Louisiana oil disaster

Politics International Politics
81

[quote=“bob”]There are nearly four thousand oil wells in the gulf of Mexico and THIS is the best plan they had in case of an emergency of this kind? And that is suppsed to be in any way acceptable? I ain’t buyin it. A lot of other people aren’t buying it either. And Obama is up there with his usual superior attitude telling us all how it is. Wake up fucko. YOU and BP are in the hot seat on this, not anybody else, and when YOU are in the hot seat it’s unwise to appear too smug. (BTW, have you noticed the EARS on that man. Funny I never noticed how big his fucking EARS are till this happend.)
[/quote]

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you. If they want deep water (and ultra deep water) wells they need to have working contingency plans for when disasters happen (not if). The shallow offshore wells are running out of easily extracted oil so they are drilling deeper in the gulf. The problem is that no one has the experience with wells that deep compared to shallow wells. The North Sea oilfield is a max depth of 700 meters, half of what Deep Horizon is.

There is a lot of oil in the gulf and America isn’t going to switch overnight to a new source of fuel. They estimated in 2007 that there is between 3 to 15 billion barrels of crude in the Jack field in the gulf. That’s even deeper than the Tahiti field which was under 4000 feet of water and then they had to drill 22,000 feet of shale til they got it. Tahiti has an estimated 400 to 500 million barrels of crude.

[quote]
Might have been a good time to think “outside the box” on this one too. You know, show a little creativity. Some form of absorbant material would have been an idea. Say, for example, hay or peat moss. Throw it on, pick it up, move it somewhere and burn it. They could have had an army of boats out there doing that, and they would have except it would have exposed the size of the mess and would have been too expensive.

Just watch. BP, Obama and all the rest of the hypocrite politicians will get slaughtered on this. It’s a fuck up in slow motion.[/quote]

I saw a report that they were using human hair and animal fur to absorb oil. Lay it down in bundles and it soaked the oil right up on shore. You’d have to use a hell of a lot of it though. Your peat moss idea is pretty inventive.

Oil spills are something that America is just going to have to get use to. The deep sea oil rigs will leak or there will be a tanker that crashes. Those methods are riskier than onshore drilling. That’s the tradeoff for keeping ANWR off limits from drilling. You have to go with riskier methods to get the oil to keep America moving.

82

What about equipping ships with pumps attached to long hoses that go into the deep water? It can suck up water, screen out any marine life it catches, and pump the resulting water/oil mix into centrifuges. The spinning of the centrifuges can separate oil from water, and cleaned water can be pumped back into the sea.

83

Here’s the Google page for that oil spill. It has some interesting data.
google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/

84

That sounds reasonable too. The feeling I’m getting from this is that the experts made huge mistakes because they didn’t want to admit the enormity of the spill and they didn’t want to fork out the cash up front to combat it. The first mistake was pumping dispersant into the water colomn. That dispered the oil a bit and caused a lot of it to remain suspended below the surface or to sink completely. What they should have done is let it float to the top where it could have been collected by some means. Nobody knew the magnitude of this event better than BP and they decided essentially just to add a lot MORE toxic materials and let it sort itself out after that. They put out the booms but I don’t see any vacums or skimmers working even behind them. PLEASE somebody correct me if I’m wrong on this. It distresses me to think that the powers that be are so corrupt and incompetent.

Ibskig - I wish I could take credit for the peat moss idea. Actually I got it from a Canadian aborigine guy I saw on CNN. He demonstrated how well it works, and since peat moss is so readily available and in such large quanities it struck me as quite a workable idea. They won’t actually do it I don’t imagine preferring instead to just let it wash up on the beach where they can shovel it up. Where it would certainly appear they could be doing A LOT more to remove the oil from the wate is around the marshes and wetlands.

The other thing that irritates me is that the current admistration has done so little to promote alternatives. It would appear we are indeed addicted to oil but you’d think people would have the strength of character to start weaning themselves off. What I see from Obama is lip service to the idea.

85

[quote=“bob”]It would appear we are indeed addicted to oil but you’d think people would have the strength of character to start weaning themselves off.[/quote] I fear that there will be no chance of that happening until the gun is to our collective head, the hammer is cocked back, and all the slack has been taken up on the trigger. And I fear that even then there will be just a chance of change, not a certainty. I truly hope I’m wrong, though.

