gaaboard.com

BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs
Owner of Louisiana Oil Well Objected to System That Would Have Shut Off Spill

By MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS and RHONDA SCHWARTZ
Apr. 30, 2010

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/bp-fought-safety-measures-deepwater-oil-rigs/story?id=10521078 (http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/bp-fought-safety-measures-deepwater-oil-rigs/story?id=10521078)

BP, the company that owned the Louisiana oil rig that exploded last week, spent years battling federal regulators over how many layers of safeguards would be needed to prevent a deepwater well from this type of accident.

One area of immediate concern, industry experts said, was the lack of a remote system that would have allowed workers to clamp shut Deepwater Horizon's wellhead so it would not continue to gush oil. The rig is now spilling 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

In a letter sent last year to the Department of the Interior, BP objected to what it called "extensive, prescriptive regulations" proposed in new rules to toughen safety standards. "We believe industry's current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs&continue to be very successful."

That was one in a series of clashes between the industry and federal regulators that began during the Clinton administration. In 2000, the federal agency that oversaw oil rig safety issued a safety alert that called added layers of backup "an essential component of a deepwater drilling system." The agency said operators were expected to have multiple layers of protection to prevent a spill.

But according to aides to Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has followed offshore drilling issues for years, the industry aggressively lobbied against an additional layer of protection known as an "acoustic system," saying it was too costly. In a March 2003 report, the agency reversed course, and said that layer of protection was no longer needed.


"There was a big debate under the Bush administration whether or not to require additional oil drilling safeguards but [federal regulators] decided not to require any additional mandatory safeguards, believing the industry would be motivated to do it themselves," Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club told ABC News.

A second area of focus emerging Friday involved the cement casing that was supposed to seal the well and prevent gaps from opening between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole drilled into the sea floor. If cement is not poured properly, oil and natural gas can escape  a cause of more than a dozen previous well blowouts in the Gulf.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman Friday sent a letter to Halliburton, the company responsible for pouring the cement seal, asking company executives to brief committee investigators on conditions at the rig, and preserve all documents relating to their work on the sea floor.

Elmer Danenberger, an expert on offshore drilling who retired from the U.S. Department of the Interior in January, told ABC News he is worried that "lack of attention" during the pouring of the cement could be to blame.

"With these cementing operations it's just a matter of not being attentive enough," he said. "What you want is a closed system. You want the cemented pipe totally sealing the well bore. If you don't have that, you have problems."

Because the well us under more than a mile of water, it may be some time before investigators have more clarity on what exactly went wrong. But Brent Coon, a lawyer who sued BP over a previous deadly oil facility explosion, said he has obtained a restraining order to prevent the company from doing anything to cover up the cause of the accident.

"BP stands apart, heads and shoulders above all the rest of them, with respect to their conduct," said Coon, who represents a 24-year-old roustabout who was working on the rig at the time of the blast. "It's like they just don't care."

BP issued a release saying it had launched its own investigation into the cause of the blast, and would cooperate with federal efforts.

"Losing 11 of our industry colleagues is a tragedy for the offshore community," said BP Group Chief Executive Tony Hayward in the statement. "As an industry, we must participate fully in these investigations and not rest until the causes of this tragedy are known and measures are taken to see that it never happens again."

Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures

_______________________________________________________________

I wonder what the good people of the coastline from Houston to the Florida panhandle think of voluntary industry controls now? The shrimp fishermen? The hotel owners? (We know what the wildlife managers think). Its looking like the worst oil pollution disaster in US history, and they still haven't got the thing stopped (big test for Obama here on how all this is dealt with).

Its been a bad few weeks for the fossil fuel industry in the US with this, the Massey coal mine disaster and the planned wind farm off Cape Cod. Now Obama is putting the breaks on opening further areas of coastline to drilling.

Can the US authorities not seize or freeze their assets to ensure they pay up the right compensation?

Quote from: Hedley Lamarr on May 01, 2010, 05:58:56 PM
Can the US authorities not seize or freeze their assets to ensure they pay up the right compensation?

Given that there are several companies involved, I'm sure they'll be suing each other to see who is liable. I would expect massive fines though (especially if they didn't in fact add the additional protective features that the Bush administration, according to this ABC piece, said they would be "motivated" to do) in addition to the oil companies footing the bill for what is going to be a massive clean-up and restoration (that could take years), compensating local fisheries, tourist businesses and so on.

The main priority now is to get the well capped. It is still spewing 5,000 barrels a day into the sea. The compensation/blame-apportionment can come later. However, I see the right wing is already are crowing about "Obama's Katrina". They may turn out to be correct, but had he gone in with the full weight of the feds from day one, instead of letting BP handle things themselves at first, before the extreme gravity of the situation became apparent, they'd have been crying about that too. But whoever gets the blame, they had better implement strict regulations to stop this devastation happening again, no matter how much crying certain elements do about oppressive government, free markets and socialism. Same as with mining worker safety and environmental issues.

Hope they can get it sorted sooner rather than later.

Quote from: Hedley Lamarr on May 01, 2010, 06:45:17 PM
Hope they can get it sorted sooner rather than later.

Lawyers are going to get very, very fat of the back of this disaster, this is going to take a long time before those who are responsible are held accountable.

Is there anyone on the board who lives down in Florida, Louisianna, or Mississippi?

I have been following the BP oil spill closely, and if anyone lives in these regions, could they give us an insight into how things are in the region?

The scary part for me is the fact that Halliburton are up to their eyes in guilt in all of this.
Firstly, they buy a little known Oil clean up company, "Boots and Coots", and then a couple of weeks later, they are responsible for cementing the BP well. 20 hours after cementing, the well blows, with the loss of 11 lives, and to date, nearly 80 million barrels of oil has gushed into the Gulf. Not to mention the fact that a handful of large investors sold their stock in BP a few weeks before this disaster. Goldman Sachs been one of them.......

Apparently, the sea bed is 5,000 ft below the sea. Then, the drilling below the sea bed is another 20,000ft. It would appear that the oil deposit is like an underground volcano, and nothing they can do will stop the flow of oil. The sea bed is now fractured under the immense pressue, with methane gas and oil gushing out from many cracks at a pressure of 100,000psi. A regualar power hose at a car wash would have 1,500 psi.
The is a very real possibility that a nuclear bomb will be used to control the leaks.

So far, BP and private contractors have taken full control of the clean up, and the US govt havn't got involved. No media are allowed near any of the clean up operations, with private security companies controlling the affected area's. A no fly zone is in place, so no footage from the air is readily available. Anyone working on the clean up isn't allowed to speak to the press, and they are forbidden to carry mobiles or recording devices with them.

In the past few days, oil and wildlife have been washing up on the shores in Florida, and before too long, with the help of the gulf stream, it will hit Ireland and the western shores of Europe. Inside a year or so, the whole of the worlds oceans will have some form of contamination. Plus, there is such a high level of Methane gas escaping, that experts agree that the possibility of an underground explosion is real, and a tidal wave could hit these southern states.

This is the largest environmental disaster to hit the world, and the long term damage is going to be severe, and far reaching. Already "Oil Rain" is hitting these states, and with the hurricane season around the corner, the chances of widespread contamination is very real. 

Is this the beginning of the end, as promised by the crazy right wing Christains? Along with the very real and imminent threat of nuclear war with Iran, i'm afraid the numbers are adding up.......

I am struggling to see  how a nuclear bomb would help.

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 01:45:00 PM
Is there anyone on the board who lives down in Florida, Louisianna, or Mississippi?

I have been following the BP oil spill closely, and if anyone lives in these regions, could they give us an insight into how things are in the region?

The scary part for me is the fact that Halliburton are up to their eyes in guilt in all of this.
Firstly, they buy a little known Oil clean up company, "Boots and Coots", and then a couple of weeks later, they are responsible for cementing the BP well. 20 hours after cementing, the well blows, with the loss of 11 lives, and to date, nearly 80 million barrels of oil has gushed into the Gulf. Not to mention the fact that a handful of large investors sold their stock in BP a few weeks before this disaster. Goldman Sachs been one of them.......

Apparently, the sea bed is 5,000 ft below the sea. Then, the drilling below the sea bed is another 20,000ft. It would appear that the oil deposit is like an underground volcano, and nothing they can do will stop the flow of oil. The sea bed is now fractured under the immense pressue, with methane gas and oil gushing out from many cracks at a pressure of 100,000psi. A regualar power hose at a car wash would have 1,500 psi.
The is a very real possibility that a nuclear bomb will be used to control the leaks.

So far, BP and private contractors have taken full control of the clean up, and the US govt havn't got involved. No media are allowed near any of the clean up operations, with private security companies controlling the affected area's. A no fly zone is in place, so no footage from the air is readily available. Anyone working on the clean up isn't allowed to speak to the press, and they are forbidden to carry mobiles or recording devices with them.

In the past few days, oil and wildlife have been washing up on the shores in Florida, and before too long, with the help of the gulf stream, it will hit Ireland and the western shores of Europe. Inside a year or so, the whole of the worlds oceans will have some form of contamination. Plus, there is such a high level of Methane gas escaping, that experts agree that the possibility of an underground explosion is real, and a tidal wave could hit these southern states.

