10-05-2010, 04:26 AM
"Oil companies are criminal enterprises supported
by government thugs.
Not hyperbole."
Video:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/212.html
#######
BP's Preparedness for Major Crisis Is Questioned
By GUY CHAZAN and NEIL KING
BP PLC engineers struggled over the weekend to overcome problems with a containment dome the company hopes might capture much of the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.
Challenges with the dome come as White House officials, U.S. lawmakers and others in the industry ask whether BP failed to foresee and prepare for a disaster of this scale, as doubts deepen over the company's ability to handle the spill.
View Full Image
![[Image: NA-BF908_BP_D_20100509180524.jpg]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BF908_BP_D_20100509180524.jpg)
European Pressphoto Agency Researcher Lisa Pfau tests for oil Sunday near Pass Christian, Miss.
![[Image: BTN_insetClose.gif]](http://si.wsj.net/img/BTN_insetClose.gif)
BP assured regulators last year that oil would come ashore only in a small area of Louisiana, even in the event of a spill much larger than the current one. But as of Sunday evening, authorities reported that black, gooey balls were washing up on beaches in Alabama, farther than the company's original calculation.
BP spent Sunday trying to determine how to proceed with the huge metal-and-concrete containment dome, after it got clogged with crystallized gas 5,000 feet below the surface. The contraption was designed to sit over the leaking pipe and funnel as much as 85% of the oil to the surface, where it could be captured.
The four-story, 98-ton dome took the company two weeks to build and deploy—evidence, critics say, that the company didn't envision or prepare for the sort of blowout that occurred last month.
"The only thing that's clear is that there was a catastrophic failure of risk management," said Nansen Saleri, a Houston-based expert in oil-reservoir management and a former top official at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company.
More
BP defended its actions. "You have here an unprecedented event—never before have you seen a blowout at such depth and never before has a blowout preventer failed in this way," BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said. "The unthinkable has become thinkable, and the whole industry will be asking searching questions of itself."
The dome is now sitting on the seabed, about 600 feet away from the main leak. Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production division, denied the operation had failed and said the company was trying to figure out a way of providing heat at a depth of 5,000 feet to melt the crystals. BP had anticipated that the crystallized gas, called hydrates, could form in the pipe connecting the dome to the surface vessel, but not inside the dome itself.
BP also said it would try to deploy a smaller "top hat" dome that will form a tighter fit around the leak, hopefully preventing more water from entering the device and forming hydrates, Mr. Suttles said. The top hat will be lowered on Tuesday or Wednesday, he said.
BP and its partner on the project, Transocean Ltd., will face two Senate panels Tuesday on the April 20th explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, setting off an oil leak that has since released around 85,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf.
The issue of BP's preparedness is sure to be a prime topic at the hearing, according to Senate staffers.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that his "own preliminary observations" were that BP and its partners had made "some very major mistakes" leading up to and after the disaster.
Some in the oil industry questioned why it took the company so long to come up with the idea of a containment dome, and why it didn't have one ready to use.
"There should be technology that's pre-existing and ready to deploy at the drop of a hat," said one former Transocean executive. "It shouldn't have to be designed and fabricated now, from scratch."
BP is also struggling to secure sufficient amounts of booms, the floating strips used to keep oil offshore, and a large enough fleet of skimmer boats to keep the slick from spreading.
BP's general spill plan, which was updated last summer, shows that the company's claimed abilities were out of sync with the realities of the spill. Under the plan, BP said that the worst spill from a mobile drilling operation would come from a lease called the Mississippi Canyon 462, about 33 miles off the Louisiana coast. A blowout of that lease could discharge a mammoth 250,000 barrels a day, BP said, 50 times the estimated flow of the current leak. Yet BP claimed to have in place sufficient booms, stocks of dispersants and skimmers to deal with a spill far in excess of the volume it is now struggling to contain.
BP's plan, as submitted to the Mineral Management Service, placed exceedingly low probabilities on oil reaching land in the event of a major spill. Even in the case of the worst spill, BP said, there was only a 3% chance that oil would come ashore after a month in any part of the Gulf other than Plaquemines, La., which juts into the Gulf south of New Orleans.