[quote=“bob”]What I see from Obama is lip service to the idea.[/quote] In the tenth grade I had a super-cool high-school speech teacher, no joke. This was in 1969 in Texas. One day during a conversation in class about national politics, a few of the boys expressed a preference for George Wallace for president. I believe that the teacher was quite liberal in his politics, albeit with a libertarian streak, and also a courageous person who was perfectly capable of disagreeing with their preference, and perfectly capable of expressing strong disapproval of Wallace. But instead, he said something that blew my mind at the time. He said that if Wallace had been elected president, within the first couple of weeks of his administration someone would have explained to him how things worked in Washington, and that Wallace would have wound up being more or less like every other president.

Maybe somebody has explained to Obama how things work.

86

There are indications that financial concerns may well have played a substantial role in the disaster:

[quote]Based on earlier testimony that a typical well costs a lease-holder like BP $500,000 a day, [Jason] Mathews [of the U. S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service] asserted that the company had already overspent by $21 million to $22 million. He asked BP’s health and safety team leader, Steve Tink, if that was correct; Tink said he wasn’t familiar enough with drilling operations to answer.

It’s the first time anyone has tried to quantify the economic pressures that may have led BP to do things like remove the drilling mud before placing a final cement plug or send a subcontractor’s team home without performing the most definitive test of the well-cementing job.[/quote]–“Oil spill hearings: BP was under economic pressure to finish job,” (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, May 26 (bracketed text added by me) nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill … _unde.html

Here’s some more on the use of seawater instead of mud:

[quote]Douglas Brown, the chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon, said he attended a planning meeting 11 hours before the rig exploded at which the BP company man overruled drillers from rig owner Transocean and insisted on displacing protective drilling mud from the riser that connected the rig to the oil well. Without the mud to slow it down, a kick of natural gas shot up the well and the riser pipe to the rig floor and ignited, setting off the disaster.

Before Brown came to the witness stand, a ship captain with 15 years of drilling experience told the joint investigative panel that he doesn’t know why a rig would displace the protective column of heavy mud with light seawater before closing off a well.

“That’s something you learn at well-control school,” said Capt. Carl Smith, a former Coast Guard captain serving as an expert witness for the panel.[/quote]–“BP Deepwater Horizon operations were six weeks behind schedule, documents say,” Times-Picayune, May 26 (asterisks added by me to indicate significant snipping) nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill … ation.html

I don’t see a true smoking gun yet, but I’ve only read a little. Anyway, the night is young.

Poor old Louisiana must have been born under a bad sign! :frowning:

87

The real question people should be asking but the liberal eastern elites are overlooking (surprise, surprise :laughing: ) is why are the oil companies drilling at 5,000 feet in the first place?

Answer: Environmentalism has driven them out there. As production from shallower wells decreases, the companies are forced to go deeper and deeper. Why? Because radical leftist environmentalists, so safe and comfy in their suburban upper class Malibu and Manhattan bubbles :smiley: , have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and Atlantic coasts off-limits to oil production. And let’s not forget that the safest area to drill, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, has a 30 year ban.

I mean, there will always be oil spills but it’s about risk assessment–something leftists bureaucrats don’t seem to understand too comprehensively (probably from taking too many Art history or philosophy courses in uni instead of useful ones :laughing: :laughing:)Where would you rather have an oil spill? In the Arctic where nobody lives, or in the Gulf of Mexico, where thousands depend on tourism and fishing for their livlihoods. People, by the way, that Obama didn’t even bother to mingle with during his visit. Instead of meeting local small business people and showing compassion, he met with local government elites and left soon thereafterwards. Why have we pushed the drillling from the barren to the populated? I think it’s because of these environmentalists and their anti-development positions on wilderness areas.

88

[quote=“Chewycorns”]What kind of emotional and sophomoric responses I’m reading on IP and the open forum where so many Forumosans are blaming big business for the spill. Yeah, it must be the fault of big business. After all, all big business is evil, right?

I mean, it really couldn’t be the Obama administration’s fault could it? After all, it was Obama administration bureaucrats that fast-tracked the Department of Interior (DOI) environmental assessment studies. People might blame Bush for starting deregulation in this sector before, but let’s not forget that deregulation is outcome based. Its whole purpose is to take prescriptive regulations and reduce them by making them outcome based. Sometimes this requires risk management. The Obama administration took the chance that nothing would happen by reducing the environement assessments, especially in risk management and disaster responses, and they totally fucked up. I’m all for deregulation, but its intent is to improve and streamline not to completely remove, as was done with disaster response elements of the environmental assessment. An article in the New York Times also suggests there were substance abuse and alcohol problems with the specific staff at the DOI. But instead of blaming Obama, his cheerleaders on Forumosa will continue to blame big business. Anything to avoid responsibility and admit their preferred leader made a mistake. If anything, government should be launching numerous investigations into the staff and the approval process for the changes. But that might mean accountability and no one wants that…better to blame the companies, especially if they are oil. :smiley:

