…numerous industry experts have warned that there is no upside to temporarily capping the well as part of the well integrity test, and that it might actually cause the well to blow out.
Admiral Thad Allen previously said that the test will be considered a success if pressure in the well stays at 8,000 psi or higher for 48 hours. So we won’t know for a couple of days whether the test has succeeded.
As AP correctly notes:
Now begins a waiting period to see if the cap can hold the oil without blowing a new leak in the well. Engineers will monitor pressure readings incrementally for up to 48 hours before reopening the cap while they decide what to do.
Interestingly, as CNN’s Situation Room noted a couple of minutes ago, the cap might soon be re-opened, and closed again only during hurricanes:
Admiral Thad Allen releasing a statement to us just a short while ago…
He cautions “This isn’t over”…
Very interesting here. He talks about the cap as a temporary measure to be used for hurricanes…
“It remains likely that we will return to the containment process… until the relief well is completed”
So it looks like the plan is to go back to releasing the oil and letting it pump up to the surface.
(hat tip FloridaOilSpillLaw).
So is the well integrity test a meaningless PR stunt, which is delaying completion of the relief wells, and failing to bring us any closer to permanently killing the oil gusher?
Tag: Well Blowout
Jul 16 2010
BP’s Cap is “Temporary Measure” Says Adm. Thad Allen
Jul 01 2010
BP’s Well May Leak For 55 Years Or More Into The Gulf Of Mexico?
On June 15, 2010 the US Department of Energy announced that a group of federal and independent scientists convened by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and Chair of the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) Dr. Marcia McNutt (Director of the U.S. Geological Survey) had developed a new estimate for the amount of oil gushing from the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico that indicated the leak could be spewing up to 2.52 million gallons of crude oil per day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from British Petroleum’s Macondo Well.
“This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well,” said Chu, who then expanded with “As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change. In particular, the upper number is less certain – which is exactly why we have been planning for the worst case scenario at every stage and why we are continuing to focus on responding to the upper end of the estimate, plus additional contingencies.”
Estimates from both BP and from the US Government of the amount of oil gushing from the blown out wellhead on the gulf seabed have been almost continually revised upwards since the well blowout and leak began on April 20, with widespread suspicions that BP has deliberately understated the leak rate in attempts to limit liability for the company.
It now appears that Chu may have been somewhat prescient with his statement that “it is important to realize that the numbers can change”, and that the estimate of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico may need to be increased again, since an undated internal BP document (.PDF) obtained by Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) was released by Markey on Sunday June 20 showing that BP’s own internal analysis believed that a worst-case scenario, based on damage to the well bore, could result in a leak rate from the well of 55,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
Jun 23 2010
Gulf Oil Leak May Be Over 4 Million Gallons Per Day
Last week on June 15 the US Department of Energy announced that a group of federal and independent scientists convened by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and Chair of the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) Dr. Marcia McNutt (Director of the U.S. Geological Survey) had developed a new estimate for the amount of oil gushing from the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico that indicated the leak could be spewing up to 2.52 million gallons of crude oil per day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from British Petroleum’s Macondo Well.
“This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well,” said Chu, who then expanded with “As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change. In particular, the upper number is less certain – which is exactly why we have been planning for the worst case scenario at every stage and why we are continuing to focus on responding to the upper end of the estimate, plus additional contingencies.”
Estimates from both BP and from the US Government of the amount of oil gushing from the blown out wellhead on the gulf seabed have been almost continually revised upwards since the well blowout and leak began on April 20, with widespread suspicions that BP has deliberately understated the leak rate in attempts to limit liability for the company.
It now appears that Chu may have been somewhat prescient with his statement that “it is important to realize that the numbers can change”, and that the estimate of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico may need to be increased again, since an undated internal BP document (.PDF) obtained by Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) was released by Markey on Sunday June 20 showing that BP’s own internal analysis believed that a worst-case scenario, based on damage to the well bore, could result in a leak of 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
May 29 2010
Naomi Klein: “A Strange Corporate Oil State”
Author and activist Naomi Klein has been visiting Louisiana, and conducted a short on camera interview with Al Jazeera about her impressions of the disaster response to BP’s oil leak catastrophe…
Senator Dick Durbin once described Capitol Hill as being owned by the banks. He said the banks ‘own this place’ describing why it was so hard to get financial reform through in Washington, and all I can say from having spent the week here in Louisiana is that it really feels like the oil and gas industry owns this place.
I think we’re dealing with two factors here. One is an election strategy for the Obama Administration, they want to keep some distance, they don’t want to own the disaster fully, they want to still have somebody to point fingers to. But then there’s also just this major attitude in this administration from day one really, to trust industry.
And so, even when the industry creates the disaster – I’m sorry to make these analogies with the financial sector, but we saw it with the banks as well – they melted down the economy but then we still heard from the Obama Administration as well as the Bush Administration starting with them but carried through from the Obama Administration, ‘we’re not going to tell the banks how to do their jobs, they’re the experts, we’re going to stand back’.
