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-   -   Louisiana Oil Rig Fire / Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (https://thetfp.com/tfp/general-discussion/154159-louisiana-oil-rig-fire-gulf-mexico-oil-spill.html)

Rekna 05-13-2010 07:24 PM
So now it comes out that the well is likely letting out 70,000 barrels a day instead of 5,000 as thought..... This is equivalent to the exon-valdez incident every four days. I honestly don't think the gulf of mexico will recover within the next 20 years from this.

Derwood 05-14-2010 06:10 AM
ace, I don't understand why you're going out of your way to defend and/or downplay BP's role in this. Are you arguing for the sake of arguing? Is your 401k tied to BP stock? This doesn't seem to be a right vs. left debate, so why are you spending so much time trying to explain away what seems like a pretty simple case of negligence?

roachboy 05-14-2010 07:20 AM
this is grand.

Quote:
Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.

But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger. They also criticize BP for refusing to use well-known scientific techniques that would give a more precise figure.

The criticism escalated on Thursday, a day after the release of a video that showed a huge black plume of oil gushing from the broken well at a seemingly high rate. BP has repeatedly claimed that measuring the plume would be impossible.

The figure of 5,000 barrels a day was hastily produced by government scientists in Seattle. It appears to have been calculated using a method that is specifically not recommended for major oil spills.

Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.

“The government has a responsibility to get good numbers,” Dr. MacDonald said. “If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.”

Scientists said that the size of the spill was directly related to the amount of damage it would do in the ocean and onshore, and that calculating it accurately was important for that reason.

BP has repeatedly said that its highest priority is stopping the leak, not measuring it. “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing.

Yet for decades, specialists have used a technique that is almost tailor-made for the problem. With undersea gear that resembles the ultrasound machines in medical offices, they measure the flow rate from hot-water vents on the ocean floor. Scientists said that such equipment could be tuned to allow for accurate measurement of oil and gas flowing from the well.

Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements.

But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.

“The government and BP are calling the shots, so I will have to respect their judgment,” Dr. Camilli said.

BP did not respond Thursday to a question about why Dr. Camilli and Mr. Bowen were told to stand down. Speaking more broadly about the company’s policy on measuring the leak, a spokesman, David H. Nicholas, said in an e-mail message that “the estimated rate of flow would not affect either the direction or scale of our response, which is the largest in history.”

Dr. MacDonald and other scientists said the government agency that monitors the oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had been slow to mount the research effort needed to analyze the leak and assess its effects. Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at NOAA and perhaps the country’s best-known oceanographer, said that she, too, was concerned by the pace of the scientific response.

But Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, said in an interview on Thursday: “Our response has been instantaneous and sustained. We would like to have more assets. We would like to be doing more. We are throwing everything at it that we physically can.”

The issue of how fast the well is leaking has been murky from the beginning. For several days after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, the government and BP claimed that the well on the ocean floor was leaking about 1,000 barrels a day.

A small organization called SkyTruth, which uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, published an estimate on April 27 suggesting that the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day, and probably several times that.

The following day, the government — over public objections from BP — raised its estimate to 5,000 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so the estimate works out to 210,000 gallons per day.

BP later acknowledged to Congress that the worst case, if the leak accelerated, would be 60,000 barrels a day, a flow rate that would dump a plume the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into the gulf every four days. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has estimated that the reservoir tapped by the out-of-control well holds at least 50 million barrels of oil.

The 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate was produced in Seattle by a NOAA unit that responds to oil spills. It was calculated with a protocol known as the Bonn convention that calls for measuring the extent of an oil spill, using its color to judge the thickness of oil atop the water, and then multiplying.

However, Alun Lewis, a British oil-spill consultant who is an authority on the Bonn convention, said the method was specifically not recommended for analyzing large spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, since the thickness was too difficult to judge in such a case.

Even when used for smaller spills, he said, correct application of the technique would never produce a single point estimate, like the government’s figure of 5,000 barrels a day, but rather a range that would likely be quite wide.

NOAA declined to supply detailed information on the mathematics behind the estimate, nor would it address the points raised by Mr. Lewis.

Mr. Lewis cited a video of the gushing oil pipe that was released on Wednesday. He noted that the government’s estimate would equate to a flow rate of about 146 gallons a minute. (A garden hose flows at about 10 gallons per minute.)

“Just anybody looking at that video would probably come to the conclusion that there’s more,” Mr. Lewis said.

The government has made no attempt to update its estimate since releasing it on April 28.

“I think the estimate at the time was, and remains, a reasonable estimate,” said Dr. Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator. “Having greater precision about the flow rate would not really help in any way. We would be doing the same things.”

Environmental groups contend, however, that the flow rate is a vital question. Since this accident has shattered the illusion that deep-sea oil drilling is immune to spills, they said, this one is likely to become the touchstone in planning a future response.

“If we are systematically underestimating the rate that’s being spilled, and we design a response capability based on that underestimate, then the next time we have an event of this magnitude, we are doomed to fail again,” said John Amos, the president of SkyTruth. “So it’s really important to get this number right.”
Calculations of Gulf Spill Volume Are Questioned - NYTimes.com

yeah, there's no reason to assume bp is operating in questionable faith here, now is there?
meanwhile transocean is trying to get the liability limits that are in place--you know, the cap on losses for those excellent petroleum corporate persons--applied to them.

meanwhile, i hope the estimates from the environmental groups are wrong.
an amount equal to that dumped by the exxon valdez every 4 days? what the fuck?

roachboy 05-14-2010 09:48 AM
more on the minerals management service and its non-regulation of oil production:

U.S. Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits - NYTimes.com

this just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

Cimarron29414 05-14-2010 09:53 AM
Wait until the oil hits foreign shores and they (rightly so) demand the U.S. clean it up.

roachboy 05-14-2010 11:39 AM
the political class of the gulf states seems to have been purchased by oil corporations.
how else to explain the call to continue drilling in the middle of the deepwater horizon fiasco?

Quote:
Gulf State lawmakers juggle oil industry interests with climate, safety concerns

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 14, 2010; 11:30 AM

In their battle to represent Louisiana in the U.S. Senate, incumbent David Vitter (R) and challenger Charlie Melancon (D) differ sharply on Wall Street reform, stimulus spending and a host of other issues.

But as the devastation from BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster widens, the two lawmakers agree on one thing: It is no reason to halt drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The calamity illustrates the overwhelming influence of oil on the politics of Louisiana and other Gulf States, in which lawmakers of both parties have generally maintained enthusiastic support for offshore drilling in defense of one of the region's bedrock industries. In Louisiana, the sector provides more than 300,000 jobs and handles about a quarter of the oil and natural gas consumed in the United States, according to industry estimates.

The oil business strongly favors delegations from key Gulf States in its campaign contributions. Lawmakers from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama received an average of $100,000 from oil and gas companies and their employees in the past three years, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and analyzed by The Washington Post. That compares with $30,000 for lawmakers from other states.

Local Republican and Democratic politicians alike say they try to balance the interests of both the industry and of conservationists while being mindful of the central role the region plays in supplying oil and gas to the rest of the nation. Many gulf area lawmakers also say BP must be held responsible for the economic impact of the spill on the commercial fishing and seafood industry, which has come to a halt because of the disaster.

"We need to find that balance between 'drill, baby, drill,' and 'spill, baby, spill," Melancon said in an interview. "We need to figure what it is that needs to be done so we can move forward."

But Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said many elected officials in the Gulf States "have very close, cozy ties with the oil and gas industry. That habit is hard to break even when disaster is staring them in the face."

The Deepwater Horizon rig, leased by London-based BP and owned by Transocean of Switzerland, suffered an explosion on April 20 about 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., killing 11. The spill has poured tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf.

The disaster has prompted growing pressure from environmental groups and some Democratic lawmakers to slow or halt the pace of oil exploration along the coastal United States. Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar halted offshore drilling permits and canceled hearings -- including some scheduled in Virginia -- until officials complete a review of the incident.

The spill has also hurt the chances that climate-change legislation will pass Congress this year, since expanded oil drilling was viewed as a crucial concession to winning over moderate Republicans in the Senate.

"Expanded drilling is dead on arrival," said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), an opponent of offshore drilling. "Now that people see that this can completely disrupt their livelihood, their culture and their way of life, I think you're going to see attitudes on drilling changing dramatically."

But it's not clear whether that applies to states such as Louisiana, where the oil and gas industry has dominated the state's economy for nearly a century. Vitter said in a recent television interview that slowing or halting offshore drilling is simply not realistic.

"Clearly, there have got to be changes made because of this incident," he told Fox News. "We need to learn a lot of from it and there needs to be new procedures and equipment. . . . But we certainly shouldn't start shutting things down."

During a hearing Tuesday, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) warned against a "reactionary and overly stringent" response to the spill. "This accident should not be used as an excuse to halt the gains the United States has made in developing domestic energy sources," he said.

Vitter and Louisiana's other senator, Mary Landrieu (D), rank among the top recipients of oil and gas money in Congress; while on the Hill, each has taken in more than $750,000 from companies and their employees, records show. Melancon, who lags Vitter badly in both fundraising and the polls, has received just over $300,000 from the industry and its employees in three terms in the House, records show.

