http://texaskaos.com/diary/6536/the-love-fest-between-us-regulators-and-big-oilSun May 16, 2010 at 16:25:08 PM CDTby Libby Shaw |
This is what happens when lobbyists are put in charge of our regulatory agencies. It is the same as appointing Bernie Madoff the Sheriff of Wall St.An article in the New York Times reveals the Minerals Management Services gave permission to BP and other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without requiring permits that are obtained at another agency. The MMS also put a muzzle on the agency’s scientists.
Meanwhile BP, Deepwater Horizon and Halliburton refuse to take responsibility for the devastating link by pointing fingers at one another. What an irresponsible, disgraceful and disgusting bunch. |
The President’s wrath, just like that of most of us has not been noticed by the CEO of BP. Last week he carried on with his PR sham games and lying campaign. On Friday Tony Hayward claimed that the leak is just a tiny little ol’ thing when compared to the size of the ocean.
Meanwhile the little ol’ leak continues to spell an unmitigated disaster for regions in the Gulf. Mr. Hayward does not want us to know that there is a gas leak that is 3000 times worst than oil.
The diary linked above is a substantive one that includes charts that give us a glimpse into the long term and devastating consequences of this “little ol’ leak.” A number of diaries about this calamity have been posted on Daily Kos by folks who have worked in oil and gas for over 30 years. Others are geologists and scientists who appreciate the devastating significance of this apparently unstoppable oil volcano. Unfortunately we will not see the same kind of exhaustive reporting in most of our newspapers and on TV. This horror would have never happened had not such a cozy relationship existed between U.S. Regulators and the oil industry. It is as if the Bernie Madoff of big oil ran the agency that was supposed to have regulated it. A thorough purging of all complicit players in the Interior Dept., especially the MMS, should take place immediately. Any Reagan, G.H.W. Bush and W. holdover should be fired yesterday. And any complacent Clinton and/or Obama appointees should also be shown to the door. Finally, BP should be fired and thrown out of the entire Gulf b/c it remains clueless as to how to stop the carnage it has inflicted upon our environment and economy. It is time for a team of federally appointed scientists and O&G experts to take over. Such a team would have far more credibility than the likes of a reckless and irresponsible BP. Special thanks to Dave Curtis |
Associated Press: Models indicate Gulf spill may be in major (Gulf Loop) current
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jwYFoBlYjTHWsi1MaarZvk_C_ljwD9FO4PGO6
May 16, 2010
By JASON DEAREN
Associated Press Writer
Researchers tracking the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico say computer models show the black ooze may have already entered a major current flowing toward the Florida Keys, and are sending out a research vessel to learn more.
William Hogarth, dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, told The Associated Press Sunday that one model shows that the oil has already the loop current, which is the largest in the Gulf. The model is based on weather, ocean current and spill data from the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other sources.
Hogarth said a second model shows the oil is 3 miles from the current – still dangerously close.
The current flows in a looping pattern in the Gulf, through the area where the blown-out well is, east to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
New York Times: Tube Offers Limited Success in Oil Leak, BP says
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17spill.html?hp
by Shayla Dewan
Published May 16, 2010
NEW ORLEANS, La. — An experimental attempt to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico experienced some limited success over the weekend, BP announced Sunday afternoon.
Engineers successfully inserted a tube into the damaged riser pipe from which some of the oil is spewing, capturing “some amounts of oil and gas” before the tube was dislodged, the announcement said. The tube was inspected and reinserted, BP said.
“While not collecting all of the leaking oil, this tool is an important step in reducing the amount of oil being released into Gulf waters,” the announcement said. It did not say why the tube had come dislodged or how much oil and gas were taken aboard the Discover Enterprise, the drill ship waiting to separate the oil, gas and water as it is siphoned off. The gas that reached the ship was burned using a flare system on board.
The tube is one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf, threatening marine life and sensitive wetlands and beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of the techniques has been previously attempted at the depth of this leak, 5,000 feet below the surface.
Efforts to insert the tube, a five-foot section of pipe with a rubber seal designed to keep seawater out, into the broken riser pipe from which the majority of the oil is gushing, began on Friday using robotic submarines.
But the initial attempt to connect the mile-long pipe leading from the drill ship to the tube failed, and the device had to be brought back to the surface for adjustments.
“This is all part of reinventing technology,” said Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”
BP still has an array of untested short-term options for reducing the flow, including a small “top hat” that could be placed over the leak, a “junk shot” that would involve plugging the blowout preventer at the well’s opening with debris like old tires, and a “top kill” that would pump mud and cement into the preventer in an attempt to seal the opening.
The long-term solution, already under way, is to drill two relief wells, a process that will not be completed until August, officials said.
New York Times: Giant Plumes of Oil Found Forming Under Gulf of Mexico
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hpw
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 15, 2010
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.
BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.
“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”
Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.
Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.
Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.
“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”
He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.
While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.
Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.
Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.
While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.
The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.
“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from Robert, La.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 16, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
Science News: Rig has history of spills, fines before big one
http://news.remedy.org.ua/226d1ce7/
Science News May 15th, 2010 by admin
During its nine years at sea, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig operated by BP suffered a series of spills, fires – even a high seas collision – because of equipment failure, human error and bad weather. It also drilled the world’s deepest offshore well.
