Sealing the oil spill in the gulf

[Buffy]

I don't know that it's possible to talk about BP as disregarding safety, as if it were a person. The fact is, BP's investors and administration didn't come together and decide not to follow procedures - it was something that happened at the level of the individuals working on that specific project. .... I just don't get why people working on something a million times more harmful in the case of a failure would not think that following protocol is important.

 

It's called profit, dear. No, Tony "I'd like my life back" Hayward didn't ever explicitly say to his underlings, "Forget safety, pump the damn oil even though you've had signs for weeks that the blowout preventer is defective and probably will explode," but I can pretty much guarantee you that lots of people got fired over the last few years for "not making their targets."

 

It's called "neglegence with full awareness of the consequences."

 

You're right, it is hard to understand why people would do this. It's probable that some bean counter did come up with a "tradeoff analysis" that pinned the likelihood of a failure to a catastrophic accident: one of our members--Pyrotex--does this sort of thing for NASA, but the devil is in how the data is *used* by management. In NASA's case there's a very low tolerance for deaths because they *know* what the costs of failure are. In BP's case, it's obvious that there's a pretty cavalier attitude toward these costs. Moreover these "mistakes" went back weeks before the accident:

The broken blow out preventer had not been inspected in over five years.

 

BP was in a severe economic and time crunch to finish the job quickly and were over six weeks behind schedule.

 

Immediately leading up to the explosion, BP used procedures that violated their own drill plan; and in spite of indications of a “very large abnormality,” kept testing until they got something they could disingenuously claim fulfilled the test.

 

BP management supervisors refused to run the comprehensive cement bond log test, a definitive test of the integrity of a well’s cement mandated by Federal Regulations if there are concerns with the results of negative and positive pressure tests like were clearly present.

 

The BP management official on Deepwater Horizon making the unconscionable decisions, over the vehement objections of seasoned drilling experts, Robert Kaluzza has refused to testify by invoking his 5th Amendment criminal right against self incrimination.

 

BP officials aboard the rig wanted to skip required pressure tests and tried to impose a drilling plan sent directly from BP’s Houston headquarters that had not been approved, as required, by the federal government’s Minerals Management Service.

No, it's not just a few bad apples. It's constant pressure from the top down to "cut corners" because of a culture of self-reinforcing "nothing-will-happen" attitudes, exacerbated by the complete dismantling of the government regulatory agencies that could have applied the pressure necessary to "do the right thing."

 

They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them, :phones:

Buffy

[lemit]

To reinforce what Buffy's saying, the worst crash in aviation history, the KLM-Pan Am crash on the ground at Tenerife, was caused apparently by KLM's senior, most decorated pilot wanting to get out of the air before a limit of continuous time on duty would have forced him to stay overnight. 583 people died because a very safety-conscious pilot simply wanted to go home.

 

People do stupid things. People say stupid things. The BP people I've seen testifying both in Congress and in the joint Coast Guard-MMS hearings have been saying a lot of stupid things. They may not be guilty, but they're starting to act like it.

 

BP seems to have tried something brand new without establishing safety protocols like those mentioned by previous posters. They easily could have got away with it, but they didn't.

 

It's been a long time since I worked in the industry, editing technical reports on drilling, but I can imagine both geologists and drillers going crazy at the risks BP apparently took. Their fumbling of the recovery efforts seems consistent.

 

--lemit

 

p.s. I know this isn't the worst oil spill in history, but it's bad enough.

[Boerseun]

Everybody's up BP's nostrils because of the huge news covering the spill is getting. BP is being vilified as being the most evil corporation with no consideration of safety measures. Yet, since the seventies, when big-time oil exploration, drilling and recovery began in the Niger delta, more than 7,000 oil spills took place, causing irreparable damage to the marine ecosystems of the delta. That's a big spill every second day, for forty years. The biggest part of Nigeria's coastline is a toxic mess with zero sea life remaining, as well as the land-based animals who used to be dependent on the tides bringing them sustenance from the sea. Complaints fall on deaf ears, because it's in the country's leadership's interests to have the oil companies proceed unhindered - because of shared ownership, kick-backs and bribery. Those very same companies then carry on, spending zero on clean-up or even spill prevention, because that is the route to highest profits.