This is the largest environmental disaster to hit the world, and the long term damage is going to be severe, and far reaching. Already "Oil Rain" is hitting these states, and with the hurricane season around the corner, the chances of widespread contamination is very real. 

Is this the beginning of the end, as promised by the crazy right wing Christains? Along with the very real and imminent threat of nuclear war with Iran, i'm afraid the numbers are adding up.......

You've been reading to much propoganda, i recommend an innoculation of the daily mash (http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/obama-starting-to-sound-like-a-bit-of-an-arse-201006102804/)

I recommend you also look up the lakeview gusher (largest oil spill in history 9-11 million barrels), oil spills into the gulf of persia during the first gulf war (circa 11 million barrels) and possibly even the very comprable Ixtoc spill in 1979 which pumped 3 million barrels into the gulf of mexico.
Its the pity the yanks weren't so keen to clean up after themselves in Bhopal.

But on a positive note the two relief wells are ahead of schedule.

Delboy, I havn't been reading too much propaganda, just facts on the ground from scientisits who know a bit about what is going on.

Going by your facts, are you try to tell me that the current oil spill hasn't put out as much as the one's you have quoted?

Government officials estimate the leak at 60,000 barrells a day. Considering there is 40 gallons in a barrell, then that is close to 2.4 million gallons a day. You give 3 examples of 9-11 barrels, 11 million barrels, and 3 million barrells. Do you really believe that less than 11 million barrells have leaked in the current spill?

As for a postitive note, well, i'm afraid there isn't anything positive about what is happening there right now.


Have a read at this report from John Kessler, a scientist who has just returned from a 10 day examination of the area.
Does the Methane levels worry you?

Methane levels in the ocean near the site of the BP oil spill are "astonishingly high", according to some U.S. scientists. Last week, the scientists returned from 10-day research expedition in the Gulf of Mexico close to where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and eventually sunk more than 60 days ago.

The April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 men and spawned the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Since then, oil has been gushing into the Gulf at a rate of as much as 60,000 barrels a day, according to U.S. government estimates.

Methane is a colorless, odorless gas that is a major component in natural gas. It is also highly flammable. A bubble of methane is believed to have ignited the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

John Kessler of Texas A&M University in College Station, one of the scientists on the research expedition, said last week that methane in deep-ocean waters (below 1,000 feet) near the oil spill are 10,000 to 100,000 times higher than normal. At times, the team measured methane levels that were 1 million times above normal.

According to Reuters, the team took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile radius of the leaking well. Kessler characterized the leak as "the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history,"

The team of 12 scientists from Texas A&M, Texas A&M Galveston and The University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that the methane, which makes up 40 percent of the substances coming from the well, is staying in the deep waters and not escaping into the atmosphere.

Kessler said the amount of methane seen was enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone in the Gulf. High concentrations of methane can encourage the growth of microbes that consume oxygen needed by marine life.

"At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. At other places, we saw no depletion of oxygen in the waters. We need to determine why that is," Kessler said.

Though oxygen depletion hasn't reached a critical level yet, Kessler said he feared what it might look like "two months down the road, six months down the road, two years down the road?"

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 03:10:53 PM
Delboy, I havn't been reading too much propaganda, just facts on the ground from scientisits who know a bit about what is going on.

Going by your facts, are you try to tell me that the current oil spill hasn't put out as much as the one's you have quoted?

Government officials estimate the leak at 60,000 barrells a day. Considering there is 40 gallons in a barrell, then that is close to 2.4 million gallons a day. You give 3 examples of 9-11 barrels, 11 million barrels, and 3 million barrells. Do you really believe that less than 11 million barrells have leaked in the current spill?

As for a postitive note, well, i'm afraid there isn't anything positive about what is happening there right now.


Have a read at this report from John Kessler, a scientist who has just returned from a 10 day examination of the area.
Does the Methane levels worry you?

Methane levels in the ocean near the site of the BP oil spill are "astonishingly high", according to some U.S. scientists. Last week, the scientists returned from 10-day research expedition in the Gulf of Mexico close to where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and eventually sunk more than 60 days ago.

The April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 men and spawned the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Since then, oil has been gushing into the Gulf at a rate of as much as 60,000 barrels a day, according to U.S. government estimates.

Methane is a colorless, odorless gas that is a major component in natural gas. It is also highly flammable. A bubble of methane is believed to have ignited the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

John Kessler of Texas A&M University in College Station, one of the scientists on the research expedition, said last week that methane in deep-ocean waters (below 1,000 feet) near the oil spill are 10,000 to 100,000 times higher than normal. At times, the team measured methane levels that were 1 million times above normal.

According to Reuters, the team took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile radius of the leaking well. Kessler characterized the leak as "the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history,"

The team of 12 scientists from Texas A&M, Texas A&M Galveston and The University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that the methane, which makes up 40 percent of the substances coming from the well, is staying in the deep waters and not escaping into the atmosphere.

Kessler said the amount of methane seen was enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone in the Gulf. High concentrations of methane can encourage the growth of microbes that consume oxygen needed by marine life.

"At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. At other places, we saw no depletion of oxygen in the waters. We need to determine why that is," Kessler said.

Though oxygen depletion hasn't reached a critical level yet, Kessler said he feared what it might look like "two months down the road, six months down the road, two years down the road?"

The figures are still being debated but lets go with your 60000 barrels a day for arguements sake, 11 million is divisble by 60000 roughly 183, that means you'd need to be leaking oil at that rate for 183 days to get up to 11 million barrels.
Now the exploison happened on april 20th its now the 24th of june so thats 65 days at that rate its spilled 3.9 million barrels, so when you do the math it is exactly like i said comparable with the previous gulf of mexico spill. So yes i am saying it hasn't spilled in more than 11 million barrels and i've used your own figures to answer you.

You also mention methane, you can't have it both ways, if there is lots of methane pumping out then that means there is actually less oil pumping out (the models just measure particles). Take into account that almost invariably once the dust settles and the media have stopped scaremongering and whiping up fears the estimates of oil spills tends to fall, i see no reason why this one should be any different.

To suggest this is the worst global environmental disaster and thats is something for the world to be worried about is just americancentric nonsense, i refer you once again to bhopal, its ongoing environmental problems, the huge number of attributable deaths and birth defects etc, and no sign of an american clean up, shame on them.

Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO193f8xAls

Short 1 minute video on Pensecola beach in Florida.

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

They are just gay sharks anyway, who gives a fcuk.

Quote from: thebigfella on June 24, 2010, 05:51:37 PM

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

They are just gay sharks anyway, who gives a fcuk.

Great contribution to the debate  ::)

Quote from: delboy on June 24, 2010, 06:58:38 PM

Quote from: thebigfella on June 24, 2010, 05:51:37 PM

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

They are just gay sharks anyway, who gives a fcuk.

Great contribution to the debate  ::)

Ah go way out of that it was funny.

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

That figure doesn't sound right. There are several species of dolphin that live no where near the Gulf of Mexico. Where are you getting it from?

Quote from: Eastern_Pride on June 24, 2010, 07:03:56 PM

Quote from: delboy on June 24, 2010, 06:58:38 PM

Quote from: thebigfella on June 24, 2010, 05:51:37 PM

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

They are just gay sharks anyway, who gives a fcuk.

Great contribution to the debate  ::)

Ah go way out of that it was funny.

Gay sharks, yeah right enough absolutely hilarious, i wonder what he does for an encore  ::)

Quote from: delboy on June 24, 2010, 08:01:08 PM

Gay sharks, yeah right enough absolutely hilarious, i wonder what he does for an encore  ::)

(http://media.nowpublic.net/images//c5/f/c5f4cb8e83485686d39a91c5c95267d4.jpg)?

(http://www.family-vacation-getaways-at-los-angeles-theme-parks.com/images/SeaworldDolphinsPeek.gif)?

:)

Quote from: give her dixie on June 24, 2010, 05:32:41 PM
Fair enough on the figures DElboy, but lets get back to the main points in this spill.

Firstly, the Halliburton connection and the sale of BP shares by certain individuals and companies is worrying.
Did they have prior warnings, or was it shrewd investing policies?

Secondly, the US Govt need to take a larger role in this, and not let private companies control the clean up.

Thirdly, wether it is media hype or whatever, the serious consequences for the environmental disasters about to happen are very real. The oil spill is coming our way, no doubt about that.

There is no doubting that the ones you have mentioned above are just as serious, and you are right, the Bhopal disaster is horrible, and the loss of human life incredible. Shell's record in Nigeria isn't to clean either.

Personally for me, this disaster unfolding before us right now in the Gulf is going to have far reaching consequences for not only those living in that region, but futher afield. Not to mention the marine life that will suffer greatly. Roughly 80% of the dolphins in the world use the Gulf as their habitat, and they are already washing up dead on Florida's beaches.

So, what is the best case senerio, or worst case? I don't know, and I dont think the experts really know either. Either way, it is still bad whatever way we look at it, and only time will show us the results.

