Louisiana Oil Rig Fire / Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill - Page 14 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 07-20-2010, 09:54 AM

as of this morning, the seeps that have been located around the well are not understood as cause(s) for alarm. so the cap remains in place. one day at a time is apparently the watchword:

Allen Takes Day-At-A-Time Approach To Well Seepage : NPR

meanwhile congressional talking heads point the finger at each other as to which party's more to blame for the regulatory backdrop that enabled this fiasco:

Quote:

Lawmakers trade partisan barbs over regulation of offshore drilling

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post staff writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2010; 12:18 PM

House lawmakers exchanged partisan barbs Tuesday as they looked back on how the current and former administrations have regulated offshore drilling over the past decade.

Members of an energy panel bickered over whether Republicans or Democrats deserved more of the blame for failing to ensure safe drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon explosion took place April 20.

"There has been a pervasive failure by the regulators to take the actions necessary to protect safety and the environment," said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. "These failures happened at the same time as federal officials offered oil and gas companies new incentives to drill in deeper and riskier waters in the Gulf of Mexico."

Gale Norton and Dirk Kempthorne, who served as successive interior secretaries under George W. Bush, sat quietly as more than a dozen committee members delivered opening statements. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is slated to testify later Tuesday.

Democrats cited several key decisions made by the Bush administration to loosen federal rules for oil and gas companies as contributing to the BP oil spill. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) pointed to a report by the energy task force chaired by then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney that directed Interior to "consider economic incentives for environmentally sound offshore oil and gas development."

"With the Cheney task force report, the first condition for this disaster, rewriting the offshore drilling policies to prioritize speed, rather than safety, was set in motion," Markey said.

But Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.) said the panel should spend at least as much time scrutinizing the Obama administration's approval of BP's Macondo well and its handling of the explosion's aftermath.

"We want to understand why the department has allowed BP to do what it did," Barton said. He added that when it comes to the current spill, Norton and Kempthorne are no longer in charge. "The decisions that are being made, and the non-decisions are not being made, by these two individuals, they're being made by Secretary Salazar and President Obama."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs the full committee, said the actions of both current and past administrations contributed to the disaster.

"We will learn that the Department of Interior under both President Bush and President Obama made serious mistakes," Waxman said. "The cop on the beat was off duty for nearly a decade. And this gave rise to a dangerous culture of permissiveness.'

Monday night, Stupak and Markey's staffs released a 14-page memo that detailed several key federal drilling decisions over the past decade. In addition to the Cheney Energy Task Force's recommendations, it cited decisions by the Minerals Management Service in 2003 to fail to require two blind-shear rams, a critical safety mechanism, in blowout preventers and to exempt all companies leasing in the Gulf of Mexico from providing a blowout scenario in their exploration plans except in rare instances.

Lawmakers trade partisan barbs over regulation of offshore drilling

neo-liberalism was a kind of equal opportunity ideological lobotomy.

aceventura3 · 07-20-2010, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ring

Ace:
The Lions & Wolves & other Critters you reference, are not small-medium-large
business owners in the human capitalist arena.

If you were one of these critters you so admire, you couldn't debate so disingenuously.

....................................................................................................................

Thanks roach for the newest links.
The idea of the Macondo well being sorely compromised & unstable,
is something we all hold our collective breath about.

Yikes.

Post-script. Ace, I don't have testicles. What do you suggest I back up my claims with?

It has been long established that I am disingenuous, and many many other things that I have read and have forgotten. In addition my analogies are just dumb, so I have heard, but just like a cat who plays with the mouse before bringing its dead carcass to the family member owned by the cat, I have fun with them.

I have given consistent warning and have often suggested, that those not interested in my silliness - ignore my posts. It is possible, it can be done. Generally, I will just post my opinion and move on, if left alone. I won't change who I am based on posters taking pot shots at my character or my intellect, to the contrary - just like an un-brakable stallion - the technique of using spurs, just increases my resolve. Only the soft hands and approach of loving and caring person can break this stallion.

I really do believe humans can learn a great deal about systems and organizational behaviors from the study of animals.

---------- Post added at 09:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:31 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

this is a digression.

Why not answer simple questions? Let's face it, your pattern of smug, little b.s. throw away comments are just that and they are often baseless.

roachboy · 07-20-2010, 01:51 PM

problems before the deepwater explosion. nothing happened.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...-problems.html

then a few days before things blew up, command of the rig was transferred. there's no conspiracy in this, btw. i just find it kinda interesting. were it not for the maintenance problems, the transfer woulda been unremarkable, and were it not for the explosion and subsequent disaster, all of this woulda been unremarkable.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...8Greenspace%29

but of course it's all very interesting because of what did happen.
there's more to the story of the waning days and what happened with the explosion came:

Deepwater Horizon engineer testifies about power failures before oil spill - latimes.com

on the up side, there are 5 leaks identified around the geyser site now. but the cap is still operating.
5 small leaks have been identified in Gulf well, Thad Allen says | NOLA.com

so the concern now is weather.

ring · 07-20-2010, 03:32 PM

Yes. The weather patterns are ripe for their seasonal romp.

Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook

The Oil Drum folk have been of great service.
They've relied on donations to add servers as their traffic has increased.

roachboy · 07-21-2010, 07:43 AM

more information about the run-up to the deepwater horizon disaster, a run-up which is becoming increasingly bizarre:

Quote:

Before rig explosion, BP pumped chemical mixture into well, contractor says

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2010; 9:47 AM

KENNER, LA. -- In the hours before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, BP pumped into the well an extraordinarily large quantity of an unusual chemical mixture, a contractor on the rig testified Monday.

The injection of the dense, gray fluid was meant to flush drilling mud from the hole, according to the testimony before a government panel investigating the April 20 accident. But the more than 400 barrels used were roughly double the usual quantity, said Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for contractor MI-Swaco.

BP had hundreds of barrels of the two chemicals on hand and needed to dispose of the material, Lindner testified. By first flushing it into the well, the company could take advantage of an exemption in an environmental law that otherwise would have prohibited it from discharging the hazardous waste into the Gulf of Mexico, Lindner said.

The procedure mixed two substances. "It's not something we've ever done before," Lindner said.

A BP specialist said using the two substances together would be okay. Nonetheless, the night before the rig exploded, Lindner was busy conducting an improvised chemistry experiment to double-check. He mixed a gallon of one of the substances with a gallon of the other and observed their reaction.

When the well became a gusher on April 20, a fluid that fit the general description of the mixture rained down on the rig.

Stephen Bertone, chief engineer on the rig, said in testimony earlier in the day that part of the rig was covered in an inch or more of material that he said resembled "snot."

Ronnie Penton, an attorney for one of the rig workers, said in an interview after the hearing that the double-sized dose of spacer fluid, also known as a "pill," skewed a crucial test of pressure in the well just hours before the blowout. Based on the test, BP concluded it was safe to continue displacing the heavy mud from the well in favor of much lighter sea water.

"That large pill skewed the testing," Penton said.

The alleged departure from standard practice came despite a series of complications in the attempt to complete work on the well.

washingtonpost.com

a speculative point---it seems to me that the petroleum industry and all those who benefit from it--erm support it in principle--have at this point every interest in painting up the deepwater horizon fiasco and bp/transocean/halliburton as having acted in a peculiar/particular way as a means of basically--and i hate this expression--throwing bp under the bus.

this is not to say that i doubt these stories which are coming out of the govt appointed panel hearings in louisiana. i just find the emphasis on the particularities interesting.

meanwhile, bp continues scrambling to raise capital, selling off assets:

Quote:

BP sells $7 billion in oil and gas assets to Apache Corp.

By Steven Mufson
Wednesday, July 21, 2010; A09

BP has sold oil and gas properties in the United States, Egypt and Canada to Houston-based Apache Corp. for $7 billion as part of the oil giant's effort to raise cash to cover oil spill expenses and bolster its financial position, the two companies announced Tuesday.

The sale takes BP most of the way toward its goal of raising $10 billion over the next year by selling exploration and production assets. Those asset sales would cover half of the $20 billion BP has pledged to put in an escrow fund to cover claims resulting from the spill.

The deal includes oil and gas reserves in Texas and southeastern New Mexico, natural gas reserves in western Canada, and the Western Desert business concessions and East Badr El-din exploration concession in Egypt.

"It is a win-win situation. BP is a motivated seller, and Apache is an opportunist. Both are happy with the deal," said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Gheit said the transaction involved "marginal assets for BP but core business areas for Apache."

He said Apache paid "reasonable prices" of $18 per barrel of proven reserves of oil or the natural gas equivalent.

"I think Apache got a fair deal," said Pavel Molchanov, an oil analyst at Raymond James. "But it is not a fire-sale price. Far from it."

BP shares had fallen 1.5 percent to close at $35.20 before the announcement but recovered most of that ground in after-hours trading.

This is the fourth deal between the two companies in the past six years, Gheit said.

Apache said it would acquire the equivalent of 385 million barrels of oil reserves, which Molchanov said was about 2 percent of BP's proven reserves. The properties currently produce 28,000 barrels of oil and 331 million cubic feet of gas a day.

The purchase price includes $3.1 billion for 10 areas in West Texas's Permian Basin, an oil and gas region where Apache already has substantial production. G. Steven Farris, Apache's chief executive, said in a statement that they were "under-exploited assets." The package also includes $3.25 billion for gas and unconventional gas properties in western Canada. The rest covers concessions for exploration and some infrastructure in Egypt.

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said in a statement that "over the last two months the Board has considered BP's options for generating the cash necessary to meet the obligations likely to arise from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill." He said that the company sought "to divest assets which are strategically more valuable to other parties than they are to BP."

Apache's Farris said that "this is a rare opportunity to acquire legacy positions from a major oil company." He added: "We seldom have an opportunity like this in one of our core areas, let alone three."

The deal did not include a share of BP's Alaska holdings, which sources close to the company said might be sold. A failure to reach agreement on Alaska might explain why the package fell short of the $10 billion to $12 billion figure that had been widely reported.

washingtonpost.com

and indicating that tony hayward, who i seem to remember was characterized as the greastest ceo of all time by some eccentric earlier in this fiasco, is likely to step down in october:

BP's Tony Hayward 'set to step down' | Business | guardian.co.uk

ring · 07-21-2010, 01:15 PM

The spacer fluid composition:
Method and spacer fluid composition for displacing drilling fluid from a wellbore

ring · 07-22-2010, 04:49 PM

BP admits using Photoshop to exaggerate oil spill command centre activity | Environment | guardian.co.uk

This is but one of BP's desperate scrambling moves.
This whole asset selling/trading business is more complicated yet just as calculated.

Hayward will appear to step down, but in reality he will side-wind slither to another position in the same game, but different arena.

roachboy · 07-23-2010, 07:07 AM

meanwhile:

Quote:

BP denies 'buying silence' of oil spill scientists

Oil giant says it is just keeping company data confidential, as it faces 200 federal civil lawsuits over spill

BP has rejected accusations of muzzling the scientists and academics it has hired to help fight hundreds of lawsuits relating to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The American Association of University Professors claims the oil giant is seeking to "buy the silence" of the scientific community in its fight against litigation.

But BP says it is only protecting confidential information and is not trying to prevent the discussion of scientific data.

A copy of the contract issued by BP to scientists, obtained by the BBC, says they cannot publish the research they conduct for BP or speak about the data for at least three years, or until the government gives the final approval to the company's restoration plan for the gulf.

It also states that scientists may perform research for other agencies only so long as it does not conflict with the work they are doing for BP, and that they must take instructions from lawyers offering the contracts and other in-house counsel at the oil company.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, criticised the contract. He told the BBC: "This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty silence in a comprehensive way."

Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama and one of the scientists approached by BP's lawyers, said the company wanted to hire his whole department.

"They contacted me and said we would like to have your department interact to develop the best restoration plan possible after this oil spill," he said. "We laid the ground rules – that any research we did, we would have to take total control of the data, transparency and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and subject to peer review. They left and we never heard back from them."

BP said that it had hired a number of experts to help with the lawsuits, as well as a number of national and local scientists with expertise in the resources of the gulf of Mexico to help in restoration work.

"These scientists are helping us collect and understand data about the impacts of the oil spill on the natural resources and to plan for restoration of those resources," BP said.

"As is customary, we have asked these experts (more than a dozen) to treat information from BP counsel as confidential. However, BP does not take the position that environmental data are confidential.

"Moreover, BP does not place restrictions on academics speaking about scientific data."

Seven federal judges next week will meet attorneys in Boise, Idaho, to try and decide whether or how to consolidate more than 200 federal civil lawsuits filed by a range of claimants, from fishermen to injured rig workers, oil-rig owner Transocean and other contractors tied to the spill.

The judges will consider two key questions: where the cases will be heard and who will preside over them.

The lawsuits range from civil racketeering and personal-injury suits to claims from out-of-work shrimpers and owners of now-vacant hotels on the gulf shore.

The cost of the spill to BP has already exceeded $3.1bn (£2bn), and the company has pledged some of its assets as security to the US government while it builds up a promised $20bn compensation fund. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate the final bill for the disaster caused by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers, could run to $70bn.

BP denies 'buying silence' of oil spill scientists | Environment | guardian.co.uk

so here we are: a direct confrontation between notions of proprietary information and the public's right to be informed in the context of a disaster.

the bbc article:
BBC News - BP accused of 'buying academic silence'

the contract bp is offering:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/h...p_contract.pdf

i find this kinda startling---that more than surprising really.

it does pose an underlying question for the neo-liberal set: on what planet is private information more symmetrical with an illusion of democracy than public information?
it's obvious: privately controlled information is subject to far more controls, particularly on the part of corporate actors. it is a commodity. as such, it is controlled by the highest bidder. in conservative-world, that is apparently how it should be. if you want democratic responsiveness, you buy it.

american conservatives seem to want a corporate oligarchy, but they want it by confusing it with some version of democracy. the only thing i can conclude is that the incoherence of american conservative political philosophy is total.

meanwhile, in the domain of things that suck even more:

Quote:

Tropical Storm in Gulf Halts Oil Spill Response Efforts
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

A tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico has forced the evacuation of response vessels at the site of BP’s blown-out oil well, further stalling efforts to permanently seal the well.

Tropical Storm Bonnie, with winds of 40 miles an hour, was about 80 miles south-southeast of Miami and moving west-northwest at 19 miles an hour, the United States National Hurricane Center said Friday morning. The agency projected that the storm would approach the northern Gulf coast late Saturday or early Sunday.

Among the vessels forced to flee the well site, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, was a drill rig that was working on a relief well, which is considered the ultimate way to seal the well. Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who leads the federal response effort, said late Thursday evening that it was beginning the process of disconnecting a riser pipe from the rig to the seabed and pulling it up, a process expected to take up to 12 hours.

“While this is not a hurricane, it’s a storm that will have some significant impacts,” Admiral Allen said.

Kent Wells, a senior vice president of BP, said in a conference call with reporters in Houston on Thursday that the storm would delay operations 10 to 12 days, depending on its severity and how close it passed by the site. That would push back completion of a relief well to the middle of August, he said.

Despite the evacuation of the ships involved in the response, the government said Thursday that the well would be left closed off and unattended.

The decision to leave the well capped, which was made at the recommendation of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, means that scientists with the government and with BP think that the well is undamaged and that there is little risk it would deteriorate if kept under pressure, as it has been since valves on a new cap were closed a week ago. Reopening the valves would mean that oil, which has not flowed since they were closed, would once again pour into the gulf.

“We have enough confidence to leave the well shut in,” Kent Wells, a senior vice president of BP, said in a conference call with reporters in Houston.

