May 2010 archive

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Welcome to the Thursday Night Express. This is a new service joining the Sunday Train.

In Sunday Train, I try to dig into some information related to energy independent transport and share what details I can find.

And of course, some people have time to ride the Sunday Train, and some people do not have the time to spare. The Thursday Evening Express is an experiment that will pick three specific topics, primarily from the previous Sunday Train, and present three short arguments in two to three paragraphs.

Cannon Fodder

Function noun

Date: circa 1891

1  soldiers regarded or treated as expendable in every battle

2  an expendable or exploitable person, group, or thing

So today, late in the work day my boss says ‘Hey Brunemeyer, lets go.  We’re off to Monmouth County to push up a 30’.  This translated into driving to one of the wealthiest towns in the country to push ups a $2,000 flagpole, on a guys front lawn, in front of his brand new anitque looking 4000 sq ft summer home, a block from the ocean.

On the way back south to our humble base camp we got to discussing the state of affairs we face today.  Things like the, largest environmental disaster ever seen, the riots in Greece and Ice Land, Wall St. bailouts and ‘to big to fail’.  

I mentioned that I’d been listening to the Lord Ramage novels and the Richard Sharpe series on my blinky book reader and how the idea of Cannon Fodder hadn’t changed since the beginning of time.  We, and I’ll be liberal in thinking of anyone not of the ‘mover and shaker’ cast are nothing but cannon fodder.  1% give or take of humanity is and has always controlled the game.  The 99% remaining are nothing but Cannon Fodder.  We the ‘enlisted, drafted, enslaved, pressed’ are of no concern beyond our use as prostitutes consumers, borrowers, laborers, clarks willing of necessity to sell our minds bodies and souls to survive swindled and defrauded with the scam we call the American Dream.  “yep, you too can live the life of luxury and hedonistic over indulgence if ya work hard and do as we say”  

Now you may say  ‘not me, I have a degree, a good job, great future and who knows what all else but think about it.  Loose your job, get sick or have any sort of setback and see how fast all that secure future is real and how much is so much hype.  

It’s the same old tune, cyclical and unending,  I’d hoped we’d evolved to something better than our brutish past proved.  I’d thought maybe just maybe we’d learned at least in some small way that we’re all in it together but no I was delusional, drunk or stoned.  We are still a brutish species.  The revolutionary war in the U.S., the French Revolution, Russia, India, Iran, Cuba et al are but blips in the great theater of history.  The little men behind the curtain still play Svengali and we still march, bayonets at the ready, stocks on, hopes and patriotism swirling in our minds into the breach to die.  To play our parts, no more valuable than chits, or playing cards in the great game of life.

It now appears that BP while attempting to plug the gusher with their so called “top kill” operation, has moved to trying to blame the Deepwater Horizon platform explosion and the BP oil gusher in the Gulf on it’s employees who were on the platform at the time of the explosion.

In this short clip from CBS Wednesday, beginning at the 1:26 minute mark, you hear CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassman say that…

BP officials have told congressional investigators that right before the rig exploded, workers on it ignored strong warning signs – equipment readings that something was terribly wrong, including contaminated cement and leaking gas, signs that the rig could blow – and two hours later, it did.

Nice try, BP. Directly contradicting BP’s spin was BP’s Chief Electronics Technician Mike Williams who was on the rig at the time of the explosion.

You might remember Williams. He was the technician who appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, in an interview by 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, and described the events leading up to the explosion…

Update 4: it appears they’re doing one junk shot after another, at least they were on Friday, each has failed so far to lodge enough material to restrict the flow very much if at all.

Despite Obama’s (public) orders, they have stopped drilling one of the relief wells.   Which means this could all come down to one relief well attempt months from now.

Update 3: again as should be obvious to anyone watching the feed, the junk shots have failed:

But the technician working on the effort said that despite the injections at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well. He said that was barely an improvement on Wednesday’s results when the operation began and was suspended in its 11th hour of operations. BP resumed the pumping effort Thursday evening for about 10 more hours.

“I won’t say progress was zero, but I don’t know if we can round up enough mud to make it work,” said the technician. “Everyone is disappointed at this time.”

Frankly, I think they knew this was never going to work from the start, and it’s a bunch of theatre and gamesmanship with Obama that we’re seeing.

Update 2: Thad Allan is now claiming the Junk Shot is working ‘Oil flow is stemmed’–but he said that yesterday, and it was an outright lie.

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 mud injections, to strengthen their ability to counteract the leaking oil.

NYT

Update 1: CNN is reporting that the 2nd attempt– with ‘Junk Shot’  has started. However, there is no indication of that on the live feed at all.

————

The top kill has not succeeded in reducing the pressure enough to inject concrete.  They have ‘temporarily’ stopped–as anyone watching the live stream could have figured out.

New York Times:

Setback Delays ‘Top Kill’ Effort to Seal Leaking Oil Well in Gulf

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and LIZ ROBBINS 15 minutes ago

BP had to temporarily stop its effort to plug the well when engineers saw that too much of the fluid they were injecting into the well was escaping along with the leaking crude oil.

Word is they are going to try the junk shot. Maybe, then another top kill attempt?

I worry they’re gonna blow this thing up.

The leakage rate is significant (I calculated earlier that it was around 17,000 bd, which lies within the newly reported range of 12,000 to 19,000 bd, and may have been higher than BP were actually anticipating. (Though the leak may also have increased a little as the mud was injected at higher pressures). The operation has already used all the mud on one of the supply boats, and has moved to the second (there is a third standing by so they won’t run out). The concern, however is now with the volume of cement that will be required for the seal.

The high volume that is leaking would require that additional amount to the volume needed for the seal itself, and that may be closer to the available capacity of the system that they have in place, or the supplies that they have on site to achieve the seal. If that is the case, one can understand the desire to at least partially plug the leaks in the BOP, and to wait until the mud column fully balances the pressure in the oil reservoir before starting this phase of the operation.

Until this point in the operation the volume of cement required to create an effective plug has not been seen as an issue.

– The Oil Drum