Mr. Gowers defended BP's clean-up operation. "We moved very rapidly to implement the approved response to the accident," he said. "The evidence for that is the huge containment effort on the surface and onshore."
—Brian Baskin contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...st_Popular
###
Huge U.S. oil spill drifts west; BP mulls options
(Reuters) - BP Plc engineers desperately explored options on Sunday to control oil gushing from a ruptured well deep under the Gulf of Mexico after a setback with a huge undersea containment dome fueled fears of a prolonged and growing environmental disaster.
U.S. | Green Business
The spill is spreading west, further from Florida's beaches but toward the important shipping channels and rich seafood areas of the central Louisiana coast, where fishing, shrimping and oyster harvesting bans were extended.
BP is exploring several new options to control the spill after its 98-ton containment chamber, which took about two weeks to build, struck a snag on Saturday.
A buildup of crystallized gas in the dome forced engineers to delay efforts to place the huge containment device over the rupture and funnel leaking oil to a waiting drillship.
"We're gathering some data to help us with two things. One is another way to do containment, the second is other ways to actually stop the flow," BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told Reuters in Venice, Louisiana.
BP was also exploring ways to work around the containment dome's problem with gas hydrates, or slushy methane gas that would block the oil from being siphoned.
"One is a smaller dome; we call it the 'top hat.' The second is to find a way to tap into the riser, the piece of pipe the oil is flowing through, and taking it directly to the pipe up to a ship on the surface," Suttles said.
Conducting operations a mile below the ocean's surface complicated BP's efforts. Engineers worked with remote-controlled vehicles in the blackness of "inner space."
At least 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil a day have been gushing unchecked into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, rupturing the well and killing 11 crew members. The leak threatens to become the worst-ever U.S. oil spill.
On Dauphin Island, Alabama, a barrier island and beach resort, sunbathers found tar balls along a short stretch of beach on Saturday, and experts were testing the tar to determine if it came from the Gulf spill.
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
The spill threatens economic and ecological disaster on Gulf Coast tourist beaches, wildlife refuges and fishing grounds. It has forced President Barack Obama to rethink plans to open more waters to drilling.
The disaster could slow the exploration and development of offshore oil projects worldwide, Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency warned on Sunday.
"The future potential is offshore in deeper water and in the Arctic, so if offshore investment is going to be slowed down, that is a concern," Tanaka told Reuters.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward told London's Sunday Telegraph it could be weeks or months before the spill is brought under control. He said the company could spend $10 million a day on clean-up efforts.
BP may next try to plug the damaged blowout preventer on the well by pumping debris into it at high pressure, a method called a "junk shot," or by putting a new preventer on top.
"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris -- some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," U.S. Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News. BP also is drilling a relief well to halt the leak, but that could take three months.
Hundreds of boats deployed protective booms and used dispersants to break up the oil again on Sunday, but rougher seas threatened to curtail the spill response. Crews have laid more than 189 miles of boom and spread 325,000 gallons (1.2 million liters) of chemical dispersant.
SANDBAGS
The spill's major contact with the shoreline so far has been in the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, mostly a wildlife reserve. The next few days threatens wider contact.
Forecasts show the giant oil slick moving west, as brisk onshore winds blow from the southeast through next weekend.
A state of emergency was declared on Sunday in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes in Louisiana, west of the Mississippi Delta, where training is under way to teach local fisherman how to deploy booms and assist with oil spill contractors.
Sheen was about eight miles off the coast of Port Fourchon, with heavy oil still some 28 miles offshore, said Charlotte Randolph, president of Lafourche Parish. "We're keeping a very close watch, deploying boom and closing some beaches," she said.
Truckloads of sand were being delivered to Port Fourchon to fill large sandbags, which will be dropped by National Guard helicopters in five areas along the coast.
Louisiana officials closed more waters to fishing and shrimp and oyster harvesting as the slick edged westward.