The drill rig that was working on the relief well was most likely to be among the first to leave because it travels very slowly. Other ships that are better able to handle higher seas and travel faster would leave later, Admiral Allen said. Support ships for submersibles that have been monitoring the well would be among the last to leave, so the well would probably be unattended for only a few days, he said.

The relief well has been temporarily plugged because of the weather worries, Admiral Allen said. Once the decision was made that the rig evacuate, he said, it would take 8 to 12 hours to detach a riser pipe from the seafloor and pull it back up so the rig could move.

Once the storm has passed, officials can resume their work on drilling the relief wells.

And when the rig is back in place and operating, about two days of work are needed to install and cement a last section of steel casing pipe in the relief well. After that, BP plans to first try another well-sealing procedure, called a static kill, in which heavy drilling mud would be pumped into the well in an effort to permanently stop the flow of oil and gas.

If the static kill is successful, the only need for the relief well may be to confirm that the well is permanently sealed. If the results from the static kill are ambiguous, though, it would then take at least several days, and perhaps several weeks, to permanently shut the flow from the bad well by pumping mud down the relief well.

On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency, telling reporters that some low-lying coastal communities might need to be evacuated. But did not order a mandatory state evacuation.

By Thursday afternoon, though, BP and the Coast Guard had already started moving some surplus materials and equipment from low-lying areas into secure staging areas in Louisiana, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, the federal on-scene coordinator, said at a news conference in New Orleans on Thursday.

Admiral Zukunft said that officials were “re-positioning and re-anchoring” the protective boom in some areas. Only the boom that was staged and waiting to be used would be moved to higher ground, he said.

But this actions prompted heated debate in some of Louisiana’s coastal parishes.

Kevin Davis, the president of St. Tammany Parish, was upset that the Coast Guard told him it was planning to move inland barges that had blocked oil from entering Lake Pontchartrain. He issued an executive order saying that anybody who would move such equipment could be arrested.

In St. Bernard Parish, officials worried about whether the protective boom would be moved too far away to be re-deployed quickly after the storm passes. Admiral Zukunft said that moving supplies and equipment was necessary to protect resources so they can quickly be re-deployed after the storm. “We don’t want to lose this material,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us...ef=global-home

Baraka_Guru · 07-23-2010, 07:19 AM

Wow, in my eyes, this whole debacle is quickly becoming a symbol of advanced capitalism.

roachboy · 07-24-2010, 08:02 AM

day 96.
at least the hurricane is breaking up.

Quote:

BP oil spill: Transocean in spotlight

US rig owner could be in the spotlight after damning testimony told of safety breaches

The damning testimony yesterday from rig technicians working on the stricken Deepwater Horizon about safety alarms being routinely switched off on the Transocean rig could be a pivotal moment in the political blame game.

The oil company that commissioned the fateful Macondo well, BP, has so far taken all the flak for the blowout which killed 11 men and triggered an environmental disaster. But that may be about to change.

Transocean, which has had an easy ride so far, could find itself in the line of fire as a range of official investigations into what went wrong that fateful early morning of 20 April continue to unearth evidence of widespread mistakes and failures.

The singling out of BP for criticism over the last eight weeks has led some to conclude – this side of the ocean at least – that the oil company was a convenient target. It was after all a foreign-controlled entity and had very deep pockets when it came to being asked to set aside $20bn (£13bn) for potential claims – before blame had even been formally apportioned.

The fact remains that the American drilling company, Transocean, with its first quarter profits of $677m, is a relatively small target for any ambulance-chasing lawyers who know that BP made almost 10 times that amount.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, did not help his own cause with a number of ill-judged remarks.

Early on he appeared to clumsily lay the blame for the disaster entirely on Transocean: "This was not our accident. This was not our drilling rig. This was not our equipment. It was not our people, our systems or our processes. This was Transocean's rig. Their systems. Their people. Their equipment," he said.

The verbal hailstones that followed this attempt to pass the buck left BP reluctant to make any other effort to suggest others were to blame, although it did talk about a "complex accident" and "multiples causes" being at the heart of the accident.

Last night BP said it had always believed that a lot of different things went wrong. BP might well have reminded everyone who their partners were on Macondo – because the names of Mitsui of Japan and Anadarko Petroleum of America are little known in this unfortunate saga. Both made appearances in front of a Senate sub-committee earlier this week, where Anadarko executives seemed happy to keep all the blame on the main operator BP.

But BP will start to fight its own corner more vocally next Tuesday when Hayward reveals first half financial results, talks about future corporate strategy and argues BP should not be the sole focus of blame.

BP oil spill: Transocean in spotlight | Environment | The Guardian

this information can be true and an element in a theater of positioning at the same time seems obvious, yes?
the sniffly "ö bp is taking all the hit for this what about the american corporations also involved?" acquires a certain weight, something that goes beyond angst over the fate of the corporation the dividends from which account for 1 of every 6 dollars paid out in the uk...

it's remarkable, when you think about it, the scale of intertwining that seems characteristic of petro-capitalism--intertwining at the level of stockholding and other forms of financial transactions, at the level of petroleum-based or derived commodities (looking at my laptop for example, thinking through the interactions and systems they presuppose that link what i'm typing here to what you're seeing there), at the level of direct consumer relations (the whole transportation model centered on automobiles)...

it's taken quite a while to come this far:

Quote:

Federal records show steady stream of oil spills in gulf since 1964

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 24, 2010; A01

The oil and gas industry's offshore safety and environmental record in the Gulf of Mexico has become a key point of debate over future drilling, but that record has been far worse than is commonly portrayed by many industry leaders and lawmakers.

Many policymakers think that the record before the BP oil spill was exemplary. In a House hearing Thursday, Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, "It's almost an astonishingly safe, clean history that we have there in the gulf." Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the industry's "history of safety over all of those times" had provided the "empirical foundation" for U.S. policy.

But federal records tell a different story. They show a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum -- which would fill an equivalent number of standard American bathtubs -- into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. The spills killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as far away as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Altogether, they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989.

The industry's record had been improving before the BP spill. In 2009, the largest one was about 1,500 barrels, about what BP's damaged well was leaking every hour before it was capped last week. But at least a handful of spills take place annually as a result of blowouts, hurricanes, lax pipeline maintenance, tanker leaks and human error, according to figures kept by the Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Moreover, in at least one key instance, the official statistics understate the actual quantities of oil that have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. MMS statistics say that a 1970 blowout on a Shell Oil well that killed four people triggered a spill of 53,000 barrels. But Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley professor who at that time worked for Shell tracking the oil spill, says that the spill was 10 times that size and contaminated shorelines on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the U.S. Gulf Coast.

"I see the numbers, and I shrug my shoulders," said Bea, who contributed to a report issued last week on the April 20 Deepwater Horizon accident. The 1970 Shell blowout happened on a production platform, he notes. "We knew what the production rates were," he said.

Today regulators rely heavily on company estimates, although some environmentalists fear that the spill size might be underestimated.

The industry's track record is a crucial issue. On March 31, President Obama cited advances in offshore drilling technology as a key reason for his willingness to open up new offshore areas to exploration and production.

Now, the oil and gas industry is trying to use its earlier record to persuade Obama to lift a temporary moratorium and to convince the public that companies can continue offshore drilling without a similar incident.

"The oil industry has drilled 42,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and this is the first time an incident of this magnitude has happened," said the American Petroleum Institute's president, Jack Gerard, who has been urging Congress to avoid imposing tough new regulations.

The BP oil spill is the biggest ever, but MMS records tell a more complicated story. Performance had been improving but from a poor baseline.

One big spill was 160,638 barrels in 1967 when an anchor tore a hole in a corroded pipeline operated by Humble Oil, a unit of Exxon; it leaked for 13 days. In 1969, a blowout on a Union Oil well spilled 80,000 barrels, killing 4,000 birds and seeping for four years after being plugged. In 1974, a Pennzoil pipeline break spilled 19,833 barrels probably because an anchor was dragged across the submerged line. Another anchor tore open an Amoco pipeline in 1988, spilling 15,576 barrels. A Shell pipeline leak in 1990, discovered when a helicopter noticed a heavy oil slick 25 miles by 15 miles, spilled 14,423 barrels.

One frequent assertion among some oil executives and lawmakers is that technology has advanced since then. They hold up hurricanes Rita and Katrina as evidence that offshore exploration rigs and production platforms can weather the worst Mother Nature can heave at them.

"I think people are reassured that not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in 2008. "Those rigs in the gulf, there was not a single incident of spillage that anyone reported."

But while the overwhelming majority of safety valves did work during the two hurricanes, the MMS reported that there were five modest-sized spills, each between 1,000 and 2,000 barrels. There were also 125 small spills, many from riser pipes or storage tanks on platforms. Altogether, they added up to 16,302 barrels, almost a quarter as big as the 1969 spill off Santa Barbara, Calif., that helped give rise to the modern environmental movement.

In recent years, spills persisted at a more modest rate. From 2006 through 2009, there were 33 spills of more than 50 barrels each.

Maintaining that performance could be difficult moving forward. As the gulf infrastructure expands, it is harder to keep track of what's happening far below the sea. Bea notes that there are 35,000 miles of pipeline on the gulf's outer continental shelf and that "those pipelines traverse a very, very interesting series of hazardous environments."

They also require maintenance, and monitoring can be difficult. In 2007, after receiving reports of five small oil slicks, regulators got word of a larger one covering 30 miles by 6 miles. They discovered that the oil was leaking from a 30-year-old 4 1/2 -inch pipelines owned by Lafayette, La.-based Stone Energy lying under more than 300 feet of water. At first Stone denied it had a problem, but divers found four holes in a 100-foot-long section on the seafloor.

A later MMS probe revealed that Stone had failed to do annual checkups of cathodes designed to combat pipeline corrosion and had not done vital maintenance even after being ordered by regulators to do so. Divers found that anodes, also part of the anti-corrosion mechanism, "were 100 percent depleted," the MMS said.

Stone's reply addressed the question of negligence, but it's hardly reassuring about the safety of offshore infrastructure. The company said that underwater ultrasonic wall-thickness readings taken by divers showed that "this damage was not due to corrosion."

"Our conclusion is that the damage to the pipeline was not caused by corrosion, but by mechanical damage, such as an anchor dragging over the pipeline during Hurricane Katrina," the company said in an e-mail to The Washington Post.

Bea said that the issue of safety in offshore drilling is similar to safety issues for airplanes or aspirin: There is a "line of acceptability" balancing risk and consequences. "The thing that is concerning is that we continue to work close to that line," Bea said. "Because of airline regulation, we get in an airliner with a level of comfort. I don't have that same level of comfort when I go out to these offshore activities."

Staff writer Marc Kaufman contributed to this report.

washingtonpost.com

oopsie daisy.

meanwhile, our comrades on the oil drum continue their salutary efforts to make sense of what they---and we---are seeing:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Tropical Depression Bonnie (1a) - and Open Thread

roachboy · 07-25-2010, 11:44 AM

so much for the greatest ceo in the history of everything:

Tony Hayward to quit BP | Business | The Guardian

i don't see what this solves for anyone anywhere, with the possible exception of bp who get to unload a publicity liability maybe. well, it solves some shit for tiny hayward, who can retire to his yacht now.

o the price the captains of industry pay when the corporate persons they control fuck up. retiring to a yacht. i shudder to think on it.

roachboy · 07-27-2010, 06:46 AM

so it's official:

Quote:

BP Will Fulfill Commitments in the Gulf, New Chief Says
By JULIA WERDIGIER

LONDON — Robert Dudley, BP’s newly appointed chief executive, said Tuesday that the oil giant remained committed to its business in the United States as it moved to sell $30 billion in assets before 2012 to pay for costs related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP on Tuesday set aside $32.2 billion to deal with the aftermath of the spill, leading to a record second-quarter loss of $17 billion. That compared with a $4.4 billion profit in the period a year ago.

The company picked Mr. Dudley, an American, to succeed Tony Hayward at the beginning of October. He would be BP’s first non-British chief executive. Mr. Hayward is stepping down after criticism of the way he handled the spill.

Mr. Dudley, who was joined by a visibly tired and saddened Mr. Hayward at BP’s headquarters Tuesday, pledged to stick to BP’s commitments in the Gulf, which includes cleaning up the oil and compensating residents.

“We will fulfill the promises we’ve made,” Mr. Dudley said at a media briefing in London. “Meeting our commitments is critical for BP’s long-term success. Taking over this role, I will not reduce my commitment in the region.”

He added that “it’s not our intention to exit the U.S. nor do we believe we will have to. We fully intend to maintain those businesses and restore our position in the Gulf.”

BP said the planned sales, which represent less than 10 percent of its total assets, would mainly affect its upstream business and leave BP with a smaller but higher quality exploration and production operation. The company chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said the sales did not represent a change of strategy but were more about “adjusting the portfolio.”

In an emotional statement, Mr. Hayward, who had been chief executive since 2007, said his departure should allow BP to move forward and repair its reputation. “It’s a very sad day personally,” Mr. Hayward said. “I love this company and everything that it stands for” but “for it to move on, particularly in the U.S., it needs a new leadership.”

Mr. Hayward angered American policy makers and gulf fishermen with the way he handled the spill, and many investors regarded his departure as necessary even if they did not blame him personally for the disaster at the Macondo well. He is the second BP chief executive to leave following a major accident. His predecessor John Browne had lost support after a string of setbacks that included a blast at a Texas refinery in 2005 and leaking oil pipelines in Alaska.

BP said it planned to nominate Mr. Hayward as a nonexecutive director of TNK-BP, its Russian venture.

Mr. Dudley, 54, grew up in Mississippi and has been in charge of BP’s response to the spill for the last month. His appointment was widely expected among analysts and investors, who are hoping that he can help repair BP’s reputation in the United States, where it is most tarnished. BP has about a third of its business interests and 40 percent of its shareholders and employees in the United States.

BP has succeeded in stopping oil from spewing into the gulf, but the company is still drilling relief wells and will have to deal with the spill’s consequences for some time. Mr. Dudley’s experience in running BP’s joint venture in Russia, where he clashed in 2008 with the company’s business partners and the Russian government, is expected to help him in mending relations with Washington and residents of the Gulf Coast. BP will need political backing if it seeks to drill new wells in the gulf, as some investors hope it will.

Mr. Dudley will also have to rebuild morale among employees who had just watched their company recover from the aftermath of the deadly explosion at its Texas City, Tex., facility only to witness another tragic accident.

He has been with BP since it bought Amoco in 1998, and he said he had been shocked by the damage caused by the spill when he visited the region in June.

“The charge is bigger than expected, but I’m not disappointed,” said Nick McGregor, investment manager at Redmayne-Bentley, a stock brokerage firm in Britain. “They are trying to draw a line under this and get Bob a clean sheet to move forward, but the difficulty is that the litigation challenge persists.”

BP’s shares rose 4.6 percent in London Monday when BP’s board met to discuss the leadership changes. They were up 0.1 percent on Tuesday. The company has lost about 35 percent of its market value since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, although shares have rebounded from the lows registered a few weeks ago.

Mr. Hayward, asked how he felt about the oil spill given that he pledged to improve safety standards in light of the Texas City explosion, said he “was determined not to have a repeat” of such an accident but “sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/bu...ef=global-home

and so's a pretty large-scale selloff of assets:
FT.com / Energy - BP plans $30bn sales to meet Gulf costs

poor criminal corporate person bp:

Quote:

BP's record as a market manipulator

Let's not forget that BP's record includes accusations--and evidence--of wrongdoing that go well beyond the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The company, which announced a $17 billion loss Tuesday, also has faced civil and criminal charges that it uses its massive financial resources to manipulate the energy market.

We already know that BP missed warning signs before the Deepwater Horizon explosion that led to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. We know that BP's business partners said the energy giant acted "unsafely." And we know that, after the fact, BP altered photos to make it seem like it was keeping a more watchful eye than it was.

