Offshore Oil Drilling and the Oil Rig Disaster in the Gulf

[urbanlibertarian]

I'll agree that the lease rates the feds charge are probably way too low and that the oil companies are probably protected by law from having to pay 100% of damages and those things should be fixed.  Offshore oil and gas will never be absolutely safe for the environment but it's probably safe enough now and will be safer after the lessons we learn from this spill.  Alternative energy won't come along fast enough to satisfy demand and maintain the economic growth we need.

[Bostech]

Karma is a bitch and so are oil spills.

Isn't ironic that USA invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to secure black gold only to get a huge oil spill in own front yard.
As they say,taste of own medicine.

I guess I am only one that sees irony here.

Nope, some of the rest of us see the irony too.  And the idiom is, "in your own back yard".  We should outsource all of our oil spills.

Too late,British have outsmarted you...they already outsourced their oil drilling...to America.

[urbanlibertarian]

Stephen,
Here's an article about applying private property rights to fisheries which would probably give fishermen greater standing to sue BP:

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/10/local/me-fish10

[Lunican]

The oil is still flowing and he writes an article to let everyone know that, despite the destruction, oil is still profitable.

[thelakelander]

The funny thing is everyone already knows that and so is pimping.  The question for Florida is, like becoming a pimp, is it worth it overall in the long run?

[floridaforester]

Isn't it ironic that if the flow of this well goes uncontrolled for long enough the oil slick might end up in the gulf stream and eventually on the British coast.    Not that their tourism or seafood industry will suffer too terribly much.  I think this really begs the question that why did BP not have a contingency plan in place for this occurrence.  Considering that these "shear rams" that are supposed to stop or, at least, mitigate these kind of blowouts, but the industry has known that they are  questionable at best in their reliability.  Sounds like negligence if I've ever heard it. Just guessing that this will be considered in any and all lawsuits that are bubbling to the surface as we speak.  No pun intended.  Seriously, it took them almost 2 weeks to formulate a plan to try to stop the flow.  BP's green cover has gone the way of the republican party's dignity...not with a bang, but with a whimper.

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18853-deepwater-horizon-scrutiny-falls-on-blowout-preventer.html

Deepwater Horizon: scrutiny falls on blowout preventer
13:49 04 May 2010 by Kate Ravilious

A record of reliability will not stop the device at the centre of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster â€" the blowout preventer (BOP) â€" from being investigated intensely in the weeks and months to come.

BOPs use a system of massive hydraulics to choke off supply if oil begins to surge up a pipe. "They are normally very reliable," says Per Holand from Exprosoft, a risk assessment company for the oil industry based in Trondheim, Norway. "They have two control switches and a number of different ways of closing the pipe."

Eleven rig workers are reported dead and more than 6 million litres of oil have gushed from the well, which lies under 1500 metres of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The leak is threatening to become the largest ever in US waters.

Why the BOP failed to stem the flow is still unknown: both the switches â€" manual and automatic â€" may have failed, or else they worked but the BOP closed only partially. Some experts say the well head must be partly shut because the rate of oil spill is not as great as might be expected.

Others question why the rig didn't have a remote backup switch. "Acoustically controlled remote switches are mandatory in Norway and Brazil, but not elsewhere," says Holand.

Not the first
Deepwater Horizon is the second such accident in less than a year. Just eight months ago, the BOP failed on a deep-water well in the Timor Sea, north-west of Australia. After five attempts and 10 weeks a relief well was drilled and the flow â€" much smaller than Deepwater Horizon â€" was stemmed.

Drilling for oil in more than 1000 metres of water was rare a decade ago, but the profit to be made from squeezing the last few drops out of conventional wells has made deep-water exploration economically feasible. Such wells are now common off the coasts of Brazil, Angola and Nigeria as well as in the Gulf of Mexico.

A giant containment chamber with a dome on top to funnel the oil directly to the surface is being constructed. "Domes have never been used at this kind of depth before, and it is probably going to be difficult to position," says Ken Arnold, an offshore production facility expert based in Houston, Texas.

In theory the risks of an accident at depth are no greater than those in shallow water, but dealing with a deep-water accident is far more challenging. "You can't see and touch what you are trying to repair, and fewer pieces of equipment are rated for that pressure and depth," says Arnold.

[Bostech]

Just like Chernobyl they will put dome on top of it plus some newspapers over to make sure its not seen anymore.

[mySpringfield]

BP now estimates up to 60,000 barrels a day...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- BP /quotes/comstock/13*!bp/quotes/nls/bp  (BP  51.00, -0.20, -0.39%)  officials told members of Congress in a closed-door meeting that the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be spewing as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day, well over an earlier estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, according to reports on Wednesday. BP officials said the larger figure respresents a worst-case scenario. Meanwhile the Obama administration signaled it would support a fresh push in Congress to raise the oil spill liability limit to $10 billion from $75 million.

[finehoe]

Post from George Ure's urbansurvival.com has one sobering point of view:

(The media is) totally missing the boat on how big and bad of a disaster this is.
First fact, the original estimate was about 5,000 gallons of oil a day spilling into the ocean. Now they're saying 200,000 gallons a day. That's over a million gallons of crude oil a week!
I'm an engineer with 25 years of experience. I've worked on some big projects with big machines. Maybe that's why this mess is so clear to me.
First, the BP platform was drilling for what they call deep oil. They go out where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and drill another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. This it right on the edge of what human technology can do. Well, this time they hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Take a moment to grasp the import of that. The pressure behind this oil is so high that it destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it.
When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean.
Now they've got a hole in the ocean floor, 5,000 feet down with a wrecked oil drilling rig sitting on top of is spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that, will you!
First they have to get the oil rig off the hole to get at it in order to try to cap it. Do you know the level of effort it will take to move that wrecked oil rig, sitting under 5,000 feet of water?
We're so used to our politicians creating false crises to forward their criminal agendas that we aren't recognizing that we're staring straight into possibly the greatest (environmental) disaster mankind will ever see.

[Dog Walker]

Who beside Ure is saying that the rig is on top of the well?  That would be a remarkable coincidence. 

The TV pictures of the robots trying to close the blowout valve didn't show it.  The diagrams I've seen show that the leaks are coming from a couple of places in the drilling pipe that fell and the broken end, which is where they are going to try to put the cap.  The rig isn't near or on this pipe.

[fieldafm]

Here's a map google has of the latest satellite imagery, etc

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/

[NotNow]

I don't believe that the rig is on top of the well.  I am pretty sure that the author just assumed that.  Deep water rigs are not tied down but are kept in place by a GPS thruster system.  When that failed then the rig would have drifted.  Even if it sank right on top of the well the chances of it settling on the well are very, very slim.

[mtraininjax]

Do we all stop flying when there is an airplane crash? Do we all stop driving due to car crashes? So why would we stop looking for alternative means of energy, just because of one disaster? I don't understand the logic.

[JC]

Do we all stop flying when there is an airplane crash? Do we all stop driving due to car crashes? So why would we stop looking for alternative means of energy, just because of one disaster? I don't understand the logic.

LOL...