Overall, nearly half of the top 20 recipients of oil and gas money in Congress hail from Texas or Louisiana, which together account for about a quarter of the industry's jobs in the United States. Landrieu, who has received nearly $200,000 from oil and gas political action committees over the past 15 months, said that she is "not a handmaiden to the oil industry" and had also received money from environmentalists.

Stuart H. Smith, a New Orleans attorney who has filed lawsuits against BP on behalf of environmental and fishing groups, said that "the oil business has pretty much gotten whatever they want in Louisiana for as long as they've been here." He said the oil spill has laid bare tensions between oil conglomerates and commercial seafood operations, which extract resources from the same waters.

"You'll find a lot of fishermen who will have two sons, say, one who's a fisherman and one who's working on a rig," Smith said. "Those are the main opportunities down there."

Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association, said the political influence of the energy sector in the state is exaggerated. He also bemoaned the attacks on the industry by environmentalists and others since the BP disaster.

"The industry has a lot of opponents, political and environmental, and this provides a great stage for those opponents to stand on," Briggs said. "But we didn't stop going to space because of the Challenger, we didn't stop importing oil because of Valdez and we shouldn't stop drilling exploration because of this one very tragic accident."

Staff writer T.W. Farnam contributed to this report
washingtonpost.com

some other information from the center for responsive politics (cited above) on oil/gas corporations and campaign contributions/wheel greasing:

Oil & Gas: Long-Term Contribution Trends | OpenSecrets

dogzilla 05-14-2010 12:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2788073)
the political class of the gulf states seems to have been purchased by oil corporations.
how else to explain the call to continue drilling in the middle of the deepwater horizon fiasco?
Just out of curiosity, if we stop drilling for oil now, when we have no realistic substitute, then what so we do? Do those of us in the northern US just huddle around campfires in the winter trying to stay warm?

Granted, problems like this fiasco need to be fixed, but let's drill for oil and do it right.

What we don't need is Obama deciding he needs to add trillions to the federal debt subsidizing nonsense like methanol production.

roachboy 05-14-2010 01:21 PM
well first thing is that i'm mostly in information gathering mode in this thread. it's become interesting to me assembling various fragments from different sources and putting them together in an effort to see something of what's happening around the deepwater horizon.

the regulatory system came up as problematic quite early on--in the thread via a post from mit press that referenced the author of a book on a spill that took 20-odd years to be cleaned up in california--i had little idea of how central that would become and how many problems with regulation would be revealed through this accident. if regulation we are to call it, really. that seems to me a basic, basic problem---that there's way way too much reliance on corporate reporting and way too much emphasis on cheerleading the extraction of oil at the expense of oversight and/or protection of even access to the resources not to speak of the surrounding environment. this system hasn't even caught up with the language of stakeholders so isn't even set up to take into consideration the interests of adjacent activities/industries that are directly affected by things going south on a rig (think fishing. shrimp for example. big big bidness. potentially fucked in a big big way)...you'd think that there'd be comprehensive regulation/oversight of the gulf (for example) as a commons from which lots of types of capital is extracted...this wouldn't be in the interest of any particular sector/industry though the protection of the resource/commons would be in the interest of all...allowing private sector domination of--or in the case of oil evacuation of--regulatory oversight in the interest of the narrowest imaginable bidness objective (shareholder profits) is simply not acceptable.

that's what the deepwater horizon has made really really obvious.

i'm not particular advocating yanking the plug on all offshore drilling...the only real conclusion i've come to so far based on the information i've been assembling and reading is that the regulatory frameworks that shape the activities already underway are seriously flawed. but everyone knows that now. so that would have to be addressed. and there are twitching moves in that direction--whether they're damage control or substantive in a bigger sense is impossible to say at this point, yes?

it would also seem to me that the assumption that things on the 400-odd rigs off lousiana are correct or even safe is now a Problem as well.

and this is the place at which it seems to me to make little sense to simply say "keep drilling"....the **only** interest that seems served by that are the profits of oil corporations.

it's too simple to say: yank the plug. and its too simple to say: keep drilling.

past that, i'm still putting together a view of what the regulatory set-up was, who the actors in this are and what happened, much like anyone else. and i've spent way way too much of my life around folk who work(ed) for oil companies to indulge rapid reactions to this. so i can only say where my thinking is heading.

what's your take on the regulatory system? what should be done at that level?
obviously this is not a panacea (fix the oversight, make it real, introduce accountability, stop giving hand jobs to oil interests, that kind of thing or a restatement of it) but it's the aspect of this that seems to jump out when i read this information...

The_Dunedan 05-14-2010 02:07 PM
Quote:
what's your take on the regulatory system? what should be done at that level?
obviously this is not a panacea (fix the oversight, make it real, introduce accountability, stop giving hand jobs to oil interests, that kind of thing or a restatement of it) but it's the aspect of this that seems to jump out when i read this information...
RB, I think this may be one of those situations were you and I should put our heads together and see if we don't come up with something.

I personally, of course, am not a fan of the Government regulating things. But as this incident (among many others) has shown, it's not usually a good idea to leave the fox guarding the metaphorical hen-house.

My thinking on this specific situation (and others like it) is basically this.

A: The only reason BP/Transocean/Halliburton are able to get away with this kind of laxity is because no effective method of sanction is in play. Part of the reason for this that, as "Corporate citizens," such entities are a very lucrative source of funds for our cash-strapped Government: the US has the second-highest corporate taxation rate in the world (.5 of one percentage point behind Japan), and this makes "don't bite the hand that pays you" a serious dynamic in all such cases. If the Gov't sanctions such a company too aggressively, that company might just pack up and leave, depriving the Government in question of access to billions of dollars in tax revenue. Additionally, the nature of Corporate Personhood means that actually -hurting- these companies (and the people within them making boneheaded decisions) is very, very difficult.

B: Since the Gov't will not or cannot sanction such Corporations effectively, consumers and the market should step in. This is where I regard the de-legitimization of Corporate Personhood as essential. Using the Deepwater Horizon accident as an example, an environmental catastrophe like this -should- be opening up the principal actors (BP, TO, HB) to enormous and crippling lawsuits by millions of plaintiffs. Those lawsuits should stand, and those lawsuits should STING. But because the Gov't is dependant upon Corporate tax revenues (while at the same time being beholden on the individual-legislature level to Corporate lobbyists), neither is likely. If past behaviors are any example, the lawsuits may be allowed to proceed, but none of the principal actors (or their numbnutted employees who made these decisions) will pay a cent. Twenty years on, and Exxon -still- has not paid a red cent of their fine for the Prince William Sound spill.

C: As a result, I am in favour of a multi-part approach such as the following:

1: Remove the market distortion known as Corporate Personhood. I've made my thoughts on this step clear in other threads and earlier here, so I won't elaborate.

2: Consumer's groups (J.D. Power & Associates, for example) should step up to the plate and compile the same kind of quality reports for oil/gas firms, nuke plants, etc...that they already do for automobiles, consumer goods, etc. If a firm or product passes below an acceptable threshold, that firm should be slapped with the kind of bad press that sinks gunmakers (Smith & Wesson), electronics firms (Fuji) and auto manufacturers (Chrysler). If that product causes actual -harm- (as in BP's drilling fuckup)...

3: Lawsuits. BIG ones. Lots of them. Against not only the offending firm (BP, say) but also against the persons -within- that firm responsible for the decision(s) which led to the litigable harm. If the CEO of British Petroleum had to come to the US (or send his lawyers) to defend against lawsuits from essentially the entire Gulf Coast of the US, -plus- the Mexican east coast, -plus- all the people (seasonal workers, tourists, travel-agents, seafood resteraunts, etc) who have been harmed by this...methinks he'd make sure his company was a bit more careful.
It like "Fight Club" in reverse. What if, instead of figuring out if a company could afford lawsuits more than they could afford a recall, "Jack" had to have been employed as an auditor looking out for lawsuits-in-waiting because, should he -miss- one and someone get hurt, his jackass boss would have been sued down to his skivvies along with the company itself? Combine this with the power of the advocacy groups mentioned above, and the possibility exists for a very responsive and very thorough feedback/sanction system which would not only provide a marvelous incentive to deal with these kinds of problems pro-actively. If negligence of this scale was enough to sink a company and impoverish its' officers, this kind of thing would be a -lot- less common.