But less than three years ago, BP agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to several federal regulators to settle fraud allegations that it cornered the propane market and inflated heating and cooking costs for millions of mostly rural American homes.

It was the largest commodities manipulation in U.S. history.

In the case, BP faced criminal charges from the Department of Justice and civil charges from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In the end, the company agreed to pay $303 million in penalties and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement under which it would not face criminal penalties if it agreed to a host of sanctions.

"BP engaged in a massive manipulation," said Walt Lukken, the acting CFTC chairman at the time.

The alleged fraud was carried out in 2004 by one of BP's subsidiaries, Illinois-based BP America Production Company, which traded energy futures on behalf of the firm. The company and several of its traders sought to corner the market for propane transported between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast and Midwest, according to the government.

They did this by using the massive financial resources of BP to purchase such a large number of propane futures that the firm appeared to own more propane than actually existed. That pushed up the price of propane, and BP could sell a portion of their supply to other businesses at inflated values, earning the firm tens of millions of dollars in profits.

The CFTC also alleged that BP attempted to corner the propane market once before, in 2003.

Settling the case was, ironically, one of the measures taken by then new chief executive Tony Howard to put legal squabbles behind the company. Also announced today was that American Robert Dudley would take over Oct. 1 as BP's next chief executive, replacing Howard.

Until Howard took over, the company tried to fight the regulatory charges. It ended up settling the market manipulation case as well as a variety of other charges that the company violated environmental standards

Market Cop - BP's record as a market manipulator

an editorial from le monde on haywoods departure entitled "the fall of the head of bp: the end of impunity"
La chute du patron de BP : la fin de l'impunité - LeMonde.fr

meanwhile, back in the general vicinity of the actual spill, a plan from a coalition of environmentalist groups on this, day 99 of the disaster:

Quote:

Environmentalists link oil spill response, coastal restoration
Published: Monday, July 26, 2010, 11:45 PM Updated: Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 7:36 AM
Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune

Speed the reconstruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands by tapping offshore oil revenue and dedicating a significant share of any penalties levied against BP, a group of influential national and local environmental groups urged Navy Secretary and Gulf Coast oil spill recovery leader Ray Mabus in a letter published today in advertisements in The Times-Picayune, the Advocate of Baton Rouge, Washington-based Roll Call magazine, and the online publication Politico.

"We applaud the President for giving you the restoration mandate and ask you to move with the urgency our battered coast demands," said the advertisement, sponsored by America's Wetland Foundation and published in cooperation with the National Wildlife Federation, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society and Ducks Unlimited.

"Americans care," said the ad. "They know the world is watching and that history is recording this moment of opportunity or lost promise."

Restoring the Mississippi River's southernmost delta, a wetland area rich in natural resources, "is the single most important way to make this region whole again," said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. "The survival of this region's productive fisheries, its abundant wildlife habitat and its hardworking coastal communities hinges on healthy, regenerative wetlands along Louisiana's coast."

The advertisement urges Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, to support six steps aimed at speeding Louisiana's coastal restoration efforts:

* Accelerating the payment of a greater share of federal revenue from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas leases to Louisiana and other Gulf states. The existing revenue-sharing law would provide about $200 million a year to Louisiana in 2017.
* Arranging immediate financing for new freshwater and sediment diversion and barrier island reconstruction projects already authorized by Congress.
* Establishing a dedicated long-term funding stream sufficient for Louisiana's long-term coastal restoration plan. The ad does not say where that money would come from.
* Ensuring a significant percentage of penalty payments resulting from the BP oil spill are dedicated to coastal restoration "as reparations for the contamination of thousands of acres of coastal marsh that cannot be cleaned up."
* Cutting red tape to speed payment of existing federal appropriations for restoration projects, including more than $1 billion owed coastal states under the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program.
* Creating a federal-state authority to oversee coastal restoration efforts that has the ability to act quickly enough to stave off further wetlands loss.

The organizations backing the ad all have been major players in Louisiana's coastal restoration efforts. America's WETLAND Foundation was created with state backing in 2002 to raise awareness nationally about the state's wetlands problems.

Officials with the Environmental Defense Fund have been directly involved in writing and implementing the state's coastal restoration master plan, and have sat on the Governor's Advisory Commission for Coastal Protection, Restoration and Conservation.

In addition to their support for restoration efforts nationwide, the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited all own coastal refuge land or have underwritten expensive restoration projects along the coast.

The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, which represents a wide variety of state environmental groups and businesses, also has been instrumental in shaping the state's restoration plans.

Obama named Mabus as oil spill restoration chief in mid-June, and Mabus has said his marching orders include looking at long-term ways of restoring the coast.

"The secretary continues to work to develop a long-range plan for restoration of the Gulf Coast economically and environmentally," said his spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Beci Brenton. "He continues to meet with stakeholders to insure that the genesis of the plan actually comes from the people and organizations that understand the issues of the Gulf the best."

"Secretary Mabus' commitment that recovery plans should come from within the region itself is welcomed," said R. King Milling, chairman of America's Wetland Foundation. "Louisiana has a master plan for coastal restoration and protection unanimously approved by the Legislature, as well as congressional authorizations, that sit idly without funding. Acting on these plans, especially those that reconnect the river to the wetlands, is what is needed now."

Brenton said Mabus expects to present his plan to the president in 60 to 90 days, but it's unclear how long it would take to get the approval of Congress necessary to adopt most of the measures proposed in the ad.

Environmentalists link oil spill response, coastal restoration | NOLA.com

meanwhile in the general vicinity of the actual spill:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Restarting Progress - and Open Thread

aceventura3 · 07-27-2010, 11:38 AM

Perhaps to prevent some people from injecting BP into other posts, I am back - primarily to be a nuisance to the flawed ideology littered throughout this thread.

BP has been focused on stoping the leak, and from the beginning everyone knew it would take about 90 days.

BP has also been working equally hard on PR. The TV spots where obvious. It became clear early on that Hayword was not up for the job - his firing is not surprising. When Dudley assumed the lead role or became the "face" it was clear that he was going to be the next CEO. Again no surprises.

The act of genius was when BP agreed to the $20 billion compensation fund to be administered by the government. In one stroke they transferred all the negative implications of compensating victims over to the government. They will not have the on-going negative PR of denying claims. This move was surprising, and surprising how eagerly Obama jumped on it. This will cost him and his administration.

BP is planning on selling $30 billion in assets, the company will be leaner - but still produce over 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. And they have taken a $32 billion dollar loss in their latest quarterly earnings, clearing the slate for future clean financial reports.

BP still has a long and difficult fight ahead of them, but so far they are making the right moves to save the company and enhance share-holder value. The share price has seen its low, of about $27 per share, now at about $37-$38, the 12 month peak was about $62. Sell Obama, buy BP.

roachboy · 07-27-2010, 11:49 AM

perhaps it is a flaw to think it is more important that the leak be stopped and the gulf cleaned up and that regulation be tightened in order to both make another such disaster less likely and to enable an actually coherent response to problems when they do occur than to cheer for how bp manoevers to save its corporate person ass.

and perhaps it is a flaw to see in the relation between aspects of the petro-capitalist system more a symbiotic matter (state and corporations co-operating all too much) than a private-vs-public thing as you do. perhaps it is a flaw in approach to be interested in actual social systems and how they work rather than being content with looking at mirror images of (conservative) ideological constructs.

but they're flaws i'm fine with.

Ourcrazymodern? · 07-27-2010, 12:01 PM

^^Chewing your leg off to get out of a trap works if you don't bleed to death. You know the folly of howling at the moon. The noise has been against the cause, which you again defend. I don't get it.

roachboy · 07-27-2010, 12:05 PM

i find this type of conservative "thinking" to be basically dishonest. it bugs me, dishonesty does.

roachboy · 07-28-2010, 05:48 AM

back to oil in the gulf of mexico:

so thanks in part to the reactive regulatory system and in part to obstruction and in part to the amount of time it takes to assemble a coherent research team and locate funding and all that, the implications of the following are not at all obvious:

Quote:

On the Surface, Gulf Oil Spill Is Vanishing Fast; Concerns Stay
By JUSTIN GILLIS and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.

Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.

John Amos, president of SkyTruth, an environmental advocacy group that sharply criticized the early, low estimates of the size of the BP leak, noted that no oil had gushed from the well for nearly two weeks.

“Oil has a finite life span at the surface,” Mr. Amos said Tuesday, after examining fresh radar images of the slick. “At this point, that oil slick is really starting to dissipate pretty rapidly.”

The dissolution of the slick should reduce the risk of oil killing more animals or hitting shorelines. But it does not end the many problems and scientific uncertainties associated with the spill, and federal leaders emphasized this week that they had no intention of walking away from those problems any time soon.

The effect on sea life of the large amounts of oil that dissolved below the surface is still a mystery. Two preliminary government reports on that issue have found concentrations of toxic compounds in the deep sea to be low, but the reports left many questions, especially regarding an apparent decline in oxygen levels in the water.

And understanding the effects of the spill on the shorelines that were hit, including Louisiana’s coastal marshes, is expected to occupy scientists for years. Fishermen along the coast are deeply skeptical of any declarations of success, expressing concern about the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants used to combat the spill and of the submerged oil, particularly on shrimp and crab larvae that are the foundation of future fishing seasons.

After 86 days of oil gushing into the gulf, the leak was finally stopped on July 15, when BP managed to install a tight-fitting cap on the well a mile below the sea floor, then gradually closed a series of valves. Still, the well has not been permanently sealed. Until that step is completed in several weeks, the risk remains that the leak will resume.

Scientists said the rapid dissipation of the surface oil was probably due to a combination of factors. The gulf has an immense natural capacity to break down oil, which leaks into it at a steady rate from thousands of natural seeps. Though none of the seeps is anywhere near the size of the Deepwater Horizon leak, they do mean that the gulf is swarming with bacteria that can eat oil.

The winds from two storms that blew through the gulf in recent weeks, including a storm over the weekend that disintegrated before making landfall, also appear to have contributed to a rapid dispersion of the oil. Then there was the response mounted by BP and the government, the largest in history, involving more than 4,000 boats attacking the oil with skimming equipment, controlled surface burns and other tactics.

Some of the compounds in the oil evaporate, reducing their impact on the environment. Jeffrey W. Short, a former government scientist who studied oil spills and now works for the environmental advocacy group Oceana, said that as much as 40 percent of the oil in the gulf might have simply evaporated once it reached the surface.

An unknown percentage of the oil would have been eaten by bacteria, essentially rendering the compounds harmless and incorporating them into the food chain. But other components of the oil have most likely turned into floating tar balls that could continue to gum up beaches and marshes, and may represent a continuing threat to some sea life. A three-mile by four-mile band of tar balls was discovered off the Louisiana coast on Tuesday.

“Less oil on the surface does not mean that there isn’t oil beneath the surface, however, or that our beaches and marshes are not still at risk,” Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a briefing on Tuesday. “We are extremely concerned about the short-term and long-term impacts to the gulf ecosystem.”

Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who leads the government’s response, has emphasized that boats are still skimming some oil at the surface. Admiral Allen said the risk of shoreline oiling might continue for at least several more weeks.

“While we would all like to see the area come back as quickly as it can,” he said, “I think we all need to understand that we, at least in the history of this country, we’ve never put this much oil into the water. And we need to take this very seriously.”

Still, it is becoming clear that the Obama administration, in conjunction with BP, will soon have to make decisions about how quickly to begin scaling down the large-scale — and expensive — response effort. That is a touchy issue, and not just for environmental reasons.

The response itself has become the principal livelihood for thousands of fishermen and other workers whose lives were upended by the oil spill. More than 1,400 fishing boats and other vessels have been hired to help deploy coastal barriers and perform other cleanup tasks. Those fishermen are unconvinced that the gradual disappearance of oil on the surface means they will be able to return to work soon.

“Surface is one thing; you know that’s going to dissipate and all,” said Mickey Johnson, who owns a shrimp boat in Bayou La Batre, Ala., pointing out that shrimpers trawl near the sea floor.

“Our whole big concern has always been the bottom,” Mr. Johnson said.

The scientific picture of what has happened at the bottom of the gulf remains murky, though Dr. Lubchenco said in Tuesday’s briefing that federal scientists had determined that the oil was primarily in the water column and not sitting on the sea floor.

States have been pushing the federal authorities to move quickly to reopen gulf waters to commercial fishing; through most of the spill, about a third of the United States part of the gulf has been closed. The Food and Drug Administration is trying to speed its testing, while promising continued diligence to be sure no tainted seafood gets to market.

Even if the seafood of the gulf is deemed safe by the authorities, resistance to buying it may linger among the public, an uncertainty that defies measurement and is on the minds of residents along the entire Gulf Coast.

“How do we get people to buy our food again?” Mr. Johnson asked.

While leaders on the Gulf Coast would welcome moves by the federal government that could put residents back to work, they are also wary of any premature declaration of victory. Officials in Grand Isle, La., met with the Coast Guard after the well had been capped to insist that no response equipment be removed until six weeks had passed.

Rear Adm. Paul F. Zukunft of the Coast Guard, coordinator of the response on the scene, said any decisions about scaling down the effort would be made only by consensus, and only after an analysis of the continuing threat from oil in each region of the gulf.

“I think it’s going to happen one day at a time,” Admiral Zukunft said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/us...ef=global-home

an alternate version, with more weight on noaa:

washingtonpost.com

now this is quite strange. and none of us are in a position to second-guess anything, so basically we're all kinda....um....what?

the surface-level disappearance of oil originating a mile below the surface that's been heavily doused with a dispersant of controversial toxicity...it's just curious.

and you know other things sometimes have one appearance on the surface and another below. so it is that the captains of industry apparently plan on transferring the cost of compensating victims of this fiasco back onto you and i by deducting the amount from their corporate tax return.

Quote:

BP to cut U.S. tax bill by $10 billion because of losses in gulf spill

By Jia Lynn Yang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2010; 11:56 PM

BP said Tuesday that it plans to cut its U.S. tax bill by $9.9 billion, or about half the amount pledged to aid victims of the disaster, by deducting costs related to the oil spill.

A portion of that could be refunded from taxes BP paid in earlier years.

The company disclosed its intentions as part of its second-quarter earnings report, in which it said it would record a $32.2 billion charge to reflect the costs of the spill.

Under U.S. corporate tax law, companies can take credits on up to 35 percent of their losses.

The credit for BP could mean, however, that taxpayers will indirectly foot part of the bill for the $20 billion fund that BP established to compensate people and businesses harmed by the disaster.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said U.S. taxpayers would not be responsible for the cost of the spill. When asked whether BP should be claiming a credit, Gibbs said, "I don't think anybody would prefer that they do that."

Gibbs would not say whether the president would press BP on the tax deduction. He said, though, that "there are tax laws in this country that have been written for quite some time."

Lawmakers called for BP to renounce any claim for a refund. "I call on BP to show, for once, a glimmer of humanity in this situation and halt its claim for this tax break immediately," said Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.).

Policymakers crafted the tax code this way so that companies can spread their profits and losses over more than just one calendar year. Let's say a company makes $100 billion one year and pays the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent, or $35 billion. The next year, the economy goes south, and the company loses $100 billion. Over those two years, the company made nothing but still paid $35 billion in taxes.

From the tax code's perspective, the company overpaid in previous years. To rectify this, companies can claim a credit, also at the 35 percent rate. Companies can seek a refund for taxes paid from the previous two years or, if there's money leftover, carry the credit forward up to 20 years.

"What they're trying to do is take the arbitrariness of what you did this particular year over the life of the company, or over a long period of the life of the company," said Douglas Shackelford, a tax professor at the University of North Carolina.

It's how a company such as General Electric, which reported $408 million in losses at its U.S. operations last year, not only paid nothing in U.S. corporate income taxes last year but also received a refund.

Robert Willens, a corporate tax expert, said it's unlikely that BP will give up its tax credit, even if faced with public opposition. The company voluntarily established the $20 billion escrow account for victims of the spill and never promised the government that it would not seek any deductions associated with the spill, he said.

This month, Goldman Sachs promised not to ask for tax credits associated with the $535 million it paid in penalties to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle a fraud charge. But as Willens says, that was specifically negotiated in Goldman's agreement with the SEC.

"The cost associated with the cleanup and the damage and all that -- that's just another cost of doing business from the tax perspective," Shackelford said. "It's viewed no different from paying salaries or other costs they might incur."

washingtonpost.com

now isn't that special?

meanwhile in the investigation of (other) criminal activity, the nature of the petro-capitalist regulatory system is moving by degrees to the center of investigations. which is good. about time. conservatives have contempt for regulation, the bush administration was very conservative, so it follows that if you haven't got the votes or ambition to erase regulation, you can make them unenforcable by way of good old fashioned corruption.

Quote:

Criminal probe of oil spill to focus on 3 firms and their ties to regulators

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 28, 2010; A01

A team of federal investigators known as the "BP squad" is assembling in New Orleans to conduct a wide-ranging criminal probe that will focus on at least three companies and examine whether their cozy relations with federal regulators contributed to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to law enforcement and other sources.

The squad at the FBI offices includes investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies, the sources said. In addition to BP, the firms at the center of the inquiry are Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, and engineering giant Halliburton, which had finished cementing the well only 20 hours before the rig exploded April 20, sources said.

While it was known that investigators are examining potential violations of environmental laws, it is now clear that they are also looking into whether company officials made false statements to regulators, obstructed justice or falsified test results for devices such as the rig's failed blowout preventer. It is unclear whether any such evidence has surfaced.

One emerging line of inquiry, sources said, is whether inspectors for the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with regulating the oil industry -- which is itself investigating the disaster -- went easy on the companies in exchange for money or other inducements. A series of federal audits has documented the MMS's close relationship with the industry.

"The net is wide," said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Justice Department investigation -- announced in June by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and accompanied by parallel state criminal probes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- is one of at least nine investigations into the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Unlike the public hearings held last week in Kenner, La., by a federal investigatory panel, the criminal probe has operated in the shadows. But it could lead to large fines for the companies and jail time for executives if the government files charges and proves its case.

Justice Department officials declined to comment Tuesday. Holder, in an interview with CBS News this month, confirmed that investigators are conducting a broad probe. "There are a variety of entities and a variety of people who are the subjects of that investigation," Holder said.

In an additional avenue of inquiry, BP disclosed in a regulatory filing Tuesday that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into "securities matters" relating to the spill, although no more details were included.

Scott Dean, a spokesman for London-based BP, said the company "will cooperate with any inquiry the Justice Department undertakes, just as we are doing in response to other inquiries that are ongoing."

Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Transocean, a former U.S. firm now based in Switzerland, declined to comment, as did Teresa Wong, a spokeswoman for Houston-based Halliburton.

Halliburton informed its shareholders about the Justice Department probe in its July 23 quarterly report to securities regulators. It also noted that the department warned the company not to make "substantial" transfers of assets while the matter is under scrutiny.

The probe is in its early stages, with investigators digging through tens of thousands of documents turned over by the companies, beginning to interview company officials and trying to determine the basics of who was responsible for various operations on the rig.

Although lawyers familiar with the case expect that environmental-related charges -- which have a low burden of proof -- will be filed, some doubted that investigators can prove more serious violations such as lying or falsifying test results.

"That's hard to prove," said one lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because details of the investigation are not public. "It's hard to show that somebody who could have died on the rig was malicious and reckless and intentionally did something that jeopardized their own life."

The emerging focus creates potentially awkward interactions on several levels. Investigators are probing companies, especially BP, which the government has been forced to work with in cleaning up the oil that cascaded into the gulf. And the former Minerals Management Service, which sources said has attracted the attention of criminal investigators, is helping to lead the federal panel that conducted last week's hearings in Louisiana.

Federal auditors have in recent years documented a culture at the MMS in which inspectors improperly accepted gifts from oil and gas companies, moved freely between industry and government and, in one instance, negotiated for a job with a company under inspection.

After the most recent investigation was released in May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he had asked his department's acting inspector general, Mary Kendall, to expand her inquiry to include whether MMS failed to adequately inspect the Deepwater Horizon rig or enforce federal standards.

One law enforcement official said criminal investigators will look for evidence that MMS inspectors were bribed or promised industry jobs in exchange for lenient treatment. "Every instinct I have tells me there ought to be numerous indictable cases in that connection between MMS and the industry," said this official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is unfolding.

Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the former MMS (now called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement), declined to comment.

FBI agents and other investigators are working with prosecutors from the environmental crimes section of the Justice Department, along with local U.S. attorney's offices. Officials would not provide details about the new squad starting in the FBI's New Orleans office. Sources said it is known internally as "the BP squad," though it will examine all companies involved with the Deepwater rig.

After learning what is in the thousands of documents, investigators plan to "start trying to turn one witness against the other, get insider information," said the law enforcement official.

The official said that no decisions on criminal charges are imminent and that "you can bet on it being more than a year before any kind of indictment comes down."

washingtonpost.com

meanwhile, at the oil drum:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Restarting Progress - and Open Thread

things just get getting curiouser and curiouser.

roachboy · 07-29-2010, 04:10 AM

day 100.

continued consternation at the missing millions of barrels of oil:

Quote:

Majority of spilled oil in Gulf of Mexico unaccounted for in government data

By David A. Fahrenthold and Leslie Tamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2010; A01

Was Tony Hayward right, after all?

Back in May, BP's chief executive told a British newspaper that "the Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," and the vast amounts of oil and chemical dispersants dumped into it were small by comparison. After he said that, BP's well leaked for two more months. Hayward's upbeat assessment was cast as one of many gaffes committed on his way to resignation.

Now, 14 days after the well was closed and 100 days after the blowout, U.S. government scientists are working on calculations that could shed some light on Hayward's analysis (even if they can't shed light on why he said it). They are trying to figure out where all the oil went.

Up to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.

And some oil is still out there -- probably mixed with chemical dispersants. Some scientists have described it floating in underwater clouds, which one compared to a toxic fog.

"That stuff's somewhere," said James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University. His research has shown concentrations of oil still floating miles from the wellhead. "It's going to be with us for a while. I'm worried about some habitats being exposed chronically to low concentrations of toxins. . . . If the water's contaminated, the animals are going to be contaminated."
'The truth is in the middle'

By July 15, when the mile-deep BP well was capped, it had leaked out enough oil to fill the Pentagon more than 10 feet high. The gulf's total volume is about 880 million times the size of the Pentagon -- although the oil's effects were concentrated in one corner of it.

On Wednesday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said the oil is now much less visible on the surface and present only in microscopic, dilute droplets further down. She said that was a sign that the gulf ecosystem is resilient and processing the hydrocarbons.

But she said that "doesn't mean the situation is benign, because it is not."

"There's so much noise out there now saying the gulf is dead or the gulf will come back easily," Lubchenco said. "The truth is in the middle."

The government's accounting of what became of all the oil will be key to making this final judgment. Officials did not provide a date when that accounting would be ready. For now, government figures allow only a rudimentary estimate of the oil that might still be unaccounted for.

Relying on the latest estimate of the leak's total volume -- 60,000 barrels (2.5 million gallons) per day, at most -- then 5.2 million barrels may have escaped over 86 days. Of that, about 1.2 million barrels were either siphoned, burned or skimmed.

That would leave slightly less than 4 million barrels missing.

The best-case scenario is that much of this amount has been eaten by the gulf's natural stock of oil-munching microbes. Several scientists have said they are concerned that these microbes could cause their own problems, depleting the oxygen that gulf creatures need in the water.

But Wednesday, NOAA's Lubchenco said oxygen-free dead zones have not been detected so far. And Ed Overton, a professor at LSU, said he believed the microbial process, supercharged by summer heat, was helping.

"We have made a gigantic biological treatment pond in the gulf," Overton said. Because of its work, he said, "we're well, well over the hump. I would say that the acute damage -- we've seen it, it's [already] been done. And that the environment is in the recovery stage."
Air quality concerns

But, in some places, good news from the water has meant bad news in the air. A NOAA report on the air quality downwind of the blowout site -- where as much as 10,000 barrels of oil were burned off every day for more than a month -- found high levels of hydrocarbons in the air, as much as 10 times what would be detected in the air over Los Angeles. The amount of "particulate matter," which means microscopic particles suspended in the air, was about twice that found over Los Angeles.

But on Wednesday, Environmental Protection Agency officials said that the pollutants seem to dissipate in the 40-plus miles between the well site and populated places on land. They said they have taken samples of air at more than 400 sites around the Gulf Coast and have found no evidence that pollutants from the BP spill exceed safe levels.

"Probably the only good thing about the BP spill is that it was far away from the coastline," said Gina McCarthy, the EPA's assistant administrator overseeing air-pollution programs. "I'm not denying that people are smelling things. But the nose is a much more sophisticated tool . . . than many people realize," she said, and a bad smell doesn't mean toxic air.

Some other portion of those 4 million missing barrels of oil has been scooped off gulf beaches, placed into plastic bags and carted away. In total, 35,421 tons of oily waste has been taken to landfills around the gulf region, according to data from the EPA and BP -- a total that includes not just the oil itself but also oil-covered seaweed and beach debris, and oil-tainted protective gear worn by cleanup workers.

The EPA says its procedures will keep the oil from leaching out into groundwater. In Louisiana, in particular, the oily waste is kept in plastic-lined "cells," with a system for capturing leaking oil before it escapes.

In several communities near the landfills, residents have protested that if BP's cleanup workers need protective suits to get the oily debris off the beach, then the oil doesn't belong in their neighborhoods. They worry it will escape into the ground.

"It's like someone dumping something in your front yard, and then you call in and complain about it," said Marlin Ladner, 64, a member of the Harrison County, Miss., Board of Supervisors. His coastal county is home to Pecan Grove Landfill, which has received at least 1,210 tons so far. "And they come and pick it up and haul it to your back yard."

The environmental legacy of the spill -- the final proof or disproof of Hayward's optimism -- will probably depend on the oil that's left. NOAA scientists have offered upbeat assessments of the oil that remains below the ocean's surface, saying they've seen significant concentrations only near the wellhead.

But other scientists, working for Gulf Coast universities, have reported finding large "clouds" of oil miles away from the site.

Cowan, the LSU professor, said that two weeks ago his crew had detected a layer of something thick underwater, then sent a remote-controlled submarine down to look at it. They saw BB-size globs, he said, that were the same orangish color as the oil on the surface. He said that, in deeper water, cold temperatures will slow the breakdown of the oil -- and it could affect animals such as worms, fish, crabs and corals.

One recent study from a Tulane University researcher found what seemed to be a worrying snapshot of what this missing oil is doing. Professor Caz Taylor looked at baby blue crabs and saw something odd under their translucent shells: orange blobs. She speculates that the crabs may have molted in the midst of oil or dispersant and trapped some of it literally inside themselves.

"We're so unsure of what's going on at this point," including whether the oil might hurt creatures that eat the crabs, Taylor said. "The worrying thing is that we're seeing these droplets everywhere that we're sampling," she said, from Galveston Bay, Tex., to Pensacola, Fla.

washingtonpost.com

you have to wonder who the various talking heads quoted above work for, who is free and who is not.

these problems may have something to do with the situation outlined in this post from the oil drum (caveat lector as a function of anonymity):

Quote:

"Mapping" is not a good term to use. I'm one of the people involved in this effort (and yes, I hate BP's commitment to secrecy. But all of this data is going into the Natural Resources Damage Assessment and, as such, will eventually be public domain. How quickly is another matter, but don't forget that this is all headed toward court). Mapping, in a geological sense, makes the very simple assumption that during the time that you're gathering data, the object being measured and mapped hasn't changed: in other words, your data is time-equivalent.

That can't be said for a plume suspended in moving water. In a boat moving at 5 knots, which is a standard survey speed, even a slow current (5 cm/s--more common deep velocities around the Deepwater site are 20-30 cm/s), such as occurs in the deep Gulf of Mexico, will move nearly 200m in one hour, and over 2 km in a day. The speed of the plumes is very likely comparable (less, but comparable) to the ship taking measurements. For that reason, creating a "map" is impossible. We'd need literally dozens of ships out here taking measurements at the same time for anything like a "map" to be made reality.

What we can do is plot sonar hits, at different depths (as interpreted), versus in-situ tests (and account for different times as well), and interpret general flow characteristics. It's not as comprehensive as a map would be, by any means.

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Clearing the Relief Well to Restart - and Open Thread

the thread is interesting for the debates about assessments that have been constructed of the deepwater horizon disaster. there are a bunch of quite pro-corporate types who are arguing that the "real disaster" is a business one and that the environmental consequences are "overblown"---i've seen this sort of response before from folk i know who work in oil, who tend to poo-poo assessments of anything and everything petro-related not made by other petro-people...but in this case it is an interesting interpretive question which gets to the ways in which significance is built (first) then attributed (second) to imagery (third) which is presumed to replicate or otherwise communicate something about a world (fourth) beyond itself.

obviously a central element in information management, so in the fabrication of consent, is defining then controlling the way imagery is framed.

framing is the mechanism that enables people to generate meanings "autonomously" that coincide in a predictable manner with the meanings other similarly "autonomous" thinkin fellers arrive at.

people like to do as they're told. but they like to feel they're being independent while they obey. it's a curiously american circle jerk. one thing seems clear, though: stay inside the framing and you are a slave to it. at the same time, it requires work to relativize these frames. and pre-chewed information makes a body feel so Certain about things, when the simplest of all simple facts is that there's very little certainty about anything at all. there's just interpretation and recursion (why this interpretation and not another).

but recursion is hard.
and certainty so tempting.

dogzilla · 07-29-2010, 04:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

back to oil in the gulf of mexico:

and you know other things sometimes have one appearance on the surface and another below. so it is that the captains of industry apparently plan on transferring the cost of compensating victims of this fiasco back onto you and i by deducting the amount from their corporate tax return.

Obama got snookered again? I remember reading his promise that BP was going to pay for this, not the taxpayer. Maybe he should have read up on tax law before opening his mouth.

Just another example of amateur hour in the Obama administration. He's making Jimmy Carter look like a genius.

roachboy · 07-29-2010, 06:29 AM

yet another vital conservative insight.

see in the real world, the one that's not about royalism and shirking responsibility for policies implemented while conservo-"thinking" had power, there was a cap on liabilities for petro-capitalist outfits, a cap brought to us by the petro-capitalist oligarchy in the context of which political appointees and elected representatives jockey with each other to be nice nice nice to petro-capitalist concerns, all shaped by republican-style "thinking" about regulation.

the liability cap was argued for as a "protection for small businesses"....right-o....well, one of the earlier indications that maybe, just maybe, this disaster will start setting fire to conservative "thinking" about regulation in general and petro-capitalist regulation in particular is starting gather some momentum:

Quote:

Sen. Mary Landrieu proposes oil spill liability compromise
Published: Thursday, July 29, 2010, 7:00 AM
Bruce Alpert, Times-Picayune Bruce Alpert, Times-Picayune

With the Senate divided about how to hold oil companies liable for future oil spills, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La, is offering a compromise she hopes will break the logjam.

Landrieu's proposal wouldn't affect the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, given that the company has voluntarily said it won't be limited by the current liability cap of $75 million.

But instead of the unlimited cap on liability proposed in a new Senate Democratic bill to toughen regulations on the oil industry, Landrieu offered something of a hybrid proposal.

