Tag: BP

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.

Energy expert: Nuking oil leak ‘only thing we can do’

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.

Turned on the tube, there’s a live press conference with  Rr. Admiral Landry and BP’s Spokesperson Doug Suttles.

Top Kill is officially Not Working.  

Suttles

“We’ve tried and it scares everybody that we haven’t succeeded in getting this stopped.”

No. Kidding.

Admiral Landry.

Obviously we’re very disappointed in today’s announcement.

We will continue with a very aggressive response posture (to get this under control)

Have directed BP to to move forward with the next option, LMRP.  

(added later quote) The real solution has been and continues to be the relief well.  

Mmm, hmm. Yes.

They think that if they can get a good seal over the top, the LMRP  Cap, lower marine riser package Cap, might work, which is the option they are going for next.

This is a newly engineered object, different than what they have used before, which is going to go on top on what they have, with a sort of seal, not a mechanical seal, but a “sealing device” and methanol injection for antifreeze,  that Suttles says “should” capture a lot of the oil.   Will not be a tight fitting may not completely seal off like a flange.

Pipe will be cut with a large crimping device and a big saw to get it ready for its new LMRP CAP.   (this is not being done for the pathetic little “top hat” device they lowered to the marine floor, never to be seen again. this is a new thing.)

Wilberforce correctly anticipated this this morning.   Where I disagreed is that this was happening this am,  is that it is going to take at least 4 days to set up, per the Coast Guard and Suttles, right now.  Landry is saying now, more like 4 to 7 days, because people remember the smaller number, and they hit glitches in trying to execute this, she emphasizes this is cutting edge technology.  They are using the data they gather from the “sippy tube” other end of the broken pipe to help design this.   That is currently what is being shown on the live feed and what was being shown earlier today.  I’ve seen then playing around with cutting on this end before.

I thought they would be too timid and/or cautious to try actually cutting the mess on the top of the BOP, because this will release a huge amount of oil that is currently restricted, which they then must be able to get this new cap securely attached, unfrozen inside,  to capture, but they are going for it. This is letting more of the Genie out of the bottle, and he’s not going to go back in easier.

My intrepretation is that they fear the well casing is not in very good shape and they want to start siphoning asap in case the relief well fails or the vital structures of the well fails, which Adm. Landry said was a possibility earlier this week.  A major hole blow out is only good for the movies.  In really, that is a catastrophe which will be unstoppable until all the oil and gas have leached out, which could take….. years.  

Suttles is also still bullsh*tting people on the Corexit, says the monitoring shows no toxicity.  Says breaking the oil up into tiny droplets will allow the microbes to eat it more easily.  

More like it’s keeping under the surface and swirling around in the Gulf in vast swarms.

Suttles: 12,000 feet deep in the relief well, counting 5000 feet of water, best forecast for the relief well is early August.

This is still a very dangerous and risky operation, and if you are in the habit of praying, start doing it.

______

edit update, here’s a picture from Beyond Pathetic of what I shall be calling Oil Hat Sucker #3

We had the containment “outhouse” box that froze shut, the sippy tube stuck up its bum, the drill mud top kill that didn’t, the junk shot that wouldn’t clog the petrotoilet, and the the forlorn little cap that they sunk down there and never used.  And now,

Introducing BP’s Oil Spill LMRP Lower Marine Riser Package CAP,  aka Oil Hat Sucker #3.    

Which is going to use a pressure gasket with no hardware casing, as a fitting on a 12,000 pounds per square inch oil and methane gas wildcat well 5,000 feet under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

As the spoof twitter bpTerry of spoof twitter bpPublic Relations said yesterday, “I just bought a magic wand, and I’m going to start waving it. ”

__

second update.

fixed spelling in blockquote, added sentence by Landry which clarifies the relief well is the way they expect to finally get this under permanent control.   Suttles reiterated that the other oil gathering devices, the caps,  are to test and implement and prevent as much oil as possible from getting loose in the Gulf and washing ashore, while this solution is worked on.

BP’s Tony Hayward is quoted by CNN as being “disappointed”  top kill failed.   Yeah, we are too.  Especially since it was more of a test round and you never did cap off the sippy tube open end.

The CNN guy is so excited he just said the Top Tail Method did not work to kill the well. You could see him wondering if he should correct himself, he just went on.

 

Well, that sure didn’t take long.  We’ve had more than a month of watching oil gush from a broken pipe a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.  We’ve watched BP, which has Ken Salazar’s foot on it’s hydra-headed neck, take every possible step to save oil it could sell while it dithered about blocking the leak and invented sci-fi machines to capture oil.  And we’ve watched in horror while enormous amounts of oil flow into the sea and onto beaches and through marshes, and we’re seeing pelicans covered in oil and drowned turtles and fishing bans and devastation in the tourist industry.  And now, after all of that, as if we don’t already know that we’re watching something that foreshadows the impending death of the Gulf of Mexico, BP has revised its characterization of the spill from having a “modest” environmental impact to being an “environmental catastrophe.”

What a sickening development.

CNN has the story and video. So does Crooks and Liars:

And the result is that while the Gulf of Mexico is being ruined everyone is now officially “frustrated.”  The President. You. Me.  We’re frustrated because all of the smart people in the world in convocation apparently cannot put this Humpty Dumpty together again.  Or haven’t.  So at long last, according to TPM, DFA is now calling for a boycott of BP.  What else, I ask, can we do to express ourselves?

There are really two issues.  The first is the leak.  But the second, and over time it might be the more important, is collecting, containing and then cleaning up the mess.  That process is sadly long overdue and it does not depend on stemming the flow.  It depends on the government mobilizing the resources necessary to contain and clean up the oil.  And if you think that blocking the leak is/was a challenge, the clean up is a far larger one.

Can we please get going on that?  Every day that we wait on this is a day of more suffering and death in the Gulf.

———————-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

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…

Nassau Guardian Online, Wednesday afternoon:

The worst natural disaster to hit the Gulf Coast is likely to reach local coastlines by the weekend, according to Chief Climatological Officer Michael Stubbs, who said a shift in wind patterns is expected to propel the oil slick towards The Bahamas.

In an interview with The Nassau Guardian yesterday Stubbs said that in pervious weeks weather conditions have kept the oil slick contained in the Gulf of Mexico.

“As it stands now the wind is not supporting movement out of the Gulf. It’s keeping the oil particles that are floating along the surface in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Stubbs.

“However as Friday approaches we see the weather pattern changing and what would happen then is the winds in the area would be flowing clockwise, making it possible for oil floating on the surface to make it to the notorious loop current. So once the particles move into the loop current the chances are [higher] for it [the oil] to reach our area.”

[snip]

Stubbs, who heads a meteorological task force set up by the Ingraham administration to monitor the oil spill, said once the surface winds shift, oil sediments will most likely reach the Cay Sal Bank, Bimini, and western Grand Bahama – key fishing areas for the marine industry.

He said for this reason the government has already been warned to prepare for the likely arrival of oil in Bahamian waters.

[snip]

On Monday, Minister for the Environment Earl Deveaux told The Nassau Guardian that the government is doing all it can to tackle the issue which has persisted for more than a month.

However, just five days earlier in a press conference, Deveaux admitted that The Bahamas is not prepared for the level of calamity that the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could cause the country.