What likely destroyed the rig in a ball of fire last week was a failure – or multiple failures – 5,000 feet below. That’s where drilling equipment met the sea bed in a complicated construction of pipes, concrete and valves that gave way in a manner that no one has yet been able to explain.
But Deepwater Horizon’s lasting legacy will undoubtedly be the environmental damage it caused after it exploded and sank, killing 11 crew and releasing an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.
Remote-controlled blowout preventers designed to apply brute force to seal off a well should have kicked in. But they failed to activate after the explosion.
Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. said in a statement Friday that workers had finished cementing the well’s pipes 20 hours before the rig went up in flames. Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. Without elaborating, one lawsuit filed by an injured technician on the rig claims that Halliburton improperly performed its job in cementing the well, “increasing the pressure at the well and contributing to the fire, explosion and resulting oil spill.”
Before last week’s catastrophe, Deepwater Horizon’s most recent “significant pollution incident” occurred in Nov. 2005, when the rig spilled 212 barrels of an oil-based lubricant due to equipment failure and human error. That spill was probably caused by not screwing the pipe tightly enough and not adequately sealing the well with cement, as well as a possible poor alignment of the rig, according to records maintained by the federal Minerals Management Service.
Scott Bickford, a lawyer for several Deepwater Horizon workers who survived the blast, said he believes a “burp” of natural gas rose to the rig floor and was sucked into machinery, leading to the explosion.
Experts say the number of safety incidents experienced by Deepwater Horizon isn’t unusual for an industry operating in harsh conditions. And it is difficult to draw any connections between those problems and last week’s deadly explosion, they say.
Following that spill, MMS inspectors recommended the company increase the amount of cement it uses during this process and apply more torque when screwing in its pipes.
Because vessels like the Deepwater Horizon operate 24 hours a day, Coast Guard officials said minor equipment problems appear frequently. But if they go unfixed such incidents could mushroom into bigger concerns.
“These are big, floating cities,” said Tyler Priest, a historian of offshore oil and gas exploration. “You’re always going to have minor equipment failure and human error, and of course they’re operating in a hurricane prone environment.”
In June 2003, the rig floated off course in high seas, resulting in the release of 944 barrels of oil. MMS blamed bad weather and poor judgment by the captain. A month later, equipment failure and high currents led to the loss of 74 barrels of oil.
In Feb. 2002, just months after the rig was launched from a South Korean shipyard, it spilled 267 barrels of oil into the Gulf after a hose failed, according to records maintained by the Minerals Management Service.
The Coast Guard, which is supposed to ensure the vessels are seaworthy, keeps its own set of safety records on the Deepwater Horizon.
In January 2005, human error caused another accident. A crane operator forgot he was in the midst of refueling a crane, and 15 gallons of overflowing diesel fuel sparked a fire.
On 18 different occasions during that period the Coast Guard cited the vessel for an “acknowledged pollution source.” No further details about the type of pollution were immediately available.
From 2000 to 2010, the Coast Guard issued six enforcement warnings and handed down one civil penalty and a notice of violation to Deepwater Horizon, agency records show.
Steven Sutton, who oversees offshore drilling inspectors in the Coast Guard’s New Orleans office, said the number of accidents and incidents reported on the Deepwater Horizon didn’t strike him as unusual.
The agency also conducted 16 investigations of incidents involving everything from fires to slip-and-fall accidents.
Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for the rig’s owner Transocean Ltd., said Friday that the Swiss-based company planned to conduct its own investigation of what caused last week’s explosion.
A collision with a towing vessel reported on June 26, 2003 could have created safety problems over the long term if the $95,000 damage to the rig’s hull wasn’t adequately repaired, Sutton said. The collision risked compromising the rig’s watertight integrity or weakening the structure that supports the drilling operation, he said.
Both Deepwater Horizon’s owner Transocean Ltd. and operator BP PLC cited comments made Monday by Lars Herbst, the regional director for the Minerals Management Service, who said the companies had a good history of compliance.
“Any prior incidents were investigated,” he said. “Any speculation that they are related to the Deepwater Horizon incident is speculation.”
“The industry is going to learn a lot from this. That’s what happens in these kinds of disaster,” he said, citing the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha rig in the North Sea and the 1979 blowout of Mexico’s IXTOC I in the eastern Gulf.
Last week’s blowout was “an aberration in the history of the Gulf for the last 40 years” during which the industry has refined and automated much of the work on the estimated 3,500 rigs currently operating in the Gulf, said Priest, a professor and director of Global Studies at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.
Norway, which has huge oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, requires rigs to have at least two independent systems to trigger the blowout preventer.
Britain overhauled its safety requirements after the North Sea incident, which killed 167 men, and companies have since spent billions upgrading emergency equipment and improving their operating procedures.
Cantwell said the $560 million semi-submersible model has been superseded by a new design capable of drilling 40,000 feet down in water as deep as 12,000 feet.
Deepwater Horizon was considered state-of-the-art when it was built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries, Cantwell said. Last year, it set a world record for the deepest oil and gas well when it drilled 35,055 feet into the Gulf of Mexico.
Special thanks to Richard Charter