Puzzled by all this BP bashing. In most cases, multinational corporations are a hell of a lot more progressive than small ones that so many liberals seem to favour with their ‘local’ preferences mantra. Corporate governance ensures this. I love it how so many Taiwanese expats, many of whom work for small and medium sized enterprises, rally against big business. Transparency, rule of law, international staff, regular audits, standardized reporting, gender equity etc. are all adopted as SOP by MNCs. Are they adopted by small companies in many locales? Fuck no. Jealousy kills more people than cancer, and I would venture to say that most people would jump at an opportunity to work for a MNC where the best and brightest of so many of the cultures of the world work together for a common goal. Again, I think people are criticizing without knowing all or even half the facts (no surprise here).

IF BP is to blame, they’ll pay the fine, their insurance provider will pay a large claim, and they’ll be paying higher premiums for years. Let’s not become anti-business zealots with this event. If anything, having it happen to a bigger company is probably a good thing as they’ll have the means to clean it up better than an SME.

BP is a good company, and with a 7 percent dividend and cheaper stock price, a real bargain!!!

Since this post was removed from another thread without so much as a notification, I’d be interested to see if responding posters actually want to discuss this issue. :laughing: :smiley: Probably not :whistle:[/quote]

Chewy…are you really trying to defend BP here? Just because a company is big, doesn’t mean that what they do is right. It’s so, so clear that they did everything wrong. You don’t have to be a liberal to say that. BP fucked up. Horizon, Halliburton, BP…they were all negligent and careless, and they should pay a hefty price for that…Why are you trying to make this an Obama thing? It’s fair to criticize his response, which Chris and the rest of the expat left will not do, but still, this was a total, negligent fuck up by these companies…I’m baffled as to why you would try to defend them.

89

[quote=“Byshguy”][quote=“Chewycorns”]What kind of emotional and sophomoric responses I’m reading on IP and the open forum where so many Forumosans are blaming big business for the spill. Yeah, it must be the fault of big business. After all, all big business is evil, right?

I mean, it really couldn’t be the Obama administration’s fault could it? After all, it was Obama administration bureaucrats that fast-tracked the Department of Interior (DOI) environmental assessment studies. People might blame Bush for starting deregulation in this sector before, but let’s not forget that deregulation is outcome based. Its whole purpose is to take prescriptive regulations and reduce them by making them outcome based. Sometimes this requires risk management. The Obama administration took the chance that nothing would happen by reducing the environement assessments, especially in risk management and disaster responses, and they totally fucked up. I’m all for deregulation, but its intent is to improve and streamline not to completely remove, as was done with disaster response elements of the environmental assessment. An article in the New York Times also suggests there were substance abuse and alcohol problems with the specific staff at the DOI. But instead of blaming Obama, his cheerleaders on Forumosa will continue to blame big business. Anything to avoid responsibility and admit their preferred leader made a mistake. If anything, government should be launching numerous investigations into the staff and the approval process for the changes. But that might mean accountability and no one wants that…better to blame the companies, especially if they are oil. :smiley:

Puzzled by all this BP bashing. In most cases, multinational corporations are a hell of a lot more progressive than small ones that so many liberals seem to favour with their ‘local’ preferences mantra. Corporate governance ensures this. I love it how so many Taiwanese expats, many of whom work for small and medium sized enterprises, rally against big business. Transparency, rule of law, international staff, regular audits, standardized reporting, gender equity etc. are all adopted as SOP by MNCs. Are they adopted by small companies in many locales? Fuck no. Jealousy kills more people than cancer, and I would venture to say that most people would jump at an opportunity to work for a MNC where the best and brightest of so many of the cultures of the world work together for a common goal. Again, I think people are criticizing without knowing all or even half the facts (no surprise here).

IF BP is to blame, they’ll pay the fine, their insurance provider will pay a large claim, and they’ll be paying higher premiums for years. Let’s not become anti-business zealots with this event. If anything, having it happen to a bigger company is probably a good thing as they’ll have the means to clean it up better than an SME.

BP is a good company, and with a 7 percent dividend and cheaper stock price, a real bargain!!!

