Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Louisiana Oil Rig Fire / Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

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If I have a gallon of water and I put a cup of salt into it I can make salt water..... If I put 20 cups of salt into into that same gallon, I can make a dead sea. I hope they find a way to stop this oil geyser or the oil to water ratio may become a dangerous issue for all sea life within the Gulf of Mexicos' ecosystem and further as it catches the currents and travels into the Atlantic. I feel sick again, this thread is like poison to me (No implication of content, merely situational), I really hate what has happened and am overwhelmed with the reality of it. :sad:

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2796921)

ace...what the fuck are you talking about? you didn't read the article, did you?

I am able to put what I read in its proper context. BP is not a victim nor is anyone making that claim. BP is a successful company with the financial strength to survive this disaster and pay what they owe - what BP can not do is win a fight against the US Federal government. BP has the funds to pay the dividend and to pay for the damages caused by the spill.

Some people depend on the BP dividend. Obama's rhetoric on this issue is hurting those people. Obama reacted without thinking the issue through as is his pattern. Similar to the damage he has done to the people working in the oil exploration industry in the Gulf.

Also, some of the people being "nickel-and dime'd" are people who have difficulty showing their real income, some with lots of cash payments rather than payments with a paper trail that typically gets taxed. Again, Obama speaking before getting all the facts.

Quote:

I am able to put what I read in its proper context. BP is not a victim nor is anyone making that claim.

apparently, ace, you can't. just read the article but pay attention to who is saying what.

here, let me help you:

Quote:

Lord Tebbit, the former government minister, also criticised Obama's attacks on BP and its management.

"The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill – so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance against a multinational company?"

David Cameron admits sympathy with Obama before discussing BP crisis | Business | guardian.co.uk

the basis for this was a whinging day amongst uk conservatives yesterday during which some were loudly bewailing the fact that poor picked-upon corporate person bp was being blamed for all this stuff when halliburton and transocean were also involved. why, they wailed, why pick on poor corporate person bp?

now at this point, ace, what has been said and how its played out since is a matter of simple record.

putting things in context typically includes reading them accurately and retaining the sense of what you read. just saying.

The stranglehold BP has on the media is staggering.

Reporters were told by the fish & game service that they could film
the oiled wildlife in a rescue center & then were turned away by a man in military garb.

The EPA has been after BP to stop using Corexit 9500A & Corexit 9527A,
& use something less toxic.

No word
no word
no word

---------- Post added at 12:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:34 PM ----------

Why does BP refuse to stop using the chemical dispersants the EPA ordered BP to stop using?

According to scientists studying the massive underwater oil plumes, the dispersants keep the oil underwater, away from the naked eye and satellite view. Some of the oil plumes are over 30 foot deep and 26 miles long.

this is long and i haven't had a chance to look at it, but here's the report on the usage of dispersants that came out yesterday:

http://www.crrc.unh.edu./dwg/dwh_dis...ing_report.pdf

a summary with discussion at the oil drum:
The Oil Drum | The BP Deepwater Oil Spill - the Dispersant Meeting Report - and Open Thread

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2797295)

apparently, ace, you can't. just read the article but pay attention to who is saying what.

here, let me help you:

David Cameron admits sympathy with Obama before discussing BP crisis | Business | guardian.co.uk

the basis for this was a whinging day amongst uk conservatives yesterday during which some were loudly bewailing the fact that poor picked-upon corporate person bp was being blamed for all this stuff when halliburton and transocean were also involved. why, they wailed, why pick on poor corporate person bp?

now at this point, ace, what has been said and how its played out since is a matter of simple record.

putting things in context typically includes reading them accurately and retaining the sense of what you read. just saying.

He is not saying BP is a victim. Everyone agrees BP is responsible for the oil spill, clean-up and damages. BP is going to pay what they legitimately owe. However, attempts to make BP responsible for those things for which they are not responsible will be met with resistance, backed by the British government.

Perhaps, we don't agree on the term "victim".

There is a broader danger in Obama and his administrations rhetoric. All business will be watching what happens here in the context of an accident involving a corporate failure as well as regulatory failures. If a company plays by the rules are they going to pay for faulty rules after the fact. This can totally disrupt "order" in markets and is a major risk Obama may not even know he is playing with.

---------- Post added at 06:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:04 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by ring (Post 2797304)

The stranglehold BP has on the media is staggering.

Your statement suggests that BP, not Obama is in control. Is that what you think?

yeah, ace...you'd best write Obama a letter.
I'm sure he will be forever in your debt for the 'heads up.'

buh bye.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ring (Post 2797320)

yeah, ace...you'd best write Obama a letter.
I'm sure he will be forever in your debt for the 'heads up.'

buh bye.

Did I offend you?

Why not answer the question? I am very interested in how people seem to take both sides of the issue - Obama is competent, handling this matter and holding BP accountable - and - .BP is not competent, mis-handling the matter and is not being held accountable?

I think BP is doing what they think is in their best interest and that Obama has failed in providing leadership and looking out for our best interests.

Broadly I think liberals think they can embarrass a corporation into doing what they think is right - that is almost laughable - so I assume it is wrong, and I ask for clarification.

ace, you've been saying the same thing over and over. and the trick is that i'd almost agree with you if i thought you were making a coherent case. but you're not.

one last time. the fundamental structuring problem here is the regulatory set-up. that set-up was revamped in 2001 by cheney's energy commission. that's where the self-reporting business becomes such a central part of the way off-shore oil drilling is overseen. that regulatory scheme makes it **impossible** for your pipe-dream of some LEADERSHIP from a manly man to happen because it puts almost everything in the control of the corporations---the anticipation of disaster, the generation of scenarios, the development of procedures, the building of technologies--all that is based on corporate self-reporting. the government was reduced to signing off on the reports, when they were required, and signing off that the things recommended in those reports were in fact done.

none of that process was required for the deepwater horizon and that's why there is no way for the federal government to take anything over.

it's your way of thinking that set this disaster up, ace darling.
that's one of many reasons why it's irritating to hear you go all blah blah blah leadership blah blah blah while you ignore page upon page of actual data about the situation preferring instead to go again blah blah blah obama sucks bp is awesome blah blah blah.

conservatives in the cheney mode imagined the federal government incompetent to regulate cheney's buddies at halliburton and the petro-capitalism for which he, and it, stands so they created a version of the federal government that IS incompetent and can't help but be incompetent. and now you complain?

give it a rest.

this is exactly what everyone was hoping to see, yes?

Quote:

BP oil spill may not be capped until Christmas, expert warns

'Everyone should be prepared for worst-case scenario', says the head of oil consultancy group

* Terry Macalister and Richard Wachman
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 June 2010 22.11 BST

One of the world's leading authorities on oil well management has warned it could take until Christmas to cap the Gulf of Mexico spill that is devastating the southern coast of America – and BP's reputation.

Nansen Saleri, a Gulf drilling expert, said he hoped BP would meet its August timetable for capping the blown-out well, but made it clear success was not certain.

"I know it is a frightening assessment but everyone should be prepared for a worst-case scenario, and that could mean a Christmas timeframe," said Saleri, chief executive of the consultancy group Quantum Reservoir Impact. "The probable outcome is much better but the technological challenges … are enormous."

The futures of BP and of wildlife around the Gulf of Mexico are largely dependent on the rapid success of two "relief" wells that are being drilled in an attempt to halt anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels of oil a day that is flowing out of the stricken Macondo subsea hole.

Saleri, who dealt personally with four blowouts during a career with Saudi Aramco and Chevron, said the BP fire and spill was the worst he had seen. He believes it may cause more damage than the Ixtoc I blowout 30 years ago, which is regarded as the most damaging of its kind.

BP faced renewed pressure to do more to contain the Gulf of Mexico spill as the US and Britain played down diplomatic tensions over the crisis.

The British foreign secretary, William Hague, said relations between the US and UK were "outstanding at every level". He said it was up to BP – under pressure in the US to suspend its dividend to help pay for damage – to decide on its payout to shareholders. David Cameron and Barack Obama talked at the weekend, when Cameron expressed his sadness at the "human and environmental catastrophe".