Her plan would raise the current cap from $75 million to $250 million and require companies to pay into an insurance policy covering damages of as much as an additional $10 billion. It would base premiums on the size of a company's drilling operations, meaning larger firms would pay more.

All spill-related costs above $10.25 billion, under Landrieu's proposal, would be borne by the company or companies responsible for the spill.

Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders said the senator is looking to meet the demands of some fellow Senate Democrats for unlimited liability without pushing smaller firms out of the drilling business.

The Senate bill, unveiled Tuesday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., appears short of the 60 votes needed to begin debate this week. Republicans accused Reid of seeking an early vote so that party members can head home for the August recess and campaign against Republican unwillingness to regulate the oil and gas industry, even after the BP tragedy.

"I think people who are very serious about responding to the spill in the Gulf should be offended by what has been presented," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee. Murkowski said the bill has some good ideas but that she can't support a bill that would leave firms with unlimited liabilities for oil spills.

Reid said Republicans are acting as if they were "in Alice in Wonderland" by refusing to accept reasonable changes in oil and gas regulations.

"It's just too bad that we can't have cooperation to get something done on a bipartisan basis," he said.

Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democratic senator pushing hardest for unlimited liability for oil spills, said he's working with Landrieu to figure "out a process in which the taxpayers never are held responsible for any dollars out of their pockets." But there was no immediate comment from Murkowski on whether she or other Republicans might go along with Landrieu's compromise.

Aaron Viles of the Gulf Coast Restoration Network expressed disappointment that neither the Senate Democratic bill nor the companion House Democratic proposal establish the kind of community advisory panel established in Alaska after the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident. He said Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans, has agreed to propose an amendment to the House bill to establish such a panel.

"Tourism, fishing and the environment all suffer when the oil and gas industry makes mistakes in the Gulf, so it's appropriate for those perspectives to have useful input into how the oil and gas industry behaves in the Gulf," Viles said. "Citizens advisory committees have proved to be an effective entity in Alaska, and I'm sure they will amplify the public's voice in the ongoing discussion about how the oil industry develops the Gulf."

Other Louisiana lawmakers are trying to amend the House bill to end the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. But the moratorium is popular with environmentalists and some House Democrats, making the effort to curtail it something of a long shot.

Sen. Mary Landrieu proposes oil spill liability compromise | NOLA.com

of course this remains a petro-capitalist oligarchy, one in which the federal judiciary has been packed to the rafters with reactionary judges in order to "counter judicial activism" of course---so i expect that texas will be the site of much of the litigation. because texas conservatives love love love their oil corporate persons:

Bring on the expense accounts into debate over location of oil spill lawsuits: Stephanie Grace | NOLA.com

meanwhile the other captains of industry are trying to figure out ways to continue extracting profits through deepwater drilling:

FT.com / Companies / Oil & Gas - Shell chief defends deep-water drilling

aceventura3 · 07-29-2010, 11:07 AM

The reason why we might want a person with executive business level experience in government - the nearly $10 billion tax credit being claimed by BP! What are the implications, among others here are two.

First, there is the $20 billion compensation fund, BP will put up $5 billion this year and the remainder over the next 3 years. The tax credit is half of this $20 billion fund.

Second, there is taxable income and there is cash flow. BP reported a $17 billion dollar loss in the second quarter, but they generated a net positive cash flow of $6.8 billion, which includes $2.1 billion spent on the spill already. They have generate more than enough cash to make their 2010 payment to the fund plus the first quarter of 2011.

The cost of the spill is punitive no matter how you look at it, but if you ever wondered why CEO's get paid what they get paid, just keep tabs on how the numbers unfold. So far BP has the upper hand in how they are managing this issue relative to the Obama administration.

And, it is funny how again and again, the folks in Washington cry and complain when a company follows the rules - and then want to change those rules after the fact. Just as in this situation with the $10 billion dollar tax credit, they want BP to voluntarily not take the credit. How about having some folks in charge of government who don't get taken to the cleaners on simple deals?

roachboy · 07-29-2010, 11:22 AM

my expectation, ace, is that one result of this fiasco is that the rules of the game are going to change. you can already see it starting--that's why i posted the article about the changes in liability cap legislation that's being proposed. i expect the rules around drilling are going to be tightened quite considerably. i expect that some of the tax laws will be changed for corporate persons if bp is not careful about how it manages it's "playing by the rules"....

truth be told, i'm not terribly optimistic about how far it'll go.

and that's not really my interest in the thread. i'm not particularly gathering this information around any explicitly political arguments. there are recurrent themes, questions that interest me, explanations that may arise from accumulation of information around them. i see this as tracking what is happening as much as an information flow as an oil flow.

whatever.

aceventura3 · 07-29-2010, 12:13 PM

Politics aside, I still find the financial response interesting and given the common dislike of math some of these issue will not get the focus it deserves.

So, we have BP planning to sell $30 billion in assets when they don't really need to. So why are they doing it?

One, they can off-set capital gains against the losses they report. They can end up with paper losses but "cash-flow profits". This reduces tax burden.

Two, they make the sale in 2010 before Congress passes any capital gains tax increases or let the Bush tax cuts expire. So if they owe taxes they pay less.

Three, given the losses they can off-set and/or the lower capital gains taxes - for simplification assuming about a 33% rate or a third of the profits - if they sell $30 billion in assets that cost them $20 billion, that $10 billion dollar gain on the sale, this year, could mean up to $3.3 in cash for BP, simply based on timing. Not bad for 2 minutes of thought by a CEO.

roachboy · 07-29-2010, 01:16 PM

i haven't been following this aspect of things, but is bp still having short-term paper trouble? when i saw the sell-off i assumed it was happening to bump their liquidity which i connected in my brain to the credit trouble they had gotten into a few weeks ago. i remember without really remembering (in the way one does when one's looking at other things) that these credit problems kinda disappeared from the press, but am not sure.

have you been tracking this?

=================================================

aside: later in the afternoon

[/COLOR]this report was released today by the national wildlife foundation:

Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit - National Wildlife Federation

this link will take you straight to the pdf:

http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazine...-Disaster.ashx

aceventura3 · 07-29-2010, 03:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

i haven't been following this aspect of things, but is bp still having short-term paper trouble? when i saw the sell-off i assumed it was happening to bump their liquidity which i connected in my brain to the credit trouble they had gotten into a few weeks ago. i remember without really remembering (in the way one does when one's looking at other things) that these credit problems kinda disappeared from the press, but am not sure.

have you been tracking this?

Not tracking, but I did read the company's statement on the actual use of debt upon their earnings release.

Quote:

Net debt at the end of the quarter was $23.2 billion, compared with $27.1 billion a year ago. The ratio of net debt to net debt plus equity was 21% compared with 22% a year ago. The net debt ratio at the end of the second quarter 2010 was impacted by the reduction in equity arising from the liabilities we have recognized in relation to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The group intends to reduce net debt to $10-15 billion within the next 18 months.

Second quarter 2010 results | Press releases | BP

The use of debt does not appear to be a concern. And each day that uncertainty is removed from their financial future debt will become less of an issue.

roachboy · 07-31-2010, 04:49 AM

just in case the lot of actual people gets forgotten behind all this watching the struggles of the corporate person bp to maintain it's cash position:

Quote:

BP oil spill: A Louisiana tragedy

For Tim Gautreaux, a Louisiana local whose family is immersed in the oil industry, the BP leak means the death of his whole community. And things can only get worse…

* Tim Gautreaux
* The Guardian, Saturday 31 July 2010

Those who live in Louisiana all their lives develop an understanding of disaster. We know a hurricane can turn over hundreds of offshore oil rigs in one pass and then come to land and do the same to our homes. Refineries explode, rigs blow up, pipelines burst, well pressures cause accidents that take fingers, feet, arms, legs and life itself.

There's hardly a family in the Gulf region that does not have a member involved in the oil industry. My father was a tugboat captain who handled barges of crude oil for the sprawling refineries, my brother sells oilfield equipment and technology, my nephew captains offshore supply vessels, my great-nephew operates a giant crane currently picking Katrina-smashed equipment from the Gulf floor. Cousins manage oil leases.

So, even though I am not an oil worker, the industry is part of my environment, my history, and when I saw images of the April Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire, I thought at once, "Wait a minute. Something's wrong. That rig is state-of-the-art, the size of a small factory, loaded with technology that rivals the space programme in complexity. Why is the fire so enormous?" And later, when the labyrinth of pipes and valves keeled over in a rumbling, hissing nimbus of flame, I was astounded, thinking, "Why didn't the blowout preventer shut down the well?" And days later, when it was revealed that the device was not functioning, a dark spill began to spread in my soul, a burgeoning realisation that nothing could stop a runaway well 5,000ft below the Gulf's surface. Nothing. A wide open fire hydrant blasting a plume of water out of a four-inch opening operates on a pressure of 50 pounds per square inch. The oil and gas venting from the rig's seven-inch pipe is propelled by at least 3,000 psi. Or more. And if the pipe beneath the blowout preventer fails? The reservoir pressures, I understand, are 11,000 psi. Unchecked, the subterranean caverns of oil would roar to the surface for years. BP has made a number of attempts to stop the fountain of oil and all have failed, except for the latest cap. But even this success poses many dangers, including a well rupture far below the ocean floor, initiated by the high pressure caused by the cap. No one knows what the result of such a failure would be, and this highlights the most frightening facet of the catastrophe: its unpredictability. The final solution is supposed to be the relief wells BP is drilling, and on the day I realised even these might not arrest the blowout, I decided to stop thinking about it all.

I drove into my south-east Louisiana town of Hammond to get something good to eat. At a seafood cafe I ordered Oysters Scampi. The TV was on above the bar, showing miles-long strands of red oil streaming across the face of the Gulf. I thought of the men killed in the explosion, how they spent their lives trying to avoid something like this. My oysters were large and plump; I ate the first fellow, then looked up at the oil. Locally, it's well known that 60% of the US's oysters come from Louisiana's coastal regions. The oyster beds would be killed by the oil and take years to regenerate. Longer, if the oil kept coming next year. And the next. The spill inside me widened as I realised that the shrimp fisheries would soon be closed, the commercial taking of red snapper, grouper and all their delectable cousins banned. I remembered that Louisiana supplies 73% of the nation's shrimp. My God, what about the charter boat industry and sport fishermen from Texas to Florida?

The nightly news told of oil coming ashore. Unlike its neighbour states, Louisiana has no shore, no sand beach except for a small spit called Grand Isle, no dunes, hills, cliffs. The entire Gulf border and its wide attendant marshes are exactly at sea level. The shore is mostly gritty mud held in place by tall, dense marsh grass. What is not water is grass, thousands of square miles of it. When the oil kills the grass, the shore will begin to melt away. This coastal marsh is home to millions of birds – pelicans, terns, egrets, great herons – and a rich variety of mammals and reptiles. It is threaded through by countless miles of narrow bayous, inlets and lagoons, all spawning areas for shrimp and succulent blue-claw crabs, nesting grounds for vast flocks of migratory geese and ducks – a hot and humid greenhouse teeming with life.

Louisiana is a relatively small state, but it contains 40-45% of the nation's coastal wetlands. The neighbour states of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have similar fertile and productive marshes, though such areas are much smaller.

The oil that began to show up, the so-called tar balls, were really reddish pancakes of axle grease; they began to appear on Grand Isle, then east, on the Alabama beaches, followed by a nasty invasion of the lovely green water and white sand shores of Pensacola and Santa Rosa Island. Heavy dark oil began to pool against the Louisiana marshes, coating wildlife with a greasy, glue-like batter – no one can ever know how many thousands of animals have died, how many carcasses are at the bottom of the quarter million square miles of the Gulf.

Next, every fisherman's greatest fear happened. The government had to close over 80,000 square miles of the Gulf to all fishing, and suddenly tens of thousands of fishermen were out of work, losing their identity and a way of life they and their ancestors have pursued for generations. The Cajuns have fished since they arrived in the 1700s; the Vietnamese, Croatians, African Americans, Native Americans, Islenos and plain American country boys who trawl and fish and process are all on the bank watching their livelihoods drown in oil. How much oil? Who will ever know? As of now, a safe final estimate, if the cap holds and the relief wells work, is 200m gallons. The oil washing up in July might have leaked in April. Locals are losing sleep about how much oil is looming underwater to bedevil us next year or for 10 years. Calls to counselling and crisis lines are through the roof. Fourteen million people depend on fishing and oilfield work for a living in the Gulf region. The fishermen can't pay rents and mortgages, utility bills, insurance, buy fuel for their boats, save for any kind of future; they stand in charity food lines on 100-degree days. The oilfield people are facing cutbacks because of the new ban on deepwater drilling; this is affecting shipbuilding, crewboat, supply and helicopter fleets, machine shops, pipe yards, supply houses, foundries and a hundred other businesses. The fishermen are hurting acutely at the moment, but the oil workers are worried for their futures as well, as the industry is facing a wind-down that could last for years. The news keeps getting more uncertain and, yes, things can get worse because hurricane season is now upon us and no one knows what havoc a big storm in the Gulf could cause. It could do anything from pushing a bow wave of killing oil over the estuaries to painting New Orleans with black rain.

I don't think people living outside the region understand what is happening. One so-called environmentalist suggested Gulf fishermen and oil workers should just get educated in green technology and work in solar panel factories. What are they supposed to do for 20 years until the technology is perfected and the factories built? Fishermen want to work as fishermen; the Gulf is 1,000 miles wide and they are independent members of a huge culture, not employees.

By the end of June I tried to limit my news intake. It was now clear the enormous Gulf tourism industry was on shaky ground because all the beaches from Panama City, Florida to Grand Isle, Louisiana were fouled or soon to be fouled, and the result was a freefall in hotel, condo and restaurant bookings, and trade in the thousands of gift shops, filling stations, convenience stores, bait-and-tackle shops… Each type of business was firing workers, cutting orders, falling into debt.

After a charter boat captain shot himself in the head, I turned off the television. But everywhere I went, neighbours, bank tellers, waitresses, university professors all fretted about the spill. Last year, one billion pounds of fish was harvested from the Gulf; now only a tiny fraction of that is being caught in the small areas still open, and chances are even that clean catch will be distrusted by buyers outside the region. How many years will it take for Gulf seafood's reputation for quality to return?

This disaster rides like a tumour on the back of the monster Katrina, a storm that in 2005 killed more than 1,800 people in the New Orleans area. Many residents of the region were finally getting their homes rebuilt, their boats and docks restored.

It is true a few hundred men have been hired by BP at low wages to shovel muck off the shores. Several motels have been rented to house workers and BP has been leaking out cheques to fishing families and charter boat operators (though there are tales of cheques never arriving). Hundreds of boats have been hired to go after the oil, but not a man in a thousand miles is glad about any of it.

Everyone has a sense of why the accident happened. Weeks before the explosion, it seems BP knew the blowout preventer was leaking and missing a crucial seal. About 10 hours before 11 men were burned up, employees report an argument broke out between the rig's BP manager, who wanted a speedy and cheap sealing of the well, and the driller and cementer, who demanded traditional, safe plugging methods. The company man overruled the experts. He wanted to save money, ignoring the first rule of industry economics: safety is never more expensive than an accident.

The clean-up bill is complex and will extend for years. In Florida, workers clean a beach at dusk; at sunrise it's covered again. The spill is slathering four states now. It could be blown over to Texas. It could show up in the marinas of Key West, or even Wilmington, North Carolina on the Atlantic, wherever the Gulf Stream carries it. The coming expense is not to be imagined. Lawsuits are spilling out with no judicial blowout preventer to slow them down. Injury and loss of livelihood suits, suits from hotels for loss of bookings, suits from restaurants, bars, stores, suits for mental anguish, even claims from municipalities for loss of taxes.