The point I'm trying to make is that no company, BP included, are inherently "good" or "evil". Companies only respond to the environment in which they operate in such a way as to maximize income and minimize expense.

I'm not trying to defend BP by any means - all I'm saying is that they're no worse or better than any oil company you care to mention. The big polluter in the Niger delta is Shell, and if the same media shitstorm have been whirling around their heads since their first spill in Nigeria, they would have had to close shop long ago.

 

The Niger Delta is completely and utterly ruined because we like to drive SUV's instead of little fuel-saving tin-boxes. The companies just follow the path of least resistance and maximized profits.

[Buffy]

The point I'm trying to make is that no company, BP included, are inherently "good" or "evil". Companies only respond to the environment in which they operate in such a way as to maximize income and minimize expense.

I agree with this completely: In the US however, one of the fetishes of the right is to anthropomorphize companies into human actors: under decisions of the Supreme Court, companies actually enjoy *all* of the rights granted by the Constitution.

 

Unfortunately as you point out, they actually have no morals, no conscience, and the humans actually running them have a multitude of excuses to claim that they have neither the power nor the incentive to "do the right thing."

 

I'm not sure that this is necessarily bad, but with the enormous power--due to enormous monetary resources, far beyond any individual citizen--they have had the ability to manipulate governments to change laws to their favor, from the fig leaf level in the US where they've merely found administrations willing to ignore a broad range of slightly weakened but popular laws, to the wholesale criminality of Nigeria.

 

It's not BP that's criminal, its the politicians who in spite of their actual legal and moral promises do the bidding of the people who pay for their election rather than the people who actually vote for them.

 

Now apropos of all of this, there actually are many laws on the books here in the US that pose criminal liability for companies and their officers for some of the things that have happened in this episode, and the US Attorney General announced a criminal investigation today: there are indeed some people at BP who ought to be quaking in their boots, but hopefully they'll be able to pay their lawyers, consultants and lobbyists enough to get them the same result that they get in Nigeria....just a little bit more expensively...

 

..oh and this: How hard is BP trying to get control and clean up the mess? Well, just enough to look busy but keep their costs as low as possible... click the link to read Robert Reich's interview with a veteran petroleum engineer on this...

 

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread, :thumbs_up

Buffy

[Donk]

Found THIS today.

 

Yes, the Oil Drum has an agenda to push, but the guy seems to know what he's talking about. Could it really get this scary?

Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it....I sincerely hope I am wrong.

 

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

 

The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens...

 

We are seeing the puny forces of man vs the awesome forces of nature.

We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win...

and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will....

[Boerseun]

Check it out for some perspective: If It Was My Home - Visualizing the BP Oil Spill

[freeztar]

I'm still perplexed as to why the dome approaches didn't work. Anyone know the nitty gritty details?

 

From what I read, there was some sort of problem with methane caltrate (ice) crystals forming. Perhaps it is just my naivety, but doesn't this seem like an engineering challenge that could be overcome? I don't have any ideas myself, but it seems strange to me that we can drill 20,000 feet into the Earth below 4,000 feet of ocean and yet we can't lower a dome onto a gushing oil stream and collect it because conditions at 5,000 feet deep create project-ending ice.

[modest]

From what I read, there was some sort of problem with methane caltrate (ice) crystals forming.

 

If that's true, and I really haven't been following the news too closely, then the place where the well meets the ocean should be,

 

http://sepwww.stanford.edu/public/docs/sep92/christin1/Gif/phase.gif

 

below the diagonal line at the appropriate depth and temp. If that is not the case then what they are saying would not be possible.

 

Water that deep would be no more than a couple C over freezing, so, yes. I think they would expect some of the natural gas to turn crystalline at about 1500 meters. Crystals have a habit of forming on surfaces so it would also make sense that they would grow on the cap and make it buoyant (easily fixed by physically strapping the cap to the sea floor) or even to clog up the pipe or cap entirely (not so easy to fix, I'd imagine).

 

Two solutions would either be to not let water into the cap and pipe, or to heat the cap and pipe. The first option seems to be what they are doing. The first option would work because methane must react with water to form a hydrate which is solid at that depth and temp. It has the apparent side effect of allowing some of the oil to leak out from under the cap otherwise some water might leak in.

 

The second option (heating the cap) seems simple enough. My first thought was that the gas would be hot coming out the well anyway so maybe mother nature would be helping in that regard. But, the gas is probably expanding many, many times its volume as it exits the well and an increase in volume would immediately lower the temp—like spraying a canister of CO₂. It will come out of the nozzle cold, and so too might the gas coming out of the well be cooling.

 

Come to think of it, probably the best solution would be to seal the connection between the well and the ship above... then water couldn't get in the cap (or tightly sealed connection) and neither could oil get out. That must not be practical to implement, because it would be a simple and direct solution.

 

~modest

[C1ay]

I'm still perplexed as to why the dome approaches didn't work. Anyone know the nitty gritty details?

 

I'm still wondering why prayer hasn't worked

[Buffy]

I'm still wondering why prayer hasn't worked ;)

Gee, with all the teabaggers praying for it to be "Obama's Katrina," maybe it has! :(

 

The Dutch, they are known and the Norwegian, they are known for, um, for dikes, and for cleaning up water and dealing with spills,

Buffy

[Buffy]

From this evening's Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel: ...today the ceos of oil companies heard about those problems from congress. all of those executives from the top five oil companies in the country were summoned to capitol hill to answer for what their industry has wrought in the gulf. and ended up being one of those oddly satisfying days of congressional hearings when the stuff that ought to get asked actually gets asked. stuff like hey, oil industry executive, why exactly are you still using technology from the 1960s to clean up a spill in 2000s.

 

Congresswoman: Now another picture. A picture I'm very familiar with, the boom used in the santa barbara oil spill in 1969. that was about the era of the rotary telephone. now here's a picture of the boom used in the gulf today. 40 years later. do you see a big difference between the boom technologies used in these two pictures?

 

CEO: i don't see a big change in boom technology. there have been tremendous changes in technology and how the boom is deployed and how satellite imagery helps deploy resources into the best possible places.

 

Congresswoman: yes, we do have satellite imagery now, but that was the era of the rotary telephone. we now live in the era of the iphone.

 

Rachel: According to bp, it's okay to use 1960s-era technology because now, because we have satellites and stuff, we're better at knowing where to put our 1960 1960s-era technology. that's like if we were still driving ford pintos that exploded on impact. but now they have onstar in them, so when they blow up, we know exactly where to find the smoldering wreckage. this current disaster happened specifically to bp, but one of the things that's emerged clearly since is it could have happened easily to any of the five big oil companies that testified today, at least, including, say, exxonmobil. the ceo was grilled by congressman bart stupak today about his company's claim that they can handle a spill as large as 166,000 barrels per day.

 

Congressman Stupak: if you can't handle 40,000, how are you going to handle 166,000 per day as you indicate?

 

CEO: the answer to that is when these things happen, we are not well equipped to deal with them.

 

Congressman: so when these things happen, these worst-case scenario, we can't handle them, correct?

 

CEO: we are not well equipped to handle them. there will be impacts, as we are seeing. when they happen, it is a fact that we're not well equipped to prevent any and all damage. there will be damage occurring.

 

Rachel: there will be damage occurring. freeze frame. saw this, stop with this. leave that guy there. this is one of those moments, this is important. append this to every deep water drilling application. append this to every complaint about the deep-water drilling moratorium. append this to when every politician says what we really should be doing is continuing to drill. here's the oil industry, the ceo of exxon mobil admitting they have no idea what to do when these things go wrong...

...the whole segment is worth a watch....

 

By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?... While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.

Buffy

[Boerseun]

YouTube - BP Spills Coffee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM&feature=player_embedded