Since this post was removed from another thread without so much as a notification, I’d be interested to see if responding posters actually want to discuss this issue. :laughing: :smiley: Probably not :whistle:[/quote]

Chewy…are you really trying to defend BP here? Just because a company is big, doesn’t mean that what they do is right. It’s so, so clear that they did everything wrong. You don’t have to be a liberal to say that. BP fucked up. Horizon, Halliburton, BP…they were all negligent and careless, and they should pay a hefty price for that…Why are you trying to make this an Obama thing? It’s fair to criticize his response, which Chris and the rest of the expat left will not do, but still, this was a total, negligent fuck up by these companies…I’m baffled as to why you would try to defend them.[/quote]
Oh, I blame BP partially. They fucked up big time. But isn’t it the responsibility of government to protect its citizens through legislation? I think anyone with business and government experience will no doubt be supportive of regulatory reform that improves and streamlines tedious and redundant processes, but removing risk assessments? Real stupid move by Obama bureaucrats. As Harry Truman (great president for a Dem) once said, 'the buck stops here." I think Obama’s reaction has been piss weak. Perhaps because BP was one of his big contributors, but more likely because of ineptitude. His officials fucked up by removing these assessments and it was appoved by the admin. Both parties may have deregulated, but I question the Dems and their ability to risk manage complex situations. :smiley: It’s also the fault of the left and their environmental friends for banning drilling in so many places. If they could drill in areas in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic, you can be sure they wouldn’t be drilling so deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

So, to answer your question, it’s the fault of both the government and BP. But of course, most media outlets continue to blame big business. Again, it is much better this happening to a company that has deep pockets and insurance for the cleanup, don’t you think? Wouldn’t the worst thing be if this happened to a real small player. One in which the clean up process would bankrupt the company?

90

Have a listen to the first 15 min or so of this interview with Matt Simmons. Mr. Simmons is an Energy industry consultant. Some of what he says his very alarming.

financialsensenewshour.com/b … 0529-2.ram

91

So now the folks on your side of the political aisle want big government to step in? I thought government was supposed to be small enough that you can drown it in a bathtub!

92

[quote=“Chris”]
So now the folks on your side of the political aisle want big government to step in? I thought government was supposed to be small enough that you can drown it in a bathtub![/quote]

Chris, I’m not a Ron Paul supporter. Unlike many paleoconservatives, I believe there is a role for the government in small areas. I just think an efficient, streamlined, and modernized government is the best, and more government definitely isn’t the solution. That’s where I don’t think you read my previous post. Most Republicans and a good many Democrats support deregulation in certain areas. However, this needs to occur without damaging public safety. In most areas of deregulation, prescriptive regulations that are long are often streamlined or made to be outcome based. This involves a certain amount of risk management. Under the Obama admin, the DOI removed crisis response sections from the environmental assessments. To me, this is a big fuck up. It’s not streamlining or removing redundant sections, but endangering public safety. Furthermore, dangerous anti-development bans of drilling are the real culprit here. If companies were able to drill in shallower waters or in nature reserves in Alaska, they wouldn’t have to be drilling deep in the ocean where dangers exist. But of course, radical muesli-eating, birkenstock wearing, enviro radicals have ensured, along with the Democratic Party friends, that there are bans on Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic drilling. But of course, the media still blames big business. Weak reporting from the Eastern media IMHO.

93

Chewy, it’s too early too claim that you know why this happened. We probably won’t be able too truly understand what happened for months. Claiming that it is the fault of the government is no different than reflexively blaming the company…Like most of the left has done but so has Sarah Palin who, amazingly, thinks it happened because we let furriners drill in the gulf… :ponder: :ponder:

Not to get off topic, but I am one of those under 30 “Paleoconservatives” who supports Ron Paul and I don’t disagree with any of what you said…and either would the good doctor himself :notworthy: :notworthy:

94

I haven’t just been blaming the government. :unamused: I blame three forces here:

  1. Government for relaxing the environmental assessments, especially the risk assessment parts of the assessment
  2. Environmentalists and their green counterparts in government for banning Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic drilling, which has forced the deeper drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
  3. BP
95

Astoundingly bad coverage we are getting on this disaster, from CNN anyway. Almost as if they don’t want anyone forming an informed opinion. :wink:

I did a bit of snooping around and discovered a few interesting things. I’m not going to post a link for all of it.

  1. The dispersant they are using isn’t the best one available. It is neither the most effective or the least toxic. BP’s position is that compared to the gulf of mexico the amount of dispersant is minimal. Indeed they claimed at the beginning of this that the environmental impact of the entire incident would be minimal, for the same reason.

  2. There is such a thing as a “gel” available. It is the opposite of a dispersant and causes the oil to gel so that it can be more easily picked up.

  3. One strategy is in fact to just suck oily water up out of the water and store it in a boat until it can be processed in some way. They are doing that but on a very small scale.

