Oil Spill

Was watching Chris Matthews last night and he had a GOP congressman on from LA.

This congressman pointed out that a law was passed in 1990 that gave the president the authority to mitigate these kind of events.

So why isn't the president down in the Gulf asking BP to step aside?

 

Because the federal government doesn't know what to do.

BP doesn't know what to do, just keep up drilling that relief well, which should be done by August the earliest.


Honestly, while BP should have acted better to PREVENT this crisis, once it happened there is nothing they or the federal government or anyone can do. Besides work on that relief well. Obama is powerless, he just won't admit it.

Nobody wants to admit it, but we are helpless, and the Gulf Coast is screwed. Exactly how bad this will get is the only debate.

 

I'm afraid you might be right about all of it: the damage done, the costs involved, the lack of ideas.

They better remove those liability caps when it's all over. BP, Halliburton, the platform firm(can't remember their name right now) need to be held financially accountable at the least.

 

This, there is alot of holier-than-thou people(Ratigan, Matthews etc) that think the Federal government actually knows anything about how to deal with this. BP, for all their faults have the resources and knowledge to deal with the mess, more so then the government. Granted the government does deserve some blame, but not for the response but the lack of goverment oversite of the oil industry the last couple of decades.

 

Obama does have an option, to do what the Russians suggested and nuke the well shut.


It might not be a politically viable option, but it's an option.

 

Well one of the issues is that LA wanted to put up sand berms to try and stem the tide from the incoming spill two weeks ago and the entire LA congressional delegation sent a request to the corps of engineers for the permit(required under federal law because of the environmental impact), only to have no response for 10 days.

Now the oil is hitting the marshes and it's too late.

edit:

Raven

to do what the Russians suggested and nuke the well shut.

Oh great, then in 10 years a Godzilla-sized tuna appears off the LA coast.

 

Outraged at themselves for not taking the stupid option?

ES

 

I don't get this option. The intent is to seal the well shut; not to blow open a larger hole.

I sure hope to god that this new method they're using can finally put an end to the leak. If not, I don't want to imagine how much worse it's going to get if it'll be at least another three months for a relief well. As it is, this disaster is the worst oil spill in history.

 

Someone just said that this oil reserve has hundreds of millions of barrels, at least. If this doesn't stop, and while I'm skeptical about the top kill method but the relief well should work, but IF nothing works and it comes down to waiting for it to dry out, the spill could keep leaking 100,000 barrels a day for DECADES, nevermind actually cleaning up all the oil that has already escaped.

 

The oil shaft is very thin and narrow, all things considered. The nuke basically seals it shut, puts a fused rock plug in it.

 

Yeah, the Russians did that six times successfully with presumably very limited-blast nukes. Anyone got some techie info? I've never heard of a nuclear weapon with the blast apparently focused like that, and I'm not even sure how it could be achieved.

 

That is how I always thought of it. People are quick to blame the government for not stepping in to clean it up, but I question their ability to. BP has the resources (equipment, managers, technology, engineers) to deal with this sort of thing (well, in theory). Last I checked, the federal government doesn't possess the necessary resources to come up with a solution and step in to fix it. Maybe they should demand or oversee the process more, but even that can only go so far. Their true fault is the lack of oversight and regulation that has been going on for decades, I think, to make sure this kind of thing didn't happen in the first place.

 

At least 7 safety violations found so far on this rig's operation alone, and those are just the ones found among the documentation provided to Congress by BP! And now BP wants Houston judge with oil ties to hear spill cases.

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR !*@^%!! MIND?!?!

 

Government has authority to lead spill response, but may lack know-how

Yep, people these days want smaller government and less taxes but somehow expect that same government to do all sorts of magical things for them.

 

People are stupid. They just think that everything else in the world revolves around them. They think that if they outsource to China, those people are going to be just as happy working in sweatshops as us Americans. They think that their taxes are too high as it is and pay for services that have yet to be rendered. That everything is already against them and that we should be demanding even more for less effort on our part.

This oil spill really is a perfect example when our demands for huge oil at low prices push for a compromise of safety measures and cutting corners everywhere.

