Gotta love that New York Times headline. The paper doesn’t trust BP’s claims anymore, even while reporting “Live feeds of video images from the undersea well clearly showed that the release of oil had had been completely halted”
I’ve seen some slight misreporting that the gusher is 100% capped for good. Apparently not:
“We’re encouraged by this development, but this isn’t over,” , the retired Coast Guard admiral who is overseeing the federal response to the spill, said in a statement on Thursday.
“It remains likely that we will return to the containment process using this new stacking cap connected to the risers to attempt to collect up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day until the relief well is completed.”
Too bad they hadn’t been required to pre-build and pre-position this system before getting their permit in the first place.
They say experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Well, we got 180,000,000 gallons of experience.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
I fail to understand why they feel like they need to re-open the cap again. Leave it capped, for heaven’s sake.
“Live feeds of video images from the undersea well clearly showed that the release of oil had had been completely halted”
Well erosion and ocean floor fissures could create new ways for the toxic soup. So let’s wait … at least a positive sign.
Maybe they don’t trust the cement in the casing along the length of the well pipe to hold. After-all, that part was done by Halliburton.
An anonymous plumber provided sketches of a flange and seal design six weeks ago that is almost identical to the containment cap lowered onto the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the latest effort to stop the BP oil spill.
http://www.truth-out.org/bp-oil-spill-mystery-plumber-may-be-brains-behind-containment-cap61415
Now we need to lift the skimmer blockade and commence with cleanup,
Energy Secretary Chu said BP would save the planet.
The country could certainly use some good news regarding the disaster in the Gulf. After nearly three months of gushing maybe, just maybe, we are finally getting a handle on the problem. There is little reason for me to go on and on about BP and big oil in general and their lack of useful response plans. That is clear to all. What concerns me now is that the media will drop the story and the citizenamericanus will go back to sleep. We do have a history of ignoring things until it actually hits our own door. A month or so ago I firmly believed that the BP blowout just might be enough to nudge the country in the direction of renewables. Unfortunately, I no longer see that happening. Perhaps if the waters along the East Coast, including the DC area, were running black, those in policy positions would have been forced into action.
From the NYT article
“I am very excited that there’s no oil in the Gulf of Mexico,” Kent Wells, a senior vice president for BP
don’t worry, lot’s of common people will
know it as the Gulf of pollution and if
lucky will be able to only remember it as
a tragedy of many years ago in 20 years or so.
Off topic, but important. Solar storms might wreck the electric power grid
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-e-joseph/the-solar-katrina-storm-t_b_641354.html
so ask your senators to just pass the d****d house bill, HR-5026, known as The GRID Act.
Urgency is more than just wise…
The former chairman (IIRC) of ExxonMobil said that BP should not shut off the flow until the relief wells are finished. The reason is that there’s evidence the well casing has been damaged below the sea bottom by erosion. If the casing fails due to the extra pressure, the relief wells will be the only way left to stop the gusher.
If the spill is really stopped, that’s good news for the President.
No doubt a ditto head will dive down and open it up again. Jes’ sayin’.
Here is a good article describing the many mistakes (deliberate and otherwise) made by BP. The blowout well is their second try. The first well bore collapsed and was abandoned – a costly tip-off that extra care should be taken in that formation and not to cut corners.
Article includes a nice diagram & an 8 minute video with critique and more details from experts.
http://www.saveusenergyjobs.com/resources/infographic/
The suggestion is that BP’s mistakes were bad, but not industry standard practice. (Unless they fall behind schedule?)
Re: today’s news. Washington is reluctant to allow the cap to contain the entire pressure for fear the casing and lower well depths will be further damaged. They really need all the integrity they can get down there to have the best chance for mud to stop the flow and then cement injections to plug it permanently.
I have read that the floor of the Gulf over this field is extremely brittle, thin and delicate, and there are concerns that it might not tolerate the weight and trauma of the testing, multiple drilling etc. In addition, it is a “young” oil field or something and (therefore?) full of methane, which is unpredictable, dangerous, uncontrollable and a greenhouse gas. If all of this is the case, why was this well permitted in the first place? Why are there literally thousands of wells in this dangerous part of the sea? I realize that the Gulf, unfortunately covers one of the largest oil fields in the world, but it was also was home to many innocent creatures who could not live any where else. Humans have the power to make choices, but animals don’t and are innocent victims of human callousness and greed. I am disgusted and full of hatred, not just for the oil companies, but for the federal agencies who were being paid to protect our environment in North America, that some of us used to like to think of as “America the beautiful”. The MMS people and some in the dept of the environment belong in jail for a long, long time. With no government pensions to look forward to.
Stephanie Mcnealy
http://www.famous-philanthropists.org
Customer Service Team
‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over.’
-Yogi Berra
Things have been known to go wrong for BP in the past so I’ll forego celebrations until there is 13,000 feet of concrete in the well bore.
There is another piece of good news about this (though it could actually be bad news). With all the oil contained, when they start pumping it up to the ships maybe we will actually get a decent measurement as to what the flow rate has been.
Oil Well Still Capped, But Maybe Not Fixed
Remember that the key measurement engineers were and are tracking is the pressure in the well. If the leak that was capped is the only or primary leak, capping it would force pressure to build up as oil tries to push out. High-pressure is a good thing, though. The alternative is that the well acts like a crude hydra: you cap one leak, and others spring up.
“Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, has said that a pressure reading of 8,000 or 9,000 pounds per square inch would be ideal, while a reading below 6,000 psi might indicate leakage,” The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach writes this morning.
So, what is the pressure, then? Unfortunately, it falls within the ambiguous middle range between 6,000 and 8,000, at least so far.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/bp-update-oil-well-still-capped-but-may-not-be-fixed/59900/
Yes, this is the problem, though pressure is still slowly rising. They say that there may be a constriction in the well (fallen drill pipe or the like, I imagine), seismic readings don’t show any indication of leaking outside the well.
If they switch to drawing oil off again, and if the flow is less than 80,000 barrels a day, and if there’s no new storm (note the number of ifs) you still get no oil escaping, but apparently it will be some time until all the ships with the necessary capacity would get hooked up. And it is storm season …
So let’s cross our fingers and hope that they can keep this capped until the relief well kills it dead for good.
Drill Baby Drill!
2nd leak from Deepwater blowout spewing 120,000 barrels a day
http://www.dirigoblue.com/diary/1717/matt-simmons-2nd-leak-from-deepwater-blowout-spewing-120000-barrels-a-day
Well, Matt Simmons says a lot of stuff.
I sometimes think that most of what he says ends up profiting ExxonMobil. Other times I think that a lot of what he says is random.
He has a lot of financial interest in the petroleum industry, and a lot of his commentary does not make his own financial interest clear.
As far as the 120,000 barrel per day hole, that appears to be conjecture on his part. He doesn’t think the riser is big enough to spew all of the oil seen.
But independent scientists who have estimated the flows coming out of the riser from video evidence say that the flows coming out of the riser could have been roughly 100,000 barrels per day.
If there is another hole, I’d like to know about it. But most of what Simmons says appears to me to be financially motivated nonsense, IMO.