  4. Absorbants are also a workable solution and are in fact being used, on what scale I wasn’t able to determine.

  5. Skimmers are being employed but again, on what scale, I wasn’t able to determine.

  6. The latest strategy to stop the spill did not work. It will be at least another week before the we find out if the next strategy will be effective. It is possible that the oil will continue to pour into the gulf at least until August. Between 12 and 18,0000 barrels per day.

Based just on the above, would it not make sense that they would be lining up as much equipment as possible to actually get the oil out of the water. After it enters the wetlands it will be impossible to remove and will be there for decades. What I think is that they could actually get a lot more of the oil out of the water than they are presently doing but it would be very expensive. BP should pay for it but just doesn’t want to. This simple truth is not covered as extensively as it should be because the economy of Louisianna is almost completely dominated by the off shore oil industry. The media in general is being muzzled by the oil industry and Obama is their lacky. If he wasn’t their lacky he would be pressing them publicly to get the oil out of the water. I honestly just don’t see another explanation.

96

Skimming the oil off the surface will only deal with a small part of the problem. What hasn’t been getting alot of air play is that there is a lake of heavy oil 300 - 400 ft deep sitting at the bottom of the Gulf. If this stuff is left to sit there or if it gets disperesed by a hurricane it will begin to becompose and consume alot of the oxgen in the water. The result would be the complete ecological collapse of the Gulf region.

97

I’d say BP will pay to get the oil out of the water as much as they could. Why? Because otherwise they will face even more massive lawsuits and compensation claims it the wetlands become completely contaminated. My view of the whole thing is that it’s just a side-effect of peak oil, working in new environments BP, oil companies and governments judged it worth the risk with technology available, I guess they were wrong. It’s hindsight of course. If BP knew there was such a real risk they would definitely have put in more precautions, they must have assessed it at very low probability.
The need for oil is driving this whole thing, something Americans need to discuss more, well will from now on anyway.

98

It would make sense that BP would try to pick up as much oil as possible to avoid lawsuits for future damages but they don’t seem to be actually “doing” it. Seriously, what is wrong with the tanker solution I proposed earlier? On a practical level, why wouldn’t that work? Particularly if they placed the ship in as close a proximity to the leak as possible? Also, why isn’t Obama pushing BP to accept the offers of help that are coming in from ALL over the world. Would you not think that they would want as much equipment as possible in there picking the stuff up, particularly now that they know more oil is coming? BP is still basing their actions on the notion that the impact will be minimal and that they can just disperse the oil and send it out to sea to be a lingering disaster in the Atlantic. Remember this could go till AUGUST. Maybe longer.

Gman: Same thing. Why aren’t they pumping it out?

99

[quote=“bob”]It would make sense that BP would try to pick up as much oil as possible to avoid lawsuits for future damages but they don’t seem to be actually “doing” it. Seriously, what is wrong with the tanker solution I proposed earlier? On a practical level, why wouldn’t that work? Particularly if they placed the ship in as close a proximity to the leak as possible? Also, why isn’t Obama pushing BP to accept the offers of help that are coming in from ALL over the world. Would you not think that they would want as much equipment as possible in there picking the stuff up, particularly now that they know more oil is coming? BP is still basing their actions on the notion that the impact will be minimal and that they can just disperse the oil and send it out to sea to be a lingering disaster in the Atlantic. Remember this could go till AUGUST. Maybe longer.

Gman: Same thing. Why aren’t they pumping it out?[/quote]

Sucking up surface oil would be too inefficient to do with tanker volumes. I don’t think they have the centrafuges to handle the volume required. I have no idea why they aren’t moving faster on the ‘sludge’ at the bottom. It would be easy pickings as the oil is 300-400 ft deep there so there would be relatively little water involved. I know stopping the leak is the first priority but that doesn’t mean they can’t get a start on the clean up. If Mr. Simmons is right nothing BP is currently doing is going to work. They will have to detonate an explosive to collapse the well bore.

100

I guess that would depend on conclusions reached by strategists working for BP. Litigation often drags on and on, and the ultimate outcome is often unpredictable. I’m not an expert on those kinds of things, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about (I’ve boldfaced monetary amounts):

1989:

1994:

2006:

[quote]ExxonMobil caught a multibillion-dollar break from a federal appeals court Friday but the oil giant still must pay $2.5 billion in punitive damages for the 1989 spill in Valdez that has been called one the nation’s worst environmental disasters.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the original $5 billion award exceeded new U.S. Supreme Court standards on punitive damage limits. [/quote]–“Exxon Valdez oil spill damages reduced,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 23, 2006 (link to article)

2008: