Offshore Oil Drilling and the Oil Rig Disaster in the Gulf

[Bostech]

Hmm maybe I should fake my birth certificate and run for presidency too. :-))

[JaxByDefault]

Underwater plume likely linked to dispersants found off the mouth of Mobile Bay.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hXrdaztYWC4b-nfTbBOcb6bX0a5gD9FVDIK03

I'm packing up the car and heading to Eastern Shore for a weekend on the bay. It apparently may be our last sail and bowl of mom's gumbo for a long while.

[samiam]

JaxByDefault
looks like there will be no more jubilees

[NotNow]

The "liberal media" does seem intent on trying to paint this as "Obama's Katrina" but I agree with NotNow.  What more could he have done?

For many a prime motivation behind ardent support for Obama during the presidential election was an intense desire to remove the oil men from the White House.The 'media' dynamic and intrenched stupid politics remain.
We are lucky to have Obama and his administration at the helm.

Whoa! Whoa!  I wouldn't say THAT! 

[NotNow]

In many ways we have been lucky.  Winds and currents have kept most of the spill out to sea.  I would like to see more and faster action on the beaches and marshes of LA, Mississippi, and AL as well as the dredge.  The government should also be building up massive clean up fleets and employ the fishermen who have been harmed. 

Other than that, I don't see where Obama could have done anything more besides waiting for more resignations from the MMS.  The drilling moratorium seems a wise and prudent policy until procedures are analyzed and reviewed.  The USG has no capability in stopping a blowout like this.  Everyone know that I am not an Obama fan, but I don't see this response as "failing".

Why is it better that the oil is "out to sea" than on the beach, aren't the fishermen still going to be affected and isn't the threat of swimming in oil going to ruin the tourism industry? 

Just saying, this type of optimism is a little bizarre, because no matter how bad it could have been it could always have been worse!  But the point is it should never have gotten this far and the "we have been lucky" statements should be held until we know the true extent of the damage caused by this spill.

Because, JC, if the petroleum stays out to sea it will eventually be diluted.  Petroleum leaks naturally into the sea, that is why we find tarballs on beaches.  If this major spill was pushed to land in the marshes and beaches, the current environmental disaster would be geometrically greater.  The best we can hope for the petroleum that is not captured is for it to be diluted by the ocean and not adversly affect land areas.

[JaxByDefault]

JaxByDefault
looks like there will be no more jubilees

This too make me sad.

I can't wait to see the Mardi Gras floats next year. Hopefully, the depictions of oil execs will be wildly unflattering (to put it mildly).

[samiam]

I miss Mobile, I lived there for 9 years. I'm currently working on a vessel of opportunity off the coast of Gulfport

(The krew of oil coated exects)

[JC]

In many ways we have been lucky.  Winds and currents have kept most of the spill out to sea.  I would like to see more and faster action on the beaches and marshes of LA, Mississippi, and AL as well as the dredge.  The government should also be building up massive clean up fleets and employ the fishermen who have been harmed. 

Other than that, I don't see where Obama could have done anything more besides waiting for more resignations from the MMS.  The drilling moratorium seems a wise and prudent policy until procedures are analyzed and reviewed.  The USG has no capability in stopping a blowout like this.  Everyone know that I am not an Obama fan, but I don't see this response as "failing".

Why is it better that the oil is "out to sea" than on the beach, aren't the fishermen still going to be affected and isn't the threat of swimming in oil going to ruin the tourism industry? 

Just saying, this type of optimism is a little bizarre, because no matter how bad it could have been it could always have been worse!  But the point is it should never have gotten this far and the "we have been lucky" statements should be held until we know the true extent of the damage caused by this spill.

Because, JC, if the petroleum stays out to sea it will eventually be diluted.  Petroleum leaks naturally into the sea, that is why we find tarballs on beaches.  If this major spill was pushed to land in the marshes and beaches, the current environmental disaster would be geometrically greater.  The best we can hope for the petroleum that is not captured is for it to be diluted by the ocean and not adversly affect land areas.

So the adverse affects on the sea dont matter?  I am not following your logic.  Are you saying that as long as land is protected everything will be ok?  I think that is what BP would like people to believe which is why the underwater plumes are not being considered, they are out of sight out of mind.

[samiam]

There is currently no way to recover oil from underwater plumes until it come to shore or breaks down. IMHO these plumes are a nightmare. It seem to be a case of out of sight out of mind.

[Bostech]

http://www.youtube.com/v/7lBQkNgY3bY

[samiam]

NOAA is showing the spill getting smaller on the 24, 48 and 72 hour maps, I just dont understand that


http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/topic_subtopic_entry.php?RECORD_KEY(entry_subtopic_topic)=entry_id,subtopic_id,topic_id&entry_id(entry_subtopic_topic)=809&subtopic_id(entry_subtopic_topic)=2&topic_id(entry_subtopic_topic)=1

[finehoe]

Oil Flow Is Stemmed, but Could Resume, Official Says
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER

HOUSTON â€" By injecting solid objects overnight as well as heavy drilling fluid into the stricken well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, engineers appeared to have stemmed the flow of oil, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, said on Friday morning. But he stressed that the next 12 to 18 hours would be “very critical” in permanently stanching what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.

Admiral Allen, who spoke on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said the biggest challenge would be to sustain the “top kill” effort, which involves pumping material into the well to counteract the upward pressure of the gushing oil so that the well can be sealed.

“They’ve been able to push the hydrocarbons and the oil down with the mud,” he said, referring to the heavy drilling fluid. “The real challenge is to put enough mud into the well to keep the pressure where they can put a cement plug over the top.”