Personally i think its an environmental disaster for the gulf of mexico but it doesn't represent a global disaster. We've had similar and greater amounts of oil spilled into the oceans and its never been a global problem.
When the oil gets diluted down as it leaves the gulf it reaches levels that the ecosystem/ microbes etc can easily deal with, so im not particulary worried about it over here.

I think there is a lot of propaganda and spin about the spill, you have the right wing trying to use it as a stick to beat obama and the democrats. You have obama himself trying to bulster his mid-terms by being Mister tough guy with his bellicose statements about 'British petroleum' and it now looks like he wants to use this bit of bad news to drive through legislation on 'green' energy production (raising taxes in reality).

The environmentalists will be pushing this for all they are worth. In fact i would think as counter intuitive as it may seem that some environmentalist strategists are dissapointed that it hasn't been worse, they have been looking for their 'game changer' to open our eyes to the looming environmental armegaddon (in their eyes). The ends justifies the means so a huge environmental disaster is exactly what they want/need.

Quote from: Puckoon on June 24, 2010, 08:03:17 PM

Quote from: delboy on June 24, 2010, 08:01:08 PM

Gay sharks, yeah right enough absolutely hilarious, i wonder what he does for an encore  ::)

(http://media.nowpublic.net/images//c5/f/c5f4cb8e83485686d39a91c5c95267d4.jpg)?

(http://www.family-vacation-getaways-at-los-angeles-theme-parks.com/images/SeaworldDolphinsPeek.gif)?

:)

Now that is funny  :D

We Are All BP Now
Militarizing the Gulf Oil Crisis [ 67344 ] -
By ANNE McCLINTOCK



June 24, 2010

In the Gulf, the forever spill has become the forever war. A calamity of untold magnitude is unfolding and, alongside it, a strange militarization has emerged, as the language for managing the crisis becomes the language of war.

War-talk is firing from the mouths of local officials, TV pundits, the Coast Guard and journalists. Campaigning frantically to protect Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal urges the TV cameras: "We need to see that this is a war....a war to save Louisiana...a war to protect our way of life."

Billy Nungesser, indefatigable President of the Plaquemines Parish, implores anyone who will listen: "We will fight this war....We will persevere to win this war."

For Ragin Cajun, Democratic strategist, James Carville: "This is literally a war... this is an invasion...We need to hear someone say 'We'll fight them on the beaches...."

Retired Gen. Russell Honore, who oversaw the Katrina debacle, insists: "We need to act like this is World War 3. Treat this like it's an invasion...equal to what we decided about terrorists. We've got to find the oil and kill it."

Find the oil and kill it? This is truly strange talk, this talk of war and killing oil. Even President Obama tried to fire up the nation by invoking 9/11, couching the spill as an invasion, a siege, an attack by terrorists. The militarization of the disaster has become the invisible norm, so much so that it is hard to see how misplaced and dangerous the analogy to war actually is.

Visit the BP site (one of the more surreal Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass internet experiences) and you will see the word "kill"--BP's favored, faux-techno buzzword--appearing with ritualistic incantation. Kill the well, killthe leak, kill the oil, which morphs into "kill mud" (the mud that will kill the leak) and "kill lines" (the lines that follow the pipes to kill the leak). All this kill-talk has a jaunty, we-know-what-we-are-doing tone, but accumulatively it borders on the bizarre, culminating in the "junk shot"--the weird slurry of car tires and golf-balls that BP fired at the leak to 'kill' it--as if, by throwing enough sacrificial detritus of our oil-soaked leisure activities into the maw of the oil-god, we could stop it spewing death.

There is a lot of verbal killing going on here, and indeed the Gulf does seem to be bleeding: a vast, streaky, orange-red smear stretching to the horizon. Sixty three days and counting, and the oil eruption gushes unstoppably past 100,000 barrels (BP's secret, original estimation), past 400,000 barrels and up...We really haven't a clue how much. In this, our summer of magical counting.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer gazes at the grey Louisiana horizon and declares: "It looks like a military campaign...heavy lift helicoptors taking sand to the frontlines of the battle against the oil." I do look, but it doesn't look like a military campaign to me. Certainly, a few Blackhawk and Chinook helicoptors drop sandbags into a filthy, yellow-brown sea overflown by a few hapless gulls, but a war front it really isn't. This is, in fact, as unlike a war front as one can imagine. The Louisiana marshes lap quietly with brown ooze; solitary birds heave and flail in the middle of nowhere under the oil's slow embrace; dolphins gape open-mouthed on beaches; a dead whale washes ashore. No, this is not a war. Only a tremendous failure of the imagination can see this as a war.

So why are people calling the calamity a war and why does it matter that they do?

Calling the oil the 'enemy' helps us not to question who was culpable in the first place. Calling the response 'a battle front' helps us not ask who, other than the military, should be in charge. Calling the spill an 'invasion' helps us not to see that our global culture of militarization is what got us into the mess in the first place. Calling the spill a 'war' only fuels the pervasive militarization that produced the crisis in the first place. And calling the oil the enemy helps us not admit how much we, the consumers, having awakened the oil from its ancient slumber to fuel our gas-greedy lives, are the most complicit of all.

A fateful circularity takes shape as the spill is managed in the same terms that produced the spill: that of war. Most critically, militarizing the catastrophe as a war becomes a cover-up for seeing the environmental catastrophe of war.

An unsettling verbal alchemy is at work in all this military talk. "Jindal has declared war!" cries the Florida Pundit. But on whom has Governor Jindal declared war? The murderously irresponsible BP? The Obama government for failing, really, to do anything? The increasingly invisible, but culpable Halliburton? (Wherever there is Halliburton, there is pain). The Sunday Herald, for one, pleaded with Congress not to blame BP: "The oil is the enemy," it urged, "not each other." Admiral Allen described the oil as "an insidious enemy that keeps attacking in different places." Viewed through the prism of war, oil and nature are seen as the enemy, for they have erupted beyond our control. Adopting a warlike stance toward nature is not new. A long-established discourse on conquering the wilderness is ready to hand to justify our rapacious assault on the life-forms around us. Dill, baby, drill. Then, when it all goes horrendously wrong, kill, baby, kill.

And if all this seems merely metaphoric, there is Rush Limbaugh to rely on, for whom the doomed rig explosion was not just a metaphor, but an actual act of war. Limbaugh says the rig was probably attacked by "a foreign government," with culprits ranging from "Muslim terrorists to the Red Chinese, Venezuela and beyond." Michael Savage began simultaneously peddling the same story, but with North Korea behind the 'attack.' Cherry-pick your terrorist of choice--whatever--it is war.

The war talk of Limbaugh, Savage & Co would be laughable if it didn't converge with the broader militarization of the spill. Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) is calling for the actual military to take charge. But what part of the military's mission and expertise, I wonder, leads Nelson to believe that the army could stop the oil billowing from the ocean bed, let alone take charge of the massive response? Do we actually have the military hardware to stave off this thing in the first place? Sure we do. We can send in a Predator Drone, point the Oil Vaporizing Missile at the leak, hit the "If-we-dream-hard-enough" button and...hotdamn. Thing works like a charm.

A painful irony is obvious: we can't send in the army because it is already overstretched by fighting two ruinous wars abroad, both wars fought precisely to secure the dwindling oil we need to lubricate our profligate lifestyles and keep our global military mobile. But the military can barely manage these wars abroad, let alone cope with environmental catastrophes back home, stretched so thin as it is that soldiers return home with post-traumatic stress so severe they commit suicide at the harrowing rate of eighteen a day.

Couching the catastrophe in the language of war conceals the political void at the heart of the clean-up. The administration's systematic failure to regulate BP, Halliburton et al before the explosion is matched only by its stunning impotence after the explosion. We're into the second month and Nungesser is still begging to know who is in charge. Even Admiral Thad Allen told reporters: "To push BP out of the way would raise the question of: Replace them with what?" The robust, accountable civilian agencies that should be responsible have been gutted by decades of deregulation. This is what the far right wants. In the last decade, Republican calls for limiting government have given way to calls for dismantling government, in favor of a system run and policed by the very rapacious energy and fiscal barons who caused the crises in the first place.

In a world of promiscuous deregulation, oil giants like BP take obscene risks and rake in undreamed-of bonanzas. BP, the third largest oil company in the world, has an annual profit of $14 billion; it made $17 billion last year, and $9 billion in the first quarter of this year alone. BP's top CEO before Tony Hayward, Lord John Browne (at $11 million a year the highest paid CEO in the UK) was so addicted to profit that he cut safety costs at all costs. BP has long been known as the top-ranking safety violator globally. Last year alone, according to OSHA, BP racked up over 700 violations, that is, over 10 violations per day. BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf was so makeshift it included references to walruses and sea-otters, neither of which inhabit the Gulf.

The oil bonanzas are so vast that when the companies are fined for spills, the fines often amount to just a few days annual profits. Exxon Valdes's fines were reduced by Justice Roberts' Supreme Court from $5 billion to $500 million and not one company official saw the inside of a jail. So why bother following safety regulations? And when safety regulations are systematically violated, well, stuff happens. Like a dead ocean.