Tony Hayward, the BP chief executive, will be grilled about the disaster in the US on Thursday when he appears before a special Senate hearing. On Wednesday, Hayward and the BP chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, will meet the president at the White House to explain BP's response.

According to reports, Obama will tell the pair he wants BP to establish a special account to meet damage claims by individuals and businesses hurt by the spill.

The prospect of a lengthy timescale to cap the well reinforces the views of Carlos Morales, the head of exploration at Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex). The company was the operator of the Ixtoc I well in 1979, when 3.3m gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf. It took nearly 10 months to bring the blowout under control.

Morales is now sharing technical information with BP in an attempt to help it block the Macondo leak. He has warned it could take "four to five months" for a relief well to cap the spill.

Hurricanes also pose a problem. The hurricane season in the Gulf began this month, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted it will be "active to very active", with up to 23 named storms and up to 14 hurricanes on the way.

Saleri said a bad storm could "really complicate" the environmental impact of spilled oil and delay relief drilling by two weeks every time a hurricane strikes.

BP is also aware that the relief wells could be as unstable as the original one. Experts admit no one can rule out another blowout such as the one that sent the original rig, Horizon Explorer, to the bottom of the ocean.

The British company has warned in a regulatory filing that a blowout on one of the relief wells could release a further 240,000 barrels of oil a day, although Hayward has since discounted the chances of this. "The relief wells ultimately will be successful," he said.

this is something that folk have been talking about all along, the tempering of the idea that relief wells are necessarily the magic bullet. they could be. but they also might not be. it's important to remember through the fog of disinformation.

meanwhile, the oil drum continues to address the bp disaster in an interesting, multi-perspectival manner. it includes a sample of conservative types who speak about obama in the same disengenuous way that we see here.

there is no real plan to deal with the leak.
there is no real plan to deal with the clean-up.
there are no easy answers, as you'll see again here.
there's no need to impute any bad faith to anyone...including bp upper management.
it is as it has been: a clusterfuck enabled by the structure of petro-capitalism itself.

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - the Problem of Cleaning Up Marshes - and Open Thread

But, you know, the oil has to run out sometime....

The sources I have checked, concur:

It will take 7 years for the oil deposit below the Deepwater Horizon well to empty if left alone.

this was a consequence of the revisions in estimates of amounts leaking into the gulf:

Quote:

BP presents new oil capture plan

By Ed Crooks in London and Harvey Morris in Houston

Published: June 14 2010 15:26 | Last updated: June 14 2010 15:43

BP has presented the US authorities with a new plan for capturing more of the oil leaking from its ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, which it says will have the capacity to trap up to 53,000 barrels per day by the end of the month.

However, the company has warned that it cannot guarantee to collect all the oil escaping from the well, and that the operation will create concerns over safety by working “significantly beyond both BP and industry practice”.

The plan and the company’s concerns were set out in a letter to US Coast Guard Rear-Admiral James Watson, the federal government’s on-scene co-ordinator.

Over the weekend, he gave the company 48 hours to provide details of additional containment capacity, after government scientists again raised their estimate of the volume of oil gushing from the well.

After some signs of recovery last week BP shares again resumed precipitous falls on Monday. They were down almost 10 per cent in late afternoon trading in London at 353p.

The Coast Guard now believes the rate is about 35,000 barrels per day, compared to its previous figure of 12,000-19,000 bpd. The US government’s initial estimate was just 5,000 bpd.

President Barack Obama flew to the Gulf region on Monday for his latest visit to see the effects of the spill.

The administration said on Sunday that it wanted an independent third party to administer a fund, paid for by BP, that would be set aside to meet claims by victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Mr Obama is expected to announce details of the fund on Tuesday night.

Setting up the fund could mean a compromise between the administration’s determination to see that all justified claims are met and BP’s fears that it could be forced to meet unlimited claims.

BP’s board will hold a teleconference on Monday at which it is likely to agree some form of suspension of the company’s dividend.

One option is that the payment could be put into the new fund and later released to shareholders once all claims for damages have been met. The dividend could also be placed in a separate fund, or paid in shares instead of cash.

Mr Obama is expected to meet Carl-Henric Svanberg and Tony Hayward, BP’s chairman and chief executive respectively, on Wednesday.

Explaining the decision to call for an independent overseer, Thad Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the federal response to the crisis, said that administering claims was not a core function of an oil company and the government wanted an outside party, so far unnamed, to be put in charge.

BP oil spill
A BP clean-up crew shovels oil from a beach at Port Fourchon, Louisiana

FT In depth: News, comment and analysis on the spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the US coast

David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, said BP would be called on to pay money into an escrow account to cover compensation to thousands of Gulf coast residents and businesses that claim to have lost income as a result of the spill. He did not specify the size of the fund, however.

Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Adm Allen indicated that the proposal for an administered fund did not reflect concerns about the financial health of the company, whose share value has been severely damaged by the crisis. “Our assumption is BP is a going concern.”

Mr Axelrod said that Mr Obama would make a televised address on Tuesday after touring affected areas in the Gulf. “We’re at a kind of inflection point in this saga,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

On Tuesday, the chief executives of the world’s biggest international oil companies will testify that the BP oil spill “was preventable’’, publicly distancing themselves for the first time from the UK company.

Adm Allen said that he was expecting BP’s response to his latest demands for a revised plan to cope with the latest higher estimates of the amount of oil leaking from the well.

FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - BP presents new oil capture plan

here's a new interactive map that gives a good idea of where the oil currently is:

ERMA

and this a rather dis-spiriting glimpse of what cleaning up on the coastline means in june:

Quote:

Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently
By MIREYA NAVARRO

GRAND ISLE, La. — On a beach where the sea breeze reeks of oil, about a dozen workers stoically shoveled contaminated sand into plastic bags on a recent afternoon, while others lolled on chairs and beverage coolers under a white tent nearby, chatting and dozing against the tent’s poles.

But there was a logic to the latter group’s inactivity. Cleanup crews have come up against a foe even more unyielding than the spill in the Gulf of Mexico: the heat.

Officials with BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, say that the gulf region’s soaring temperatures have slowed the work because of added measures to protect more than 18,000 workers on land and at sea across four states from the scorching sun.

With the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account, at 110 degrees or more in some locales, at least 100 workers have had heat-related illnesses, some of which required hospitalization, said David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor.

Mr. Michaels said the department had assigned more than 20 inspectors from OSHA to watch over workers on boats and beaches and at about 20 cleanup staging areas from Louisiana to Florida.

“This is potentially a life-threatening situation,” he said. “OSHA has been concerned about this from the very start. I’m not saying that BP is doing a terrible job, but we’re concerned and we’re vigilant.”

The most vulnerable are the workers on beaches like the one on this barrier island, some 112 miles south of New Orleans. Parts of the seven-mile beach, lined with vacation homes on stilts, resemble military construction sites, with snaking orange booms, portable restrooms and cruising Bobcat loaders and National Guard Humvees.

Out in the open, workers in groups of 10 to 15 — mostly men but also a few women — labored in white protective suits or T-shirts and jeans and accessories like sunglasses, straw or floppy hats, plastic gloves and rubber boots.

Depending on temperatures and whether the workers wear the bulkier protective clothing needed for handling oil, they may work for 20 minutes and rest for 40, or the other way around, a BP spokesman, Ray Viator, said.

Security personnel prevented reporters from approaching workers on the beach, but some of them, approached later, said they were able to cope with the heat because of the long breaks and the availability of water and sports drinks. Some said they drank up to 30 bottles a day.

“You need it,” a 21-year-old worker from Raceland in Lafourche Parish said on his way to his motel room after his shift. (He declined to be identified out of concern that he might jeopardize his cleanup job.) “I’m used to the heat, but it’s so hot that in 20 minutes you’re exhausted. One day, we worked for 15 minutes and took a break for 45. They said the heat index was 116.”

All the same, the sight of workers resting under canopies has caused some grumbling among residents angered by the loss of beaches, fishing, seafood and livelihoods.