4: Unions. I know, I know, you never thought to hear a right-wing loony like me advocating Unions. But here is where I think they could have a serious impact and in the best possible way. Unions should step in to say to their employers "Look, if you guys get stupid, we're all out of a job. So we're here to make sure you don't get stupid. We'll help you find the stupid and get rid of it...but if you bring it back, we're walking out. All of us." And I think this is one area where Unions still have a very, VERY big voice and need for existence: keeping their employers smart. This is pro-active: if the Union decides or observes that the company is getting dumb, they can put pressure on the company from within well -before- something goes catastrophically wrong. If a Shop Steward representing even 50% of the workers on Deepwater Horizon had emailed BP and said "Look, we just finished a pretty important test out here, and my guys are getting edgy 'cause a big piece of safety equipment failed on us. This needs fixin' or we're outta here, 'cause we don't wanna get caught in the fallout when this thing goes kablooey" it would have gotten somebody's attention. Even moreso if that Shop Steward hit everybody on his/her email address-book with that same email. All of a sudden every manager and safety wonk in BP would know something was up, and every Union member would too. And just because someone doesn't join a Union doesn't mean they can't act in support of that Union when it's releasing vital safety/employment-related information. A general Union/non-Union walkout, or even the threat thereof, is the kind of thing that could make BP or someone like them sit up and pay attention, especially since it would be the kind of thing that would presage the likelihood of crippling lawsuits and bad press (as above).

Just my notions and ruminations. YMMV.

Derwood 05-14-2010 02:41 PM
I'm pretty sure Exxon has started paying damages from that spill

hunnychile 05-14-2010 02:42 PM
Doesn't it seem odd that the U.S.A. can have NASA land a rover on Mars with cameras, but no one is able to cap a 22 inch hole in the Gulf of Mexico to stop the oil leak? It seems like we are more worried about star wars than our southern coast.

I find this most distressing!

aceventura3 05-14-2010 03:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Derwood (Post 2787919)
ace, I don't understand why you're going out of your way to defend and/or downplay BP's role in this. Are you arguing for the sake of arguing? Is your 401k tied to BP stock? This doesn't seem to be a right vs. left debate, so why are you spending so much time trying to explain away what seems like a pretty simple case of negligence?
No. First, I just find it unbelievable that our government on one hand is on a soap box about how bad BP and the rest are but is taking no responsibility for the accident and has not assumed a leadership role in fixing this mess. Think about it - BP says, guys it is just a small little leak, we will get it taken care of - and now a month later we get a real estimate of how much oil is leaking and it is much higher and nothing they have done is working???? How come we did not know this from day one, if it is true about the volume of oil? Why do we not know what the plans are to fix this??? How many chances do you give BP if you think they are criminal, negligent, they lie, etc., if I believed any of those thing - it is zero! So, what is up with that?

Second, everyone knows the risks in drilling oil a mile down in open water. Now we pretend that it could have been done without risk???

Third, given the alternative of drilling on land in Alaska, much less risk to the environment, tourism, and other industries we have no open minded consideration of that, but we have Obama one week wanting to expand drilling off-shore and the next wanting to stop it completely. Can we get someone to think this stuff through?

Fourth, we have Congressional show hearings before the leak is capped - what is that all about, other than politics and it is shameful in my view.

Fifth, using an example - if company A has a policy for workers to wear a certain type of shoe, and a worker comes to work in an unsafe shoe and has a fatal slip and fall accident due to the shoe - sure we can blame the company for not having a person check each employees shoes every time they enter the work site. But at some point we have to understand that with "systems", real people are involved and a company no matter how well intentioned may encounter work-place accidents due to human error and judgment. The issue is not to first demonize the company, but to learn and apply lessons learned.

There are other issue that also have my panties in a bunch, in summary I am tired of political show boating and I am tired of people just regurgitating what they hear in the media. Other than that, I am, as usual, always looking for a good debate or argument - it is my nature. Feel free to keep that in mind.:thumbsup:

Rekna 05-14-2010 03:27 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by hunnychile (Post 2788109)
Doesn't it seem odd that the U.S.A. can have NASA land a rover on Mars with cameras, but no one is able to cap a 22 inch hole in the Gulf of Mexico to stop the oil leak? It seems like we are more worried about star wars than our southern coast.

I find this most distressing!
I made this point earlier in this thread. The problem is that it is much easier to explore the moon than it is to do things a mile below the surface of the ocean. The pressures and temperatures at a mile blow the surface are much harsher than the moon.

I'm wondering who has technology to deal with something like this. The US Military does not. Maybe NASA has something to deal with this but that is unlikely. There are very few machines capable of operating at that depth let alone actually repair a leak.

aceventura3 05-14-2010 03:35 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by hunnychile (Post 2788109)
Doesn't it seem odd that the U.S.A. can have NASA land a rover on Mars with cameras, but no one is able to cap a 22 inch hole in the Gulf of Mexico to stop the oil leak? It seems like we are more worried about star wars than our southern coast.

I find this most distressing!
This administration has not taken this issue seriously and we are not holding them accountable for that. I hate to say it, but if this had happened with Bush in office - you can bet the reaction to his failure to address this issue would be off of the scale. This issue is bigger than BP, the administration needs to take charge and treat it that way. The U.S.A. can handle this. It is funny but with my "git er done" attitude, it gets mocked! But that is exactly what we need. Academic or lawyerly types should not be put in charge when real work needs to get done. Yes, I have a bias and yes I know what it is.

---------- Post added at 11:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rekna (Post 2788117)
I made this point earlier in this thread. The problem is that it is much easier to explore the moon than it is to do things a mile below the surface of the ocean. The pressures and temperatures at a mile blow the surface are much harsher than the moon.

I'm wondering who has technology to deal with something like this. The US Military does not. Maybe NASA has something to deal with this but that is unlikely. There are very few machines capable of operating at that depth let alone actually repair a leak.
First, how long did it take them to make the original dome? Too long. Second, there are people who knew why a dome at that depth would have problems, were they consulted? How long did it take to make the second dome? Too long. why did they choose to use a dome in the first place? Was it to salvage oil? was that decision in the best interests of the region or BP? What is the next plan? What is the plan after that? Who is approving these plans? The U.S.A. has not really devoted any resources to getting this fixed. It is a shame. We have the resources, the intellect, the talent to fix this, what we lack is leadership.

roachboy 05-14-2010 04:33 PM
ace, what you fail to take into account is the whole reality of the regulatory set-up. it is absurd under that arrangement to expect the federal government to break out of the reliance on industry self-reporting "from day one"---it's not how reality works in this area. this is a main reason i started posting so much about the regulatory system---you know how it actually worked, not how you'd prefer to pretend to yourself it worked so you can find some way to pretend to yourself that the bush people would somehow have been more manly or some shit about this (like they were with katrina...but that's another matter).

so reality was organized so that bp was the source of information about the leak. and if you read the article i posted this earlier about the estimates concerning the amounts that are leaking, bp---which AGAIN is the informational center of this mess---obstructed efforts to get something like an accurate assessment.

why would they do that?
pubic relations, obviously.
it's pretty clear that bp was hoping they could downplay the magnitude of the problem in the hopes that they could get it under control quickly.
it didn't work.

and it's disengenuous to pretend that reality was organized otherwise.
its good to actually read stuff, i think. you learn things.


your second point above is little more than nationalist wanking. fact is that the technologies were not in place to deal with this kind of mess because and only because the regulatory arrangement didn't require it and the exclusive emphasis on profits precluded its development according to "business reasons"---what this sort of thing does is dismantle the pollyanna worldview of neoliberals who like to pretend the private sector will take care of everything...such obvious nonsense.

but i do find your snippy accusations about the state to be funny, given how inefficient and ineffective your metaphysics usually require that the state be.

Rekna 05-14-2010 08:28 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by aceventura3 (Post 2788119)
This administration has not taken this issue seriously and we are not holding them accountable for that. I hate to say it, but if this had happened with Bush in office - you can bet the reaction to his failure to address this issue would be off of the scale. This issue is bigger than BP, the administration needs to take charge and treat it that way. The U.S.A. can handle this. It is funny but with my "git er done" attitude, it gets mocked! But that is exactly what we need. Academic or lawyerly types should not be put in charge when real work needs to get done. Yes, I have a bias and yes I know what it is.

---------- Post added at 11:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 PM ----------



First, how long did it take them to make the original dome? Too long. Second, there are people who knew why a dome at that depth would have problems, were they consulted? How long did it take to make the second dome? Too long. why did they choose to use a dome in the first place? Was it to salvage oil? was that decision in the best interests of the region or BP? What is the next plan? What is the plan after that? Who is approving these plans? The U.S.A. has not really devoted any resources to getting this fixed. It is a shame. We have the resources, the intellect, the talent to fix this, what we lack is leadership.
So just to clarify you want big government come in and tell a private business how to run their business?

roachboy 05-15-2010 04:42 AM
dunedan: interesting idea. what you outline sounds to me like a stakeholder association almost, a forum in which organizational expressions of the various groups/interests that would be impacted upon by drilling in the gulf would come to have some impact on drilling in the gulf and the policy orientations that shape it. presumably it would be an intermediate body that had effective power to force shareholder action. that's what a stakeholder forum would sooner or later have to do: in it's more interesting (to my mind) variants, the notion of stakeholder undercuts the primacy of ownership. it de facto forces resources out into the commons and makes claims concerning the management based on the way multiple interests/activities/communities interact with the same "resource context"---so for example, for bp the gulf of mexico is a site for the extraction of oil and a potential management problem should things go wrong---their leasing of a particular spot for drilling from the state (presumably) would from bp's viewpoint also be a redefinition of that space within the gulf as a resource/profit extraction space--which would tend to exclude other meanings, other types of usage, so other stakes in the same environment. which is lunacy. but without that private-property based lunacy, the present fiasco in the gulf would never have happened, i don't think. so i think this a step in a good direction.