And when stuff happens, what do we do? Who is in charge? Gov. Jindal cries out again: "This is a war. We've got to be adaptable." The trouble is, there is precious little to be adaptable with. Skimmers, sandbags, shovels. Antiquated barges with makeshift vacuums trying to suck up an ocean that is turning black. On TV, I watch men in white overalls hold a puny vacuum-cleaner nozzle to the gargantuan oil slick. Cajun engineering, some wryly call it. Absurd, if it weren't so awful.

The wildly unregulated oil industry is profit-driven to such a degree that no R and D has gone into developing any clean-up technology for the last forty years. Not since the Santa Barbara disaster in 1969, that is. Not since everyone was still using typewriters. The oil industry has the technology to drill to fabulous, sci-fi, Jules Verne depths, but is still using hopelessly outmoded methods like booms, wetmats, and spades to clean-up after them. Skimmers lumber ineffectually back to shore carrying only 10% oil to 90% water. Kevin Costner's save-the-day machines are not yet in action. The booms get tangled up in every squall and are laid out with little or no knowledge of the shoreline. I watch as men swirl mops in the ooze.

Where is the R and D for clean-up technology? As I write this, I wonder: I can touch my ipad and in a few seconds beckon from the ethers an invisible book that speeds unseen through the starry skies to materalize magically into print between my fingers. We can pull off this breathtakingly wondrous stunt, but are stumped by the task of scooping up the oil we ceaselessly spill? Why?

It's not as if there aren't enough bad spills to warrant spending some serious R and D cash. The sheer untruth of Obama's claim in April that "oil rigs generally don't cause spills" could hardly be rivaled. In fact, as much oil is spilled in the world every seven months as was spilled from the Exxon Valdes. In Nigeria's oil-devastated delta alone, where oil companies operate outside the law, where writer-activist, Ken Saro Wiwa was executed for opposing them, more oil is spilled every year than so far in the current Gulf spill.

But who cares? These spills occur slowly, every day and far away, out of range of the U.S. media's sensation-driven gaze, evading the disaster-packaging of prime time news. So that Doug Suttels, BP chief, could lie to NBC's Tom Costello, saying that BP hadn't developed any remedial spill technology because "there have been so few big spills." And when warned by a BP engineer that the Deep Horizon was a "nightmare rig," another BP official responded in an email: "Who cares? It's done... We will probably be fine."

We aren't fine, but perhaps by calling this a war we stave off feelings of helplessness by giving familiar symbolic shape to an unforeseen chaos. Perhaps fear is militarized and given a reassuringly violent form. Certainly, Americans are particularly prone to deploying the language of war to deal with social crises. We pretend to wage war on a lot of things that we can't wage war on: the war on drugs, on crime, on poverty, on AIDS, the forever War on Terror, and now on oil. The militarization of our culture has become so pervasive that every crisis of neo-liberal capitalism rolling in is seen as the next war.

Very early into the spill, the militarization of the Gulf extended even to journalists being prevented from covering the disaster by a motley alliance of BP contractors and Coast Guards, on the grounds that the Gulf was a war zone. After protests, Admiral Allen assured the media that they would have "uninhibited access," but the blockades only increased, flyover permits were revoked, photography on public beaches was banned, and cleanup workers were silenced. National guardsman blockaded even CNN from filming oil-damaged birds. The question remains why President Obama, who campaigned on the promise of government transparency, would collude with BP in the media blackout, refusing to let even the New York Times fly over "Ground Zero"--a blatantly militarized reference to an industrial disaster? One Coast Guard official referred to journalists as "media embeds," but embeds in what, precisely?

All this war talk would be understandable, defensible even, were it not for a fatally circular, feedback loop. BP would not be in the Gulf drilling deeper than it knows how to drill were it not for its uniquely profitable relation with the US military war machine. The United States Department of Defense buys more oil than any other entity on the planet. The protection of overseas oil is now so unquestioned that even Defense Secretary Gates warned against the "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy. And to fuel this militarization, the Pentagon uses 75% of the oil bought by the DOD for its jets, bombers, drones, tanks, and Humvees. And in order to keep buying this oil, the military has to keep protecting our regional oil interests, two thirds of which are now in conflict prone zones. US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan use a staggering ninety million gallons a month. And to garrison this vast, global gas-station, the DOD keeps expanding, which means buying more oil.

From whom? In 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest contractor at $2.2 billion. The DOD has a longstanding, multimillion dollar business relation with BP, which it says it has no intention of relinquishing, even now, in the aftermath of the Gulf disaster. Despite knowledge that BP has racked up 97% of all flagrant safety violations. In 2005, the DOD paid BP $1.5 billion. Indeed, last year 16% of BP's profits came from sales to the Pentagon alone.

Keeping this in mind, we would do well to remember that militarization is the number one cause of environmental destruction in the world, and that military production facilities, which are exempt from environmental restrictions, are the most ecologically devastated places on earth. We drill, we spill; nature pays the bill.

Blaming BP means we don't have to admit our complicity as consumers in the slow-mo, chemical slaughter we have unleashed on the planet. Blaming BP means we don't have to look too hard in the rear-view mirrors of the cars we drive, or too deep into the plastic water bottles we drink. Last year Americans drank enough plastic water bottles to stretch around the world one hundred and ninety times. Blaming BP means we don't have to admit how our oil-addiction keeps U.S. foreign policy in thrall to petro-despots and oligarchs.

BP would not be drilling in the Gulf in the first place were it not reaping ungodly, monster profits from our luxurious oil-bingeing. A gas-pedal-to-the-metal nation, we American consumers are especially complicit, our profligate lifestyles devouring 30% of all raw materials used by people globally every year. We Americans siphon 25% of all the earth's black oil into our cars, trucks, airplanes, helicopters, mega-malls and military bases. Every one of us who drives one, two, three cars is complicit. Every one of us who shops with plastic bags is complicit. Every one of us who strolls through malls heated to a permanent tropical summer in winter, is complicit. We are all complicit in this calamity. We are all BP now.

In 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest contractor at $2.2 billion. The DOD has a longstanding, multimillion dollar business relation with BP, which it says it has no intention of relinquishing, even now, in the aftermath of the Gulf disaster. Despite knowledge that BP has racked up 97% of all flagrant safety violations. In 2005, the DOD paid BP $1.5 billion. Indeed, last year 16% of BP's profits came from sales to the Pentagon alone.

These figures probably explain why there is so little been done by the US Government.......

Are you really Jim Corr?

The First OilCane? What Happens if a Hurricane Rides over the Oil Spill       

Written by Art Horn     
Thursday, 24 June 2010 16:45 

The gulf oil spill is bad but it could become much, much worse and soon. The threat is a hurricane moving over the spill. If a hurricane's violent winds track over the spill, we could witness a natural and economic calamity that history has never recorded anywhere or anytime. We will literally be in oil-soaked waters. We will have witnessed the first oilicane.

A category one hurricane (on a scale of 1 to 5) has maximum sustained winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour near the eye. A category five hurricane has maximum sustained winds of 156 to 200 miles per hour. The difference between the two storms is gigantic and non-linear. The latter hurricane may cause 250 times more damage than the former.

Water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are now running as warm or warmer than they did during the record setting season of 2005. This is significant. Warmer water means more heat and humidity over the tropical ocean to fuel hurricanes. Just as a car needs gasoline to fuel its engine, a hurricane needs hot, humid air because a hurricane is little more than a gigantic atmospheric engine. The warmer and more humid the air it breaths in, the faster its pistons pump and the stronger its winds become. The warmer water not only makes more hurricanes, it make more big ones. The 2005 season had a record 15 hurricanes. Nobody knows how many there will be this season. But it appears that it could be a big year.

Oil continues to gush out of the bottom of the gulf. Some progress has been made to reduce the amount escaping. Oil is washing up on shores and efforts are being made to clean it up. The good news is that most of the oil is confined to coastal areas. The bad news could come if a moderate to large hurricane rides over the spill.

The winds of a hurricane are so strong that the normal interface between ocean and atmosphere disappears. The winds begin to generate large waves. Spray is blown off the top of the waves. That spray mixes with the air so that after a short time there is no real boundary between what is ocean and what is the atmosphere. If a large hurricane moves over the spill, this chaotic mixture of water and air will inevitably also contain oil. The oil will become airborne and travel with the hurricane.

When hurricanes make landfall the winds push the ocean onto the land in what is called a storm surge. The height of the surge on land is dependent on several factors. The strength of the wind and the rate of forward motion of the storm is critical as to how much water is forced up onto the land. The diameter of the hurricane will also determine how much water is blown inland. The wider the storm the more water is pushed in and over a greater area. If the water is shallow offshore, the surge will be deeper on land. Naturally, the elevation of the land is important as well. The water off the gulf coast is shallow. The elevation inland is only a few feet. This area is prime territory for devastating and deeply penetrating storm surges.