Thomas Himel, 51, a home improvement contractor who was painting a beachfront home near the cleanup operations here, said he had run into workers who “actually care about the situation and how it’s hurting us” and others who he felt were taking advantage of the disaster.

“They already have people with itchy eyes,” he said, suggesting that some workers were weighing personal injury lawsuits. “Some people are fully into that.”

The health risks from the heat alone are undisputed, said Laura Leckett, a nurse with West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, La., who has been running a first-aid tent here since May 31. Ms. Leckett said she had treated about 50 of the workers for heat-stress symptoms like headaches and muscle cramps.

“They feel sluggish,” she said. More serious symptoms can include rapid breathing, unresponsiveness and disorientation.

But some of the workers said the money they were making made the risks worthwhile.

A 28-year-old worker who said he had traveled here from Dallas said he was making $15 an hour scooping up oil at sea.

The worker from Raceland, a technical school student, said he had worked here three weeks so far for $12 an hour — enough to persuade him to postpone his studies so he could work on the cleanup for at least a year.

Still, he said, the gravity of the devastation is not lost on him.

“The more we clean it up, the more oil washes on the beach,” he said. “It’ll take more than just shovels.”

Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently - NYTimes.com

It's incredible to me that this is still going on. This is an incredible disaster.

And to think we're heading into hurricane season.

"The clean-up workers should be allowed to use respirators, but BP is not allowing them to use them.

Why?

According to Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association:

…..If you would do your research, the same situation occurred with Exxon Valdez over twenty years ago. It is a question of liability. The minute BP declares that there is a respiratory danger on the situation is the day that they let the door open for liability suits down the line. If they could have gotten away with covering this up, like they did in Alaska Valdez situation, like Exxon, they would not have to pay a penny for any kind of health-related claims….(source; democracy now)

The oil and chemicals are not only beginning to make the clean-up workers sick, but it will have long term health consequences for the people of the Gulf."

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3 (Post 2797316)

Your statement suggests that BP, not Obama is in control. Is that what you think?

Wasn't this already discussed on page 1? Then page 3, then 5, probably 6..... we get it, to you it's all Obama, of course it's not BP's fault, they're just looking out for themselves,, they should have been 'fired', all avaliable assets should have been brought to the clean up, like they weren't already, of course the regulations have nothing to do with it..... blah, blah, blah.....

c'mon gg--the thread's not that bad.

the magnitude of this seems to be a variable, yes? as aspects clarify or grow so do the adjectives. it's not surprising that a uk paper would be a little bent about this....

Quote:

Barack Obama compares oil spill to 9/11

President's comments on impact of BP oil spill are ridiculous and off-base, say relatives of World Trade Centre victims

* Jenny Percival
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 June 2010 18.00 BST

Barack Obama today risked the wrath of September 11 victim's families by comparing the BP oil spill to the 2001 terrorist attacks, as pressure intensified on the White House to show greater urgency over the crisis.

Ahead of a trip to Louisiana and his first televised address to the nation tomorrow, Obama said the spill – the worst environmental disaster in US history – would, like the 2001 terror attacks, continue to influence the country for decades to come.

"In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come," he told the US political website Politico.

Some people who lost relatives in the attacks criticised Obama's decision to compare an environmental disaster with a terror plot in which almost 3,000 people died. "He's off-base," said former New York fire department deputy chief Jim Riches, whose son died at the World Trade Centre. "These were terrorist attacks, not something caused by people trying to make money."

Jack Lynch, whose firefighter son Michael was killed in 2001, said: "To compare an environmental accident, if that's what you call it, to a premeditated terrorist attack is ridiculous. Politicians have no sense of reality."

Sally Regenhard, however, who also lost a son, said she could see some validity to the comparisons.

"Just like on 9/11, there were no plans for emergency preparedness, co-ordination of response," she said. "It's a failure of the system and the government. I'm not offended by the comment."

Protagonists in the oil spill disaster face a crucial week. Amid criticism that he has failed to show enough personal leadership, Obama is embarking on his fourth visit to the Gulf of Mexico and will spend two days visiting other states affected by the crisis – Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. The president will address the US in a prime-time televised speech from the White House on the oil spill . On Wednesday, he is due to hold a crucial meeting with BP executives.

In the Politico interview, Obama vowed to "move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented, visionary energy policy we so vitally need and has been absent for so long". "One of the biggest leadership challenges for me is going to be to make sure we draw the right lessons from this disaster."

Obama said he could not predict whether the US would make a complete transition from an oil-based economy within his lifetime. "Now is the time for us to start making that transition and investing in a new way of doing business when it comes to energy," he said.

"I have no idea what new energy sources are going to be available, what technologies might drive down the price of renewable energies. What we can predict is that the availability of fossil fuel is going to be diminishing; that it's going to get more expensive to recover; that there are going to be environmental costs that our children … our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren are going to have to bear."

Barack Obama compares oil spill to 9/11 | Environment | guardian.co.uk

and this is a link to the interview obama did with politico:
EXCLUSIVE: Obama talks oil spill, frustration and 2012 - Roger Simon - POLITICO.com

I think the President's point is completely valid. Three-mile Island changed the way we looked at nuclear power. 9/11 changed the way we look at national security. Deep Horizon will change the way we look at oil.

Might I add, and this is only my opinion, we went in the wrong direction after three mile island which lead to the problems we now face with oil. We went in the wrong direction after 9/11 which lead to the problems we now face in the ME. Undoubtedly, we will go in the wrong direction because of this and will create even more trouble. What's the right direction? I haven't a clue. All I know is there's too much politics in this spill for them not to fuck this up.

Just nuke the friggin' hole. At this point the pollution is so bad the fish won't even notice, and unlike oil radioactive dust settles out of the water-column. At those depths, pressure would keep debris/fireball from ever reaching the surface, or anywhere close.

GAWD, I -never- thought I'd actually be advocating the use of a nuclear weapon. But it's seriously looking like a "glass parking-lot" over that hole may be the only way to stop this thing and keep it from getting any worse than it already has (which alone is terrifying.)

God help us all, and God save Cajunland. For those people, this is the end of the world.

Except there's no guarantee that a nuke would seal the hole. The only way to do that would be to lower it down the hole before setting it off, but there's a good chance that would fracture the bedrock to the point that would leak up through the edges and create a whole bunch of smaller but completely unknown and untracked leaks that would spit oil for decades.

As much as I wish there was a quick fix like this, there's not.

Russian experience seems to indicate that besides melting and then glassifying the seabed, such explosions will heap partially-glassified debris over the hypocenter of the explosion itself. However, those were shallow-water shots, so this is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm simply not sure that we haven't reached the point where waiting for Christmas (and -still- maybe not getting it plugged) isn't a worse outcome (or set of outcomes) than the possible consequences of using a very small nuclear explosion. IMO, we're reaching the point of where we can either watch the patient bleed out, or use gunpowder to cauterise the wound. The shock and pain might still kill the patient, but if it doesn't it'll probably stop the bleeding. Without cautary, OTOH, the patient -will- die. "Might live" versus "will die" has never been a difficult choice for me.

However, the sheer tomfoolery of having to potentially rely on a nuclear weapon to plug a leak that should never have been permitted to occur in the first place just plain makes my head hurt.

Edited to add: I'm not implying that nuking this thing is an "easy answer." It's not. There's nothing "easy" about a nuke, however it's used. I simply worry that the potential damage from a nuke may be far exceeded by the damage from 6+mo of mostly unimpeded oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

Yeah, if you could see the below structures of how the oil lies between stratified layers,
in some areas of this field, it makes no sense to nuke this large of a deposit,
that has been only somewhat explored.
It's not just how far down the actual well-head is, they have been drilling to
depths of 30,000 plus feet.

Drilling this deep is a whole 'nother animal.

things are moving at speed away from the "shit happens" approach that the defenders of the regulation-that-isn't-really-regulation system took early on in this disaster.

Quote:

Lawmakers accuse BP of 'shortcuts'

By Steven Mufson and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 15, 2010; A01

To save time and drilling costs, BP took "shortcuts" that may have led to the oil rig explosion and the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a letter released Monday by two House Democrats leading an investigation of the disaster.