i'm not sure i see the link to corporate personhood as directly as you do, but i will say that the notion of corporate personhood is particularly ...um...pungent as an allegory for one of the central problems that the private ownership model sets up, which is that the interests of wider communities are subordinated to the interests of capital. the fiction of corporate personhood simply makes the mechanism for this subordination explicit: a corporate entity engages in contractual relations as a corporation so is de facto acting as an individual, so why not give that individual rights, make it over into the legal fiction that is a person? in that way types of claims are flattened---human beings have no more rights than do corporate abstractions---so conflicts come to a matter of resources. and people almost always loose. it's capitalism in action.

the exception is some massive fuck-up that shakes the passive consent that folk are conditioned (and i use this word knowing what it implies) to give away to this system which is predicated on their subordination to phantoms and fictions....it's stunning to think the magnitude of incident that seems required to jolt people from their political slumbers, but there we are.

legal remedies---lawsuits and lots of em---seem a cumbersome way to substitute for the subordination of shareholders to stakeholders really.
and the basic inequality that is set up through the superficial equalization of persons and corporations reappears in it.

what i am seeing---through all the pr---is the collapse of a type of consent behind the existing arrangement as it pertains to oil extraction, particularly in the form that the right has for some time been trying to use for its own political benefit---as an aspect of a general "concern about the environment is for wimps" viewpoint that plays somehow as reasonable in some quarters--even as i know the way this position is marketed i can't say i understand it's appeal at all. but anyway, i see such traction as that stuff ever got dissolving at speed.

but mostly i see a disaster to the ecosystems of and around the gulf of titanic proportions and it's kinda difficult to imagine what chain of responses in the shorter term could do anything about it. hopefully something. so far nothing's worked.
and it's starting to hit land:

Oil spill from Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion begins to reach land | Environment | guardian.co.uk

aceventura3 05-15-2010 12:15 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rekna (Post 2788197)
So just to clarify you want big government come in and tell a private business how to run their business?
I believe there is a role for government in society. I also believe our legal system plays an important role in maintaining order and justice. I am a simple person and I don't try to make simple things more complicated than they need to be:

Companies have an obligation to have safety policies and procedures. If they don't they should be forced out of business.

Employees have an obligation to follow company safety policies and procedures. If they don't they should be fired.

Companies have an obligation to ensure employees follow safety policies and procedures. If they don;t they should be forced out of business.

Government has an obligation to oversee and regulate safety policies and procedures based on "best practices" within each industry holding all accountable to those standards.

Our judicial system has an obligation to administer justice based on the above.

How does your view differ from mine?

Some liberals want to punish the entire industry for the actions of one company, I do not see that as justice. However, to the degree that there are costs to society that can not be allocated to one company those costs should be dispersed to the industry through taxation. Obama's notion of increasing taxes on all companies because of BP's failure is wrong in my view. If BP truely failed they should incur the burden and be put out of business if need be - so in that regard, yes, I want government to come in.

hunnychile 05-15-2010 12:59 PM
^^^ Well said, Ace^^^^.

Thanks.

hunnychile

Rekna 05-15-2010 10:20 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by aceventura3 (Post 2788382)
I believe there is a role for government in society. I also believe our legal system plays an important role in maintaining order and justice. I am a simple person and I don't try to make simple things more complicated than they need to be:

Companies have an obligation to have safety policies and procedures. If they don't they should be forced out of business.

Employees have an obligation to follow company safety policies and procedures. If they don't they should be fired.

Companies have an obligation to ensure employees follow safety policies and procedures. If they don;t they should be forced out of business.

Government has an obligation to oversee and regulate safety policies and procedures based on "best practices" within each industry holding all accountable to those standards.

Our judicial system has an obligation to administer justice based on the above.

How does your view differ from mine?

Some liberals want to punish the entire industry for the actions of one company, I do not see that as justice. However, to the degree that there are costs to society that can not be allocated to one company those costs should be dispersed to the industry through taxation. Obama's notion of increasing taxes on all companies because of BP's failure is wrong in my view. If BP truely failed they should incur the burden and be put out of business if need be - so in that regard, yes, I want government to come in.
I agree with all your initial points. My question is this, this accident has highlighted areas where regulations are not sufficient and this will lead to more regulations in those area's. Do you consider these added regulations a punishment to all companies in that field and if so is it a justified or unjustified punishment?

roachboy 05-16-2010 05:46 AM
the points you lay out ace are all very nice & in some alternate fantasy capitalist universe they'd be adhered to (the initial points about obligations of various organizational layers)..but all you've really done here is restated the "bad apple" explanation for why things go wrong with capitalism. in your fantasy capitalism the system is perfect but people let it down. in your fantasy capitalism people are entirely dominated by capital, but that's cool with you, good even because capital does not let you down the way imperfect humans do. capitalism is a kind of god-term.

particularly given the realities of the regulatory arrangement in this situation. which you don't seem to have bothered researching even though there's alot of material you could have read posted to this thread. the regulatory arrangement was set up around assumptions exactly like yours, ace. that bidness knows better than regulators, that capitalism is a perfectly rational system, that profit uber alles works as an orientation for the greatest good for the greatest number and that profit taking and environmental "stewardship" aren't mutually exclusive. this in the face of instance after instance after instance in reality that show none of these metaphysical assumptions obtain in the actually existing world (strip mining anyone? for a particularly egregious example)...

in reality, ace, the regulatory arrangement was such that it is amazing that something like the deepwater horizon hadn't happened before. the regulatory arrangement was such that it more or less guaranteed something like this would happen again. profit-taking leads to cutting corners particularly when you dont take seriously the regulations that enforce environmental considerations. there's abundant information to back this up in the thread, and even more out there in the world of information.

i assume that when you write that statement about "some liberals" wanting to "punish an entire industry" what you really mean is that not everyone buys your bad apple theory nonsense. in that you are correct. but it's not about punishing an industry: its about recognizing the regulatory problem that petroleum corporations have created around themselves through their political and lobbying activities that resulted in a set of rules that made this disaster in the gulf of mexico possible.

Baraka_Guru 05-16-2010 06:14 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2788582)
in reality, ace, the regulatory arrangement was such that it is amazing that something like the deepwater horizon hadn't happened before.
*Ahem* ....

The Gulf Oil Spill: Conceivable and Precedented | Jamie Friedland's Blog

roachboy 05-16-2010 08:39 AM
Quote:
May 15, 2010
Giant Plumes of Oil Found Forming Under Gulf of Mexico
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”

Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.

Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.

Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.

“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”

He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.

While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.

Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.

Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.

“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”

Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from Robert, La.
Giant Plumes of Oil Found Under Gulf of Mexico - NYTimes.com

it's interesting in a cynical awful kinda way that bp would resist efforts to work out how much oil is in the water. the response is basically "why measure? we're trying to fix this" while of course it's not being fixed and bp as every interest in any and all attempts to minimize the public image of the damage that's happening. so this is a kind of pyhrric brand triage it seems to me.

meanwhile, there's no agreement about what these plumes are or are doing: bp wants to spin them as evidence that the dispersants are doing something, while the scientists are concerned about the oil hoovering oxygen and turning the gulf of mexico into an underwater wasteland.

it's like the scientific community and bp aren't talking about the same thing at all.

silent_jay 05-16-2010 09:06 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by aceventura3 (Post 2788114)
Second, everyone knows the risks in drilling oil a mile down in open water. Now we pretend that it could have been done without risk???
Not without any risk no, most things have a risk factor, hell even crossing the street, but had they had a relief well drilled before this happened, if relief wells were mandatory, rather than starting it after it's already spewing oil, the leak wouldn't have been as bad, but them starting the relief well after this one already blew, and that relief well taking 70-90 days to drill doesn't really help anything.

roachboy 05-16-2010 12:05 PM
this paragraph makes the problem with the use of dispersants more clearly than in the ny times piece above:

Quote:
There is speculation that the plumes, first reported by the New York Times, might be forming as a result of BP's use of dispersants injected close to the source of the spillage at the sea floor.

The technique has never before been used, and scientists are now wondering whether the dispersants are causing the oil to coagulate into relatively large clumps which are then heavier than water and remain suspended below the surface.
Ten-mile oil plume found beneath surface of Gulf of Mexico | Environment | The Guardian

ladies and gentlemen i believe that we are entering the space of a genuine clusterfuck here. that would be my interpretation. yes it would.

Strange Famous 05-16-2010 01:30 PM
This whole thing is pretty bad

I understand the world economy needs oil, that as long as capitalist conditions exist there is no possibility really to move away from oil until it is too sparse and expensive to get... but you have to question why it is the case that BP is given a license to drill a mile under the sea when the only effective (or known to be effective) fix to a problem takes 2 to 3 months to implement.

This is the problem of an international structure where the demands or finance and capital take precedence over any social, environmental, or human need. BP dont deserve ALL the stick they are getting, but they are not helping themselves by trying to spin things and hide the real extent. The worst case scenario I have heard is 7000 barrels a day, say going on for 100 days...