The future? There is a large, years-old black spot in my driveway where my old Jeep once leaked a quart of transmission oil. It's not fading away. The BP spill is likewise staining the coast's soil, and sinking into the psychological fabric of the Gulf. Beneath the sorrow lies suspicion and anger based on the notion that if this spill had occurred near a place like Boston harbour where a lot of wealthy, well-connected people live, every oil-skimmer in the hemisphere would have been brought in and every offer of foreign help accepted immediately, instead of 71 days after the spill began.

The locals have watched with disbelief some of BP's lunatic and expensive clean-up methods, such as wiping down each blade of marsh grass with paper towels. They have watched their own, more effective, home-grown efforts ridiculed and crushed by irrelevant Coast Guard regulations and "experts" who have never seen Louisiana's coast except perhaps through the windows of a plane.

In three to 10 years, maybe the lawsuits will be settled, maybe the sea grasses will grow back to hold the marshlands together, maybe the fish now trying to breathe clouds of undersea oil will somehow propagate, maybe trust in the world's best seafood will return. But a person's life is composed of minutes and is most fulfilled by working and bringing one's earnings to the family table. And who can give back even one ruined minute?

BP oil spill: A Louisiana tragedy | Environment | The Guardian

roachboy · 07-31-2010, 09:43 AM

a bit later on day 105 (i think):

so if there are no rules that define conflict of interest then there is no conflict of interest.

Quote:

Oil spill highlights conflict-of-interest issue within investigation agency

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 31, 2010; A02

David Dykes -- the federal regulator now leading his agency's investigation of the BP oil spill -- has spent five years as a senior investigator and office chief enforcing oil industry safety in the Gulf of Mexico. For much of that time, his brother was a top executive at an energy company with significant activities under Dykes's purview.

But David Dykes did not formally recuse himself from matters involving his brother's company. No rule required him to do so. Unlike many federal agencies that make employees distance themselves from matters involving friends, relatives or former bosses, the nation's chief oil regulatory agency had no such policy.

Now, in the wake of the BP disaster, Congress is pressing the agency formerly called the U.S. Minerals Management Service to clamp down on potential conflicts of interest. The case of David and Rodney Dykes highlights the challenges of the task. The oil industry of the Gulf Coast is an insular world in which rig foremen and the federal inspectors charged with regulating them sometimes work side by side, or grew up in the same towns and even homes.

Investigations into the BP spill have focused on whether MMS regulators properly oversaw the Deepwater Horizon rig or merely accepted company assurances that the rig was safe. An inspector general investigation in May showed that MMS regulators in the gulf sometimes viewed themselves more as industry friends and fishing buddies than policemen. In one office, they took free trips, sporting tickets and gifts from industry officials they were supposed to be monitoring, the investigation found.
New rules

Since June, the newly renamed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement [BOEM] has worked to develop new rules that would require inspectors to recuse themselves from matters in which they have a family or other personal conflict. Michael Bromwich, the new head of BOEM, said the agency needs a strong recusal policy to assuage public concerns about closeness between regulators and industry.

"Since arriving a month ago to lead reforms at BOEM, it is clear to me that there are concerns about conflicts of interest that we must address within the agency's inspections and investigation programs. We're looking very closely at these issues, including implementing new recusal policies and taking appropriate action where necessary," Bromwich said.

Bromwich said he and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar have confidence in David Dykes's work as co-chair of a team investigating the BP spill.

Both David Dykes and his brother declined to comment. A spokesperson at the former MMS said David Dykes was never asked to review any matters involving Energy Partners, where Rodney Dykes was a senior vice president for production, or Stone Energy, a company under a tentative merger with the firm in 2006.

David Dykes, a native of Hammond, La., has worked in the gulf oil business for nearly three decades, as had Rodney Dykes. David Dykes drew the attention of MMS officials when, as a safety manager at Taylor Oil, he helped shape a model safety plan. In 1999, he joined MMS, and by 2005, he was a senior safety inspector in the Office of Safety Management. He became office chief in February 2007. David Dykes was considered a "junkyard dog" as an investigator, a former MMS manager said. His office oversaw accident investigations, issued industry safety alerts, imposed civil penalties and recommended regulation changes.

Rodney Dykes stayed on the corporate side, including a short stint with his brother at Maxus Energy. By 2001, he had joined Energy Partners Ltd., and he rose to senior vice president in 2003.

From 2006 to early 2008, Energy Partners and a company under a tentative merger agreement with it in 2006 reported 30 incidents including fires, explosions, collisions and injuries on their rigs and facilities, according to MMS records. The MMS judged 25 to be very minor or not meeting the criteria for an investigation, and did not probe further. District offices far below Dykes's investigated the other five.

In three cases where MMS inspectors found company violations and failures, MMS fined the companies an average of $18,000 for each incident.

BOEM officials said no one in Dykes's office or in lower district offices ever asked him to weigh in on cases involving his brother's business.

"David Dykes is among the many diligent, dedicated, professional public servants who works for BOEM and who is committed to ensuring the safety of offshore energy operation," said Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff. She said David Dykes orally disclosed in 1999 that his brother worked in the oil industry but did not do so in writing because there was no policy covering such conflicts.
'Doubt in your mind'

Some argue that a formal policy is necessary because of the inevitable perception that the office policing oil rig safety could be conflicted about regulating the boss's brother.

"If the one running the show at MMS runs the office in charge of [monitoring] his own brother, it's hard to really come down on him," said Gary Arsenault, a Louisiana lawyer who has sued on behalf of workers injured at Energy Partners facilities. "There's always that doubt in your mind about how well his office can investigate."

Under the policy under consideration, BOEM employees would be required to formally step away if there was a possible conflict between job and family. A June 12 memo alerts BOEM inspectors in the Gulf to immediately notify bosses of potential conflicts.

"You must get with your supervisor and recuse yourself of any inspections of facilities/fields/rigs that currently have family members or close friends working there," the deputy regional supervisor for the gulf field operations wrote.

BOEM is now considering strengthening that directive, requiring employees to document conflicts, make formal recusal requests and avoid performing any official duties relating to family members, friends or recent former employers.

washingtonpost.com

for what it's worth, i had little knowledge of the regulatory and institutional frames that shape off-shore oil drilling prior to this disaster. i've been interested in the topic and also in the way that an image of that regulatory system has been surfacing across it. so here---this isn't exactly news at this point (the relation between mms & oil corporation has been a subject of recurrent interest, despite the name change). it's also clear that the deepwater mess is going to result in changes to these rules. where these changes happen and what they are is kinda interesting as well.

once this is over with, i expect that for most of us (likely myself included) this whole arrangement will start slipping back into invisibility where it will operate for the folk directly involved and few besides. so a picture of petro-capitalism in 2010 that can be assembled through a crisis...

that's the "agenda"

roachboy · 08-03-2010, 04:58 AM

the initial rate of leaking was under-stated (let's say) by a multiple of 12:

washingtonpost.com

one result of the amounts dumped into the gulf of mexico and this despite the questions of the missing oil plumes...

Quote:

BP oil spill: final tests due before 'static kill'

Scientists confirm the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which released 5m barrels of oil, was the worst accidental spill ever as preparations are finalised to seal the ruptured well

BP hopes to carry out a crucial test later today in final preparation for sealing the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, which scientists agreed last night has been responsible for the worst accidental oil spill in history.

Nearly 5m barrels of oil have gushed into the ocean since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in April, according to federal scientists. That makes the spill larger than the 3.3m barrels released into Mexico's Bay of Campeche when the Ixtoc I oil rig suffered a catastrophic blowout in 1979.

At its peak, the BP well was spewing 62,000 barrels a day, according to the federal team, which is higher than the original worst-case scenario of 60,000. But by the time that BP was able to cap the well last month that figure had dropped to 53,000 a day.

The new estimate of the size of the spill – of a total of 4.9m barrels – means the potential penalty that BP faces under US law has ballooned. Under the Clean Water Act, BP faces a fine of $1,100 (£691) a barrel, or $4,300 a barrel if it is found that the spill was the result of gross negligence. As a result, BP could be fined either $5.4bn or $21bn. The federal team reckon BP's own containment efforts saved about 800,000 barrels which could be taken into account as a mitigating factor, reducing the fine to either $4.5bn or $17.6bn.

The largest oil spill in history came at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991 when retreating Iraqi forces destroyed countless Kuwaiti wells, which resulted in an estimated 1.4m to 1.5m tonnes of oil being released into the Persian Gulf. That spill is not, of course, counted as accidental.

In an attempt to finally close the Macondo well, BP engineers will today carry out a pressure test to see whether they can begin the so-called 'static kill' procedure, which involves pumping heavy drilling mud into the well.

If tests go to plan, BP will begin pumping mud into the well from a nearby ship loaded with 8,000 barrels of it. The plan is to slowly force the oil back down into the reservoir by steadily pumping in the heavier mud. If successful, BP will be able to either cement the well from the top, or wait until the relief wells – which are due to be completed later this month – have reached the correct depth and cement the well from the bottom.

Preparations for the "injectivity" test – which was delayed on Monday because of a small leak of hydraulic fluid in a control panel – come as it emerged BP has sent a bill for $480m to one of its partners in the well.

Japan's Mitsui, which has a 10% stake in the well through its unit Mitsui Oil Exploration, said overnight that it has received a bill for $480m from BP which it will "carefully" study but has yet to decide if it will pay any clean-up costs.

Last month it emerged that BP was looking to recoup some of the costs of the clean-up from Mitsui and Canada's Anadarko Petroleum, which has a 25% share in the well.

Anadarko has flatly refused to accept any blame for the disaster. In June its chairman and chief executive, Jim Hackett, said BP's actions probably amounted to "gross negligence or wilful misconduct".

Last month, BP announced that it had set aside $32.2bn to pay for the spill as embattled chief executive Tony Hayward announced plans to quit his job.

BP oil spill: final tests due before 'static kill' | Environment | guardian.co.uk

but on the up side, hopefully anyway, preparations for the static kill attempt proceed apace.

and just in case that you, like me, have a tenuous grip on what that refers to:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Start of the Static Kill - and Open Thread

roachboy · 08-03-2010, 12:16 PM

meanwhile, more dissent within the obama administration about bp's hyper-enthusiastic use of corexit to disperse the oil. the reasons for the dissent are below:

Quote:

Gulf oil spill chemical use alarmed EPA scientists

Five scientists and two other officials expressed concerns to superiors about use of dispersants, says whistleblower group

The Obama administration is facing internal dissent from its own scientists for approving the use of huge quantities of chemical dispersants to tackle the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Guardian has learned.

The Environmental Protection Agency has come under withering attack in Congress and from independent scientists for allowing BP to spray almost 2 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit on the slick and, even more controversially, pump the chemical into the leak site 5,000ft below the sea. Now it emerges the EPA's own experts have been raising similar concerns within the agency.

Jeff Ruch, exective director of the whistleblower support group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said he had heard from five scientists and two other officials who had expressed concerns to their superiors about the use of dispersants.

"There was one toxicologist who was very concerned about the underwater application particularly," he said. "The concern was the agency appeared to be flying blind and not consulting its own specialists and even the literature that was available."

Veterans of the Exxon Valdez spill questioned the wisdom of trying to break up the oil in the deep water at the same time as trying to skim it on the surface. Other EPA experts raised alarm about the effect of dispersants on seafood.

Ruch said EPA experts were being excluded from decision-making around the spill. "Other than a few people in the united command, there is no involvement from the rest of the agency," he said. EPA scientists would not go public for fear of retaliation, he added.

Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who introduced a ban on dispersants pending further testing in an oil spill bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, said the EPA had failed in its duty to protect the environment.

"We are undertaking a huge uncontrolled experiment with the entire Gulf," he said. "They have fallen down on the job very substantially because they allowed BP to use dispersants. Even when they told BP not to use dispersants they allowed BP to ignore their advice."

On Wednesday, a toxicologist from Texas Tech University is scheduled to tell a Senate hearing that the unprecedented use of dispersants "created an eco-toxicological experiment".

But independent scientists weighed in against the EPA for claiming that the combination of oil and dispersants posed no greater danger to marine life than oil on its own. Previous studies, including a 400-page study by the National Academy of Sciences, have warned the combination of oil and dispersants is more toxic than oil on its own, because the chemicals break down cell walls making organisms more susceptible to oil.

EPA made its assertion on Monday after testing how much of the mixture was needed to kill a species of shrimp and small fish, just two of the 15,000 types of sea animals in the Gulf. The EPA test did not address medium- or long-term effects, or reports last week that dispersants were discovered in the larvae of tiny blue crab, entering the food chain.

"It was only one test and it was very crude. We knew going into this and the EPA knew that this mixture is highly toxic to many, many species. There is a whole weight of literature," said Susan Shaw, the director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, who has been organising scientists on the issue. "It is not the whole science. It's the convenient science."

Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst and veteran whistleblower at EPA, dismissed the tests as little more than a PR stunt. "They are trying to spin this limited piece of information to make it look like dispersants are safe and that the Corexit dispersant is safe."

EPA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

EPA is also under fire from Congress for allowing BP and the Coast Guard to ignore its order last May to cut the use of dispersants by 75%. Documents released by the Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey this week show the EPA allowed spraying of dispersants 74 times over a period of 48 days. At times, the agency gave advance approval for the use of dispersants for up to a week. The documents also showed the EPA allowed BP to spray 36,000 gallons of Corexit in a single day.

The controversy surrounding EPA's role in the oil spill marks a turning point for the Obama administration, which came to power vowing to repair the frayed relationship between scientists and government under George Bush and promising a new era of transparency.

BP oil spill: Obama administration's scientists admit alarm over chemicals | Environment | The Guardian

to the public employees group:

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: Homepage

YouTube - Talking Heads - "Once In A Lifetime"

roachboy · 08-04-2010, 03:50 AM

let's hope, yes?

Quote:

BP says 'static kill' has successfully plugged oil well

Deepwater Horizon well now being monitored as US government expected to confirm slick causing less damage than feared

BP claimed today that it had successfully plugged the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well, for now at least, using a "static kill" technique, as the White House was looking into the long-term effects of the spill.

The procedure, which involves pumping heavy mud into the top of the capped well, began last night. It was stopped this morning after the operation went to plan.

BP said the breakthrough was a "significant milestone", but cautioned that more mud may still have to be pumped into the well.

It issued a statement saying that "the desired outcome" of the operation had been achieved as the well had "reached a static condition".

Later today, the US government is due to release a report that is expected to estimate that only a quarter of oil that leaked from the well would continue to cause problems.

In a briefing to the New York Times, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which prepared the report, said most of the oil had already dispersed. Last week, satellite images of the slick showed that it was breaking up on the surface and was confined to isolated patches.

The plugged well is being monitored to ensure it remains static, BP said. "Further pumping of mud may or may not be required depending on results observed during monitoring", it said. If the plug holds, BP will start pumping cement into the well.

The operation is being conducted in tandem with the drilling of relief wells, which BP says is still the "ultimate solution to kill" the well. The first relief well is on course to intercept the well by the middle of this month, but drilling was halted during the static kill operation.

The White House said the well leaked 4.9m barrels of oil before being capped last month, making it the worst environmental disaster in US history.

The Deepwater Horizon well exploded in April, killing 11 oil workers.

BP says 'static kill' has successfully plugged oil well | Environment | guardian.co.uk

roachboy · 08-05-2010, 06:28 AM

so far so good at the wellhead, so there's reason to be optimistic, more than before at least..but not so optimistic as to think that almost all the oil vaporized. well, a bunch of it did but that still leaves alot, they say. like 2x exxon valdez. not that anyone actually knows. no-one seems to actually know much at this point.

maybe it's the uncertainty. maybe it's that in this case cameras can't provide the requisite illusion of transparency and/or control, which is creating problems for the dominant technology of reality management.

or maybe its something else:

Quote:

In Gulf, Good News About Oil Is Taken With Grain of Salt
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — There is little celebration on the Gulf Coast.