And now they’re doing the same thing with the response to the greatest, what looks like the greatest environmental catastrophe, or what could very well prove to be he greatest environmental catastrophe this country has ever seen. And I think people are very confused by this because this is clearly a national emergency, so why is it that BP is in charge of the whole operation?
May 28 2010
BP Blaming Employees For The Gusher
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…
May 23 2010
It’s Deja vu all over again, from the Timor Sea
History is full of “flashbulb moments” — when FLASH!
the course of History, changes instantly, on a dime,
as the result of some collective common experience.
This is not one of those tales.
Rather it’s another kind of story entirely,
when we all collectively sense something’s wrong,
but no one can really pin it down, to …
Exactly what the problem is.
Déjà vu [Deja vu] is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the recent past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain.
[…]
The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of “eeriness,” “strangeness,” “weirdness,” or what Sigmund Freud and other psychologists call “the uncanny.” The “previous” experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience has genuinely happened in the past.
May 20 2010
BP = Beyond Prosecution
Mention the name of the corporation BP to Scott West and two words immediately come to mind: Beyond Prosecution.
West was the special agent in charge with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criminal division who had been probing alleged crimes committed by BP and the company’s senior officials in connection with a March 2006 pipeline rupture at the company’s Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 267,000 gallons of crude oil across two acres of frozen tundra – the second largest spill in Alaska’s history – which went undetected for nearly a week.
West was confident that the thousands of hours he invested into the criminal probe would result in felony charges against the company and the senior executives who received advanced warnings from dozens of employees at the Prudhoe Bay facility that unless immediate steps were taken to repair the severely corroded pipeline, a disaster on par with that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill was only a matter of time.
In fact, West, who spent more than two decades at the EPA’s criminal division, was also told the pipeline was going to rupture – about six months before it happened.
In a wide-ranging interview with Truthout, West described how the Justice Department (DOJ) abruptly shut down his investigation into BP in August 2007 and gave the company a “slap on the wrist” for what he says were serious environmental crimes that should have sent some BP executives to jail.
He first aired his frustrations after he retired from the agency in 2008. But he said his story is ripe for retelling because the same questions about BP’s record are now being raised again after a catastrophic explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and ruptured an oil well 5,000 feet below the surface that has been spewing upwards of 200,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf waters for a month.
May 19 2010
Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak to Loop Current Forecast – May 17 through May 21, 2010
Video compiled from data produced by The College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, Ocean Circulation Group http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu/
OCG/CMS/USF maintains a coordinated program of coastal ocean observing and modeling for the West Florida Continental Shelf (WFS).
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory ensemble forecast from four different numerical models – Modeling includes a West Florida Shelf version of ROMS nested in the Navy’s operational HYCOM. We are also diagnosing model output from the Navy’s HYCOM, from NCSU’s SABGOM ROMS, and also from the NOAA RTOFS.
http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil_spill_ensemble_forecast.html
Embeddable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d53Y8t85bI
(about 1 minute 8 seconds)
May 04 2010
The Gulf Stream Is Only The Beginning
There have been many predictions that the oil leak from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon catastophic oil well blowout will enter the Gulf Stream since the well is at the end of one branch of the stream.
There hasn’t been much talk so far about what happens if it does get into the Gulf Stream.
Here’s a visual of where it can go from there…
Click image to view full size
May 04 2010
Spinning The BP Catastrophe
According to Cassandra LaRussa writing on May 01, 2009 at CommonDreams.org British Petroleum (BP), like most of the oil industry, enjoys enormous lobbying strength and very close ties to the lawmakers who are responsible for regulating oil industry practices as a federal investigation looms over them in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon debacle in the Gulf of Mexico.
Cassandra pointed out in her article that:
During the 2008 election cycle, individuals and political action committees associated with BP — a Center for Responsive Politics’ “heavy hitter” — contributed half a million dollars to federal candidates. About 40 percent of these donations went to Democrats. The top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.
And make no mistake, a debacle it is, and one that makes all other industrial ‘accidents’ in history pale by comparison.
As Political Spin Examiner Maryann Tobin noted back on March 31 after President Obama announced his plans to lift the longtime ban on offshore drilling:
The shores off America’s coast had been safe from oil drilling – until now. President Obama has announced plans to allow oil companies to drill in areas that were previously protected.
The newly opened oil fields will span from Delaware to Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and parts of Alaska.
“In a reversal of a long-standing ban on most offshore drilling, President Barack Obama is allowing oil drilling off Virginia’s shorelines and considering it for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard,” according to the AP.
Environmental group, The Sierra Club, believes that more drilling will not stop US dependence on foreign oil. According to a statement to MSNBC, offshore drilling will only serve to end another boundary of protection for the environment.
The beneficiaries of offshore drilling will be the oil companies. Exxon Mobile and Chevron posted more than $50 million in profits last year. After President Obama’s announcement this morning, oil stocks began to rise.
Lifting the ban on offshore drilling will erase a prohibition that has been in place for more than 20 years.