Is it the end of the world? No.

Its the end of the US fishing industy on one side of the coast probably, the destruction of whole eco systems.

If you drive your car recklessly when drunk and go out of control and hit somebody, you probably would go to jail.

If endemic greed causes you to scimp on the maintenance of vital safety equipment, not invest the time and effort in strong health and safety procedures, and there is an accident that kills 11 people and pollutes half an ocean and costs billions of dollars and 1000's of local jobs... somebody should go to jail for that.

ASU2003 05-16-2010 08:44 PM
There was an interesting account of what happened on 60 Minutes tonight. It was actually pretty good journalism.

aceventura3 05-17-2010 08:09 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rekna (Post 2788537)
I agree with all your initial points. My question is this, this accident has highlighted areas where regulations are not sufficient and this will lead to more regulations in those area's. Do you consider these added regulations a punishment to all companies in that field and if so is it a justified or unjustified punishment?
Given the circumstances and potential damage to the environment and innocent people, no. The type of regulations I would not support are the types of regulations that don't actually add value or don't actually protect society or innocent people.

---------- Post added at 03:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:40 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2788582)
the points you lay out ace are all very nice & in some alternate fantasy capitalist universe they'd be adhered to (the initial points about obligations of various organizational layers)..but all you've really done here is restated the "bad apple" explanation for why things go wrong with capitalism.
This "bad apple" thing you describe, is what I see as a given in a regulatory system. As I stated previously "regulators" are responsive, it is not probable that in a regulatory environment you can have proactive regulators.

Quote:
in your fantasy capitalism the system is perfect but people let it down.
People are the system! What are you talking about? Corporations are legal entities run and operated by people. Government is a legal entity, run and operated by people. Justice is administered, determined and defined by people. Who is in a fantasy world?

Quote:
in your fantasy capitalism people are entirely dominated by capital, but that's cool with you, good even because capital does not let you down the way imperfect humans do. capitalism is a kind of god-term.
Here is the issue - I say what I mean, but you project a bunch a garbage into it that is not there and then you form a response based on the garbage you projected. That is one way to always be right, but I see it as kinda silly.

To be clear - in my view, people control capital.

Quote:
particularly given the realities of the regulatory arrangement in this situation. which you don't seem to have bothered researching...

Here we go again. You can't resist this kind of stuff can you? So, you want people to believe that I have not done research but you have, correct? I can be honest and say, I have done some research but there is still much I don't know and that I don't understand - for me this is a process, including, doing research, asking questions, doing more research, presenting my thoughts, doing more research and responding to questions and challenges. I am to assume that you come to the table having done all the research there is to do, or that you have all the answers, that you are perfect, that you sit in judgment of all others, that you are superior to me and the rest of us. Please, please, give it a rest - it is not working for ya!:thumbsup:

---------- Post added at 04:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:55 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru (Post 2788588)
I really doubt that anyone thought there were no risks of a major oil spill. Do you? "We" (all of us, one way or the other) made choices. BP has to be held accountable but I do not pretend to think that BP acted in a manner inconsistent with the risks of deep water oil exploration and drilling. If there is a probability of systems failing, sooner or later those systems will fail. So again the base issue is that oil drilling is not and never will be risk free.

---------- Post added at 04:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:03 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by silent_jay (Post 2788625)
Not without any risk no, most things have a risk factor, hell even crossing the street, but had they had a relief well drilled before this happened, if relief wells were mandatory, rather than starting it after it's already spewing oil, the leak wouldn't have been as bad, but them starting the relief well after this one already blew, and that relief well taking 70-90 days to drill doesn't really help anything.
O.k., I agree. And after the fact we can play the "if" game all day long, but there was a failure. BP will be held accountable for the failure, and we need to learn and improve systems and regulations based on that failure. I don't think we disagree, I am just very vocal about the blame game by our government, there lack of leadership, and the grand-standing.

roachboy 05-17-2010 09:45 AM
you know, ace, i really don't care what you think of how i write. i could be much more blunt about your specious reasoning and frequently bogus information, but i guarantee you that you wouldn't like it.

but it's nice that you think people control capital. shame it doesn't really square with anything you say.

meanwhile, out in the world of stuff that matters....

Quote:
BP installs insertion tube, begins siphoning oil from leaking pipe

By Steven Mufson and Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 17, 2010

In the first progress in containing the oil gushing from a blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers on Sunday inserted a tube into a leaking pipe and began siphoning some of the oil to a drilling rig at the surface.

The deep-sea plumbing did not do anything to close the well, and a substantial amount of oil continues to leak at the bottom of the gulf, but the day's efforts were a rare bulletin of good news about 3 1/2 weeks into the crisis.

On Sunday, a four-inch-wide pipe was inserted into the broken section known as the riser, from which the majority of the oil has been leaking. If it works, the inserted pipe could keep a substantial amount of the oil out of the sea by siphoning it up a mile-long pipe to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and then to nearby barges.

"So far it's working extremely well," said Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP.

But the race against time continued. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned over the weekend that plumes of oil already spilled and suspended beneath the water surface might, as soon as Tuesday night, start to get picked up by the powerful "loop current." The current could carry the oil to the Florida Keys and beyond, scientists fear.

Moreover, BP said that to completely stop the oil from flowing into the gulf, it would have to plug the damaged well at the top. The company said it will try to do this in the next 10 days or wait weeks for a relief well to be complete.

Wells called the insertion tube, which functions like a straw, a "positive step forward." He said the company has been able to flare, or burn, some of the natural gas at the surface, an indication that the insertion pipe is working.

But he said it would not be clear for another day or two how much of the oil can be captured. At least some oil will continue to leak into the water, adding to a slick that stretches more than 80 miles wide and more than 140 miles long.

"As of now there are still reasonably substantial amounts of oil coming out" of the damaged pipeline into the ocean, said Andrew Gowers, an executive vice president at BP. "That is, in part, a factor of the pressure we are bringing to bear in producing the oil." He added that the amount of oil brought up the new line would "be steadily increased." He cautioned that "this is a gradual, carefully calibrated process aimed at steadily reducing the leak rather than a magic bullet."

BP's efforts to stop the flow of oil into the gulf come as the slick has begun to touch shorelines and come closer to currents that could carry plumes of oil suspended beneath the surface out of the gulf to areas much farther away.

A feeling of imminent calamity continues to pervade Louisiana's coastal towns, where tar balls have been washing up intermittently on beaches and watermen are dreading what they think is the inevitable arrival of the huge oil slick and its penetration into marshes rich in fish, shrimp and crabs.

In Grand Isle, just west of, and tucked underneath, the lengthy claw of the Mississippi River delta, shrimper Harry "Chu Chu" Cheramie, 59, said fishermen are encountering oil not far to the west in Timbalier Bay.

"That's going to kill our fishing grounds. We won't be able to drag that area for a long time to come," Cheramie said.

His wife, Josie, the tourism commissioner of Grand Isle, said people come to the island only for three reasons: "Play on the beach. Fish. Eat the seafood."

Fish market manager Juanita Cheramie -- no relation -- was fearful on a gloomy and rainy Sunday afternoon.

"We're going to get it. It's only a matter of time. We're just on a wing and a prayer right now," she said. When the oil hits, she said, "it's over. You can lock the gate in Leeville" -- a town up the road toward New Orleans.

In the town of Golden Meadow, along Bayou Lafourche, crabber Thomas Barrios said he felt "devastated" and "helpless."

"I've worked for this my whole life. Something my grandparents did," he said. He recently opened a fish market and a restaurant. His crabbing grounds are still open, but he doesn't know how long that will last.

"I never know when I wake up in the morning if they're going to shut the gates on me," he said.

BP said it was doing everything it can. While it tries to siphon oil up the insertion pipe, it was also making preparations to "kill" the damaged well at the sea surface by pumping drilling mud at higher pressure and weight than the oil. The mud would be pumped at more than 30,000 horsepower through three-inch hoses and through "choke" valves at the bottom of the blowout preventer near the seafloor. Wells said the valves could shoot as much as 40 barrels of mud a minute into the well.

"We'll be able to pump much faster than the well can flow," he said. "It's about us outrunning the well."

Wells said the company had brought 50,000 barrels of the mud, a mixture of clay and other substances, for the effort, which he said should be far more than needed. He said that the much-ridiculed "junk shot," in which golf balls and shredded tires would be fired into the blowout preventer, would be used only if the drilling mud were being forced upward and needed to be blocked.

Wells said it would take a week to 10 days before preparations for what the company has called the "top kill" effort would be complete.

In the meantime, BP pressed ahead with its insertion pipe, which has rubber components to seal itself off as much as possible from seawater while letting oil and gas push their way into the new pipe.

BP is also pumping 120-degree water and methanol into the long pipe to prevent the formation of crystals of gas hydrates. Those hydrates -- combinations of natural gas and sea water at high pressures and low temperatures -- form slushlike crystals that can block pipelines or even lift heavy objects off the seafloor. They were one reason for the failure of an earlier effort to lower a 98-ton steel cofferdam over the main leak site.

Once the mixture of oil, gas and water reaches ships on the surface, it will be processed and separated into different components. The insertion Sunday was BP's second effort. Late Saturday, after the new tube was inserted, it was yanked out after the umbilical cord of a remotely operated vehicle got entangled with the tube's line to the surface, according to sources familiar with the project.

Meanwhile, questions continued to be raised about the cause of the drill rig accident. On CBS News's "60 Minutes," Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician for the rig's computers and electrical systems, alleged that rig operator Transocean was under pressure from BP to hurry up and finish the well, which had taken weeks longer than expected.

Williams also said that there were problems with the blowout preventer before the accident. He said one of the control pods wasn't functioning as it should have weeks earlier. BP said in congressional testimony last week that it found one of the pods had a dead battery.

Williams also said that a crew member accidentally lowered steel pipe into a closed blowout preventer and that bits of rubber from a gasket were found later in the drilling fluid. That rubber gasket might have helped seal the space around the pipe in an accident.

Achenbach reported from Grand Isle, La.
washingtonpost.com

roachboy 05-18-2010 05:28 AM
when folk talk about "punishing an entire industry" and they're conservatives, you can bet they're mean: what's gonna happen with the drilling off alaska? given that meme was central to the sarah-palin wing of the concern-about-the-environment-is-for-persecuting-elitists school. well, turns out that the massive oil spill in the gulf is forcing shell to say a whole lot of things about how very safe they'll be when they start drilling. if they do.

Quote:
Shell Offers Reassurances on Drilling
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Responding to a federal request to increase safety measures for its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, Shell Oil on Monday vowed an “unprecedented” response in the event of an oil spill, including staging a pre-made dome in Alaska for use in trying to contain any leaking well.

As the Obama Administration reviews the safety and environmental risks of offshore oil drilling after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the fate of the pending Shell project in Alaska looms more urgently. Shell has received initial permits and hopes to begin exploratory drilling this summer. Yet the project, which would be the first offshore drilling in Alaska in many years, still requires final permits and could be delayed.

Environmentalists and Native Alaskan groups that have long worked to stop the project have seized on the Gulf spill to emphasize risks in the Alaska project. The drill sites, far out in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, are in some of the most remote and frigid waters of North America, with ice forming much of the year, endangered whales and other animals living in the area and little onshore support in the event of a spill.

In a letter sent to the head of the Minerals Management Service, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, Shell’s president, Marvin E. Odum, said Shell the dome it would have ready would “take into consideration issues with hydrate formation.” In the Gulf spill, a huge box built to try to contain the leaking well proved ineffective after it became clogged with gas hydrates — crystal structures that form when gas and water mix.

Shell also said it would be ready to apply dispersal agents below water “at the source of any oil flow” after “all necessary permits are acquired.”

The company also said it would work to prevent a spill from happening, including refining how it drills, increasing the frequency of inspections of its blowout preventer to 7 days from 14 – the blowout preventer failed in the Gulf spill – and adding a remote underwater vehicle nearby that would be capable of working on the blowout preventer.

Marilyn Heiman, the U.S. Arctic program director for the Pew Environment Group, said in a statement, “Basic questions remain about Shell’s ability to respond to any significant sized oil spill in Arctic waters” and she called for Minerals Management to “suspend offshore lease operations in the Arctic until these issues are addressed. It would be irresponsible to move forward.”
Shell Offers Reassurances on Drilling - NYTimes.com

that the plug has not been yanked on this as a matter of prudence is astonishing to me. that there's ***any*** possibility of proceeding with new drilling off the coast of the united states until a different regulatory arrangement is put into place--or better yet at all--is astonshing.

IdeoFunk 05-18-2010 05:43 PM
And what I find even more astonishing is that even in the midst of the commotion we still don't have any real idea of what the extent of this calamity actually is. Right now there is serious reason to believe that the well is gushing far far more than 5,000 barrels a day and nobody seems to be interested in actually quantifying this. BP seems just fine using a bunch of coagulants to keep things below the surface so to speak. So much for getting even a trace of accountability for their blunder.

roachboy 05-19-2010 06:30 AM
Measuring or even getting a real sense of the scale of the disaster is not a priority for any of the corporate interests involved any more than it is for any of the "regulatory" agencies. nor is it a priority for the obama administration. everyone is like a rat from a sinking ship on this one now. meanwhile the oil appears to have reached the gulf currents and its getting pulled a very considerable distance away from the origin.
and meanwhile politico-types are saying that a basic rethink of this off-shore drilling business is obviously in order while at the same time the head of interior is trying to prevent that rethink for affecting expansion of drilling.

it's lunacy.

but read on:
Quote:
Atlantic coast now under threat as current spreads Gulf oil slick

Scale of disaster apparent as no-fishing zone doubles and controversial dispersant is used
* Suzanne Goldenberg
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 May 2010 22.04 BST


There was mounting evidence last night that the scale of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has grown beyond all the initial worst-case scenarios, as thousands of gallons of oil continued to gush from the sea floor.

On the island of Key West, south of Florida, coastguard officials said about three tar balls an hour were washing up on the beaches of a state park. They said the globs of concentrated oil suggest leaking crude has now become caught up in the powerful loop current and could move from the gulf up to the Atlantic coast.

Meanwhile, an oceanographic research ship reported sighting a 10km (six-mile) plume lurking at depths below 1,000 metres and invisible from the surface.

The evidence of spreading environmental damage grew even more compelling with the release of fresh video showing thick clouds of oil billowing from the ruptured well.

The Obama administration responded by doubling the no-fishing zone to 19% of the waters in the gulf.

Fighting the spill is risky. Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledged that authorities were relying heavily on Corexit, a chemical banned in the UK because of its effects on limpets and other sea life.

"There has been a real reliance on them, maybe more than anybody thought would ever happen," she told the Senate environment and public works committee.

The mounting evidence forced administration officials to admit for the first time yesterday that they had underestimated the risks of offshore drilling.

In two highly charged hearings in the Senate, Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, conceded there had been failures in oversight by the agency responsible for policing offshore drilling. "We need to clean up that house," he said.

The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the regulatory body for offshore drilling, was notorious in the George Bush era for sex-and-cocaine fuelled parties in Colorado.

Salazar, under heated questioning from some senators, was forced to concede that the agency had not been entirely cleansed in the 15 months under his charge. "We need to have the right regulatory regime in place and we will work hard to make sure that happens," he said.

He admitted that the disaster had been a "wake-up call" and had persuaded him that policing of safety and environmental regulations on offshore oil rigs may have been inadequate. "My initial read on that is there should be additional safety requirements," he told the committee.

Salazar also conceded there were "a few bad apples" among the inspectors of the MMS, and promised that if they over-ruled environmental advice from other government agencies – as was alleged by some senators – they would be punished. "If there is someone in the department who ignored the science, then heads will roll," he said.

But Nancy Sutley, the chair of the White House council on environmental quality, told a Senate hearing later yesterday she had raised concern in February about a widespread policy of waiving environmental reviews for offshore drilling.

Salazar was also adamant that the administration had been right to seek an expansion of offshore drilling last March, and made it clear there would be no revisiting that decision.

The White House this week intensified its efforts to limit the potential political damage on November's mid-term elections by backing an independent commission to investigate the disaster. In testimony yesterday defensive actions also included dogged resistance by administration officials to senators' demands to provide estimates of the size of the spill.

The stonewalling went beyond the Senate hearings. For the past 48 hours, officials have resisted reports by scientists that the spill could have entered the loop current, or downplayed their significance. "By the time the oil is in the loop current, it's likely to be very, very diluted. And so it's not likely to have a very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is," said Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.
Atlantic coast now under threat as current spreads Gulf oil slick | Environment | The Guardian

genuinegirly 05-19-2010 12:55 PM
I'm a bit shocked that it took this long for people to realize tourism is suffering:
Quote:
Oil Spill Has Florida Worried About Hit to Tourism
By CATHARINE SKIPP

MIAMI — Off Florida’s Gulf Coast, the seas are calm and the king mackerel are running. Captain Joe Meadows’s telephone should be ringing with bookings for his 42-foot sport fishing boat for the summer season. Instead, the calls are from reservation holders wondering if they should cancel.

In a state already reeling from foreclosures and unemployment, those whose livelihood depends on visitors lathered in sunscreen are trying to persuade tourists scared off by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to reconsider.

For now, Florida tourism is living and dying in 72-hour increments. While no oil from the spill — sheen, slick, blobs or balls — has washed ashore on Florida beaches yet, the state Department of Environmental Protection is guaranteeing such conditions for only three days at a time.

Hotel operators in Florida’s Panhandle say they are frustrated by headlines forecasting a “black tide” hitting Florida beaches.

“People are acting like there is a huge oil slick that is going to wash in and cover the buildings,” said Dana Powell, general manager of the Paradise Inn in Pensacola Beach. “But right now, we don’t have any oil and we are still playing.”

Then again, there is cause for concern at her 55-room hotel on a barrier island off the Florida Panhandle. Scientists have warned that crude oil leaking from the blown well off the Louisiana coast is drifting toward an area where it could be swept into the Florida Keys and the Atlantic Ocean within the next two weeks.