The letter, sent in advance of congressional hearings with senior oil executives this week, paints a damning picture of five decisions the lawmakers said the oil firm took "to speed finishing the well," which was running "significantly behind schedule." Marshaling e-mails, interviews and documents, the lawmakers said: "In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time, and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk."

In one instance, four days before the April 20 explosion, Brett Cocales, one of BP's operations drilling engineers, sent an e-mail to a colleague noting that engineers had not taken all the usual steps to center the steel pipe in the drill hole, a standard procedure designed to ensure that the pipe would be properly cemented in place. "[W]ho cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine and we'll get a good cement job," he wrote.

Cocales could not be reached to comment Monday, and Andrew Gowers, a company spokesman, said only that "it would be inappropriate for us to comment ahead of the hearing."

The letter was part of another bad day for BP. The company's stock dropped 9 percent, to $30.67 a share. Investors fretted about a White House meeting Wednesday between top BP directors and President Obama, who will also make the oil spill the centerpiece of his first Oval Office address at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Speaking inside a large shelter at a Coast Guard clean-up staging area in Theodore, Ala., on Monday, Obama vowed that "we're going to continue to hold BP and any other responsible parties accountable for the disaster that they created."

That cost to BP will dwarf whatever amounts its rig workers were worried about. White House officials were working to strike a deal with the oil giant on a multibillion-dollar escrow account to compensate victims, administration advisers said. Led by White House counsel Robert F. Bauer, administration negotiators were hoping to finish an agreement before the meeting Wednesday. Obama called talks "constructive."

One potential area of disagreement loomed: whether the escrow account would be limited or whether it could be replenished, as the administration is demanding. BP is also seeking assurance that money be used only for reasonable or "legitimate" claims through an impartial administrator.

Investment analysts expect that BP might suspend or reduce its dividend to fund an escrow account that some lawmakers have demanded be as large as $20 billion. "Suspending the dividend would significantly reduce the political heat on BP and enhance its financial flexibility," said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer. "BP can raise $20 billion in escrow account within days."

Meanwhile, rival oil companies, worried about new regulations or limits on deepwater drilling off U.S. coasts, began openly criticizing BP.

"What we do know is that when you properly design wells for the range of risk anticipated; follow established procedures; build in layers of redundancy; properly inspect and maintain equipment; train personnel; conduct tests and drills; and focus on safe operations and risk management, tragic incidents like the one in the Gulf of Mexico today should not occur," Kenneth P. Cohen, Exxon Mobil's vice president of public and government affairs, said in a blog.

But Exxon Mobil's criticism paled next to the 14-page letter that Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the panel's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, sent to BP chief executive Tony Hayward, who will testify before the committee Thursday. After reviewing documents and interviews the committee obtained, the two lawmakers said that "BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure."

The money that BP allegedly saved seems trivial in light of the blowout that killed 11 Deepwater Horizon rig workers and led to the oil spill that has polluted large swaths of the gulf. But given the daily costs of $1 million to $2 million to run a drilling rig, they appear to have been a big factor in the decision-making.

"I know the planning has been lagging behind the operations, and I have to turn that around," Gregory Walz, a drilling engineering team leader, said in an e-mail to his superior, the well team leader John Guide.

One decision that looks questionable was the one to use only six devices for centering the drill pipe in the well hole instead of 21, as initially planned and recommended by Halliburton, the service company hired to put cement between the pipe and wall of the hole.

Halliburton warned that without the full complement of centralizers, the danger of cracks in the cement surrounding the pipe increased. The American Petroleum Institute's recommended practices say that if the pipe, or casing, is not centered, "it is difficult, if not impossible," for the cement to displace the drilling mud on the narrow side of the opening. That could create channels for gas to travel up the well.

But the equipment needed to center the well in all 21 places was not on the rig. A BP rig worker located some pieces in Houston and made arrangements to fly them to the rig, but more senior officials decided against doing so. In an e-mail April 16, BP's well team leader Guide said that "it will take 10 hours to install them. . . . I do not like this," according to the lawmakers' letter.

That sentiment reflected a pattern of time- and money-saving measures, Waxman and Stupak wrote. They said their investigation is "raising serious questions" about decisions made in the days and hours before the explosion on the drilling rig that sank. According to the committee's investigation, other decisions also "posed a tradeoff between cost and safety," including:

-- BP saved $7 million to $10 million by using a more risky option for the well casing, or steel tubing. The safer method, known as the liner-tieback option, would have provided more barriers to prevent the flow of natural gas up the space between the steel tubes and the well wall.

-- BP decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. Although the company had a team from Schlumberger, a leading oil services firm, onboard the rig, BP sent the team home, saying its services were not needed.

-- BP did not fully circulate drilling mud, which would have taken as long as 12 hours. That would have helped detect any pockets of gas, which later shot up the well and exploded on the deck of the drilling rig.

-- BP did not secure the connections, or casing hangers, between pipes of different diameters.

The letter says that many of those decisions contradict the advice in other BP internal documents, which warned against the dangers of using certain types of pipe. And it reveals that even before the accident, BP engineers were struggling with unusual difficulties. On April 14, BP drilling engineer Brian Morel e-mailed a colleague, Richard Miller, saying: "This has been [a] nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."

Since then, the nightmare has spilled out across the gulf. BP has said it will bring in additional vessels to boost its ability to handle as much as 53,000 barrels a day, though it warned that the site was so crowded with vessels that safety is a concern.

"Several hundred people are working in a confined space with live hydrocarbons on up to 4 vessels. This is significantly beyond both BP and industry practice," BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles wrote in a letter to Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson.

Obama, struggling to appear in command in the face of the continuing spill, made a swing though Mississippi, Alabama and Florida on Monday. The trip was aimed largely at audiences in those three states rather than at the national viewing public. The president softened his tone measurably from the week before, when he said he was figuring out "whose ass to kick." On Monday, he acknowledged that there are problems complicating the quick payment of damage claims to those affected by the spill -- a relatively muted complaint and one that other senior officials had already made publicly.

"There are still problems" with the claims process, Obama said after a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., with several governors, Coast Guard officials and others involved in the response. Flanked by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) and Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen, the incident commander, Obama said the discussion included how best to coordinate skimmers and other boats already on the gulf to prevent the slick from coming ashore.

"We also talked about claims so that people in Mississippi and throughout the region are adequately compensated for the damages done," Obama said.

The White House on Monday announced Obama's choices for the bipartisan commission tasked with issuing a report within six months about the spill and how to prevent and mitigate future oil spills.

The appointees would be National Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke; Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; Terry D. Garcia, executive vice president for the National Geographic Society overseeing programs in scientific field research, conservation and exploration; Cherry A. Murray, dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and Fran Ulmer, chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage.

The five will work with the co-chairmen, former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K. Reilly.

Staff writers Scott Wilson and Joel Achenbach contributed to this report.

washingtonpost.com

which is a nice story but apparently things are unlikely to be so simple as a function of the extensive mode of subcontractor usage that bp preferred to use.
and there is an interesting question about insurance and who is going to end up paying and for what that follows from the manoevering around narrative (a process in which this letter is but one salvo).

you'd think that the folk who see petro-capitalism as a necessary good (and i am personally really ambivalent about it, even as i write on a laptop that is built from all kinds of petroleum derivatives and so forth) would be pleased to see the emergence of specificity around the accident. for these folk, however, the problem is that this specificity is likely to further erode the neo-liberal assumptions that underpinned the old regulatory regime.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2798418)

and there is an interesting question about insurance and who is going to end up paying and for what that follows from the manoevering around narrative (a process in which this letter is but one salvo).

