We’re now into day way too many of the BP oil spill, and the President has just yesterday been down on the Louisiana coast-again.
There have been suggestions that the Administration should take action to essentially push BP out of the way and take over the work itself, particularly as it relates to the cleanup.
It may have even occurred to you that an official declaration of some sort might be needed, in order to bring the full power of the Feds into play.
That’s some good thinking, but before we go jumping right into declaring things we better understand the law, because if we don’t, we could actually make things worse.
After six methods for stopping the [Deepwater Horizon] leak failed, BP is now trying a seventh method: “cut and cap.”
[snip]
If this seventh attempt fails, the next option will be to wait on one of two relief wells to intercept and block the original well. This is considered the best hope for permanently stopping the flow, but those wells won’t be in place until August at the soonest. Some predict that it could take until Christmas.
But Kaku thinks that even those predictions could be too optimistic.
“You would have to win the lottery to get on the first try an exact, an exact meeting at the bottom of the well in order to pump cement to shut it off,” Kaku told NBC’s Matt Lauer Wednesday.
If the attempt fails, the drill will be reversed, the hole will be filled with cement and they will try again.
“You have to do this over and over again until you get it just right,” Kaku said. “It takes many tries. So August is optimistic.”
“So this could be spewing oil for months. Could it last for a year?” asked Lauer.
“It could last for years, plural. Okay? If everything fails and all these different kinds of relief wells don’t work, it could be spewing stuff into the Gulf until we have dead zones, entire dead zones in the Gulf. For years,” Kaku said.
This video is from NBC’s Today Show, broadcast June 2, 2010.
The EPA on May 10 authorized BP to use two dispersants-COREXIT 9500 and COREXIT EC9527A, distributed by the Tennessee and Texas units of Nalco Co. in Illinois. BP had already applied those products at the spill site for nearly two weeks. As concerns about COREXIT grew, however, the EPA asked BP on May 19 to find a less-toxic dispersant within 24 hours, and to start using its replacement in 72 hours. BP answered that it wanted to stick with COREXIT.
Frustrated EPA and Coast Guard officials said the company’s response was inadequate, and told BP to start reducing its use of surface dispersants. But in a decision questioned by some scientists, officials said BP’s subsea or underwater dispersant use, authorized in mid-May, could continue.
Last week, the EPA and the Coast Guard said that they would start calling the shots about BP’s dispersant use and that COREXIT applications could be scaled back by as much as 50% to 80%.
COREXIT should be scaled back to 0% —
Especially since BETTER options are available NOW.
PORT FOURCHON, La. – Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that federal authorities have opened criminal and civil investigations into the nation’s worst oil spill, and BP lost billions in market value when shares dropped in the first trading day since the company failed yet again to plug the gusher.
Investors presumably realized the best chance to stop the leak was months away and there was no end in sight to the cleanup. As BP settled in for the long-term, Holder announced the criminal probe, though he would not specify the companies or individuals that might be targeted.
“We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response,” Holder said in New Orleans.
VENICE, La. – Disputing scientists’ claims of large oil plumes suspended underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, BP PLC’s chief executive on Sunday said the company has largely narrowed the focus of its cleanup to surface slicks rolling into Louisiana’s coastal marshes.
During a tour of a BP PLC staging area for cleanup workers, CEO Tony Hayward said the company’s sampling showed “no evidence” that oil was suspended in large masses beneath the surface. He didn’t elaborate on how the testing was done.
Hayward said that oil’s natural tendency is to rise to the surface, and any oil found underwater was in the process of working its way up.
“The oil is on the surface,” Hayward said. “There aren’t any plumes.”
David Edwards at RawStory notes in a May 30 article that “Oil giant BP has said it is responsible for the Gulf oil spill, but now the company seems to be reserving the right to blame someone else” and that “Fox News’ Chris Wallace questioned the managing director of BP, Bob Dudley, about the company’s poor safety record. While taking full responsibility for the spill, Dudley indicated they may shift that responsibility in the future”.
“We have had this accident in the Gulf, which we’re taking full responsibility for. We’re not blaming anyone yet for it. The investigation of this will determine the causes,” Dudley said on the program to Wallace.
Dudley’s comments come only one day after BP announced that the so-called “top kill” procedure, its latest effort to plug the leak, was a failure.