“We are all terrified because they really don’t know how big it is, where it’s going to go, how bad it’s going to be,” Ms. Powell said. “It is a great unknown.”

The state’s department of tourism has tried to alleviate any public concern about the beaches by posting information about Florida’s destinations on its Web site in real time with beach Webcams, Twitter feeds and photos. Gov. Charlie Crist said he had secured $25 million from BP, which was leasing the oil well, to fund the tourism advertising campaign after an initial $25 million went to disaster preparation and response.

Still, bookings to destinations on Florida’s West Coast declined around 15 percent in the three weeks after the spill, compared with the three weeks before the spill, said Katie Deines Fourcin, a spokesperson for Expedia.com. She said the trend was slightly worse for the Panhandle region.

Many travelers have already decided to avoid the area for now.

Robert Baldari, 60, and his four brothers had chosen Key West for a week of scuba diving and dining for their annual vacation, but they postponed their trip this week.

“We’ve been following the oil slick, and when it was staying northwest of the Keys, we thought it would be O.K.,” Mr. Baldari said. “But when it started moving, we decided it was too much money to spend if we weren’t going diving.”

Under normal circumstances, most hotels in the Panhandle would be fully booked by now for Memorial Day weekend — the traditional start of the peak summer tourism season. This year, plenty of rooms are still available.

“The pace of new reservations is down 70 percent,” said Julian MacQueen, chief executive of Innisfree Hotels, which operates four hotels along the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast.

The same situation is playing out hundreds of miles away at Florida’s southern tip. When asked if new reservations were down at her Key West hotel, Carol Wightman, owner of the Marquesa, laughed and said, “Have you heard the phone ringing?”

There is disagreement among scientists, government and industry experts about the potential risk of oil pushing onto Florida’s coastline. Dr. Peter Ortner, director of the Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Studies at University of Miami, said he would be surprised if a surface spill made it to the Florida Keys, Miami and Fort Lauderdale beaches.

“I’m feeling better and better about it,” he said. “It’s more than three weeks later, and even the leading edge is now older. Older is better, because the most toxic stuff evaporates off and readily disappears.”

But the spill could still have a substantial effect on fish populations, Dr. Ortner said.

“I am concerned that a lot of species’ larvae — snapper, lobster, blue fin tuna, dolphin, billfish — are out on the edge of the Gulf Stream and loop,” he said, referring to the powerful current that carries warm water in a clockwise motion from the Yucatán Peninsula into the northern Gulf of Mexico, then south of the Florida Keys and out into the Atlantic. “Newborns and larvae are much more sensitive that adults. They are vulnerable.”

Damage to those populations would be more bad news for Captain Meadows and the $5.2 billion sport fishing industry. “That would wipe out my business for a few years,” Captain Meadows said.

There remains one other looming threat: Hurricane season opens June 1.

“All bets are off if a hurricane blows across the shelf,” Dr. Ortner said.

pai mei 05-19-2010 10:30 PM
BP Fails Booming School 101 Gulf Oil Spill
 
YouTube - BP Fails Booming School 101 Gulf Oil Spill (MIRROR)
They have no idea about how to contain the oil. Or the problem is too big for them.

Also see:
Giant Plumes of Oil Found Under Gulf of Mexico - NYTimes.com

Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico - The Big Picture

Blog Archive Gas Leak 3000 Times Worse Than Oil

roachboy 05-20-2010 04:52 AM
more on the controversy over bp and noaa's attempts to obstruct something like accurate assessments of what's happening.

you really have to wonder what any of these institutions hope to gain by this sort of action.

Quote:
Scientists Fault U.S. Response in Assessing Gulf Oil Spill
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

The administration has mounted a huge response to the spill, deploying 1,105 vessels to try to skim oil, burn it and block it from shorelines. As part of the effort, the federal government and the Gulf Coast states have begun an extensive effort to catalog any environmental damage to the coast. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing results from water sampling near shore. In most places, save for parts of Louisiana, the contamination appears modest so far.

The big scientific question now is what is happening in deeper water. While it is clear that water samples have been taken, the results have not been made public.

Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told Congress on Wednesday that she was pressing for the release of additional test results, including some samples taken by boats under contract to BP.

While the total number of boats involved in the response is high, relatively few are involved in scientific assessment of the deep ocean.

Of the 19 research vessels owned by NOAA, 5 are in the Gulf of Mexico and available for work on the spill, Dr. Lubchenco said, counting a newly commissioned boat. The flagship of the NOAA fleet, the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, was off the coast of Africa when the spill occurred on April 20, and according to NOAA tracking logs, it was not redirected until about May 11, three weeks after the disaster began. It is sailing toward the gulf.

At least one vessel under contract to BP has collected samples from deep water, and so have a handful of university ships. NOAA is dropping instruments into the sea that should help give a better picture of conditions.

On May 6, NOAA called attention to its role in financing the work of a small research ship called the Pelican, owned by a university consortium in Louisiana. But when scientists aboard that vessel reported over the weekend that they had discovered large plumes undersea that appeared to be made of oil droplets, NOAA criticized the results as premature and requiring further analysis.

Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and a veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, assailed NOAA in an interview, declaring that it had been derelict in analyzing conditions beneath the sea.

Mr. Steiner said the likelihood of extensive undersea plumes of oil droplets should have been anticipated from the moment the spill began, given that such an effect from deepwater blowouts had been predicted in the scientific literature for more than a decade, and confirmed in a test off the coast of Norway. An extensive sampling program to map and characterize those plumes should have been put in place from the first days of the spill, he said.

“A vast ecosystem is being exposed to contaminants right now, and nobody’s watching it,” Mr. Steiner said. “That seems to me like a catastrophic failure on the part of NOAA.”

Mr. Steiner, long critical of offshore drilling, has fought past battles involving NOAA, including one in which he was stripped of a small university grant financed by the agency. He later resigned from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and now consults worldwide on oil-spill prevention and response.

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

Andrew Gowers, a spokesman for BP, said this was not correct. Given the complex operations going on at the sea floor to try to stop the flow, “introducing more equipment into the immediate vicinity would represent an unacceptable risk,” he said. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the response to the spill, said Wednesday evening that the government had decided to try to put equipment on the ocean floor to take accurate measurements. A technical team is at work devising a method, he said. “We are shoving pizzas under the door, and they are not coming out until they give us the answer,” he said.

Scientists have long theorized that a shallow spill and a spill in the deep ocean — this one is a mile down — would behave quite differently. A 2003 report by the National Research Council predicted that the oil could break into fine droplets, forming plumes of oil mixed with water that would not quickly rise to the surface.

That prediction appeared to be confirmed Saturday when the researchers aboard the Pelican reported that they had detected immense plumes that they believed were made of oil particles. The results were not final, and came as a surprise to the government. They raise a major concern, that sea life in concentrated areas could be exposed to a heavy load of toxic materials as the plumes drift through the sea.

Under scrutiny from NOAA, the researchers have retreated to their laboratories to finish their analysis.

In an interview, Dr. Lubchenco said she was mobilizing every possible NOAA asset to get a more accurate picture of the environmental damage, and was even in the process of hiring fishing vessels to do some scientific work.

“Our intention is to deploy every single thing we’ve got,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “If it’s not in the region, we’re bringing it there.”

Robert Gebeloff, Andrew W. Lehren, Campbell Robertson and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.
Scientists Fault U.S. Response in Assessing Gulf Oil Spill - NYTimes.com

though perhaps bp/noaa/mms are looking more at the leak itself and not so much at what it's doing...the separation is lunacy in this context however. it does follow from a very basic capitalist rationality though---abstraction, separation---pathways to an illusion of rational mastery. the illusoriness is sometimes more apparent than others...

roachboy 05-21-2010 10:24 AM
as if there was some prize at stake for generating maximum ambivalence, if you follow this link:

GlobalWarming.House.Gov | Oil Spill in the Gulf LiveCam

alternate link:

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_inte...ov_stream.html


and watch a live feed (sometimes) of the oil spilling from the deepwater horizon wreckage into the gulf.
as you'll see if you go to the first page, rep ed markey is pretty proud of having forced bp to make this stream public.

i assume the motive was to maintain public pressure by enabling folk to click onto the spill. but it's also a really bizarre choice, and i think it poses some interesting problems, this stream.
like:

what are we looking at?
is *this* the reality of the spill? is the spill the continuing flow of oil, so is it a matter of origin? or is it a matter of extent? if it's both, why is the feed from the origin separated from all other data?

when i've been able to get on, i've spent much of the time sitting while i'm supposed to be working, head in the palms of my hands trying not to say the phrase "what the fuck?" too loud because i'm at work.

but seriously....what other response is there?

what do you make of this?

ASU2003 05-21-2010 06:35 PM
I just wonder if the dome would work if the seabed isn't flat? They needed to have a much better plan on how to fix this problem and have it ready to go within a few days.

roachboy 05-22-2010 03:00 PM
well, maybe an explanation for the wholesale lack of preparation for such a contingency is in part that the ms and epa didn't bother to press bp about it, but mostly because taking envrionmental considerations seriously just isn't how bp rolls.

