which were protested by the drill workers.

:/

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[catchblue22]

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.

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[sectoidman]

The acoustic dead-man's switch wouldn't have been any help, since it's linked to the same valve on the BOP that failed even when they sent robots to manually shut it down. And, that valve failed because of an accident that happened some weeks before that destroyed the annulus seals: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197_page4.shtml. I agree that the relief wells should be required for this kind of eventuality, but if BP hadn't been criminally negligent in maintaining its equipment, this never would have happened.

People can be as bad as corportations.

[uncqual]

There are plenty of people who run small, unincorporated, business that show little empathy and even actively defraud people and shirk their responsibilities. Many of these individuals are far less responsible than "big corporations" -- mostly because they lack oversight by a BOD, by investors, by a multitude of people in the company, and by regulators.

I've known individuals who ran their own small, unincorporated, business that were the most amoral people I know.

If you've ever tried to collect money that you are legally owed, even with a judgment, you will probably know what I mean.

The notion that "corporations are bad" and that individuals are better (showing more empathy, morality, ethics etc.) is largely a fantasy IMHO.

Re:How long

[blair1q]

this was an inherited problem from the previous administration.

The regulatory system in place for the oil industry is the result of 8 years of direct action on the part of Bush and Cheney.

They set up the rules that allowed lax safety and backup systems, set the liability levels that induced the company to ignore safety and backups, packed the civil service component of the department with oil-company cronies who ignored the mounting pile of known safety violations (which no doubt were only a fraction of the regulated vulnerabilities and a small fraction of the factual vulnerabilities), and made oil men their best friends (well, more oil men; oil men have always been Bush and Cheney's best friends, right next to defense contractors).

Obama trusted the regulatory structure of this department because he hadn't had it audited for integrity and was too busy with several active fires Bush and Cheney had left behind to deal with something that merely hadn't blown up yet. He even believed their assurances enough that he approved drilling off the East Coast just a few weeks before this well blew up. So clearly they were not informing him of the corruption of their office or the decrepitude of the industry.

So now you don't have to wait any more. You just have to ask yourself why you didn't know these facts existed, and whether you should ever again trust the people who led you to believe these facts didn't exist.

Re:How long

[bill_mcgonigle]

For better or worse the Federal Government doesn't have the experience or the resources to deal with a problem of this nature.

Very true. But they refused the help of those who did (the Dutch). Their boats could only get out something like 98% of the oil and EPA regulations say you can't discharge water back into the Gulf that's less than 99.998% pure or whatever, so they've been trying to pump the Gulf of Mexico into ships and bring it on shore into storage containers for later processing.

It's so asinine I can't go to 'incompetence' on this one.

More "Oh Noes !1!!" noise - Article is wrong.

[zooblethorpe]

Debunking requested? Sure! :)

I hesitate to even post the URL, but I'm sure the Slashdot folks will give this "ominous report" the debunking it so thoroughly needs: Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event

Interesting link, albeit woefully flawed. The beginning, emphasis mine:

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world. [2]

55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM).

The LPTM lasted 100,000 years. [3]

Those subterranean seas of methane virtually reshaped the planet when they explosively blew from deep beneath the waters of what is today called the Gulf of Mexico.

Here's a pic of the world's land masses around 255 mya, and another of around 237 mya. Here's a pic from close to the 55 million years later mentioned in the article above, around 195 mya.

In none of these scenarios is the current Gulf of Mexico a body of water. This would seem to rule out any sort of clathrate-based "sea fart", at least from that specific region.

Moreover, the two events the article mentions aren't quite right. The first is the Permian-Triassic extinction, indeed around 251 mya, but the cause is still debated, with one of the leading explanations being a combination of factors that include one or more impact events.

The second event is dated in the article at 55 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, or around 196 mya. However, the Paleocene didn't even begin until around 65 mya. What the article author was probably thinking about was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, dated to around 55 mya. One of the theories for the cause of the PETM is indeed that methane clathrates may have destabilized, causing a runaway greenhouse effect, until the poles were warm enough for palm trees and sea turtles. However, the PETM isn't associated with any mass extinction -- the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction happened 65 mya when the geologic K-T boundary was laid down in the rock, and is again theorized to be due mainly to one or more impact events. Note in the pic here that the Gulf of Mexico is indeed a body of water by this time, but rather than being the source of any clathrate fart, it is instead noted as the location of the Chicxulub crater, theorized to be the kicker that killed the dinosaurs.

So basically, as disruptive as any sustained "sea fart" might be, the article you linked is full of bunkum and misinformation. And that's just in the intro.

Cheers,