Tuesday, June 8, 2010

More oil disaster

I have an "evil anonymous" that likes to haunt me on this blog, and A "good anonymous" that provides me with topical tips. The following is from a tip from "good anon".

It just keeps getting worse. It has been brought my attention that the leak that we have been watching in the Gulf of Mexico, on our TV screens, is much worse than any of us suspected. Maybe you have heard them talking about a “mysterious plume of oil” some miles away from the leaking well-head. It now has been confirmed that there is a leak coming right out of the seabed at the rate of 120,000 BARRELS (barrel = 60 gallons) per day. The leak is about five miles from the well-head, but they believe that it is coming from a fracture on the subterranean part of the well shaft.

The recommended fix is that Obama remove all BP executives from the picture, and require the U. S. military to take over the leak repair. I agree with this plan so far, because BP is trying harder to cover their ass than fix the leak.

The next stage of the repair would be to drill another parallel shaft down 18,000 feet, lower a nuclear bomb down the shaft and blow the leak closed. The alternative is to see this oil flow into the Gulf for the next ten to twenty years.

Okay the nuke thing doesn’t bother me, the depth will more than completely contain any radiation. (my opinion, which ain’t worth a hell of a lot) The thing that bothers me is that this oil well is beneath a methane-hydrate deposit that could float loose and cause a huge methane explosion at the surface of the ocean, similar to what happened to the drill rig that we all watched on TV, only magnitudes worse. ( again, my opinion. Which… you get the drift) Also, I don’t know what the chances are that it will cause a massive release of underground oil. I mention this fear because there has been many indications that this oil field delivers extreme pressure. Imagine the disaster if a good part of the oil field was released pretty much all at once.

I’m sick to my stomach now, and like I keep saying “You ain’t seen nothing yet”

Click on arrow at center screen and play video:

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Top Houston attorney Tony Buzbee says he has new evidence which indicates that Deepwater Horizon’s managers knew that the BP oil rig had major problems before its explosion on April 20, citing the eyewitness account of a crew member who rescued burning workers on the rig of a conversation between Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell and someone in Houston. According to the witness, Harrell was screaming, “Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen.”"

"Appearing on no less than three major networks Wednesday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles continued to deny the existence of oil plumes underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico."

Anonymous said...

"BP is being accused of trying to manipulate the search results on sites like Google and Yahoo, as it attempts to salvage its battered image following the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company is purchasing terms such as “oil spill”, “Deepwater Horizon” and “Gulf of Mexico”, so that when a user types these words into the search engines, the results prominently feature a “sponsored link” to BP’s official page on its response to the spill."

Joe said...

I do not favor "big" government solutions to this (or most) crises. If there is a "big" side, it needs to be on the prevention side. In this case, it is too late for that (except to deal with the thousands of other projects that are at risk of failure). It amazes me (not really) to see that many people who are so often anti-government expect the government to take over and manage this catastrophe. Even if they did take over, there is little prospect that they could solve the problems. But then, of course, we would have all the more reason to hate government. What's wrong with this picture? Maybe the government could bring in expertise from other petroleum companies, but even they would have conflicts of interest if they are competitors of BP.

Ernie Branscomb said...

"It amazes me (not really) to see that many people who are so often anti-government expect the government to take over and manage this catastrophe"

Ouch, that feels like me.

Joe, I'm not against government, I'm against government that doesn’t accept their responsibilities. In this case the regulatory commission had a verifiable orgy with the oil company executives.

If it is true, that they will need a nuclear bomb to be small enough the place down 18,000 feet in the sea bed, yet still be powerful enough to close the flow, the government will be the only people to play that card. As I’ve said, the nuclear part doesn’t scare me, but the thought of the oil under the sea bed escaping scares the hell out of me. The oil has already proven to be under extreme pressure, and I’m afraid that a powerful explosion might cause a massive amount of oil to be released. I am far from being an expert, but somebody would have to do a lot of convincing me to prove that would NOT happen.

Ernie Branscomb said...

Copy of a letter written to the Two Rivers Tribune, Hoopa. From Chief Arvol Looking Horse:

Dear Two Rivers Tribune,

Time has come to speak to the hearts of our Nations and their Leaders. I ask you this from the bottom of my heart, to come together from the Spirit of your Nations in prayer.

We, from the heart of Turtle Island, have a great message for the World; we are guided to speak from all the White Animals showing their sacred color, which have been signs for us to pray for the sacred life of all things. As I am sending this message to you, many Animal Nations are being threatened, those that swim, those that crawl, those that fly, and the plant Nations, eventually all will be affect from the oil disaster in the Gulf.

The dangers we are faced with at this time are not of spirit. The catastrophe that has happened with the oil spill which looks like the bleeding of Grandmother Earth, is made by human mistakes, mistakes that we cannot afford to continue to make.

