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Another Gulf Oil Rig Explodes
A few readers have noted that another gulf oil rig has exploded. This one is off the coast of Lousiana. So far all the workers are accounted for, but they are in immersion suits waiting for rescue.
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Call me back when there's oil spewing.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I wonder if BP execs will give themselves a bonus.
"Hey! It wasn't one of ours!" bonus.
JUST MAYBE, we should look into this stuff.. I know, it happens off of the land so "civilians" are safe, but I am about 99% sure when big metal buildings *EXPLODE*, something is wrong. Once in a year? Extremely bad. Twice in a year? Something is broken.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Oh yeah, that 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling seems like an overreaction now...
Cap baby, cap?
THL phish sticks
This one isn't a deep water rig, so it should be much easier to cap.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anyways, fires happen all the time on oil rigs, it's nothing new, or even exceptional: "The U.S. Minerals Management Service reported 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries, and 858 fires and explosions on offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from 2001 to 2010." [wikipedia.org]
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Remember after the massive earthquake in Haiti, the news started reporting earthquakes about once a week? Accidents and casualties are nothing new to the oil industry.
Clean coal? I hate to tell you this... No, actually, I love to tell you this. Clean coal is a lie.
You would get more energy out of coal if you were to filter the radioactive particles from it and use that in a nuclear reactor than if you had burned the coal normally.
All that ash and coke, full of mercury, heavy metals and other toxic stuff has to go somewhere, It either goes in the air for us all to breath or it gets stored and eventually makes its way into our soil and water supply.
CO2 sequestration can not work, you are talking about pumping billions of tons of gas underground into pockets in the rock. This has been shown to cause minor earthquakes, those earthquakes will eventually result in a blowout event, a blowout event will kill everyone in the area as the CO2 suffocates everyone, similar events happen all the time in Africa with natural CO2 sources.
Nuclear? sure, but we need to reprocess waste instead of storing it, preferably inside the reactor.
Solar? sure.
Wind? Ok, but it is unreliable so you can't rely on it for than a relatively small amount of the grid power.
Clean Coal? make me laugh.
The Chilean mine is for gold and copper. You might argue that it's even less important than "energy", or that it's more important, or that it provides some sort of "economic energy" or psychological energy, or whatever. But good luck getting gold and copper anywhere else (other than recycling).
Apparently Louisiana really pissed off Poseidon sometime in the last few years. Y'all might want to update your Kraken attack response drills just in case...
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
There's a yougottobeshittingme tag missing in the article.
my personal preference is that we use up foreign oil while it's still relatively cheap. when it hits $500 barrel, then maybe we should tap into offshore wells and sell some back to OPEC for 20x what we paid for most of theirs.
in the mean time we should probably focus on perfecting blow-out preventers.
just mah opinion.
douche-bag Manhattanite driving a Range Rover
That's a strange choice of phrase considering you're knocking the one area of the country where under 25% of people own cars, compared to 92% nationwide.
I don't know about your keyboard, but mine has the main body of the keyboard painstakingly shaped from the horn of a rhinoceros.
The keys carved from ivory obtained by hunting elephants for their tusks.
The ink to label the tops of the keys comes from finely dicing baby octopuses then running them through a centrifuge.
The springiness of the keys is particularly effective, to get the proper resistance for each key the sinews of baby seals is used.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Given that the rig is on the continental shelf, the well can't be in more than 800-1000ft of water, and is likely in closer to 200-400ft. I don't have hard number on this specific rig, but given the relative position the news agencies are reporting, and depth measurments of that area (see Google Earth), it can't possibly be in 2500ft.
I entirely agree. US politicians yelling about how we need to drill more to make ourselves more energy independent are selling false goods. Even if we tripled the amount of oil that we were producing domestically, it would still be a small fraction of the oil that the country uses, and would at best reduce prices by a few pennies per gallon. It would earn big piles of money for a relatively small number of people in the oil industry, and the rest of us wouldn't notice anything different.
We should consider the rest of that oil as a strategic reserve, in case one day we really need it, or somebody else really needs it and is willing to pay out the nose for it.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
It's really not that much of a spin. The GP's point is completely correct. If self-described environmentalists (actually just anti-nuclear activists) hadn't scared the American public away from a nuclear-based energy policy with scientifically bankrupt scare tactics, the United States would rely far, far less on fossil fuels today (probably almost exclusively for cars by now) and the chances of oil rigs exploding would be lessened by the fact that there would be far less oil rigs in the first place.
Not only that, but extracting oil from deep-water drill sites would probably not yet (if ever) be cost-effective for the prices wrought by demand and so the major Gulf spill of 2010 quite possibly would never have happened either.
So while they're not directly to blame, it's not a huge stretch to draw a line between the lies and ignorant actions of past anti-nuclear activists and the environmental disasters happening all the time in our fossil fuel draining little world.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
That idea that they learned is a joke. here is a quote from a news site comparing the BP blow out to an earlier one.
79 Mexico oil spill
Attempted Fixes
# They attempted to put a cone over the top, calling it operation Sombrero (as oppose to Top-Hat)
# They attempted to plug up the leak by pumping rocks, mud and seawater into it
Pemex pumped cement and salt water into Ixtoc for months before finally bringing the runaway well under control and sealing it with cement plugs.
Pemex's scramble to come up with other solutions while the relief wells were being drilled will sound familiar to those who have followed BP's efforts to stop the oil gushing out of its ruptured well.
Divers tried to manually operate the blowout preventer but this effort was unsuccessful and over the next several months Pemex tried a variety of solutions, including a plan to force metal spheres into the well to cut the flow of oil and lowering a steel structure over the spill to capture the crude.
BP is trying similar schemes but the huge water depth it is operating at is vastly complicating its efforts.
Does any of that sound like BP learned anything from an almost exact issue as theirs?
In both cases natural gas flowed unnoticed into the well being drilled, causing an explosion. In both cases a critical piece of fail-safe equipment -- the blowout preventer -- failed. And in both cases the operators struggled to quickly staunch the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Here are some links.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64N57U20100524
http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/an-identical-oil-spill/399603
love the taste, hate the texture
no it's just people cutting corners to save cash sometimes it's cheaper to pay on then death of a working then to pay the cash to make it safer it's time for some big time fines for doing that.
False.
"Mariner's platform is in 340 feet of water, which would make any spill response much easier than the response to BP's blown-out well."
Citation