Even with the news of the tentative plugging of BP’s well, the attention here has largely been focused elsewhere, on a week’s worth of reports, culminating in a federal study released on Wednesday, that the oil in the Gulf of Mexico has been rapidly breaking down and disappearing. These reports have been met, for the most part, with skepticism if not outright distrust.

“It’s not gone,” said George Barisich of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance, who has been making his money these days selling anti-BP T-shirts while also working in the Vessels of Opportunity program, a BP effort created to employ boats to help with the spill cleanup. “Mother Nature didn’t suck it up and spit it out.”

According to federal scientists, about a third of the oil was captured or mitigated by recovery efforts, a quarter naturally dissolved or evaporated and 16 percent was dispersed into microscopic droplets. Just over a quarter remains on or below the surface or has washed ashore, and is either being collected or is degrading naturally.

But many here have grown skeptical after the false assurances following Hurricane Katrina, the early flow rate estimates from BP and federal agencies that turned out to be drastically low and cautionary tales from Alaska about the Exxon Valdez disaster.

The skepticism has been stoked by environmental groups that came to the gulf in droves, lawyers who have been soliciting clients from billboards along roads leading south, a sensation-hungry news media and politicians who have gained broad popularity for thundering in opposition to response officials.

But it has also been fed by continued discoveries of oil clumped in marshes, stratified underneath fresh sand or exposed in the surf at low tide. These sightings do not contradict the scientific reports, which acknowledge millions of gallons of residual oil, but they fuel a broadly held fear: that the oil is merely hidden, liable to appear in a thick, brown ooze at any time.

Federal scientists and coastal residents agree in at least one respect: that the long-term effects of the spill are unknown, and that it is too early to make any conclusions about the true scale of the damage. That uncertainty leads to perhaps the most potent source of skepticism: a deep anxiety about the region’s economic future.

The anxiety begins in the short term. Billions of dollars have poured into the gulf during the response, supporting coastal communities that have had a dreary summer but also enriching contractors involved in the cleanup. Any news of dissipating oil hints at a looming end to that.

BP has promised full compensation, but that has not stopped officials and residents from pursuing lawsuits or seeking billions more in restoration payments.

Just as the problems were being ironed out in the Vessels of Opportunity program, which had left many hurting commercial fishermen on the outside, recoverable oil started disappearing on the surface.

Plenty are worried that there will be no revenue to take the program’s place as it wraps up.

“Even if it is true,” Mr. Barisich said of the reports of dissipating oil, “and I can go catch some shrimp right now, I can’t sell it. I don’t have a dealer or processor who can take it right now.”

Commercial fishing waters are being opened all along the coast, which can be done only with the approval of the Food and Drug Administration and after a variety of tests. But many fishermen, who early on were angered at what they saw as premature closings of water where little oil was visible, are now among the most concerned that the waters are being opened too quickly.

The perception of healthy seafood is nearly as important for the business as the reality, and reassuring consumers can be a long and tricky process.

“Alaska, it took them almost five years to overcome their perception challenges,” said Ewell Smith, the executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.

And while BP has recently highlighted its efforts to speed up the claims process, more than two-thirds of claims have not been paid, mostly because adjusters are waiting on documentation that may be hard to come by for many in the largely cash-driven fishing business.

But the economic worries still come back to a fundamental disagreement: many residents simply do not believe that the oil is going away anytime soon, whatever scientists are saying.

“Smell that?” asked Forrest A. Travirca III, driving along the beach at Port Fourchon, La., on Monday. He climbed out of his cart and waded into the surf, where low tide had exposed mud flats, thick and dark with oil to a depth of three inches. The sight could be found up and down the beach.

Mr. Travirca, the field inspector for the Edward Wisner Donation, a nonprofit land trust, said that the oil had probably accumulated since late May, left by subcontracted cleanup crews that had done an incomplete job.

Both BP and federal response officials repeat that the cleanup will not be over until the beaches and marshes are clean, and that crews will not leave until local officials are satisfied. Mr. Travirca said the cleanup had been improving and gave high marks to the Coast Guard.

But the oil-caked mud flats provoked concern about the oil that may be unseen, buried all along the beach or sitting on the seabed offshore. Federal scientists said they had found that oil was not gathering on the floor of the gulf, but Mr. Travirca said he had a hard time believing that.

Fishermen are also keenly concerned about shrimp, crab and finfish larvae. If the larvae are in jeopardy, it may not be known until future fishing seasons, even after the cleanup ends.

Scientists have found hydrocarbons and possibly dispersant in samples of crab and fish larvae, but say that it is premature to draw any conclusions about the long-term effects.

That uncertainty is not reassuring, and to many here it is, in its own way, proof of deception. Response officials acknowledge that the use of dispersants was a trade-off, exposing marine life to risk but preventing a thorough oiling of the beaches and fragile marshes. And for such a huge spill, it has had a relatively small coastal impact.

But others say it was also convenient that the dispersant kept most of the oil out of public view.

“I think probably in the long term the application of the dispersants, at least at the wellhead, probably was the right thing to do,” said Dr. William E. Hawkins, director of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory of the University of Southern Mississippi. “But cynically I might say BP might have done it for the wrong reasons.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us...ef=global-home

but people seem to think that the happy-face all that oil seems to be gone report is a prelude to the obama administration abandoning the problem and by extension the region:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us/05oil.html?hp

aside:
there are lots of ways to destroy marshland:

Delacroix residents 'never imagined how bad it would get': Part four of four | NOLA.com

but the wellhead seems to be holding.

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Cementing the Well - and Open Thread

Cimarron29414 · 08-05-2010, 07:36 AM

I heard a news report yesterday that the federal government is reporting that 75% of the oil is now gone - either cleaned up, evaporated, or eaten by the sea. It seemed hopeful that there might not be any more big oil masses hitting the shore. This is fantastic news.

roachboy · 08-05-2010, 08:14 AM

for what it's worth i'd like to believe that...and the impression one could press releases and/or yesterday's noaa report, but as time is passing more and more problems are being raised about that information:

NOAA report on Gulf oil spill draws criticism for many assumptions

fact is that as of now, i don't think anyone really knows what's going on.
i certainly don't.

roachboy · 08-07-2010, 06:41 AM

an update on activities at the well:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Waiting for the Cement to Set - and Open Thread 2

and isn't this special?

Quote:

BP risks Obama row by hinting it may return to stricken oil well

A struggle between BP and the Obama administration over the future of the cemented well in the Gulf of Mexico erupted in public today when the oil company suggested it may drill in the same reservoir again.

In a briefing with reporters meant to symbolise BP's return to business-as-usual in the Gulf, the chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said the company may not give up all claims on the Macondo well, which leaked five million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

"There's lots of oil and gas here," Suttles said. "We're going to have to think about what to do with that at some point."

BP's former chief executive, Tony Hayward, told Congress in June that there were 50 million recoverable barrels of oil in the reservoir.

The company faces tens of billions of dollars of damages from the spill.

Soon after Suttles's remarks, Thad Allen, the man appointed by the Obama administration to lead the federal response to the disaster, said he knew of no plans to return to the well. Such a decision would be made by well licensing authorities, Allen said. "It had not been raised to my level at this point," he said.

The exchange marks an escalation of a subtler struggle all week, in which BP officials appeared far less convinced than Obama administration officials of the need to pump cement into the bottom of the Macondo from a relief well.

"We want to end up with cement in the bottom of the hole," Kent Wells, a senior vice-president, told a briefing on Tuesday. "Whether that comes from the top or whether it comes from the relief well, those will be decisions made along the way."

Allen, however, insisted the relief well should be cemented. "I don't think we can see this as the end all and be all until we get the relief wells done," he said.

Officially, BP remains committed to pouring mud and cement into the Macondo from two relief wells, which it has been drilling for the last three months. But BP officials recently described the relief well process as "confirmation" of the killing of the runaway well rather than a vital step.

One of the wells is now about four feet away from the Macondo. Once the cement seal hardens, BP crews are scheduled to resume work intercepting the well. But the two relief wells could also conceivably offer a way for BP or another oil company to pump the remaining oil from the reservoir, and sell it.

In another sign that BP feels confident one chapter of the oil spill is over, Suttles announced today he would return to his regular role in Houston.

He will be replaced by Mike Utsler, who has been running the oil company's command post in Houma, Louisiana.

More than 1,100 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, a major oil company was today fighting to contain the damage from a ruptured pipe.

Enbridge Energy Partners said it hopes to cut out the damaged section of a pipeline that spewed about a million gallons of heavy crude oil into a rural Michigan creek late last month.

The spill, the worst seen in the industrial heartland of the midwest, forced dozens of families to flee their homes and raised fears about air and water safety.

BP risks Obama row by hinting it may return to stricken oil well | Environment | The Guardian

roachboy · 08-10-2010, 04:34 AM

the theater of engagement involving the captains of industry and the corporate person they pilot with the lives and well-being of actual human beings is entering a new phase.

i don't think this requires much commentary. plus i have to go to work.

Quote:

BP Not Denying, Just Not Paying Nearly 40,000 Oil Spill Claims

BRIAN SKOLOFF and HOLBROOK MOHR | 08/ 9/10 07:19 PM | AP

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Sheryl Lindsay's wedding planner business is on the brink, crumbling with each cancellation over concerns about oil. Brides-to-be are walking away from plans for beachside vows, leaving Lindsay waiting to see whether she'll be part of BP's promise to make whole everyone who's suffered from its spill.

BP said Monday it had received 145,000 claims from residents and business owners like Lindsay citing lost income because of the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and had paid out $324 million without denying a single claim.

That sounds pretty good, until frustrated residents and officials point out that 39,000 claims are in limbo – some of them, including Lindsay's, have been there for months. Some that have been paid are only partial payments, and many of those people are still fighting for more money.

"Therein lies the problem," Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said recently. "They don't deny them. They just hold them open forever."

Hood speculated that BP PLC would rather wait for Kenneth Feinberg, the federally appointed administrator of the $20 billion compensation fund BP established at the behest of the White House, to take over the claims process this month. That way, if a claim is denied, "he's the bad guy" instead of BP, Hood said.

BP claims director Darryl Willis said the company isn't deliberately delaying. Rather, 26,000 pending claims are still being evaluated and thousands of others need more documentation, the company said.

"Our intent is to continue paying claims until this process is handed over to Ken Feinberg," Willis said. "There's no intent to slow this thing down."

However, BP does defer "questionable" claims to Feinberg, including "restaurants and tourist claims from areas that haven't been impacted by an oiled beach," company spokeswoman Pat Wright said.

"We believe there are some tough decisions out there that need to be made on a variety of these claims because many of these are claims are not squarely within the guidelines of the Oil Pollution Act," she added.

The act was enacted in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Under the law, BP is responsible for cleanup costs, but the act caps the company's liability for other economic damage, such as lost wages, at $75 million.

BP officials said early on that the company would not limit itself to that cap. But the company is using the guidelines for who should be compensated.

Wright said BP decided to defer some claims because Feinberg "has said that he's going to look at this, maybe, a bit differently than we are looking at it."

Feinberg, who oversaw payouts for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, did not respond to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. He has said that claims without a direct tie to the oiled water will have a harder time making it through the process.

In Washington, the Justice Department and BP announced Monday that the company had deposited the initial $3 billion into the $20 billion fund.

Louisianians have been hardest hit by the oil and have reaped the most through BP's claims process, getting 34,000 checks totaling $139 million as of Monday, according to BP. Alabama was next with $75 million, Florida residents took in $61 million, Mississippians $26 million and Texans had received $9 million since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 and started a spill that lasted more than three months.

BP said it has paid out $58 million in just the first eight days of August, in part by eliminating some paperwork requirements for business claims.

"I'll be the first to admit that this process has not been perfect," Willis said. "We're going to continue to look for ways to get this money out and do it more efficiently."

Who is eligible and how much compensation they deserve are open questions.

Lindsay said she was pointedly told by a claims adjuster that she wouldn't get money from BP to keep afloat the beach wedding business she owns with her sister, which she said was on pace to make $500,000 this year until the spill.

"Last week we were told they were not paying wedding planners," she said with a huff of frustration. "We're having to close our offices. We're not closing the business – yet – but we've just got to get out from under the rent. We can't afford it anymore."

Orange Beach Weddings has had 30 cancellations, owes on loans to the bank and must refund deposits while hoping for new clients.

"The phones just don't ring anymore," Lindsay said.

A few days after being told her claim was denied by one BP claims adjuster, another said it was merely on hold.

On Thursday, yet another adjuster, who identified himself as Buddy, said Lindsay's claim was denied, that wedding planners were ineligible.

"Nobody can make a decision," Lindsay said. "We're just stuck."

Wright said the adjusters in Lindsay's case made a mistake, and that the 1,650 people on the claims team aren't always on the same page. She said BP adjustors shouldn't be denying any claims.

"I'll be working to address this with the adjusters to make sure they fully understand," she said.

Another lingering question is whether folks hurt by the federal moratorium on oil drilling will get help, specifically those who didn't work directly on the 33 rigs that were shut down.

BP gave $100 million to a charity to give grants to rig workers affected by the moratorium, but that money isn't for businesses such as supply boats that support the rigs.

Brett Broussard, who pilots offshore oil service boats, called it laughable for BP to say the company hasn't denied claims. Broussard said BP told him he was ineligible because the moratorium put him out of work, not the oil spill.

"They're parsing words. I am not eligible because of the moratorium, but their spill caused the moratorium," Broussard said. "I find it repulsive and repugnant."

Mitch Jurisich, a Plaquemines Parish, La., oyster farmer, compared the claims process to dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – "so similar it's pitiful," he said.

"I'm still sitting here sending paperwork after paperwork trying to get my first paycheck," Jurisich said of his spill claim. "I feel I've had to give more paperwork for this than I would have to give the IRS in an audit. I'm losing confidence on a daily basis."

BP Not Denying, Just Not Paying Nearly 40,000 Oil Spill Claims

roachboy · 08-14-2010, 06:16 AM

some say it's the end of the leak.

Quote:

Deepwater Horizon crisis 'may be over'

Fishing port reacts with suspicion to claims that engineers could have sealed off the gusher for good

Scientists pored over a series of pressure tests from BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico today, trying to discover whether engineers had unknowingly already sealed off the gusher for good.

The tests could decide whether the official epitaph for the Macondo is written tomorrow or sometime next week, when crews were scheduled to complete two relief wells that officials have described as the last step in permanently securing the BP well.

A decision to stop work on the relief wells would bring an unexpected conclusion to the Deepwater Horizon crisis in the Gulf, which has devastated the local economy and environment, cost BP billions, and shaken confidence in Barack Obama's leadership.

It might also be a hard sell to a public which has been told repeatedly that the relief wells are the only sure way of plugging the well for good.

In Venice, a fishing port which saw some of the worst oil slicks, the prospect of Obama administration officials and BP executives declaring an early end to the well was greeted with suspicion. "There's plenty of oil still out there," said one of the airboat operators who have been collecting tar balls from the marshes.

News that the well may have already been blocked came as the state of Alabama announced that it is suing BP, and its partners on the Deepwater well, Transocean and Halliburton, for the "catastrophic harm" caused by the spill.

The attorney general Troy King declined to specify a figure for damages, telling Reuters: "We are suing them for the amount it will take to make Alabama whole."

There was also anger at a report in the Times-Picayune newspaper that BP had ordered claims adjusters to halve payments in August to those who lost business or income because of the spill.

