Drill Baby Drill!

[mountainboii]

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?

[delboy]

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 

[Puckoon]

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

?

?

[delboy]

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.

[delboy]

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

?

?

Now that is funny 

[give her dixie]

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.

[give her dixie]

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.......

[thebigfella]

Are you really Jim Corr?

[give her dixie]

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.

[give her dixie]

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

[delboy]

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."

[mountainboii]

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

[delboy]

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.

[mountainboii]

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.

[delboy]

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'.