(11AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
This week in Trickle Down Oilonomics:
First, remember this ?
Screen shot from June 1, 2010 of ROVs cutting the old riser pipe off the old top of the BOP, showing the underwater plume.
Two months later:
Tues, Aug 3, 2010, BP pumped drilling mud into the capped Macondo 252 Deepwater Horizon well from the top.
http://www.bp.com/genericartic…
BP announces Static pressure stabilization from Mud Pump into well a success on Wed Aug 4th.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/n…
Federal Government and NOAA’s Lubchenco & team of expert scientists announce rest of oil in Gulf of Mexico is naturally biodegrading. Oil is disappeared ! As of Wed, Aug 4th. https://www.docudharma.com/diar…
From Plume to Pie Chart, 6/1/2010 to 8/4/2010. In Amerika, Oil Spill Cleans You !
Except that 650 miles of shoreline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida remained oiled, and 57,539 square miles, or 24% of the Gulf of Mexico, is closed to fishing, per their own press release. http://ht.ly/2loZg
BP announced Thurs Aug 5th that they had completed pumping cement into the well from the top and that depending on weather, mid August was the current estimate of the date the relief well would reach the annulus of the Macondo (MC 252) well. (The annulus is the outermost part of the well bore, the casing is inside that, the drill pipe is inside that ) http://www.bp.com/genericartic…
Ret. Coast Guard Adm. and National Incident Commander Thad Allen announces the well will not be considered sealed until bottom is cemented by relief well, and that he is the boss, giving the commands, and that’s that. From Aug 3, Tues, 2 days before they pumped the cement in from the top http://ht.ly/2kQH5 poor Adm. Thad Allen is still saying they’re going to pump the cement in from the bottom. “Static Kill” was successfully pumping the well bore full with special weight drilling mud, and having the well pressure drop but hold steady. It’s not the same thing as cementing.
Once results from the static diagnostics test are received, the relief well is expected to be completed within five to seven days.
“The static kill will increase the probability that the relief well will work. But the whole thing will not be done until the relief well is completed. The static kill is not the end all be all. It is a diagnostic test that will tell us a lot about the integrity of the casing and the wellbore. It will tell us about the tolerance for volume and pressure. But in the long run, drilling into the annulus and into the casing pipe from below, filling that with mud and then filling that with cement is the only solution to the end of this,” he said.
“And there should be no ambiguity about that. I’m the National Incident Commander, and that’s the way this will end….. with the relief wells being drilled, and the annulus and the casing being filled with mud, and cement being poured.”
Energy Sec. Steven Chu wants the well to be ” dead, dead, dead. Don’t want anything to rise out of the grave.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru… He tells this to the Washington Post, the graveyard of 4th estate. They should know dead when they see it.
BP pumps cement into well from the top on Thurs Aug 5th. By Fri, Aug 6th, Waiting for cement to set up and then cure. Cement thought to take 24 to 36 hours to set up. Cement takes about 5 to 7 days after setting up to “cure.”
http://www.theoildrum.com/node…
What happens when cement doesn’t cure properly. April 20,2010
• Today from HuffPo, Friday 7/6/2010 Spill Investigators want to find undersea evidence
Coast Guard to supervise BP and Transocean’s raising of the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and well head original BOP assembly to look for evidence of what caused the blowout and explosion. And they started looking forward to what to do with their billion dollar tar ball baby maker ……
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…In other developments Friday, BP said it might drill again someday into the same lucrative undersea reservoir of oil, which is still believed to hold nearly $4 billion worth of crude. That prospect is unlikely to sit well with Gulf Coast residents furious at the oil giant.
“There’s lots of oil and gas here,” Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said. “We’re going to have to think about what to do with that at some point.”
Also Friday, BP said Suttles – who has spent more than three months managing BP’s response efforts on the Gulf – is returning to his day job in Houston. Mike Utsler, a vice president who has been running BP’s command post in Houma, La., since April, will replace him.
Good thing they’ll have an unused spare relief well #2 nearby just in case they want to suck some more in that BP sucks special sort of way.
_____________
•And from MotherJones Mac McClelland, Friday, 7/6/2010 BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers
http://motherjones.com/rights-…On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since. Included in this tally are some Coast Guard and National Guard staff, but BP and subcontractors comprise the vast majority. (I’ve been trying to get the exact breakdown from the Coast Guard for four days, but to no avail, and BP said it didn’t have it on hand, though the Coast Guard has told me it just reports BP’s numbers.) In Grand Isle, Louisiana, cleanup workers (none of whom can be named; you know this drill by now) say their coworkers were either told to go home for Tropical Storm Bonnie and then never called back or fired in a massive and sudden drug test.
“Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn’t get the further notice,” one supervisor told me. “Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was ‘Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.’ This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It’s the first time BP tested us.”
____/snipThe scaleback is set to continue. Supervisors say they’re supposed to break down to just a “skeleton crew” by the end of September, so hopefully the media myth that there’s no more oil anywhere comes true. “Everything still changes day to day,” the supervisor told me. “You don’t know when a bunch of oil’s gonna pop up.”
Current tweet from official BP twitter:
Update: BP’s present focus entirely on response in Gulf, future use of reservoir not currently under consideration.24 minutes ago
and
A survey of scientists found one key characteristic they used to identify the #Gulf: “resilient.”about 1 hour ago
Currently they have their spin down on Suttle’s little blurble.
http://www.bp.com/genericartic…
As Mr. Suttles made clear this morning, BP’s present focus is entirely on the response effort in the Gulf of Mexico and the future use of the reservoir is not currently under consideration.
Mr. Suttles also emphasized that neither the original wellbore, which was successfully cemented, nor either of the two relief wells would be used as part of any future development.
Ya huh.
Successfully cemented ? You using any of that quick- crete crap that Halliburton tried to get away with the first time, BP ?
We’ll see.
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…. so did Transocean, which leased the destroyed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP (they insured it and got paid for it).
BP’s suing them for $1.2 billion.
http://www.google.com/hostedne…
Incredibly this AP story says that Halliburton has the least risk of liability. Figures. And that they are planning to make up lost revenues with on shore natural gas drilling, which would tie in with what the Senate plans to do with that POS energy bill remnant.
BP is a mechanical abstraction, after all.
There’s what it will do next.
reporting of BP’s homeland terrorist attack. I often can’t bring myself to read the stuff – specially since the top guys got such a lovely parachute.
But appreciate your work ARC.