“Over the last decade, It’s fair to say that BP has had a poor safety record,” Wallace said. “In fact, just over the last three years according to OSHA, the government’s workplace safety agency, BP had 760 what are called ‘egregious, willful safety violations.’ Two other oil companies were next with just eight. How do you explain that, sir?” asked Wallace.
“It primarily goes back to an incident we had in Texas about a half a decade ago where tragedy and explosion of refinery in Houston. Then we’ve had an issue in Alaska as well,” said Dudley.
“In the last three years, the chief executive of the company Tony Hayward has brought in a program top to bottom where we focus on safe and reliable operations and ingrained it in the culture of the company,” he said.
“Forgive me, Mr. Dudley, that hasn’t worked too well, has it?” Wallace said.
AP also reports today that on ABC’s This Week program that Dudley has said that a “relief well is the ‘end point’ of efforts to stop the Gulf oil spill – which suggests there’s little chance of plugging the leak until the new well is completed in August”, and that “that the current attempt to cap the leaking well would at best minimize the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico”.
Here is Wallace talking with Dudley on Fox News Sunday, broadcast May 30, 2010.
Phillippe Cousteau, Jr., the grandson of French explorer and ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau:
BP’s oil spill is humanity’s latest strike against against the World’s oceans, according to Phillippe Cousteau Jr., an explorer and host for Animal Planet and Planet Green.
Phillipe Cousteau, Jr., actually dove into the oil, dispersants of this BP soup mix.
Phillippe Cousteau, Jr. was on “Real Time with Bill Maher” this past Friday and spoke of what the country’s worst in oil spill in history will mean for oceans that are already suffering from pollution and overfishing.
Philippe Cousteau, Jr., the ecologist grandson of Jacques, joined Bill Maher on Real Time last night to give his assessment of the Gulf of Mexico, where he has been working to help clean up the oil washing ashore from the the open offshore oil well. While he seemed confident that there was a way to fix the problem, he stressed that the ocean ecosystem will not fix itself. . . . .
Maher asked about the situation in Louisiana, where Cousteau had been working for the past weeks- his answer was not incredibly optimistic. He did have a direct answer for people who believe the ocean is strong and healthy enough to fix itself:
“I could cut my leg off, I could cut my arm off, I could gouge my eye out, I’d still probably survive, but not very well, and that’s what we’re doing to the ocean. It’s the life support system of this planet. We’ve been dumping in it, we’ve been polluting it, we’ve been destroying it for decades, and we’re essentially maiming ourselves… ”
Speaking about massive annual dead zones just off the U.S. Coast, Cousteau lets us know that we have exceeded the tipping point:
Daniel Tencer, RawStory, Saturday, May 29th, 2010 — 7:18 pm
As the latest effort to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico meets with failure, the idea of nuking the immediate area to seal the oil underground is gaining steam among some energy experts and researchers.
One prominent energy expert known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008 says sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is “probably the only thing we can do” to stop the leak.
Matt Simmons, founder of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, also says that there is evidence of a second oil leak about five to seven miles from the initial leak that BP has focused on fixing. That second leak, he says, is so large that the initial one is “minor” in comparison.
Simmons spoke to Bloomberg News on Friday, before BP announced that its latest effort to plug the leak, known as the “top kill” method, had failed.
“A week ago Sunday the first research vessel … was commissioned by NOAA to scour the area,” he said. They found “a gigantic plume” growing about five to seven miles from the site of the original leak, Simmons said.
Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge.
“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” he said.
[snip]
Asked by a Bloomberg reporter about the risks involved in setting off a nuclear bomb off the coast of Louisiana, Simmons argued that a nuclear explosion deep inside a well bore would have little effect on surrounding areas.
“If you’re 18,000 feet under the sea bed, it basically wont do anything [on the surface],” he said.
Joe Wiesenthal at Business Insider says the idea of using nukes will be getting a lot of attention now that the “top kill” procedure has failed.
Next, the so-called “nuclear option” is about to get a lot of attention. In this case, of course, nuclear option is not a euphemism. It’s the real idea that the best way to kill this thing is to stick a small nuke in there and bury the well under rubble. … By the middle of the coming week, it will be all over cable news, as pundits press The White House hard on whether it’s being considered and why not.
video broadcast on Bloomberg News, Friday May 28, 2010.