I asked, as Spiritual Leaders, that we join together, united in prayer with the whole of our Global Communities. My concern is these serious issues will continue to worsen, as a domino effect that our Ancestors have warned us of in their Prophecies.

I know in my heart there are millions of people that feel our united prayers for the sake of our Grandmother Earth are long overdue. I believe we as Spiritual people must gather ourselves and focus our thoughts and prayers to allow the healing of the many wounds that have been inflicted on the Earth. As we honor the Cycle of Life, let us call for Prayer circles globally to assist in healing Grandmother Earth (our Unc’I Maka).

We ask for prayers that the oil spill, this bleeding, will stop. That the winds stay calm to assist in the work. Pray for the people to be guided in repairing this mistake, and that we may also seek to live in harmony, as we make the choice to change the destructive path we are on.

As we pray, we will fully understand that we are all connected. And that what we create can have lasting effects on all life.

So let us unite spiritually, All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer. Along with this immediate effort, I also ask to please remember June 21st, World Peace and Prayer Day/Honoring Sacred Sites day. Whether it is a natural site, a temple, a church, a synagogue or just your own sacred space, let us make a prayer for all life, for good decision making by our Nations, for our children’s future and well-being, and the generations to come.

Onipikte (that we shall live),

Chief Arvol Looking Horse
19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe

Anonymous said...

A link to the link about >benzenes.

olmanriver said...

Thanks for that prayer sharing Ernie.

Anonymous said...

"The frontroom is painted shrimp pink, and Blanchard is working himself up imagining what he would like to do to the BP chief executive if he ever got the chance: fist fight, public wrestling match, jail time?

"He took away everything I love most in the world. I am going to hunt that son of a bitch down like a 'coon ," he said. "He wants his life back after all he has done to us? The hell with him."

Then he speculates about peeing in the Queen's water fountain. "What do you think would happen to me? I'd go to jail for that, and it would be relatively minor environmental damage."

Anonymous said...

I feel.... it's the beginning of
the end. Corporations rule the
world and have no conscience.

Anonymous said...

Worse case scenario spelled out "dougr on June 13, 2010 - 3:17am"... "I used to cover the energy business (oil, gas and alternative) here in Texas, and the few experts in the oil field -- including geologists, chemists, etc. -- able or willing to even speak of this BP event told me early on that it is likely the entire reserve will bleed out. Unfortunately none of them could say with any certainty just how much oil is in the reserve in question because, for one thing, the oil industry and secrecy have always been synonymous. According to BP data from about five years ago, there are four separate reservoirs containing a total of 2.5 billion barrels (barrels not gallons). One of the reservoirs has 1.5 billion barrels. I saw an earlier post here quoting an Anadarko Petroleum report which set the total amount at 2.3 billion barrels. One New York Times article put it at 2 billion barrels.

If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls -- as it were -- fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities.

All oilmen lie about everything. The stories one hears about the extent to which they will protect themselves are all understatements. BP employees are already taking The Fifth before grand juries, and attorneys are laying a path for company executives to make a run for it."

Anonymous said...

Here
is the link to the Oildrum blogthread.

Anonymous said...

"The explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killed 11 workers and began the massive and continuing flow of oil was not an “accident,” but the product of willful corporate cost-cutting and negligence. Further evidence of this fact was provided Monday in documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. One document was an email from a BP engineer, Brian Morel, on April 14, six days before the explosion, in which he described the rig as a “nightmare well which has everyone all over the place.”

An accompanying letter from the committee detailed decisions made by BP officials during the days leading up to the disaster. “The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety,” the letter said. “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense.”

In this context, the much-publicized demand by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, that BP establish an escrow fund of about $20 billion from which compensation would be paid to fishermen, seafood processors and others robbed of their livelihood by the disaster, is a fraud."

Anonymous said...

"Indeed, Wolf Blitzer said:

One -- one expert said to me -- and I don't know if this is overblown or not -- that they're still really concerned about the structural base of this whole operation, if the rocks get moved, this thing could really explode and they're sitting, what, on -- on a billion potential barrels of oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Bloomberg notes:

The ruptured well may hold as much as 1 billion barrels, the Times reported, citing Rick Mueller, an analyst at Energy Security Analysis in Massachusetts.

Oil industry expert Matthew Simmons also puts the number above one billion barrels (see this Bloomberg interview, for example, where he says that - unless stopped - 120,000 barrels a day will leak for 25-30 years; that adds up to 1,095,000,000 to 1,314,000,000 barrels).

And Rob Kall claims that a source inside BP tells him:

Size of reservoir - estimated by BP and its partner, Andarko to be between 2.5B and 10B bbl. (that's 100,000,000,000 gallons and 400,000,000,000 gallons).

Yes - all of those numbers are BILLIONS.

Given that BP's nearby Tiber and Kaskida wells each contain at least 3 billion barrels of oil (see this, this, this and this), estimates of more than a billion barrels for the leaking Macondo reservoir are not unreasonable."