Should a major hurricane push the spill towards the gulf coast there will be nothing that can be done to stop it. No amount of planning or engineering will help. No number of visits to the gulf by the president or any other official will stop the inevitable. The storm surge will drive the water and the oil miles inland. Everything in its path will be coated in a greasy bath of crude. Even the wind may have oil in it. In New England, I have seen hurricanes and tropical storms that have blown salt spray many miles inland from the coast. The leaves of the trees eventually turn brown and fall off. In the case of the gulf it will be oil that will spray the trees, buildings and everything else in the way. How far inland this oily mess will blow is anyone's guess but it will be unprecedented in its economic and environmental damage.

The recovery period after a hurricane can take years. It was 10 years until some communities fully recovered from Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, some never recovered at all. The New Orleans area is still putting itself back together after Katrina in 2005. The recovery period after an oil-soaked hurricane -- or what could be called an Oilicane – is impossible to forecast but it could take years and many billions of dollars. One wonders if BP has the money to survive such a unique disaster. The human and natural losses from such an event could be historic.

http://petroleumworld.com/sf10062001.htm

By Christian A. DeHaemer

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.

— Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

There is something primordial about BP's quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It's an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep.

I don't know if you've stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do...

The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That's the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim.

And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that — Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare.

Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed.

It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas — the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people.

More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane.

According to the New York Times , BP's internal "documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of 'well control.' And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer."

The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure...

Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi — far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff vales and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi.

It was an accident waiting to happen... And there are many that say it could get worse — much worse.

Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

According to CNN:

The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May.

And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles...

Some geologists say that BP's arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into an deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

Need the mudlogs

Geologist, Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored. 

So far, no one has seen them... BP keeps them hidden.

Mr. Landau claims:

It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mudweight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky.

But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work.

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn't fallen off

In fact... it's increased.

The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano.

I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi.

Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.

These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.

That said, a bubble this large — if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack — would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens... only under water.

The BP well is 50 miles from Louisiana. Its release would send a toxic cloud over populated areas. The explosion would also sink any ships and oil structures in the vicinity and create a tsunami which would head toward Florida at 600 mph.

Now, many people have called Hoagland a fringe thinker and a conspiracy theorist. And they may be right... But that doesn't mean he isn't on to something.

EPA finds high concentrations of gases in the area

The escape of other poison gases associated with an underground methane bubble (such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and methylene chloride) have been found.

Last Thursday, the EPA measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,000 parts per billion — well above the normal 5 to 10 ppb. Some benzene levels were measured near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000 – 4,000 ppb — up from the normal 0-4 ppb.

More speculation of doom

The Oil Drum , an industry sheet, recently ran an article about the sequence of events that tried to stop the oil spill.

The upshot of industry insiders was that after trying a number of ways to close off the leak, the well was compromised, creating other leaks due to the high pressure. BP then cut the well open and tried to capture the oil.

In other words: BP shifted from stopping the gusher to opening it up and catching what oil it could.

The only reason sane oil men would do this is if they wanted to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed... And that sort of leak — known as a "down hole" leak — is one of the most dangerous kind.

No stopping it

It means that BP can't stop if from above; it can only relieve the pressure.

So, more oil is leaking out while BP hopes it can drill new wells before the current one completely erodes.

BP is in a race against time... It just won't admit this fact.

According to the Oil Drum:

There are abrasives still present, a swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it's way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?

... No one really knows...

Which leads us back to Mr. Landau's point about the mudlogs and why BP won't release them.

I don't know... Maybe I'm wearing my tinfoil hat too tight this morning... But this stuff seems possible — if it's only a worst case scenario.

What strikes me as odd is the way the leadership of BP and the Obama administration is acting.

BP is running around apologizing to everyone they can find. Obama says give us $20 billion in escrow and $100 million for the people Obama put out of work on the oil rigs due to his six month ban — and BP says, "Sure thing mate, no problem."

And all of this in a 20-minute meeting?

I've been dealing with oil companies for a long time and it just doesn't add up...

Contrast it, for instance, with the Exxon situation in Alaska or the Union Carbide disaster in India.

Exxon fought tooth and nail for its shareholders; it appealed court rulings for 19 years. Union Carbide wasn't settled for 25 years.

BP is rolling over like a simpering dog. Why?

The only reason I can think of is that the company knows — better if not as well as the Obama administration does — that it will get worse.

Much worse.

I've put together a list of oil cleanup stocks for the readers of my Crisis & Opportunity . Many are running, and one has pulled back into a solid buy range. Three more are on my buy list.

All I know is that this spill isn't even half over.

Oil in the Gulf will lead the news-cycle for the foreseeable future.

And the companies that make products that stop, absorb, or disperse oil have an endless supply of work.

Their share prices have nowhere to go but up.








Christian DeHaemer is the Editor of Energy and Capital . Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these views.

Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published in Energy and Capital, on June 18, 2010

Dr. Walter Starck, of Townsville, Australia, paints a different picture. Starck holds a Ph.D. in biological oceanography and is a marine biologist who specializes in coral reefs and fisheries. He maintains that the media overplays oil spills' effect on wildlife. "The popular image of dead and dying birds and mammals covered in sticky oil is a relatively brief event, and as sad as it may be at the time, their populations soon recover."

He points out crude oil is an organic substance, and natural leaks are normal. Though spills caused by humans are much more concentrated and cause a temporary mess, they are also more short-lived and do not wreak the amount of environmental damage mainstream media reports claim. "The volatile components largely evaporate within a few days, and much of the heavier residue is broken down by microbial action over a few months. The heaviest residue accumulates sediment particles and sinks to the bottom where it mixes with further sediment and ends up no more harmful than pieces of the bitumen used for roads."

Starck contends that clean-up efforts from past oil spills have "only increased environmental damage and delayed natural recovery." The dispersants injected into leaking oil to prevent it from surfacing are "far more damaging to marine life" than crude alone, mixing with it to form a toxic sludge. "Their only real purpose is cosmetic and PR at the expense of the environment."

While O'Brien calls this a "singular" and "catastrophic" event, Starck remains reserved. "Right now it's a big thing. In a year or two it will become a past irritant no longer of concern." He uses a vivid analogy to support this claim, describing the largest oil spill in history during the first Persian Gulf War. In 1991, between 6 and 8 million tons of oil spilled into a shallow reef area, but nothing was done about it since workers had to deal with area oil well fires. "Follow-up studies found that within 4 months, most of the oil had been degraded naturally, and within 4 years even the most heavily affected areas had largely or completely recovered." He predicts a 95 percent recovery for the Gulf states within about four years.

Starck is also less critical of the three companies involved, calling it a major loss for them. "You can be sure they are doing everything possible, and no one else in the world is better equipped and qualified to do this job. Criticizing them is beyond moronic." He says it is "beyond stupid" to impose fines and increase liability "for a useless cleanup charade," fines which only serve to punish the end consumer who ultimately has to pay for increased production costs.

Instead, his criticism is directed at federal involvement. "The best thing the government can do is to stay out of the way, let the companies take the lead and render assistance if requested. Having a bunch of bureaucrats meddling in this is a recipe for another Katrina."

delboy, a quick google of this Walter Starck character wouldn't portray him as the most reliable authority on this, or any other, matter.

Quote from: AFS on July 03, 2010, 02:58:48 PM
delboy, a quick google of this Walter Starck character wouldn't portray him as the most reliable authority on this, or any other, matter.

I didn't bother researching his credentials TBH, just say an article with two conflicting views and thought i'd drop this viewpoint on the matter into the mix for debates sake, i presume he is one of the 'climate deniers' i've only ever seen any online hatchet jobs done on scientists that are sceptical of man made global warming.

I do agree however agree at least with some of what he says whether his credibility is questionable or not, namely that this is being hyped to the max because it happens to be in the waters of the most self obsessesed media frenzied country in the world.

Quote from: delboy on July 05, 2010, 09:10:16 AM

Quote from: AFS on July 03, 2010, 02:58:48 PM
delboy, a quick google of this Walter Starck character wouldn't portray him as the most reliable authority on this, or any other, matter.

I didn't bother researching his credentials TBH, just say an article with two conflicting views and thought i'd drop this viewpoint on the matter into the mix for debates sake, i presume he is one of the 'climate deniers' i've only ever seen any online hatchet jobs done on scientists that are sceptical of man made global warming.

I do agree however agree at least with some of what he says whether his credibility is questionable or not, namely that this is being hyped to the max because it happens to be in the waters of the most self obsessesed media frenzied country in the world.

He seems like a bit of a 'maverick' that has taken it upon himself to disagree with the scientific consensus on just about every issue going, be it climate change, fisheries management, the degradation of coral reefs. His most interesting belief though, is that crop circles are probably caused by extraterrestrials. From what I can gather, he's fairly well known for making various bold claims without presenting any supporting evidence, not having published a single thing in over thirty years. Nice to see that PhD is being put to good use. I struggle to see how the opinion of someone so discredited can be used to support any viewpoint.

Quote from: AFS on July 05, 2010, 12:10:04 PM

Quote from: delboy on July 05, 2010, 09:10:16 AM

Quote from: AFS on July 03, 2010, 02:58:48 PM
delboy, a quick google of this Walter Starck character wouldn't portray him as the most reliable authority on this, or any other, matter.