Shrimp harvesting is now banned from Freshwater Bayou on the central coast to Louisiana's border with Mississippi. Some oyster beds west of the Mississippi River also are shut.
Seafood is a $2.4 billion industry in Louisiana, which produces more than 30 percent of the seafood originating in the continental United States.
In Bayou La Batre, Alabama, the Coast Guard and BP were contracting boat owners at an average rate of $3,000 per day to help with oil-skimming operations.
"I want to get it cleaned up as fast and right as I can. This is my hometown. I want to be part of this for myself and for my son," said Lane Zirlott, a third generation shrimper.
On Dauphin Island, workers contracted by BP wore rubber boots and gloves to lay down oil-absorbing synthetic fibers called pom-poms, erect storm fencing along the beach and collect samples of the tar and water for testing.
Gary Bratt, owner of Chaise N' Rays Rentals, which rents recreational equipment on Dauphin Island, said the threat of the spill reaching shore was ruining his business. "Our business is off 70 percent at this point," with potential vacationers canceling "right and left," he said.
Gulf Coast politicians echoed the public's fears.
"You're talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training which is in the Gulf of Mexico," Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson told CNN."
Crews labored all weekend to cordon off the entrance to Alabama's Mobile Bay with a containment boom fence to try to safeguard America's ninth-largest seaport.
Ships arriving at Southwest Pass, the deepwater entrance to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, will be inspected to determine if they need cleaning.
Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, and Rowan Gould, acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, were sent to the Gulf to help lead efforts to protect coastal communities. Gould is a veteran of cleanup efforts following the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, the worst U.S. oil spill ever.
(Additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston; Tom Brown and Pascal Fletcher in Miami; Steve Gorman, Verna Gates and Kelli Dugan in Dauphin Island, Alabama; Don Pessin in Venice, Louisiana; Shaleem Thompson in Buras, Louisiana; and Eric Beech in Washington; Writing by John Whitesides and Ros Krasny; Editing by Chris Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64...me=topNews
there's a slide show with 25 photos at the link too...
by government thugs.
Not hyperbole."
Video:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/212.html
#######
BP's Preparedness for Major Crisis Is Questioned
By GUY CHAZAN and NEIL KING
BP PLC engineers struggled over the weekend to overcome problems with a containment dome the company hopes might capture much of the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.
Challenges with the dome come as White House officials, U.S. lawmakers and others in the industry ask whether BP failed to foresee and prepare for a disaster of this scale, as doubts deepen over the company's ability to handle the spill.
View Full Image
European Pressphoto Agency Researcher Lisa Pfau tests for oil Sunday near Pass Christian, Miss.
BP assured regulators last year that oil would come ashore only in a small area of Louisiana, even in the event of a spill much larger than the current one. But as of Sunday evening, authorities reported that black, gooey balls were washing up on beaches in Alabama, farther than the company's original calculation.
BP spent Sunday trying to determine how to proceed with the huge metal-and-concrete containment dome, after it got clogged with crystallized gas 5,000 feet below the surface. The contraption was designed to sit over the leaking pipe and funnel as much as 85% of the oil to the surface, where it could be captured.
The four-story, 98-ton dome took the company two weeks to build and deploy—evidence, critics say, that the company didn't envision or prepare for the sort of blowout that occurred last month.
"The only thing that's clear is that there was a catastrophic failure of risk management," said Nansen Saleri, a Houston-based expert in oil-reservoir management and a former top official at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company.
More
- U.S. Considers `Malfeasance' in Leak
- Gulf Coast States Seek Bolder Steps
- Photos: Containment Unit Lowered | Video
- Timeline | Aerial view | More Video
- Oil Spill Liability May Spike
BP defended its actions. "You have here an unprecedented event—never before have you seen a blowout at such depth and never before has a blowout preventer failed in this way," BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said. "The unthinkable has become thinkable, and the whole industry will be asking searching questions of itself."
The dome is now sitting on the seabed, about 600 feet away from the main leak. Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production division, denied the operation had failed and said the company was trying to figure out a way of providing heat at a depth of 5,000 feet to melt the crystals. BP had anticipated that the crystallized gas, called hydrates, could form in the pipe connecting the dome to the surface vessel, but not inside the dome itself.
BP also said it would try to deploy a smaller "top hat" dome that will form a tighter fit around the leak, hopefully preventing more water from entering the device and forming hydrates, Mr. Suttles said. The top hat will be lowered on Tuesday or Wednesday, he said.
BP and its partner on the project, Transocean Ltd., will face two Senate panels Tuesday on the April 20th explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, setting off an oil leak that has since released around 85,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf.
The issue of BP's preparedness is sure to be a prime topic at the hearing, according to Senate staffers.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that his "own preliminary observations" were that BP and its partners had made "some very major mistakes" leading up to and after the disaster.
Some in the oil industry questioned why it took the company so long to come up with the idea of a containment dome, and why it didn't have one ready to use.
"There should be technology that's pre-existing and ready to deploy at the drop of a hat," said one former Transocean executive. "It shouldn't have to be designed and fabricated now, from scratch."
BP is also struggling to secure sufficient amounts of booms, the floating strips used to keep oil offshore, and a large enough fleet of skimmer boats to keep the slick from spreading.
BP's general spill plan, which was updated last summer, shows that the company's claimed abilities were out of sync with the realities of the spill. Under the plan, BP said that the worst spill from a mobile drilling operation would come from a lease called the Mississippi Canyon 462, about 33 miles off the Louisiana coast. A blowout of that lease could discharge a mammoth 250,000 barrels a day, BP said, 50 times the estimated flow of the current leak. Yet BP claimed to have in place sufficient booms, stocks of dispersants and skimmers to deal with a spill far in excess of the volume it is now struggling to contain.
BP's plan, as submitted to the Mineral Management Service, placed exceedingly low probabilities on oil reaching land in the event of a major spill. Even in the case of the worst spill, BP said, there was only a 3% chance that oil would come ashore after a month in any part of the Gulf other than Plaquemines, La., which juts into the Gulf south of New Orleans.
Mr. Gowers defended BP's clean-up operation. "We moved very rapidly to implement the approved response to the accident," he said. "The evidence for that is the huge containment effort on the surface and onshore."
—Brian Baskin contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...st_Popular
###
Huge U.S. oil spill drifts west; BP mulls options
(Reuters) - BP Plc engineers desperately explored options on Sunday to control oil gushing from a ruptured well deep under the Gulf of Mexico after a setback with a huge undersea containment dome fueled fears of a prolonged and growing environmental disaster.
U.S. | Green Business
The spill is spreading west, further from Florida's beaches but toward the important shipping channels and rich seafood areas of the central Louisiana coast, where fishing, shrimping and oyster harvesting bans were extended.
BP is exploring several new options to control the spill after its 98-ton containment chamber, which took about two weeks to build, struck a snag on Saturday.
A buildup of crystallized gas in the dome forced engineers to delay efforts to place the huge containment device over the rupture and funnel leaking oil to a waiting drillship.
"We're gathering some data to help us with two things. One is another way to do containment, the second is other ways to actually stop the flow," BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told Reuters in Venice, Louisiana.
BP was also exploring ways to work around the containment dome's problem with gas hydrates, or slushy methane gas that would block the oil from being siphoned.
"One is a smaller dome; we call it the 'top hat.' The second is to find a way to tap into the riser, the piece of pipe the oil is flowing through, and taking it directly to the pipe up to a ship on the surface," Suttles said.
Conducting operations a mile below the ocean's surface complicated BP's efforts. Engineers worked with remote-controlled vehicles in the blackness of "inner space."
At least 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil a day have been gushing unchecked into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, rupturing the well and killing 11 crew members. The leak threatens to become the worst-ever U.S. oil spill.
On Dauphin Island, Alabama, a barrier island and beach resort, sunbathers found tar balls along a short stretch of beach on Saturday, and experts were testing the tar to determine if it came from the Gulf spill.
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
The spill threatens economic and ecological disaster on Gulf Coast tourist beaches, wildlife refuges and fishing grounds. It has forced President Barack Obama to rethink plans to open more waters to drilling.
The disaster could slow the exploration and development of offshore oil projects worldwide, Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency warned on Sunday.
"The future potential is offshore in deeper water and in the Arctic, so if offshore investment is going to be slowed down, that is a concern," Tanaka told Reuters.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward told London's Sunday Telegraph it could be weeks or months before the spill is brought under control. He said the company could spend $10 million a day on clean-up efforts.
BP may next try to plug the damaged blowout preventer on the well by pumping debris into it at high pressure, a method called a "junk shot," or by putting a new preventer on top.
"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris -- some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," U.S. Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News. BP also is drilling a relief well to halt the leak, but that could take three months.
Hundreds of boats deployed protective booms and used dispersants to break up the oil again on Sunday, but rougher seas threatened to curtail the spill response. Crews have laid more than 189 miles of boom and spread 325,000 gallons (1.2 million liters) of chemical dispersant.
SANDBAGS
The spill's major contact with the shoreline so far has been in the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, mostly a wildlife reserve. The next few days threatens wider contact.
Forecasts show the giant oil slick moving west, as brisk onshore winds blow from the southeast through next weekend.
A state of emergency was declared on Sunday in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes in Louisiana, west of the Mississippi Delta, where training is under way to teach local fisherman how to deploy booms and assist with oil spill contractors.
Sheen was about eight miles off the coast of Port Fourchon, with heavy oil still some 28 miles offshore, said Charlotte Randolph, president of Lafourche Parish. "We're keeping a very close watch, deploying boom and closing some beaches," she said.
Truckloads of sand were being delivered to Port Fourchon to fill large sandbags, which will be dropped by National Guard helicopters in five areas along the coast.
Louisiana officials closed more waters to fishing and shrimp and oyster harvesting as the slick edged westward.
Shrimp harvesting is now banned from Freshwater Bayou on the central coast to Louisiana's border with Mississippi. Some oyster beds west of the Mississippi River also are shut.
Seafood is a $2.4 billion industry in Louisiana, which produces more than 30 percent of the seafood originating in the continental United States.
In Bayou La Batre, Alabama, the Coast Guard and BP were contracting boat owners at an average rate of $3,000 per day to help with oil-skimming operations.
"I want to get it cleaned up as fast and right as I can. This is my hometown. I want to be part of this for myself and for my son," said Lane Zirlott, a third generation shrimper.
On Dauphin Island, workers contracted by BP wore rubber boots and gloves to lay down oil-absorbing synthetic fibers called pom-poms, erect storm fencing along the beach and collect samples of the tar and water for testing.
Gary Bratt, owner of Chaise N' Rays Rentals, which rents recreational equipment on Dauphin Island, said the threat of the spill reaching shore was ruining his business. "Our business is off 70 percent at this point," with potential vacationers canceling "right and left," he said.
Gulf Coast politicians echoed the public's fears.
"You're talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training which is in the Gulf of Mexico," Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson told CNN."
Crews labored all weekend to cordon off the entrance to Alabama's Mobile Bay with a containment boom fence to try to safeguard America's ninth-largest seaport.
Ships arriving at Southwest Pass, the deepwater entrance to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, will be inspected to determine if they need cleaning.
Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, and Rowan Gould, acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, were sent to the Gulf to help lead efforts to protect coastal communities. Gould is a veteran of cleanup efforts following the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, the worst U.S. oil spill ever.
(Additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston; Tom Brown and Pascal Fletcher in Miami; Steve Gorman, Verna Gates and Kelli Dugan in Dauphin Island, Alabama; Don Pessin in Venice, Louisiana; Shaleem Thompson in Buras, Louisiana; and Eric Beech in Washington; Writing by John Whitesides and Ros Krasny; Editing by Chris Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64...me=topNews
there's a slide show with 25 photos at the link too...
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"