Quote:
EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP’s U.S. Operations

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

That strategy may no longer work.

Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.

The EPA said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider banning BP from future contracts after weighing "the frequency and pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices."

Several former senior EPA debarment attorneys and people close to the BP investigation told ProPublica that means the agency will re-evaluate BP and examine whether the latest incident in the Gulf is evidence of an institutional problem inside BP, a precursor to the action called debarment.

Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.

The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called "discretionary debarment" and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company's contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP's existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.

Present and former officials said the crucial question in deciding whether to impose such a sanction is assessing the offending company's culture and approach: Do its executives display an attitude of non-compliance? The law is not intended to punish actions by rogue employees and is focused on making contractor relationships work to the benefit of the government. In its negotiations with EPA officials before the Gulf spill, BP had been insisting that it had made far-reaching changes in its approach to safety and maintenance, and that environmental officials could trust its promises that it would commit no further violations of the law.

EPA officials declined to speculate on the likelihood that BP will ultimately be suspended or barred from government contracts. Such a step will be weighed against the effect on BP's thousands of employees and on the government's costs of replacing it as a contractor.

(U.S Coast Guard Photo)
(U.S Coast Guard Photo)
Even a temporary expulsion from the U.S. could be devastating for BP's business. BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico and operates some 22,000 oil and gas wells across United States, many of them on federal lands or waters. According to the company, those wells produce 39 percent of the company's global revenue from oil and gas production each year -- $16 billion.

Discretionary debarment is a step that government investigators have long sought to avoid, and which many experts had considered highly unlikely because BP is a major supplier of fuel to the U.S. military. The company could petition U.S. courts for an exception, arguing that ending that contract is a national security risk. That segment of BP's business alone was worth roughly $4.6 billion over the last decade, according to the government contracts website USAspending.

Because debarment is supposed to protect American interests, the government also must weigh such an action's effect on the economy against punishing BP for its transgressions. The government would, for instance, be wary of interrupting oil and gas production that could affect energy prices, or taking action that could threaten the jobs of thousands of BP employees.

A BP spokesman said the company would not comment on pending legal matters.

The EPA did not make its debarment officials available for comment or explain its intentions, but in an e-mailed response to questions submitted by ProPublica the agency confirmed that its Suspension and Debarment Office has "temporarily suspended" any further discussion with BP regarding its unresolved debarment cases in Alaska and Texas until an investigation into the unfolding Gulf disaster can be included.

The fact that the government is looking at BP's pattern of incidents gets at one of the key factors in deciding a discretionary debarment, said Robert Meunier, the EPA's debarment official under President Bush and an author of the EPA's debarment regulations. It means officials will try to determine whether BP has had a string of isolated or perhaps unlucky mistakes, or whether it has consistently displayed contempt for the regulatory process and carelessness in its operations.

In the past decade environmental accidents at BP facilities have killed at least 26 workers, led to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope and now sullied some of the country's best coastal habitat, along with fishing and tourism economies along the Gulf.

Meunier said that when a business with a record of problems like BP's has to justify its actions and corporate management decisions to the EPA "it's going to get very dicey for the company."

"How many times can a debarring official grant a resolution to an agreement if it looks like no matter how many times they agree to fix something it keeps manifesting itself as a problem?" he said.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA's debarment negotiations with BP were strained even before the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The fact that Doug Suttles, the BP executive responsible for offshore drilling in the Gulf, used to head BP Alaska and was the point person for negotiations with debarment officials there, only complicates matters. Now, the ongoing accident in the Gulf may push those relations to a break.

Discretionary debarment for BP has been considered at several points over the years, said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who headed the agency's BP negotiations for six years until she retired last year.

"In 10 years we've got four convictions," Pascal said, referring to BP's three environmental crimes and a 2009 deferred prosecution for manipulating the gas market, which counts as a conviction under debarment law. "At some point if a contractor's behavior is so egregious and so bad, debarment would have to be an option."

In the three instances where BP has had a felony or misdemeanor conviction under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts, the facilities where the accidents happened automatically faced a statutory debarment, a lesser form of debarment that affects only the specific facility where the accident happened.

One of those cases has been settled. In October 2000, after a felony conviction for illegally dumping hazardous waste down a well hole to cut costs, BP's Alaska subsidiary, BP Exploration Alaska, agreed to a five-year probation period and settlement. That agreement expired at the end of 2005.

The other two debarment actions are still open, and those are the cases that EPA officials and the company have been negotiating for several years.

In the first incident, on March 23, 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. An investigation found the company had restarted a fuel tower without warning systems in place, and BP was eventually fined more than $62 million and convicted of a felony violation of the Clean Air Act. BP Products North America, the responsible subsidiary, was listed as debarred and the Texas City refinery was deemed ineligible for any federally funded contracts. But the company as a whole proceeded unhindered.

Workers respond on March 3, 2006 to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope after 200,000 gallons of oil leaked from a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. (BPXA)
Workers respond on March 3, 2006 to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope after 200,000 gallons of oil leaked from a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. (BPXA)
A year later, in March 2006, a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay led to the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope – 200,000 gallons -- and the temporary disruption of oil supplies to the continental U.S. An investigation found that BP had ignored warnings about corrosion in its pipelines and had cut back on precautionary measures to save money. The company's Alaska subsidiary was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and, again, debarred and listed as ineligible for government income at its Prudhoe Bay pipeline facilities. That debarment is still in effect.

That accident alone -- which led to congressional investigations and revelations that BP executives harassed employees who warned of safety problems and ignored corrosion problems for years -- was thought by some inside the EPA to be grounds for the more serious discretionary debarment.

"EPA routinely discretionarily debars companies that have Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act convictions," said Pascal, the former EPA debarment attorney who ran the BP case. "The reason this case is different is because of the Defense Department's extreme need for BP."

Instead of a discretionary debarment, the EPA worked to negotiate a compromise that would bring BP into compliance but keep its services available. The goal was to reach an agreement that would guarantee that BP improve its safety operations, inspections, and treatment of employees not only at the Prudhoe Bay pipeline facility, but at its other facilities across the country.

According to e-mails obtained by ProPublica and several people close to the government's investigation, the company rejected some of the basic settlement conditions proposed by the EPA -- including who would police the progress -- and took a confrontational approach with debarment officials.

One person close to the negotiations said he was confounded by what he characterized as the company's stubborn approach to the debarment discussions. Given the history of BP's problems, he said, any settlement would have been a second chance, a gift. Still, the e-mails show, BP resisted.

As more evidence is gathered about what went wrong in the Gulf, BP may soon wish it hadn't.

It's doubtful that the EPA will make any decisions about BP's future in the United States until the Gulf investigation is completed, a process that could last a year. But as more information emerges about the causes of the accident there -- about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout -- the more the emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters. That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it considers how "a corporate attitude of non-compliance" should affect the prospect of the company's debarment going forward.

ProPublica reporters Mosi Secret and Ryan Knutson and director of research Lisa Schwartz contributed to this report.
EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP’s U.S. Operations - ProPublica

the **only** good thing that's been coming of this is a general exposure of the absurdity of the existing regulatory set-up and the actions that set-up has enabled, which allow oil corporations and the royalty gathering segments of the federal government to be complicit in what seems to be a marginalization (at the least) of environmental concerns---and bp in particular, which seems to have found it cost-effective to deal with these concerns by waiting until the shit hit the fan and paying the fines.

obviously this cannot go on as it has. it's one of those corrupt arrangements between state and corporations that could have continued endlessly so long as it was invisible. but now it's not any more.

it's hard to imagine a way in which any change would enable anyone to say that this spill is therefore somehow "worth it."

roachboy 05-24-2010 08:18 AM
this is becoming a rather grim task i've undertaken for myself.
today's unfortunate development:

BP admits Deepwater rescue is capturing less oil | Environment | guardian.co.uk

and this provides daily updates of the fiasco, including maps that outline the extent of the spill and also helpfully show just how much of that extent is already caught in gulf loop currents.

Deepwater Horizon Response

the administration threatened today to pull bp off the efforts to stop the leak while at the same time saying that it's only the oil industry that can stop the leak.

so there is no governmental white knight to ride in to save us.

there are only fucking capitalists, the same people whose laxity with respect to planning and stewardship and those other aspects of plundering natural resources that are not cost-effective to think a whole lot about. you know, the people who caused this disaster in the first place.

roachboy 05-24-2010 11:41 AM
this is an interesting side-bar: the efforts bp continues to go to in order to manage independent press access to the beaches off louisiana which are affected by the oil spill, with the full, um, co-operation of local "law enforcement" people:

?It?s BP?s Oil? | Mother Jones

just in case you may be under the mistaken impression that information about this situation is not being managed. o yeah--if you go into the media area from the "official" site linked above, you'll also get a nice glimpse of how infotainment is being streamed, who's doing it, for what ends and that sort of thing. it's good, if not happy-making, to know that in **any** situation of any size flows of information without prior shaping are now seen as being a Problem in this o-so-democratic united of states.

yeah.


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