Regardless of what the loss actually is, there isn't enough insurance in the marketplace to cover it, especially when we're discussing essentially 4 or 5 insurance buyers - BP, Transocean, Halliburton, whoever made the blowout preventer and (possibly) whoever made the part that they end up blaming (ranked from largest purchased limits to lowest on my guesses). From what I've seen in the trade journals, there's about $1B in limits available (give or take a few million) at this point. Since we're already over that according to BP, it seems like a moot point to me.

that's interesting, jazz.
so "the market" functions to limit the liability of insurance companies which collect substantial fees to underwrite the risks untaken by halliburton, bp, transocean et al.?
as in "oops, this is too big for us. can't pay. sorry"?
do i understand that correctly?
seems a pure privatization of gain socialization of loss scenario to me. i'm surprised that's legal.

well, my inner marxist is not surprised it's legal

here's a link to the oil drum thread about the waxman letter:
The Oil Drum | BP Deepwater Oil Spill - Energy and Commerce Committee's Letter Outlining Risky Practices in Anticipation of Heyward's Thursday Testimony

which includes a copy of the whole thing and a link to a pdf of the original.

and if you're feeling inclined to do some reading:

http://energycommerce.house.gov/inde...ries&Itemid=55

the oil drum folk seem to think that there's a smoking gun in these documents. i haven't time to play along at the moment, but maybe you do?

meanwhile the "clean-up" continues to stumble and fumble along:

Quote:

Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

GRAND ISLE, La. — Deano Bonano, the emergency preparedness director for Jefferson Parish, marched from a motor home being used as a command center to an office across the street filled with BP officials.

It was late May. Oil had been creeping into the passes around Grand Isle. Two fleets of fishing boats were supposed to be laying out boom, the long floating barriers to corral oil and protect the fragile marshes of Barataria Bay.

But the boats were gathered on the inland side of the bay — the wrong side — anchored idly as the oil oozed in from the Gulf of Mexico. BP officials said they had no way of contacting the workers on the boats, Mr. Bonano recalled.

“You’re watching the oil come in,” Mr. Bonano said, “and they can’t even move.”

For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, “top kills” and “junk shots” have failed, and a “spillcam” shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day.

Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom.

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.

A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.

Every region of the country was required to have a contingency plan, tailored for its unique geography, for responding to a spill.

But Leslie Pearson, a private oil-spill response consultant, said federal oversight of spill contingency plans largely amounts to accepting what oil industry operators say they can do, rather than demanding they demonstrate that they can actually do it.

“Their plans don’t say, ‘Within X amount of time it has to be controlled and industry needs to prove how the heck you’re going to do that,’ ” she said.

She and other critics of the federal government’s response point to parts of the world where they say foreign governments have stricter rules for offshore operators. In the Canadian Arctic, for example, some offshore operators are required to have ships on close standby to drill relief wells more quickly than the ones being drilled in the gulf.

While the United States requires operators to be prepared to drill relief wells, their contingency plans do not have to specify a firm timeline for how quickly they will do so, experts said.

Some states have tried to establish tougher rules within their jurisdictions. In Prince William Sound, where the Valdez ran aground, for example, Alaska requires all tankers to be accompanied by two escort vessels. Enough equipment also has to be at the ready to remove up to 300,000 barrels of oil in 72 hours.

Scott Schaefer, the deputy administrator of California’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, said his state’s regulations also went beyond federal law, requiring, among other things, repeated tests of response equipment.

Mr. Schaefer, who is now in Mobile, Ala., working to fight the oil spill there, declined to characterize the level of preparation in the gulf. He did note, though, that many other experts had flown in from California, including scientists trained in gauging damage to sensitive areas and experts in aerial imaging to study the density of oil in the water.

“They’ve got their programs here and they’re pretty proud of them,” he said. “I think on the West Coast it’s just much bigger and better funded.”

Still, said Ms. Pearson, the consultant, states have limited tools to deal with offshore drilling in federal waters, as was the case with the Deepwater Horizon.

And by the time oil arrives at a coastline, she said, “you’ve lost the response.”

Many experts also said that no plan could really fight this leak perfectly, and that the problem was more with the regulations that allowed it to happen in the first place.

“I don’t think there’s a person in the spill world who would have thought that whole thing would be contained and recovered,” said Elise DeCola, a response consultant based in Massachusetts. “Whether or not you decide to drill is a policy decision, a calculated risk. Everyone at the end of the day understands that risk. It’s kind of damage control from the start.”

Beyond the Worst Case

There were at least five plans governing the response to this spill, including national and regional plans drawn up by the Coast Guard and federal and state authorities, as well as lengthy plans prepared by BP. Each one either failed to consider a continuing blowout or drastically underplayed the effects of one.

“I will tell you that nobody in their plan foresaw this incident,” said Capt. Roger Laferriere of the Coast Guard, who is directing cleanup efforts in Houma, La. “Nobody.”

The contingency plan for southeast Louisiana, which was drawn up by a committee led by the Coast Guard and a state representative, specifically mentions the possibility of a blowout and includes a worst case of a million-barrel spill, which is significantly short of even conservative estimates of the current spill.

But like other federal plans, it does not anticipate the possibility that the leak could continue for weeks. It concludes, for example, that such a spill would require the use of 38,400 gallons of dispersant, or roughly 3 percent of what has been applied in the last two months.

The BP plans do consider an uncontrolled blowout, one that releases 240,000 barrels a day into the gulf for at least 100 days — far worse than the current spill.

In the event of such an enormous spill, according to these plans, “no significant adverse impacts are expected” to beaches, wetlands or coast-dwelling birds.

Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the company’s oil spill response plan was “fully approved” by the Minerals Management Service.

“The plan does not, and cannot, prevent an oil spill or any impact from the spill, but it establishes the framework under which the company will respond,” he wrote. “This is the framework we and the unified command have been using in what is the largest oil spill response in US history.”

Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the national commander for the spill, said in an interview that shortcomings in the response did not stem from the actions described in the plans, but from the risk assessment on which those plans were based.

“I think they’re adequate to the assumptions in the plans,” Admiral Allen said. “I think you need to go back and question the assumptions.”

Admiral Allen said that in the future, the Coast Guard would probably need to review the oil company contingency plans — which are approved by the Minerals Management Service and not the Coast Guard — “for the purpose of executability” in a response. But mostly, he said, everyone would need to re-examine the worst-case scenarios.

The potential spills contemplated in the plans drawn up by federal authorities are monolithic slicks. The spill in the gulf, Admiral Allen said, is a series of large spills spreading in every direction from Louisiana to Florida, underwater and on the surface.

This creates a different situation entirely.

“The Coast Guard will need to take a look at this new scenario, and how we are going to address this happening in the future,” Captain Laferriere said. “This is the new, defining worst-case scenario.”

The reason for the inclusion of worst-case scenarios in these plans is for officials to ensure that enough supplies, like boom and oil skimmers, are on hand to respond to a spill.

Now critical boom is being flown in from the north shore of Alaska and oil skimming boats are coming from as far away as Norway. Requirements for more so-called mechanical response equipment, as opposed to chemical dispersant, fell short of current needs.

A 1999 Coast Guard report recommended that a mechanical response — using equipment like boom, skimmers and absorbent materials largely marshaled by boat and from land — should be increased by as much as 25 percent.

But over the next several years, lobbyists for oil companies pushed to keep the existing standard in place and emphasized the use of chemical dispersant.

Fred Felleman, an environmental consultant based in Seattle who has worked to strengthen spill prevention and response efforts in Northwest ports, said the oil industry’s preference for dispersants was driven in part by economics.

“It’s very expensive to have people on the ground trained and ready to deploy, under contract,” Mr. Felleman said.

In rules formally published last August, the Coast Guard effectively overruled its 1999 report, declining to require the substantial increase in the amount of mechanical response equipment.

However, in comments published along with the rules, the Coast Guard said that it “recognizes that the amount of mechanical recovery equipment is still inadequate to address the worst-case threat.”

There is no excuse for the failure in the plans to anticipate the situation now unfolding, said Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and a longtime advocate for the protection of Louisiana wetlands.

He pointed out that it has been more than 30 years since the catastrophic Ixtoc I blowout in Mexico in 1979, which lasted for 10 months and released 3.7 million barrels of oil.

But, Mr. Davis acknowledged, hindsight will not help with the operation in the gulf.

“You pull the ripcord on the parachute you packed,” he said. “Not the parachute you wish you had packed.”