I didn't bother researching his credentials TBH, just say an article with two conflicting views and thought i'd drop this viewpoint on the matter into the mix for debates sake, i presume he is one of the 'climate deniers' i've only ever seen any online hatchet jobs done on scientists that are sceptical of man made global warming.

I do agree however agree at least with some of what he says whether his credibility is questionable or not, namely that this is being hyped to the max because it happens to be in the waters of the most self obsessesed media frenzied country in the world.

He seems like a bit of a 'maverick' that has taken it upon himself to disagree with the scientific consensus on just about every issue going, be it climate change, fisheries management, the degradation of coral reefs. His most interesting belief though, is that crop circles are probably caused by extraterrestrials. From what I can gather, he's fairly well known for making various bold claims without presenting any supporting evidence, not having published a single thing in over thirty years. Nice to see that PhD is being put to good use. I struggle to see how the opinion of someone so discredited can be used to support any viewpoint.

So hes not even publishing, he's not really a scientist then just some bod who got a PhD once upon a time, you are right his opinion shouldn't be used as support for any viewpoint.
It does though show how much this is being spun in by the various branches of the media to suit agendas when people such as Stark are being wheeled out as 'scientific experts'.

Dont worry folks about seeing any pictures of oil covered birds, as a new law has been implemented to make sure we dont get to see what is taking place. Now, wouldn't it be so very upsetting to see a dolphin covered in oil as we enjoy the World Cup or watch Big Brother?

Move along folks, nothing to see here................


Coast Guard bans reporters from oil cleanup sites

By Daniel Tencer
Sunday, July 4th, 2010 -- 1:31 pm

Anderson Cooper: 'We are not the enemy here'

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."

The Coast Guard order states that "vessels must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law."

But since "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be."

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill.

"Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June.

In defending the new rule, Allen told reporters that he got "complaints from local officials" about the safety of people near cleanup efforts.

"We're not the enemy here," Cooper responded in a report broadcast Thursday night. "Those of us down here trying to accurately show what is happening -- we are not the enemy. I've not heard about any journalist who's disrupted relief efforts; no journalist wants to be seen as having slowed down the cleanup or made things worse. If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I'd move. But to create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency."

The rule has come under severe criticism not only from journalists but from observers and activists involved in the Gulf Coast clean-up.

"With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening," writes Mike Adams at NaturalNews.

"We might expect something like this from Chavez, or Castro or even the communist leaders of China, but here in the United States, we've all been promised we lived in 'the land of the free,'" Adams continues. "Obama apparently does not subscribe to that philosophy anymore (if he ever did)."

Under the rule, reporters or anyone else wishing to get within 65 feet of a cleanup operation need to get permission from the Coast Guard Captain of the Port of New Orleans.

"The fact is we're not attempting to keep anyone from seeing anything," Edward Stanton, the current Coast Guard Captain in New Orleans, told WKRG News in Mobile.

"Nine times out of 10, probably 10 times out of 10" access will be granted, Stanton said.

He said the rule was put into place because of complaints about "boaters interfering with the oil spill operations."

Yet the rule seems on its face to be just the latest attempt to reduce media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has now attained the status of worst accidental oil spill in history.

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches. On Friday, a photographer from ProPublica was detained by police and BP officials after taking photos of a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas.

Cooper compared the latest effort to prevent access to the oil spill to similar efforts during Hurricane Katrina.

"Frankly it's a lot like in Katrina, where they tried to make it impossible to see recovery efforts of people who died in their homes. If we can't show what is happening, warts and all ... that makes it very easy to hide failure, and hide incompetence."

Heres a more reputable article on tackling oil spills (from nature). Apologies about the lenght but i didn't want to cherrypick it.

Nature 422, 464-466 (3 April 2003) | doi:10.1038/422464a

How to clean a beach

John Whitfield1
Top of page
Abstract

As oil-spill specialists continue to tackle the Prestige slick, they are drawing on knowledge from decades of clean-up operations. John Whitfield reports from Spain's Galician coast.

From the coast road, the beaches of Lira seem as they should be: yellow sand and blue sea. But walk down to the tide's edge and things change. A whiff of petrol taints the sea spray. Water in rock pools has an oily sheen and boulders that should be wet and slippery have a tacky, tarry coating. After the oil-tanker Prestige spilt her cargo last November, these coves in Galicia, in northwest Spain, were a metre deep in a mixture of oil and sea water known to pollution specialists as 'chocolate mousse'. "There was no ocean, only oil," says Pablo Garcia, manager of the Stolt Sea Farm, an aquaculture company in Lira, the area that became known as Ground Zero of the spill.

The Prestige is the latest exhibit in the tanker hall of infamy. But while each new incident brings environmental destruction and financial loss, it also improves our understanding of how to deal with oil spills. This knowledge is hard-won — aggressive clean-ups have sometimes caused more damage than the oil. Government priorities can also clash with those of scientists. But such difficulties apart, a rough consensus on how to juggle the political, economic and ecological issues involved in clearing up oil spills has begun to emerge.

Oil is much less damaging at sea than on shore, so the best option is to suck and skim a slick off the water using specially equipped ships, or break it up with chemical dispersants. Booms can also be used to protect the coastline. But the sea around the Prestige was too rough and much of the coast too exposed for booms to work, so there was little that could be done except watch the oil wash up.
The human touch
How to clean a beach

ITOPF

Volunteers clean up after the Prestige oil spill (far left). After the Erika spill off Brittany in 1999, rocks were hosed with sea water (left).

When oil arrives onshore, the question becomes how best to save affected plants and animals while minimizing damage to the surrounding ecosystem, and without running up a huge bill. In large spills, leaving nature to do the job is a bad idea. Even the oiliest shore will return to normal, but without human intervention this can take a long time. In 1974, the Metula spilled 50,000 tonnes of oil into the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America. Because of the remoteness of the region and the rough seas, no clean-up was mounted, and patches of asphalt-like residue stain the rocks to this day. "It looks like a cheap driveway," says David Page, a chemist at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

In the case of the Prestige, the volume of oil spilt and the wildlife, fishing and tourist value of the Galician coast demanded action. The first priority in a clean-up is clear — remove oil from the beaches as quickly as possible. If washed back out to sea, or buried in the beach, oil can do more damage some other time or place.

Cleaning beaches is ideally done manually. People with shovels are the only tools sensitive enough to remove the oil while protecting the ground beneath. Only the human eye can distinguish patches of oil from the clean areas in between: on some of the Galician beaches, oil-coated rocks and apparently unaffected rocks sit side by side. And people can work on isolated rocky shores where heavy machinery cannot go.

But at Lira in early December, manual labour was having no effect. "We got the full load of a couple of tanks of the Prestige — 15,000 tonnes on two kilometres of coast," says Garcia. "You'd see guys working manually, and at the end of the day, the area occupied by the slick was the same."

To decide what to do next, specialists combined their experience with local knowledge in an assessment process known as net environmental benefit analysis. Factors taken into account include environmental considerations, such as whether an oiled beach is home to a breeding colony of seals or seabirds. Socioeconomic considerations also come into play: local people may rely on nearby shellfish beds, for example, or an affected beach could be a tourist destination. And practical realities, such as how much a particular clean-up option will cost, and how easy it will be to implement, are also assessed.

Every intensive clean-up option has its drawbacks. When high-pressure hot water was used to scrub the Alaskan shoreline oiled by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, beaches that got this treatment recovered more slowly than those that did not, although conditions seemed about equal after three years1. This technique is now used less often, says Alan Mearns, a marine ecologist with the Hazardous Materials Response Division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington. "We have a go-easy policy on using rigorous methods," he says. "The coastguard understands that you don't have to go in with all guns blazing." In Spain, high-pressure water has so far been used only on man-made structures such as jetties and harbour walls.

Chemical cleaners also do damage. When the Torrey Canyon ran aground off the south coast of Cornwall, UK, in March 1967, oiled beaches were sprayed with 10,000 tonnes of powerful solvents and detergents, including industrial degreasers. The chemicals were more toxic than the oil: many seashore invertebrates died, and the nutrients in the dispersants caused an explosion of seaweed growth2.

Dispersants are much milder now, but they can still be used inappropriately. Peter Dyrynda, a marine biologist at the University of Wales Swansea, UK, says that after the Sea Empress ran aground off the southwest coast of Wales in 1996, dispersants were used on some patches of oil but not washed off. The resulting mix was more toxic than either oil or dispersant alone and killed animals that had survived until then. Such problems, as well as the fact that dispersants are ineffective against thick oil, have prevented their use in Galicia.
Softly softly
How to clean a beach

P. DYRYNDA/UNIV. WALES SWANSEA

Common scoters heavily oiled in the Sea Empress disaster had a poor chance of surviving.

A gentler option is bioremediation, which involves using fertilizer to speed the growth of naturally occurring oil-digesting bacteria. But this won't work on every spill, says Richard Swannell, a bioremediation specialist with Momenta, a consultancy company near Oxford, UK, that works with the British government. The oily shore must be sheltered, otherwise the sea will wash the oil and bacteria away. Oil buried in sediments can't be digested. And if the natural bacterial growth is limited by temperature rather than by nutrients, the treatment will have no effect.

