Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
|
not much time at the moment to respond to the inverted world post above.
more activity at the leak site, another problem:
Quote:
Effort to contain Gulf oil spill stalls with stuck saw
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; 11:19 AM
SCHRIEVER, La. -- The latest attempt at containing oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico -- a plan to saw off a leaking pipe and slide a cap over it -- has been stopped because the saw is stuck, a Coast Guard official said Wednesday morning.
Admiral Thad W. Allen, who is in charge of the response to the massive deep-sea spill, said a "diamond-wire" saw had become hung up on the pipe it was supposed to cut. He said that crews using remotely driven submarines were trying to get it loose but that the solution might be to bring in another saw.
Allen said he would know more Wednesday afternoon.
"Anyone who's ever used a saw knows it can bind up," Allen told a news conference.
Overnight, Allen said, crews had managed to use powerful shears to cut a different section of the broken pipe, farther from the leaking well. But the cut closer in, using the diamond saw, is more important. It is supposed to allow oil giant BP, which owns the gushing well, to place a "cap" or "hat" device over the sawed-off pipe and begin collecting oil.
Allen spoke from a BP training facility outside Houma, La., that has been converted into a regional command post for the spill. Despite the location in a BP building, aides seemed to try to downplay the connection to the oil company. Minutes before Allen spoke, a Coast Guard member pried BP's green-sunflower logo off the podium, leaving behind two white strips of tape that had held it on.
Allen was joined by Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco said afterward that she was not convinced by other scientists' reports of large underwater "plumes" of oil.
"In the immediate vicinity of the well, there is undeniably a lot of oil sub-surface," Lubchenco said. "The real question is, is there a significant amount of oil beyond that?"
Other scientists have reported finding large areas of oil dissolved in water, or globs of oil that swirl like snowflakes across miles of the gulf. But Lubchenco said that tests had not ruled out the possibility that these were plankton, or the result of natural "seeps" expelling natural gas into the water.
She said new boats, several owned by NOAA, were either in the gulf or about to be, and would use new methods to determine what these other scientists had actually seen.
"People are envisioning, you know, lots of oil down there" in the plumes, Lubchenco said. "And we have yet to see if that is in fact the case."
In the news conference, Allen also said that Mississippi has reported its first contact with the oil spill, with crude reaching the Mississippi Sound. He said tar balls have also shown up in Alabama.
As BP hacked away at the pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, investors sawed off 15 percent, or $21.1 billion, of the company's market value Tuesday.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., during a trip to the Gulf Coast, announced that the Justice Department had launched criminal and civil investigations, adding to pessimism among BP investors reeling from the failed attempt to plug the leaking well over the weekend.
BP, the world's fourth-largest company before the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, has lost a staggering $74.4 billion, or 40 percent, of its market value in six weeks.
|
washingtonpost.com
informed almost play-by-play from the oil drum here:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - The Saw is Stuck, Working on the Riser, and an Open Thread
meanwhile, bp's share values are vaporizing:
BP oil spill: Shares fall further | Business | guardian.co.uk
so hayward comes clean about bp's lack of adequate planning and technology and then talks about the need for a "rethink"
Quote:
Hayward urges oil industry rethink
By Ed Crooks in Houston
Published: June 2 2010 16:20 | Last updated: June 2 2010 16:20
The oil industry and BP need to “change the paradigm” for how they operate in order to continue developing hard-to-reach resources in deep water, the company’s chief executive has said.
Tony Hayward also admitted that the company had not had all the equipment it needed to control its leaking Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which has created the largest ever offshore oil spill in the US.
With BP and the rest of the industry threatened with being shut out of the deep waters of the Gulf, the most promising region in the US for oil development, Mr Hayward argued that the industry could reform itself to justify continued drilling in those challenging areas.
Speaking to the Financial Times in Houston as engineers worked on their latest bid to trap the escaping oil, he said BP was looking for new ways to manage “low-probability, high-impact” risks like the Deepwater Horizon accident.
The gas blow-out that caused a fatal explosion on the rig on April 20 and created the oil leak had been a “one in a million” chance, Mr Hayward said, but that risk had to be cut to “one in a billion or one in a trillion.”
Analysts believe the disaster could cost BP $20bn in clean-up costs, compensation, damages and fines, and has done incalculable damage to the company’s position in the US.
Mr Hayward said the industry needed to cut the risk of accidents, and to increase its capability to deal with leaks on the sea bed in a mile or more of water.
Reducing the risk of accidents could mean redefining the relationships between the companies involved in drilling a well.
BP believes that on the Deepwater Horizon there were seven separate problems that could have contributed to the accident, including failures of the cement in the well, the tests run on the well, and the blow-out preventer, intended to stop releases of oil and gas.
Those failures could have involved a number of different companies besides BP, including Transocean, which owned and operated the rig, Halliburton, which cemented the well, and Cameron International, which manufactured the blow-out preventer.
BP was in overall control of the project, but responsibility for safety was shared. That model, according to Mr Hayward, may have to change.
“We have been driving safe and reliable operations through the company within the existing industry paradigm,” he said. “What this causes us to question is whether that paradigm is right for the future.”
It was possible, he added, that in future BP could operate its own rigs working in deep water.
“This is not about BP and Transocean,” he said. “Transocean are a very very good drilling contractor… But we have to ask how much further we can drive the risk down.”
Mr Hayward also accepted it was “an entirely fair criticism” to say that the company had not been fully prepared for a deep water oil leak.
The containment effort on the surface, he said, had been “very successful” in keeping oil away from the coast. “Considering how big this has been, very little has got away from us,” he said.
However, BP had not had ready any equipment or even ideas for stopping the leak. It has been reaching for many of the same techniques used to control the Ixtoc 1 blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico 31 years ago.
“What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool-kit,” Mr Hayward said.
“After the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, the industry created the Marine Spill Response Corporation to contain oil on the surface…. The issue will be to create the same sub-sea response capability.”
With BP’s hopes of future growth in the US riding on deep water development, it will be vital for Mr Hayward that the administration ultimately accepts that those reforms will be enough to allow drilling to continue.
|
FT.com / World - Hayward urges oil industry rethink
this is some of the stuff that's happening in the reality that people know about who read things that aren't the ibd editorial page.
but feel free to post more "relevant" materials.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|