Unclear Leadership

At the very least, these plans, which devote pages and flow charts to command structure, were meant to have an efficient hierarchy in place as soon as a spill occurred. That structure has often been unwieldy, and to some, hardly evident at all.

“I still don’t know who’s in charge,” Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said at the Senate hearing on Thursday, seven weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank. “Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?”

Governance is inherently complicated by the players who are thrown together: BP officials work alongside federal officials who rebuke them publicly, and federal officials work closely with officials at the state level, who have been equally public in their condemnation of the response.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, for example, has drawn local support for his fact-filled critiques of the response plans, but every 48 hours a state representative cooperates on those same plans with BP and the Coast Guard.

“I told him, when he signs the plan he’s endorsing our projects,” said Captain Laferriere, adding that he and the representative sit in the same office. “Louisiana is still learning the process.”

But Garret Graves, the governor’s senior coastal adviser, said that the state’s power was limited: the state strongly disapproves of the amount of chemical dispersant being used, he said, and feels that the supply of boom is drastically inadequate.

The main problems, many here say, have been sluggish response times and a consistent impression that no one is in charge.

Reports of oil reaching shore have been made days before any vessels were seen in the area. After squalls, booms have ended up tangled like spaghetti on the shores of wildlife-rich islands, only to remain like that for days with no response workers in sight.

“We are making adjustments every day to improve our efforts,” Mr. Odone of BP wrote. “For example, we initially struggled with the logistics of getting crews to work, but have made major improvement since to make sure this happens.”

Requests to the response operation, no matter how small, have required approval, a process that state and local officials said could take days or weeks. Some requests were never answered at all.

“You would throw it into the dark black hole and it might not ever come back,” Ralph Mitchell, the public safety director for Terrebonne Parish, said of early requests for boom.

On the other hand, the flurry of planning on the parish and state levels meant just that: more plans, more officials and more chains of command in an effort that was already sprawling. Parish officials have taken helicopters to observe coastline shortly after Coast Guard or BP officials did, duplicating efforts out of distrust.

Admiral Allen, echoing Mr. Nungesser, said that he had had to learn the lines of authority within Louisiana, and that in recent weeks, he had adapted the centralized command structure to the “home rule economy” of the parishes.

More decision-making authority has been given to Coast Guard officers at the local level, a move that has been broadly welcomed here after weeks of growing frustration.

“The effectiveness of the effort came way late,” said Forrest A. Travirca III, a field inspector for a local land trust that includes the nine-mile beachfront at Port Fourchon, La., and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it.

Until recently, Mr. Travirca said, “there was no direction. It was just chaotic. There was this group doing something, that group doing something. Nobody knowing who was doing what.”

Crews on the Ground

BP’s growing cleanup operation, which includes more than 100 companies and has already cost $1.6 billion, has left an often dangerous vacuum of guidance and direction in one of the most fragile ecosystems on earth.

Cleanup workers on Queen Bess Island, La., have been spotted trampling pelican nesting grounds and tossing around pelican eggs.

Yellow caution tape has been strung up on beaches to keep the news media and civilians out, only to end up in the marsh, where it could harm birds and small mammals.

On the beach at Port Fourchon, Mr. Travirca said, cleanup workers left oil-soaked mops on the beach for days, where the tides buried them in the sand. The workers were finally told to pick up the mops and put them in garbage bags, which they did — but not before shaking the mops out and strewing the beach with oil again.

While officials and residents of southern Louisiana have criticized a response that has sometimes been absent, they have also often criticized the cleanup crews that do show up.

“BP could fire all their contractors because they’re doing absolutely nothing but destroying our marsh,” Mr. Nungesser told the Senate panel.

David Camardelle, the mayor of Grand Isle and others complained that the employees in BP’s sprawling response are often outsiders who are not familiar with the fragile marshes and not local fishermen who most need the jobs.

Typically, spill cleanup workers are men and women who are found by temporary staffing agencies in unemployment lines and through classified ads, often with little education and few job prospects. They receive training and then wait to be called into action when an accident occurs.

These staffing agencies have contracts with environmental cleanup firms, which in turn have contracts with another company, in most cases the responsible party. But this spill operation is different from others because of the sheer number of contractors involved, making it difficult not only for officials demanding accountability but for the contractors themselves.

The agencies, some of them quite small, are paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, in wages, but in many cases have not been able to reach through layers upon layers of contractors to the ultimate paymaster, BP.

Several expressed concern that if the labor needs increased with the scale of the cleanup and they still did not have guarantees from BP, they may have to pull out.

“There’s way too many players in it,” said an owner of one of the staffing agencies involved, who did not want to publicly criticize the process. “You don’t know who’s getting money from where.”

For now, the problem is not that people are working without pay, but the opposite. Trained workers are brought in by the hundreds to an area so that they will be in place if work needs to be done. In some of these areas, there is no work to be done. But under the contract, they need to be paid anyway.

“Our people aren’t out on the beach,” the owner of another agency said, lamenting the lack of organization. “They’re sitting under a tree and getting paid a full day.”

The cleanup operation has also been, at times, a casualty of politics. One staffing agency sent more than 150 trained workers to the Gulf Coast only to be told that in light of local and state insistence on exclusively local employment, too many of the workers were from out of state. They were all let go the next day.

A Barrier’s Limits

One of the most vivid images in news reports on the oil spill has been boom, the lengths of orange and yellow barrier that are anchored to the seafloor and either keep oil at bay or corral it so it can be skimmed. From the earliest days, politicians have been demanding it, officials have been promising more of it and now nearly 400 miles of it is in place in gulf waters.

But it has also become a potent symbol of the problems with the response effort.

Boom, which is easily swamped by waves, provides only limited protection, something even politicians who have thundered for more to be installed will concede. It also requires constant maintenance, as squalls moving in from offshore regularly break the chains apart, and effective deployment, something officials at all levels say has been lacking.

“The boom has been a disaster from the beginning,” Mr. Nungesser said, citing improper training for workers laying it out, as well as their unfamiliarity with the area’s waterways.

But proper deployment also requires a thorough plan and a detailed map of effective locations, with precise measurements of passes and other waterways.

The southeast Louisiana contingency plan, which includes environmental sensitivity maps, had not been updated in seven years — a lifetime after intense coastal erosion and a series of hurricanes that have turned, by some estimates, nearly 500 square miles of wetlands into open water.

So after the spill, with no new plan forthcoming, state and parish officials gathered one Saturday night in an office tower in Baton Rouge, and drew up a new set of booming maps.

Such plans work best when they can be tested ahead of time. They also are dependent on certain kinds of boom.

But response crews have often had to make do with the kind of boom that was on hand, even when it was the wrong kind. And since everything was being concocted on the fly, “they hadn’t had a chance to validate the plan,” Captain Laferriere said.

“I’d fly out every day and notice the boom,” he said. “And it was failing.”

Onshore Oil Spill Response Is Described as Chaotic - NYTimes.com

No, it's more a question of capacity. In theory a company charges $x premium for $y limit. There's no such thing (in the casualty world, which is what this is) as no top end on the limit. Generally speaking, BP (for instance) probably self-insures the first $1M to $5M and then buys excess coverage over that. There are probably 2-5 companies on the first $100M in limits, then they probably buy increments of $25M to $50M to build up to probably about $500M. After that, there are a few players that can offer up to $100M in limits over that first $500M. The problem is that there's a finite number of times the same insurance companies will participate in an insurance program because they're concerned about this exact set of circumstances - a massive loss where they're paying all their limits that turns a $25M bad bet into a $250M career-killer.

Here's an example from one carrier:

H

Quote:

AMILTON, Bermuda—Aspen Insurance Holdings Ltd. said Thursday that its preliminary loss estimate for claims related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is “unlikely to exceed” $25 million.

Advertisement
The Hamilton, Bermuda-based insurer said that while it is not yet possible to estimate the environmental and economic damages as a result of the sunken oil rig and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company believes “the majority of scenarios including those which are most likely to occur” will cost Aspen less than $25 million.

In a statement, Aspen said it has been monitoring the events in the Gulf during the past few weeks and evaluated a range of scenarios concerning insurance liabilities for different parties involved before coming up with a loss estimate.