 

I was looking for data on how much oil spills into the ocean in an average year. Here's a number.Oil Spills, Impact on the Ocean.

Approximately 706 million gallons of waste oil enter the ocean every year, with over half coming from land drainage and waste disposal; for example, from the improper disposal of used motor oil. Offshore drilling and production operations and spills or leaks from ships or tankers typically contribute less than 8 percent of the total.

If true, and if the BP leak is somewhere on the order of 40 million gallons so far, the biggest in U.S. history as they're now suggesting, that's still less than 6% of the total of oil leaking into oceans in an average year. Interesting, though not a meaningless statistic since what counts obviously is the regional environmental and commercial impact in the GOM.

Also from the online article above:

The blowout of the Ixtoc I exploratory well offshore Mexico in 1979, the second largest accidental oil spill, gushed 140 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

This may turn out to be the worst oil spill in GOM history, but it may have a way to go before it passes Ixtoc I.

 

"Top Kill" has failed. The next alternative looks to be cutting off the top of the pipe and installing a connector to siphon away the oil.

EDIT: One quote in that story makes me curious:

A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the ?junk shot? came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.

Did they not have the schematics or documentation for the components? Were they too rushed? Was the pipe so damaged that they weren't sure what condition it was in? I wonder what the technician meant here...

EDIT2: Heh. Rachel Maddow points out some similarities between the current spill and the 1979 Ixtoc spill.

 

It's been over a month now and the oil well is still venting. I'm astounded at the sheer volume of oil that's escaped. All those safety measures that were supposed to be in place... to have so many other options fail is just discouraging. As far as I'm concerned, I don't remotely care what happens to BP, so long as the well is sealed.

My only hope is that the industry can adopt an industry standard design for all future wells if such an event were to happen again. For instance, if another well like the one we're dealing with happened again, there should be a module which could be attached to the sea floor base structure which can seal itself off once it's in place. BP is attaching a makeshift valve to the well as I write this, but if the industry accepted a standard design for all well base structures, they might have been able to attach such a module in only a matter of days of the disaster.

 

I don't blame Obama for this, people have said that it's his Katrina but like Bush then there are limits to what even the US goverment with all it's power and wealth can do.

Obama seemed out of his depth at the press conference (if you'll excuse the pun) but he's a busy guy and he can't be expected to know all the facts off the top of his head. What I found a little more disturbing was that this was the first press conference he's held in 10 months?

 

Definitely not Obama's fault. Although he had been pushing for offshore drilling shortly before the event happened, it's not like he could have foreseen this would happen. If there's anyone at fault, it's BP for their deliberate attempts to thwart the media from being allowed to determine the severity of the accident. If it had been known that the rate of oil leakage was measured in tens of thousands of gallons a day, this would not have been a matter left for BP to deal with on their own.

And if the reports of BP's failure to address problems with the well before the accident are confirmed, then they are culpable for the entire thing.

 

BP oil spill: 'top kill' failure means well may gush until August

 

I'm wondering why the oil spill hasn't had much effect on oil prices.

Wasn't there a big concern the last time a hurricane came through the same region? Yet prices have remained fairly stable through the spill, haven't they?

 

When a hurricane hit the region, it disrupted oil distribution from New Orleans to the rest of the US. That's not what's happening now. Although that oil gushing into the gulf is enormous, it doesn't constitute a significant fraction of the overall supplies provided from the Gulf. In other words, the disruption to oil supplies because of this disaster isn't very significant.

The ecological impact is another story.

 

They are falling in the US, at least around Boston. It would likely be related to economics, right? Oil prices in the US seem to be mainly tied to speculation on the world economy. There are other factors of course, but I think speculation over growth prospects is the biggest one. When China and India really started revving up and the global economy was booming over the course of the 2000s, the oil price started rising pretty quickly. But lately those doing the speculating (investors etc) seem to be pretty shaken by a possible debt crisis in western Europe and the potential emergence of a housing bubble in China. Add in the high unemployment figures in the USA and instability on the Korean peninsula (which would involve most of the major world economies if something happened) and prospects for strong growth seem a little bit dicey, so people are speculating lower prices, which is causing them to fall.