The oil must also be biodegradable: light crude oils of the type spilt by the Exxon Valdez are broken down easily, but heavier types contain compounds that microbes find indigestible. Finally, sites must be secluded, so that they do not offend the senses of local people and tourists during the several months the bacteria need to work. The remote Alaskan shores polluted by the Exxon Valdez fitted the bill3, but many others do not. "For marine spills, bioremediation is a niche market," Swannell concludes. Spanish researchers began bioremediation experiments on oiled beaches late last month, although the Prestige's thick, poorly biodegradable oil might not respond well to the treatment.

In Galicia, local people wanted heavy machinery to come in and remove large quantities of oil quickly. But this has its own environmental costs. There were no tracks to the worst-affected beaches and building them would have harmed the surrounding landscape. "If you've got a site that no one visits, then it's ideal to leave for natural clean-up. If it's an area that people go to all the time you can't do that, because people will be getting oil on them," says Rob Self of Oil Spill Response, a company in Southampton that worked out of the command centre in La Coruña to advise the Spanish authorities on the clean-up operation. But at Lira, oil on the surface of the beaches was likely to be washed into the pipe that supplied water to Garcia's fish farm. In the end, the desire to protect the farm tipped the balance in favour of building tracks for bulldozers and earthmovers, which scooped up the chocolate mousse from the beach.

Heavy machinery has not been used in all areas affected by the Prestige spill. Salt-marshes and estuaries are such delicate terrain that almost any activity does more damage than the oil. After the Amoco Cadiz disaster in 1978, when nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of oil were spilt off the coast of Brittany, in northwest France, heavy equipment was sent into some polluted salt-marshes, where it scraped up the top half-metre of sediment. Twelve years later, these areas had still not recovered, whereas the oiled marshes that went uncleaned seemed in good shape4.

In Galicia, some marshy areas were placed completely off-limits, even to people, when it became clear that volunteers were cleaning with excessive gusto. "People were pushing the oil into the substrate, and that has more of an effect than if you just left it," says Self. "In the end we had to close the site."

Using a combination of manual labour and heavy machinery, the Prestige spill has now moved from what Self calls the emergency phase — high profile, high pressure — to a long-term painstaking project. Cleaning beaches, for example, is a sisyphean task. At Carnota, one of the most heavily affected areas of Galicia, the high-water mark on the beach in February continues to be marked by a chain of thumbnail-sized oily gobbets. Dozens of volunteers and soldiers work their way along six kilometres of sand on hands and knees, picking up the small lumps with what look like wallpaper scrapers. At other beaches nearby, people sift the sand and comb seaside plants by hand to remove the oil and stop it becoming buried.

Perhaps the most difficult decision, and one usually taken by local politicians, is when to stop. As the coastline becomes cleaner, the clean-up starts to cost more for progressively less reward and more environmental damage. On rocky shores, once the bulk of the oil is recovered, the decision often comes down to whether the beach is an eyesore. Once workers have done all they can with shovels and pompoms — balls of plastic strips that soak up oil — stubborn patches still remain under rocks and in crevices. Moving oily boulders down the beach into the surf can accelerate the natural cleaning process, as can flushing — pumping sea water over the shore and sifting the oil out of the run-off.

As the Prestige clean-up continues into spring and summer, researchers are starting to try to assess the spill's effects. Marine toxicologist Ricardo Beiras of the University of Vigo in Galicia hopes to produce data on damage to local fisheries on which compensation claims can be based. Researchers will also be called on to pronounce when the coast has recovered. This doesn't necessarily mean that no trace of oil remains — old, weathered oil is not very toxic, and oil locked in sediments may not harm organisms.

But the definition of recovery is disputed. The owners of the Exxon Valdez are still fighting with Alaskans over whether the area hit by the spill is still suffering. Page, whose funding comes partly from Exxon, thinks it isn't. "With all spills there are places you can go back to and dig and find a deposit," he says. "The question is whether those isolated remnants are biologically relevant. And the answer is no, they're not."

Others disagree. Stanley Rice of NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Auke Bay says the oil is still damaging animals that live and feed on the seashore, such as otters and salmon. "These damages are new and continuing from the remaining oil, and not just a slow recovery from the original hit," says Rice. To try to minimize such chronic effects, he advocates a swing towards more intensive cleaning. "I would push for a more aggressive clean-up, realizing that for the short term you are going to suffer more damage."
Political science

Resolving issues such as these will require more research, but studies of spills are often only carried out in the fraught atmosphere after a disaster. As a result, clean-up efforts are not as well informed or coordinated as they could be. "We don't clean up spills as well as we should be able to," says Ian White, managing director of the London-based International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, which responds to spills around the world. "Spills take on a political significance that's hard to control."

Research tends to be improvised and opportunist, as local scientists drop what they were doing and start studying the pollution. "In the early days of a major spill things are terribly chaotic," says Dyrynda. "Scientific study is not a top priority." Like many others, Dyrynda had oil-pollution research thrust upon him when the Sea Empress ran aground close to where he works. Scientists in northwest Spain are having the same experience, and once again the research is not running smoothly. "There are different individual studies, but they're not coordinated. People are diverting resources from other projects," says Beiras.

But despite the gaps in our knowledge, scientists say that the major threat to the coast, should another spill occur, is not lack of research but of government preparedness. There have been six major oil spills in Galicia. The region is also a hotbed of marine science, with four institutes in Vigo alone. But such experience doesn't guarantee that government officials will talk to local experts. "There's not a lack of knowledge, there's a lack of communication," says plankton ecologist Pablo Serret, of the University of Vigo.

Many Spanish researchers accuse their government of ignoring scientific advice in their handling of the spill — particularly in its decision to tow the Prestige out to sea rather than into port — and of seeking to play down the incident's severity. At the end of January, the scientific community rejected the original plan for studying the clean-up and recovery, put together behind closed doors by the government's National Research Council; the replacement was published only last week, four months after the spill. Just before Christmas, Galician researchers, worried that the government was giving Spanish researchers a bad name, put together a letter of protest5. They circulated it around the research community, and got 385 signatures in 24 hours.

Research into clean-up methods may be coming together. But as the strength of feeling among Spanish researchers attests, good science is of limited use unless scientists have the backing of politicians. Without that, the damage from oil spills risks going unchecked. "We haven't learnt from the past," says Beiras.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.
.

Michael what are you doing?

yerra, I was just checking if anyone was actually reading

Now why did the well cemented by Haliburton blow up after 20 hours?

Halliburton profit soars 83% in Q2Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:50:40 GMT

US oil giant Halliburton says its second-quarter profit has jumped 83 percent, despite the company's involvement in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The news caused Halliburton shares to soar 5 percent to $28.89 in Wall Street pre-opening trade on Monday, the Associated Press reported.

Halliburton announced that the boom is the result of a hike in natural gas drilling activities in the United States.

The oil giant's net income for the April-June period was $480 million up from $262 million one year ago.

This is while the oil leak disaster in the Gulf of Mexico still hangs over the company. Before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, Halliburton was hired by BP to seal the Macondo well before it blew up.

Halliburton shares dipped 17 percent after the incident.

The US has banned deepwater explorations after the spill, forcing energy companies to turn to land-based operations.

Halliburton has predicted that the ban will cause a 5 to 8 cent drop in its share value during each quarter in the second half of the year.

Shockingly this particular oil spill doesn't seem to be on your radar John
but then the US, Cheney and or Haliburton don't as yet seem to have had anything to do with it ::)
I suppose credit where credit's due though as you don't even try to hide your blinkered and jaundiced
vitriol for the West anymore!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38337393/ns/world_news-world_environment

BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle


In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear, expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The outfits disappeared overnight.

Work crews in Grand Isle, La, still stand out. In a region where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African American men. The racialized nature of the cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, sent a public letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people were over-represented in "the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins."

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and it gets lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Known to some as "the inmate state," Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its thirty-nine thousand inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so twenty thousand inmates live in parish jails, privately-run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour. Obedient inmates, or "trustees," become eligible for work release in the last three years of their sentences. This means they can be a part of a market-rate, daily labor force that works for private companies outside the prison gates. The advantage for trustees is that they get to keep a portion of their earnings, redeemable upon release. The advantage for private companies is that trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from Bush's Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers for hiring risky "target groups." Businesses earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers."

If BP's use of prison labor remains an open secret on the Gulf Coast, no one in an official capacity is saying so. At the Grand Isle base camp in early June, I called BP's Public Information line, and visited representatives for the Coast Guard Public Relations team, the Department of Homeland Security, and the La. Fisheries and Wildlife Department. They were all stumped. Were inmates doing shore protection or oil cleanup work? They had no idea. In fact, they said, they'd like to know—would I call them if I found out?

I got an answer one evening earlier this month, when I drove up the gravel driveway of the Lafourche Parish Work Release Center jail, just off Highway 90, halfway between New Orleans and Houma. Men were returning from a long day of shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash bags in the sweltering heat. Wearing BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots (nothing identifying them as inmates), they arrived back at the jail in unmarked white vans, looking dog tired.

Beach cleanup is a Sisyphean task. Shorelines cleaned during the day become newly soaked with oil and dispersant overnight, so crews shovel up the same beaches again and again. Workers wear protective chin-to-boot coveralls (made out of high-density polyethylene and manufactured by Dupont), taped to steel-toed boots covered in yellow plastic. They work twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, as per Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety rules. The limited physical schedule allows workers to recover from the blazing sun and the oppressive heat that builds up inside their impermeable suits.

During their breaks, workers unzip the coveralls for ventilation, drink ice water from gallon thermoses and sit under white fabric tents. They start at 6am, take a half hour lunch and end the day at 6pm, adding up three to four hours of hard physical labor in twenty-minute increments. They are forbidden to speak to the public or the media by BP's now-notorious gag rule. At the end of the day, coveralls are stripped off and thrown in dumpsters, alongside oil-soaked booms and trash bags full of contaminated sand. The dumpsters are emptied into local HazMat landfills, free employees go home and the inmates are returned to work release centers.

Work release inmates are required to work for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, sometimes averaging 72 hours per week. These are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic job in America. Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA.

Inmates can't pick and choose their work assignments and they face considerable repercussions for rejecting any job, including loss of earned "good time." The warden of the Terrebonne Parish Work Release Center in Houma explains: "If they say no to a job, they get that time that was taken off their sentence put right back on, and get sent right back to the lockup they came out of." This means that work release inmates who would rather protect their health than participate in the non-stop toxic cleanup run the risk of staying in prison longer.

Prisoners are already subject to well-documented health care deprivations while incarcerated, and are unlikely to have health insurance after release. Work release positions are covered by Worker's Compensation insurance, but pursuing claims long after exposure could be a Kafkaesque task. Besides, there is currently no system for tracking the medical impact of oil and dispersant exposure in cleanup workers or affected communities.

"They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence"

To learn how many of the 20,000 prisoners housed outside of state prisons are involved in spill-related labor, I called the DOC Public Relations officer, Pam LaBorde, who ultimately discouraged me from seeking such information. ("Frankly, I do not know where your story is going, but it does not sound positive," she said on our third phone call.)

Going to prison officials directly didn't help. The warden of a South Louisiana jail refused to discuss the matter, exclaiming, "You want me to lose my job?" A different warden, of a privately-owned center admitted, on condition of anonymity, that inmates from his facility had been employed in oil cleanup, but declined to answer further questions. Jefferson Parish President Steve Theriot and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, and Grand Isle Police Chief Euris DuBois declined interview requests.

Transparency problems are longstanding with the La. DOC. There is also scant oversight of private prison facilities. Following Hurricane Katrina, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a 140-page report that documented abuses and botched prison evacuations, as well as the numerous times its requests for official information were rejected. "It appears that you are standing in the shoes of prisoners, and therefore DOC is exempted from providing any information which it might otherwise have to under public records law," DOC lawyers told the ACLU National Prisons Project.

Some officials have been more forthcoming. A lieutenant in the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office told me that three crews of inmates were sandbagging in Buras, La. in case oil hit there. "They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence," she said. "They'll work as long as they're needed. It's a hard job because of the heat, but they're not refusing to work." In early May, Governor Bobby Jindal's office sent out a press release heralding the training of eighty inmates from Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in "cleaning of oil-impacted wildlife recovered from coastal areas." DOC Spokesperson Pam LaBorde subsequently denied that any inmates participated in wildlife cleaning efforts.

Offering an exception to this policy of secrecy is Lafourche Parish Work Release Center, the only one in the state that is accredited by the American Correctional Association. It is audited regularly and abides by national standards of safety and accountability, which is perhaps why I was able to simply walk in on a Thursday afternoon and chat with the warden.

Captain Milfred Zeringue is a retired La. state police officer with a jaunty smile, powerful torso, and silver hair. His small, gray office is adorned with photos of many generations of his Louisiana family and a Norman Rockwell print picturing a policeman and a small runaway boy sharing a meaningful look at a soda fountain counter. A brass plaque confers the "Blood and Guts Award" upon Zeringue. Of 184 men living under the Captain's charge, 18 are currently assigned to oil spill work. The numbers change daily and are charted on white boards that stretch down the hallway.

Captain Zeringue says that inmates are glad for any opportunity they can get, and see work release jobs as a step up, a headstart on re-entry. "Our work release inmates are shipped to centers around the state according to employer demand," he explains, describing the different types of skilled and unskilled labor. "I have carpenters, guys riding on the back of the trash trucks, guys working offshore on the oil rigs, doing welding, cooking. Employers like them because they are guaranteed a worker who's on time, drug-free, and sober."

"And," he adds, "because they do get a tax break."

"Hate is never the answer John!"

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

ad hominem attacks are never the answer tyrones own

QuoteLike the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

:D :D
Hate can never be the answer Steve especially when ye have yourselves wrapped in the
Humanitarian  ::) flag!
Kind of reminds me of the type who are eating the rails off the alter on a Sunday morning
but would scam and screw all a sundry during the week.... Despicable Human beings!!

Quote from: whiskeysteve on July 23, 2010, 01:12:52 PM

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

Desperate....? Na Desperate is running to the Mods to have it taken down ::)

(http://cornerstork.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/crying_baby.jpg)

Keep up the great work John. My brother is currently setting up an "Antrim to Gazza"  inspired by your good self. Also encouraging to see a Tipperary to Gazza started as well. Fair play to you.

Leave poor Gazza out of this. He's beyond help from Antrim, Tipp or anywhere else :D

I see Tony Hayward will be stepping down to be replaced by a yank, apparently the Americans did not appreciate being talked to by someone with an English accent!

Quote from: Tyrones own on July 26, 2010, 02:44:54 AM

Quote from: whiskeysteve on July 23, 2010, 01:12:52 PM

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

Desperate....? Na Desperate is running to the Mods to have it taken down ::)

Pity someone complained. Would have preferred it kept up so you continue to look a right fool  8)

Exactly....sharp as marbles and twice as fast  ;D

And another one (the oil industry's assurances of their safety are not a little like Brian Lenihan's assurances about how the Anglo-Irish bailout will 'only' cost X, sorry 2X, sorry 4X, sorry 10X, and multiplying...).

From the Guardian (Latest Gulf Explosion (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/02/oil-rig-explosion-gulf-of-mexico))


Oil rig explodes in Gulf of Mexico


Fresh fears about drilling in the Gulf of Mexico were raised today when fire forced workers to abandon an oil and gas platform, just six months after the BP explosion that created an environmental disaster in the region.

The coastguard reported an oil slick a mile long and 30 metres wide near the site of the fire, undercutting a claim by the oil company that there was no pollution.

It is not known yet whether the oil might have come from the platform or, more worryingly, from a well below the surface. The prospect alarmed the White House, environmentalists, fishermen and others on the Gulf Coast, still coping with the pollution from the BP oil spill.

The company, Mariner Energy, said none of the 13 workers, who fled the platform and took to the sea in immersion suits and aboard a raft, were injured. The coastguard said they were taken by ship to a nearby platform and from there to hospital in Houma, Louisiana to be checked.

A coastguard spokesman said the platform was still on fire and that ships, helicopters and planes had been sent from Houston, New Orleans and Mobile.

The fire is a setback for the oil industry, which has been arguing that drilling in the Gulf is safe and that the BP explosion was a rare event. It came only 24 hours after companies including Mariner had staged a rally in Houston against a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. About 5,000 employees had been bussed in for the rally.

A spokesman for Mariner, Patrick Cassidy, said he did not anticipate any pollution as the platform had not been drilling and there had been no blowout. "There is no hydrocarbon spill," he said.

The fire had broken out on a facility above the water, at some distance from the wells, he added.

Dave Reed, an oil worker on a platform about 14 miles away, told CNN he could see the smoke and that a call had gone out for ships, helicopters and planes in the region to divert to the area. "It took an hour for the helicopters to get here and all 13 were taken from the water," Reed said.

The alarm was raised by a commercial helicopter flying over the platform. A coastguard spokesman, Chief Petty John Edwards, said: "We were able to confirm that all people were accounted for."

At the rally in Houston on Tuesday against the moratorium, Barbara Dianne Hagood, a spokesman for Mariner Energy, told the Financial Times: "I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this [the Obama] administration is trying to break us. The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the Gulf Coast, Gulf Coast employees and Gulf Coast residents."

The fire broke out on the platform Vermilion Oil Rig 380, about 90 miles south of the Louisiana Coast and west of the earlier BP explosion that had killed 11 workers.

Both the White House and the coastguard said they did not anticipate any pollution but that ships equipped with facilities to help clean up spills had been sent to the area as a precaution.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said: "We obviously have response assets ready for deployment should we receive reports of pollution in the water." The White House stressed that, unlike the BP rig, the platform was not a deepwater facility and was only working to a depth of 340ft.

BP's attempts to cap its well, which saw hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spill into the Gulf, were bedevilled by the depth at which they had been drilling. They finally capped the well in July.

Mariner is a small company in the process of being taken over by the Apache oil company in a deal worth an estimated $3.9 billion (£2.5bn). The deal has not yet been completed. Shares in both companies fell after news of the fire.