The top kill effort has proceeded in fits and starts. BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early Thursday that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping on Wednesday night when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.

It was the latest setback in the effort to shut off the leaking oil, which federal officials said was pouring into the Gulf at a far higher rate than original estimates suggested.

If the new estimates are accurate, the spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.

With President Obama planning to visit the Gulf on Friday, Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said on “Good Morning America” that efforts to plug the well were "going pretty well according to plan."

“Much of the volume you see coming out of the well in the last 36 hours is mud,” he said, referring to live video shots of the oil leak.

He said that overnight, workers pumped what is known as “junk shot,” a mix of more substantial materials, like golf balls and shredded tires, into the well, and he said they would follow with more mud later Friday. The junk shot serves as a “bridge,” he said, for the injections of mud to strengthen its ability to counteract the leaking oil.

While he was optimistic, Mr. Hayward gave the effort a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of success because it had never been tried in water this deep.

Mr. Obama said Thursday at a news conference in Washington that he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis.

“Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been our highest priority.”

But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a “cozy and sometimes corrupt” relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service. Earlier Thursday, the chief of the Minerals Management Service for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.

“I’m hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited,” she said in a statement.

Also on Thursday, Mr. Obama ordered a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.

Mr. Obama’s trip Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, will be his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.

Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said oil and gas from beneath the Gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation’s energy supply for years to come.

“It has to be part of an overall energy strategy,” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, we’re still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we’re going to be using oil. And to the extent that we’re using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports.”

In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.

As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume.

That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as “drilling mud” were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.

Thursday morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. “The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped,” Admiral Allen told CNN.

And Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, said on the “Today” program on NBC that the top kill “was moving the way we want it to.”

It was not until late Thursday afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday.

After the resumption, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed.

“It’s quite a roller coaster,” Mr. Suttles said. “It’s difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow.”

Engineers had feared the top kill was risky because the high-pressure mud could have punctured another gaping hole in the pipes, or dislodged debris clogging the blowout preventer and pipes and intensified the flow.

The engineers also said that the problem they encountered was not entirely unexpected, and that they believed that they would ultimately succeed.

Mr. Obama’s action halted planned exploratory wells in the Arctic due to be drilled this summer and planned lease sales off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf of Mexico. It also halts work on 33 exploratory wells now being drilled in the gulf.

The impact of the new moratorium on offshore drilling remains uncertain. Mr. Obama ordered a halt to new leasing and drilling permits shortly after the spill, but Minerals Management Service officials continued to issue permits for modifications to existing wells and to grant waivers from environmental assessments for other wells.

Shell Oil had been hoping to begin an exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would delay. Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was frustrated because the decision “will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation’s energy needs.”

“The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore,” Mr. Begich said in a statement. “But Shell has updated its plans at the administration’s request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the gulf spill.”

Environmental advocates, however, expressed relief.

“We need to know what happened in the gulf to cause the disaster, so that a similar catastrophe doesn’t befall our Arctic waters,” said William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society.

Admiral Allen on Thursday approved portions of Louisiana’s $350 million plan to use walls of sand in an effort to protect vulnerable sections of coastline.

The approved portion involves a two-mile sand berm to be built off Scofield Island in Plaquemines Parish â€" one of six projects that the Corps of Engineers has approved out of 24 proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

“What Admiral Allen told us today is that if the first one is effective, then they will consider moving on to the next one,” Mr. Jindal, a Republican, said at an afternoon news conference in Fourchon, La.

Investigators also continued their efforts to understand what caused the explosion of the rig, which killed 11 workers.

At a hearing in New Orleans, the highest ranking official on the Deepwater Horizon testified that he had a disagreement with BP officials on the rig before the explosion.

Jimmy Harrell, a manager who was in charge of the rig, owned by Transocean, said he had expressed concern that BP did not plan to conduct a pressure test before sealing the well closed.

It was unclear from Mr. Harrell’s testimony whether the disagreement took place on the day of the explosion or the previous day.

The investigative hearings have grown increasingly combative. Three scheduled witnesses have changed their plans to testify, according to the Coast Guard. Robert Kaluza, a BP official on the rig on the day of the explosion, declined to testify on Thursday by invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

Another top ranking BP official, Donald Vidrine, and James Mansfield, Transocean’s assistant marine engineer on the Deepwater Horizon, both told the Coast Guard that they had medical conditions.


Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Kenner, La.; Campbell Robertson from Venice, La.; Maria Newman from New York; and John Collins Rudolph from Fourchon, La.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?hp

[samiam]

The president is about to speak from the gulf coast

[Timkin]

There is currently no way to recover oil from underwater plumes until it come to shore or breaks down. IMHO these plumes are a nightmare. It seem to be a case of out of sight out of mind.

  Can suctioning into these plume areas not pull this stuff out of the water?  I mean if crude can be extracted over a mile down in the sea out of a hole deep into the earth, I do not follow how/why it cannot be extracted from the sea water.   Seems if we wait for it to break up and wash ashore it could take 50 years to clean up .   We would have to have crews on the coastal areas for the forseeable future... we probably will anyway.

[NotNow]

Timkin, I understand your worry, and JC's as well.  But the great volume of water that we are talking about just makes this impossible as time from the spill as well as distance from the spill increases.  As I was saying to JC, the petro will dilute more and more with time and distance.  All we can do is gather and separate all we can where the oil is floating and near the spill.  As well as protecting and cleaning at points of landfall.