If I remember correctly, Aspen wrote the hull coverage on the Deepwater Horizon.

ah. ok. so this is a suicide prevention deal for the insurance companies that enables them to play the game of insuring something like the deepwater horizon without exposing themselves to all the losses associated with all the consequences of the explosion etc.

and this is all up front, so there's no secret about it. more policies with limits that are being reached. that kinda makes sense.

===

as a side note i find this strange:

Quote:

Oil Executives Tell Committee That BP Spill Is an Aberration
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — The chief executives of the world’s largest oil companies faced a Congressional panel of inquisitors on Tuesday and tried to cast the BP spill as a rare event that their companies were not likely to repeat.

In their prepared remarks, the executives said that continued offshore exploration and drilling were essential to American oil and gas supplies and to the health of their industry.

In a moment of Capitol Hill drama reminiscent of the grilling of tobacco industry executives in 1994, the oil company officials were summoned by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to justify offshore drilling and explain how their safety practices differed from BP’s.

Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil, said in prepared testimony that if companies follow proper well design, drilling, maintenance and training procedures accidents like Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 “should not occur,” implying that BP had failed to do so.

John S. Watson, chief executive of Chevron, also pointed an implicit finger at BP, saying that every Chevron employee and contractor has the authority to stop work immediately if they see anything unsafe. Congressional investigators charge that BP went ahead with risky procedures even after repeated warnings from company workers and contract employees on the ill-fated rig.

“Our internal review confirmed what our regular audits have told us,” Mr. Watson said in his prepared remarks. “Chevron’s deepwater drilling and well control practices are safe and environmentally sound.”

The panel is also scheduled to hear from Lamar McKay, the president of BP America, as well as from executives of Shell and Conoco Phillips.

The executives appeared before the energy and environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. He planned to question the oil company representatives not only about safety procedures but about emergency planning, the use of dispersants and differences in regulations in other countries.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House committee, focused on the spill response plans of the five companies. They were prepared by an outside contractor and are virtually identical, Mr. Waxman said.

Each of the plans addresses a worst-case spill. BP’s plan says it can handled a spill of 250,000 barrels a day; Chevron and Shell say they can handle 200,000 barrels a day. The current estimate for the BP spill is about 30,000 barrels a day, and it is clear that the company’s plan was not adequate to deal with it.

Mr. Waxman said it is clear that the plans are "just paper exercises."

"BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak," Mr. Waxman said, "and Exxon Mobil and the other companies would do no better."

Mr. Markey prepared a series of questions about industry spending on research and alternative energy, and plans to expand offshore operations to the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts.

“Now the other companies here today will contend that this was an isolated incident. They will say a similar disaster could never happen to them,” Mr. Markey said as the hearing opened. “And yet it is this kind of Blind Faith — which is ironically the name of an actual rig in the Gulf — that has led to this kind of disaster.”

Mr. Markey added: “In preparation for this hearing, the committee reviewed the oil spill safety response plans for all of the companies here today. What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words. We found that all of these companies, not just BP, made the exact same assurances.”

Like BP, Mr. Markey said, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for three million years.

“Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP’s that they list a phone number for the same long-dead expert,” he said.

Mr. McKay, of BP America, issued a plea for forbearance from Congressional and executive branch officials, saying in his prepared remarks, “America’s economy, security and standard of living today significantly depend upon domestic oil and gas production. Reducing our energy production, absent a concurrent reduction in consumption, would shift additional jobs and dollars offshore and place millions of additional barrels per day into tanker ships that must traverse the world’s oceans.”

Oil Executives Try to Explain Differences From BP - NYTimes.com

what's strange is the claim that the deepwater horizon was an aberration. of course it was an aberration; massive ecological disasters aren't happening continuously except maybe in the niger river delta but no-one in the northern hemisphere particularly cares about the niger river delta i mean it's so far away and so.....african....

but the main theatrical point i put in bold above and i am not sure how much need be said about it.

For those who want to know how these large policies are written:

Insurance companies operate under a formula: based on investments and premium income, an insurance syndicate has X number of dollars to "risk". That risk is then distributed into various industries, locations, etc. in order to mitigate massive loss all at once. For example, in the residential market they might insure 50 houses on the coast, 50 in the plains, and 50 in the mountains. For large commercial endeavors, a syndicate will insure container ships which are travelling in different oceans. Once any boat makes port, the policy is satisfied and cancelled. That "risk" money is now available for another endeavor. Mathematically, there will always be policy limits so that a company will know what its risk is at all times, in order to make decisions about other underwriting. Anything above policy limits is the responsibility of the insured.

There aren't any companies who could take on the risk of an entire offshore well endeavor. By it's nature, that doesn't spread the risk adequately. Consequently, many companies take a portion of that risk. When the insurance broker gets enough aggregate to reach an acceptable level (assuming the insurer will be left with the rest), they build the platform, sail the ship, whatever.

In this case, the bean counters determine the expected risk for an oil rig is Y. They divide up the risk to the insurers. I don't think anyone expected that Y was really $50B. If they had determined that, no one would have underwritten the rig because too much of the syndicates' monies would be tied up for too long. I would say, they probably estimated the risk at $1B, or something. Yes, that means BP now gets $49B to self-insure.

Oh, and this:

YouTube- Bp coffie spill funny.flv

cimmaron: i have a meeting in a minute, so will just say that i misunderstood jazz's initial post. it may have just been my oversight or maybe the sentences didn't link overall capacity to pay to specific risk limits on specific policies--i don't remember. but there was something wobbly up there. it's better now. gotta go.

edit: actually my meeting was postponed. so. the initial post jazz made read to me as though there was a market-wide mechanism of some kind that enabled insurers who had taken on policies with very high degrees of risk (and presumably accompanying that high returns) to be confronted with a clusterfuck situation (that's the technical term) and throw up their hands, arguing effectively that we just can't pay that. the next post cleared it up...i think my confusion followed from not thinking like someone who knows insurance as a bidness so not being able to fill in detail in that way. clearer now tho. thanks.

Heh. There is a possibility of the clusterfuck that you've described. Generally those are triggered because of the policy exclusions and policy wording that isn't perfectly clear. In this case, however, the chances of that happening are diminishingly small given the high profile of the loss. That said, there was a huge case over the WTC loss. The building owner maintained that it was two separate events (effectively meaning that each insuror would pay twice), and the insurance carriers alleged that it was one. The courts eventually found for the owners.

Given the Federal promises, I doubt that will be allowed to happen here.

Policy exclusions, that's where the crime in insurance takes place (IMO). Water damage is covered, mold caused by the water damage...not covered....unless you buy the mold damage rider (which your agent didn't mention). Crap like that is what rightfully gives insurance companies a bad rep.

rb-

Yeah, I started writing all of that and published it. The refresh of the page showed that you guys had moved far beyond what I was saying. I reworded the beginning and left it there for others who might not understand the way these big policies get underwritten.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2798490)

Read your own damn policy. You're the one who paid for it. Pick it up and at least thumb through the table of contents. And if your agent didn't point out that you could have bought the mold rider and you can prove it in court, his Errors & Ommissions/Professional coverage will cover that.

And comparing homeowners insurors and commercial insurors is a bit of apples and oranges, especially since companies like BP, Transocean and Halliburton all employ teams of inhouse risk managers, outside risk consultants and brokers who all point out potential gaps in coverage.

That said, none of that is relevant at this point since the insurance companies are taking a back seat thus far. Given the type of coverage most likely in place and who's buying it, the policies are probably on "pay on behalf of" forms, but I'll bet that they've talked to the carriers and switched that to a reimbursement since the first few layers are just going to tender their limits immediately anyway.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz (Post 2798501)

Settle down their Sparkie, it didn't happen to me. My wife is the claims supervisor for an MGA.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2798503)

Settle down there, Sparkie. It didn't happen to me. My wife is the claims supervisor for an MGA.

/grammar nazi

//insurance nerd

And the masculine form is "Sparky", but I let that slide since I figured you were trying to make a dig. ;)

Whenever I have trouble sleeping, I pull out her old CIC study manuals.

more information.

1. a quite grim interview about the oil disaster with thomas shirley of texas A&M, a marine biologist who specializes in the gulf of mexico:

The Oil Spill?s Growing Toll On Sea Life in the Gulf of Mexico by David Biello: Yale Environment 360

2. a curious analysis of obama's tv speech tonight from the guardian. what i take as interesting in it really i've bolded. but feel free to discuss (or not) the article:

Quote:

Why the oil spill is getting the Oval Office treatment

When a US president talks directly to the nation it is often a sign of events spinning out of control

If it's a televised Oval Office address, it must be a crisis.

Barack Obama's talk to the nation from behind his White House desk is a rare moment for any president. Far from the rambling state of the union affairs in front of hostile members of Congress or the cosy weekly radio addresses, Oval Office speeches are a focused and powerful tool meant to suggest the smack of authority. But they are usually made when a president is far less in control of events than he would like, making them as much about reassurance as solutions.

John F Kennedy appeared on television from the Oval Office before a worried country at the height of the Cuban missile crisis when nuclear war with the Soviet Union was closer than ever.

George Bush spoke from the Oval Office hours after terrorists brought down the World Trade Centre on 9/11, and again after the US led the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Richard Nixon used the occasion to announce his resignation over the Watergate scandal.

Perhaps one of the most insightful and maligned Oval Office addresses came from Jimmy Carter in 1979 as years of oil shortages took their toll on America's economy. It looks all the more relevant today as Obama confronts his own oil crisis and a divided country and Congress.

In what became known as his "malaise speech", Carter used a question that still stalks Obama – "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" – to reflect on the dangers of an increasingly divided political system and nation that he warned threatened "to destroy the social and the political fabric of America".

"It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation ... Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy," he said.

"There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure."

It might be thought that Obama has had reason enough to deploy the Oval Office speech even before the BP crisis. The president has confronted the worst economic crisis in seven decades, has spent close to a trillion dollars bailing out banks and major industries, and has had to fight hard to pass even the most basic reform to get healthcare to most Americans.

But perhaps the real crisis of the BP oil spill is that mid-term elections loom and Obama's failure to look as if he has any control over the situation is another threat to his grip on Congress.

Why the oil spill is getting the Oval Office treatment | Environment | The Guardian

carter was right.

3. meanwhile a piece from the washington post about strains in the obama-bp relationship. like it's a soap opera. because of course that's the way to see it.

washingtonpost.com

4. meanwhile fitch's cuts bp's bond rating from aa to bbb.
BP credit rating slashed as oil spill costs mount | Business | guardian.co.uk

and there's an awful lot of oil shooting out into the gulf:

http://mxl.fi/bpfeeds2/

so it's a little like the old days: got *really* shitty news about which there is nothing obvious to be done certainly nothing in the way of Manly Intervention, then release it during the national teevee news/infotainment hour and hope that most people will be watching the celtics/lakers tonight and so will miss the second infotainment cycle.

Quote:

Panel Sharply Raises Estimate of Oil Spilling Into the Gulf
By LIZ ROBBINS and JUSTIN GILLIS

A government panel raised its estimate of the flow rate from BP’s damaged well yet again on Tuesday, declaring that as much as 60,000 barrels a day could be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The spill was already categorized as the largest in the nation’s history, and the new figures sharply increase previous estimates, suggesting a flow equal to an Exxon Valdez — every four days.

Scientists on Tuesday released a flow rate that ranged from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels — up from the rate they issued only last week, of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day. It continues a pattern in which every new estimate of the flow rate has been dramatically higher than the one before.

The current range is far above the figure of 5,000 barrels a day that the government clung to for weeks after the spill started after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

The estimate of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels released last week, however, were based on readings taken from before June 3, when BP cut an underwater pipe called a riser to install a new device to contain the oil.

The number is far greater now, as scientists and BP officials had predicted, because when BP cut the pipe, the oil began flowing out of a single, concentrated source instead of several openings.

Over the past week, scientists placed pressure meters to the containment cap to better read the rate of flow. Energy Secretary Steven Chu himself, was involved in using those pressure readings to help make the latest estimate, the government said.

The new estimates seemed in line with the images of voluminous clouds of oil shown from underwater video over the last several weeks.

The numbers came on a day when BP’s ill-fated relief efforts to stop the damaged well hit yet another snag, underscoring once again the fragility of the containment effort: lightning struck the vessel that had been collecting the oil from the well, suspending operations for nearly five hours from 9:30 a.m. Central time until 2:15 p.m.

Considering BP had only able to collect about 15,000 barrels a day at its peak with the containment cap, these numbers released on Tuesday show just how much of a small impact the method had been making to stop the oil from flowing into the Gulf.

“This estimate, which we will continue to refine as the scientific teams get new data and conduct new analyses, is the most comprehensive estimate so far of how much oil is flowing one mile below the ocean’s surface,” Ken Salazar, the Interior Secretary, said in a statement released by the Coast Guard.

The staggering estimates and the small fire set the stage for President Obama’s primetime speech from the Oval Office, when he was expected to press BP on its cleanup and claims payment plans. Mr. Obama wrapped up a two-day trip to the Gulf coast with an appearance at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday morning.

“Yes, this is an unprecedented environmental disaster, it’s the worst in our nation’s history,” Mr. Obama told an audience of sailors, marines and civilians at the base. “But we’re going to continue to meet it with an unprecedented federal response and recovery effort. this is an assault on our shores and we’re going to fight back with everything we’ve got.”

Mr. Obama added: “My administration is going to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes to deal with the disaster.”

The disaster shows no signs of abatement.

BP said in a statement that the fire, which started after lightning struck the derrick — the familiar looking tower used to lift the piping — was quickly extinguished, and there were no injuries. But as a precaution, the containment operation was shut down for about five hours.

The containment cap is still the most successful method BP has had in collecting some of the oil that has been leaking from the undersea well, and it has only been partly effective. A series of attempts by BP to cap or plug the well before June 3 failed.

Phone calls to BP requesting comment on the lightning strike and containment shutdown were not immediately returned on Tuesday afternoon.

Panel Sharply Raises Estimate of Oil Spilling Into the Gulf - NYTimes.com

on the other hand, there is to be a presidential address to the country tonight about this fiasco so maybe it's connected to that somehow.

it'd be good were obama to turn back to the carter speech on energy policy cited above because we are living through a colossal demonstration of the prescience of the words.

a new thread from the oil drum which outlines the possibility that all the various numbers have been approximately true and what explains the variance in the flows (and by extension the numbers) could be erosion. this is interesting:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill -Why Flow Rates are Increasing and Open Thread

and some bad news for transocean:

Quote:

No cheap way out for Transocean
Offshore drilling specialist Transocean cannot limit its liability in the Gulf of Mexico oil slick disaster as the company with headquarters in Zug had tried to do.

A federal judge in Houston, Texas, ruled on Monday that the owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded and sank cannot use a 159-year-old maritime law to cap its damages at $27 million (SFr30.8 million).

The Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 states that a vessel owner is only liable for the post-accident value of the vessel and cargo as long as the owner can prove that he had no knowledge of negligence in the accident.

The so-called “Titanic-clause” was used effectively in 1912, when the owners of the Titanic tried to limit their liability after the ship’s accident.

On April 20, an explosion and fire killed 11 crew members and destroyed the Transocean-owned semisubmersible Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, positioned near Venice, Louisiana, in water nearly 5,000 feet deep.

The rig, one of the largest and most sophisticated in the world, had been under contract to BP, the London-based oil giant, since September 2007.

The Deepwater Horizon accident spewed thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, and experts said it could become the largest oil spill in history.

The group’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward is expected to face harsh questioning at a congressional hearing on Thursday.

Offshore drilling specialist Transocean cannot limit its liability in the Gulf of Mexico oil slick disaster - swissinfo

Okay, so now we're looking at a spill gushing at the rate of one or two Exxon Valdez spills a week. And....we don't know how many more weeks of this.

I almost want to laugh as this just gets progressively worse. You know, in one of those laugh-in-the-face-of-death kind of laughs---the hopeless kind.