The newspaper said it had obtained an internal BP email ordering the cuts. BP told the paper it was halving payments because the Obama administration was due to take over claims on 15 August. That takeover is now delayed.

The Obama administration's lead official for the oil spill, Thad Allen, said today that crews may have inadvertently sealed off any escape routes for oil when they pumped in mud and cement in the "static kill" operation earlier this month.

BP said it was reviewing data collected from four hours of testing on the well on Thursday before making its recommendations. Executives have said repeatedly in recent days that they saw no need to carry on drilling two relief wells.

But Allen had resisted until today when he told a briefing that the cement that entered the well from the top in the static kill may have sealed it off for good. "We may be the victims of our own success here. A bottom kill finishes this well. The question is whether it's already been done with the static kill," he said.

Allen warned that there was a small chance that cement pumped in during the static kill had travelled down to the reservoir and then back up in the outer casing, sealing the well from both ends.

Pumping more cement and mud in from the relief well could raise the pressure to dangerous levels, Allen said. But if BP and Allen do decide to go ahead, drilling on the relief wells will resume on Sunday, with the final kill complete in about four days.

Deepwater Horizon crisis 'may be over' | Environment | The Guardian

others try to understand what is really going on despite new and improved information limitations and a drive for an appearance of Resolution:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - How to Deal with a Dead Well - and Open Thread

while others call bullshit

Fintan Dunne Independent Journalist Blog: Return Of The BP Zombie Well

and it's really hard to say anything definitive about what's going on. again.

on the one hand, it's obvious from all the reports that the federal govt and bp have a common interest in the appearance of an Ending.
this ending seems to be connected to some vague sense about the extent of the oil that's already in the gulf...whence the strange information of a couple weeks ago concerning how it's all magically disappeared. this is countered with reports like you see referenced in the guardian piece of oil still being found in the marshes...

but corporate person bp seems to be using this appearance as a signal to start jockeying around to cut losses, as corporate persons are wont to do because of course when a corporate person can ditch responsibilities that follow from a disaster it is responsible for shareholders make more money and everyone benefits. except of course those who don't. but i digress.

what's sure is that it is curiously difficult, even moreso than previously, to know what is happening here. but i do hope that the well is killed. it's just curious to me that even in these 3 short pieces above, there's plenty of reason to avoid being too sure about anything that's said.

roachboy · 08-16-2010, 09:36 AM

ok so here's a report from truthout about the mysteriously disappearing oil and how that trick is, allegedly, being managed. if this is accurate across the board, it's pretty stunning.

Quote:

Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil

Monday 16 August 2010

by: Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld, t r u t h o u t | Report

The rampant use of toxic dispersants, out-of-state private contractors being brought in to spray them and US Coast Guard complicity are common stories now in the four states most affected by BP's Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Commercial and charter fishermen, residents and members of BP's Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have spoken with Truthout about their witnessing all of these incidents.

Toxic Dispersants Found on Recently Opened Mississippi Shrimping and Oyster Grounds

On Monday, August 9, the Director of the State of Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (DMR), Bill Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared, "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.

BP had allocated $25 million to Mississippi for local government disaster work. As of August 9, Walker estimated that only about $500,000 worth of invoices for oil response work had been submitted to the state. Nobody knows what the rest of the money will be used for.

Recent days in Mississippi waters found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island, "black water" in Mississippi Sound and submerged oil in Pass Christian.

Mississippi residents and fishermen Truthout spoke with believe Walker's move was from an order given by Gov. Haley Barbour, who has been heavily criticized over the years for his lobbying on behalf of the Tobacco and Oil industries.

Two days after Walker's announcement and in response to claims from state and federal officials that Gulf Coast waters are safe and clean, fishermen took their own samples from the waters off of Pass Christian in Mississippi.

The samples were taken in water that is now open for shrimping, as well as from waters directly over Mississippi's oyster bed, that will likely open in September for fishing.

Commercial fisherman James "Catfish" Miller, took fishermen Danny Ross Jr. and Mark Stewart, along with scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates and others out and they found the fishing grounds to be contaminated with oil and dispersants.

Their method was simple - they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown, oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.

Shortly thereafter, Catfish Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.

Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of-Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."

Ongoing Contamination and the Carolina Skiffs

On August 13, Truthout visited Pass Christian Harbor in Mississippi. Oil sheen was present, the vapors of which could be smelled, causing our eyes to burn. Many ropes that tied boats to the dock were oiled and much of the water covered with oil sheen.
oil slick near boat

A resident, who has a yacht in the harbor, spoke with Truthout on condition of anonymity due to fears of reprisal from BP. "Last week we were sitting on our boat and you could smell the chemicals," he explained. "It smelt like death. It was like mosquito spray, but ten times stronger. The next day I was hoarse and my lungs felt like I'd been in a smoky bar the night before."

Oil boom was present throughout much of the harbor. Despite this, fishermen, obviously trusting Mr. Miller's announcement about the fishing waters being clear of oil and dispersant, were trying to catch fish from their boat inside the harbor.

"Last week oil filled this harbor," the man, an ex-commercial fisherman added. "BP has bought off all our government officials, and shut them up. You can't say the oil is gone, it's right here! Them saying it's not here is a bunch of bullshit."

Truthout spoke with another man, who was recently laid off from the VOO program. He also spoke on condition of anonymity. "Just the other day one of the Carolina Skiffs passed us spraying something," he said. "We went west instead of east as we turned and a group of Carolina Skiffs was spraying something over the water."

A Carolina Skiff is a type of boat, usually between 13' and 30' long, very versatile and can function well in shallow or deep waters. They are known for having a large payload capacity and a lot of interior space.

Alarmed by what he saw, the former VOO worker called the Coast Guard to report what he believed was a private contractor company spraying dispersants. "We were later told by the Coast Guard they'd investigated the incident and told us what we saw were vacuum boats sucking oil, and they were rinsing their tanks," he said. "But we know this is a lie and that BP is using these out of state contractors to come in and spray the dispersant at night and they are using planes to drop it as well."

He worked in the VOO program looking for oil. When his team would find oil, upon reporting it, they would consistently be sent away without explanation or the opportunity to clean it. "They made us abort these missions," he said. "Two days ago I put out boom in a bunch of oil for five minutes, they told me to abort the mission, so I pulled up boom soaked in oil. What the hell are we doing out there if they won't let us work to clean up the oil?"

He told Truthout that as his and other VOO teams would be going out to work on the water in the morning, they would pass the out-of-state contractors in Carolina Skiffs coming in from what he believed to be a covert spraying of the oil with dispersant in order to sink it. He believes this was done to deliberately prevent the VOO teams from finding and collecting oil. By doing so, BP's liability would be lessened since the oil giant will be fined for the amount of oil collected.

"BP brings in the Carolina Skiffs to spray the dispersant at night," he added, "And they are not accountable to the Coast Guard."

James Miller, who had taken the group out into the Mississippi Sound that found the oil/dispersants on August 11, told Truthout that the Carolina Skiff teams spraying dispersants were "common" and that it "happened all the time."

Miller, who was in the VOO, is an eyewitness to planes spraying dispersants, as well as the Carolina Skiff crews doing the same. "We'd roll up on a patch of oil ½ mile wide by one mile long and they'd hold us off from cleaning it up," Miller, speaking with Truthout at his home in D'Iberville, Mississippi, said. "We'd leave and the Carolina Skiffs would pull up and start spraying dispersants on the oil. The guys doing the spraying would wear respirators and safety glasses. Their boats have 375 gallon white drums full of the stuff and they could spray it out 150 feet. The next day there'd be the white foam that's always there after they hit the oil with dispersants."

Some nights VOO crews would sleep out near the work sites. "We'd sleep out there and some nights the planes would come in so close the noise would wake us from a dead sleep," Miller added. "Again, we'd call in the oiled areas during the day and at night the planes would come in and hit the hell out of it with dispersants. That was the drill. We'd spot it and report it. They'd call us off it and send guys out in the skiffs or planes to sink it."

Mark Stewart, from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, was in the VOO program for 70 days before being laid off on August 2. The last weeks has seen BP decreasing the number of response workers from around 45,000 down to around 30,000. The number is decreasing by the day.

Stewart, a third generation commercial fisherman, told Truthout he had regularly seen "purple looking jelly stuff, three feet thick, floating all over, as wide as a football field" and "tar balls as big as a car." He, like Miller, is an eyewitness to planes dispensing dispersant at night, as well as the Carolina Skiff crews spraying dispersant. "I worked out off the barrier islands of Mississippi," Stewart said. "They would relentlessly carpet bomb the oil we found with dispersants, day and night."

Stewart, echoing what VOO employees across the Gulf Coast are saying, told Truthout his crew would regularly find oil, report it, be sent away, then either watch as planes or Carolina Skiffs would arrive to apply dispersants, or come back the next day to find the white foamy emulsified oil remnant that is left on the surface after oil has been hit with dispersants.

Stewart added, "Whenever government people, state or federal, would be flying over us, we'd be instructed to put out all our boom and start skimming, acting like we were gathering oil, even when we weren't in the oil."

While acting as whistleblowers, Miller and Stewart have both been accused of being "troublemakers" and "liars" by persons in the Mississippi government and some of their local media, in spite of the fact that they are doing so from deep concern for their fellow fisherman and the environment.

Meanwhile, both men told Truthout they live with chronic headaches and other symptoms they've been experiencing since they were exposed to toxic dispersants while in the VOO program. Recent trips to investigate their waters for oil and dispersant have worsened their symptoms.

"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live, but it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."

Miller is bleak about his assessment of the situation. He pointed out toward the coast and said, "Everything is dead out there. The plankton is dead. We pulled up loads of dead plankton on our trip on Wednesday. There are very few birds. We saw only a few when there are usually thousands. We only saw two porpoises when there are usually countless. We saw nothing but death."

Coast Guard Complicity

"Lockheed Martin aircraft, including C-130s and P-3s, have been deployed to the Gulf region by the Air Force, Coast Guard and other government customers to perform a variety of tasks, such as monitoring, mapping and dispersant spraying," states a newsletter published in July by Lockheed Martin.

An article by the 910th Airlift Wing Public Affairs Office, based in Youngstown, Ohio, states that C-130H Hercules aircraft started aerial spray operations Saturday, May 1, under the direction of the president of the United States and secretary of defense. "The objective of the aerial spray operation is to neutralize the oil spill with oil dispersing agents," it says.

Joseph Yerkes, along with other Florida commercial fishermen and Florida residents, have seen C-130s spraying dispersants on oil floating off the coast of Florida numerous times.

But the Coast Guard denies it.

At a VOO meeting in Destin on August 3, Lt. Cmdr. Dale Vogelsang, a liaison officer with the United States Coast Guard said, "I can state, there is no dispersant being used in Florida waters."

The room, filled mostly with commercial fishermen, who were current or former members in BP's VOO program, erupted in protest and disbelief. When Vogelsang was immediately challenged on his statement, he replied, "I'll investigate the C-130s."

Two BP representatives, along with Vogelsang, found themselves confronted by a large group of angry fishermen for over an hour. At times, the meeting resembled a riot more than the question-and-answer session it was intended to be.

Yerkes, who lives on Okaloosa Island, has been a commercial fisherman and boat captain most of his life. For the last 12 years, he has owned and operated a commercial live bait business.

Employed by BP as a VOO operator for more than two months, Yerkes, along with many other local commercial fishermen in the VOO program in his area were laid off on July 20 because BP and the Coast Guard believed there was no more "recoverable oil" in their area of Florida. Yet residents, fishermen, swimmers, divers and surfers in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have been reporting oil floating atop water, sitting on the bottom and floating in the water column, in oftentimes great amounts, for the last two weeks. There have been many reports of various kinds of aircraft, including C-130s, dispensing dispersants over oil.

Yerkes provided Truthout with a letter he wrote to document his witnessing a C-130 spraying what he believes to be dispersant.

"I witnessed [from my home] a C130 military plane flying and obviously spraying" over the Gulf of Mexico on July 30, "flying from the north to the south, dropping to low levels of elevation then obviously spraying or releasing an unknown substance from the rear of the plane. This substance started leaving the plane when it was about ½ to 1 mile offshore, with a continuous stream following out of the plane until it was out of sight flying to the south."

The substance, Yerkes wrote, "was not smoke, for the residue fell to the water, where smoke would have lingered." He added, "this plane was very low near the water and the flight was very similar to viewings I made over the past few weeks when dispersants were sprayed over the Gulf near our area."

A member of the VOO program provided relevant information of a "strange incident" on condition of anonymity. He was observing wildlife offshore the same day Yerkes witnessed the C-130 when he received a call from his supervisor. He told his supervisor he and his crewmember were not feeling well, so he was instructed to return in order "to get checked out because a plane had been reported in our area spraying a substance on the water about 10-20 minutes before." The employee complained of having a terrible headache and nasal congestion while his crewmember said he had a metallic taste in his mouth.

After filling out an incident report, both men were directed to go to the hospital. The following day the two men were "asked to go to the hospital for blood tests."

One week after the aforementioned meeting, The Destin Log quoted Vogelsang as saying he had contacted Unified Command who "confirmed" that dispersants were not being used in Florida waters. Vogelsang added, "Dispersants are only being used over the wellhead in Louisiana," a statement that Truthout has heard refuted by dozens of commercial fishermen from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Yerkes told Truthout that he, too, was aware of the Carolina Skiffs coming in from out of state to dispense dispersants over the oil. In the recent VOO meeting in Destin, Vogelsang was asked about the out-of-state contractors being brought in to work in Florida waters. He replied, "The only vessels we are using in the program are local, vetted vessels."

His response caused an uproar of protest from the crowd, with various fishermen and VOO workers yelling that Carolina Skiffs were being brought in from out of state. To this, Vogelsang responded, "Vessels that are from out of the area are contractors with special skills."

Vogelsang went on to claim that the amount of "product" [oil] being found in Florida is decreasing daily. This, too, caused an uproar from the room full of fishermen.

"I can take anybody in here out and show them oil, every single day," David White, a local fishing charter captain responded. "I was in the VOO program, driving around calling in oil, telling them where it is and nobody ever came. I never saw any skimmers there and I'm talking about some serious oil. I can show you tar balls going across the bottom like tumbleweeds."

Yerkes provided Truthout with a written statement from Lawrence Byrd, a local boat captain who was a task force leader in the VOO program from June 4 to July 21. On July 27 and 28, Byrd took BP officials, Coast Guard officials and an EPA official on a fact finding mission in search of oil.

"The Coast Guard told us if we could show them the oil, they'd put us back to work," Yerkes told Truthout, "So Byrd took him, and other officials out on his boat and showed them the oil."

Byrd's statement contains many instances of the group encountering oil on the trips:

"Within 30 minutes in the Rocky Bayou and Boggy Bayou we found 4 different football field sized areas of oily sheen on the water ... We moved east from there in search of weathered oil, just past Mid Bay bridge we found a 2 acre oil slick with a water bottle full of crude oil. At this time the Coast Guard Lt. had seen enough to warrant a 2nd trip with BP officials and EPA."

The next day, July 28, Byrd wrote:

"On board were BP officials, a Parson official, 2 Coast Guard Lts and EPA. First stop Crab Island Destin where we found tar balls, dead fish and plenty of dead sargasm grass. All officials seemed very concerned about all of our findings."

The report goes on to list further oil findings and added, "In the eyes of BP officials, Coast Guard Lts. and EPA, this was more than enough oil product to warrant the need for more VOO boats to serve as a first line of defense against this toxic pollution. To this day Destin VOO is still operating with ½ task force in the bay and ½ task force in Gulf with Walton County being completely unprotected! I feel all parties have good intentions but nothing is being done!"

"Somebody is stopping that process," Yerkes told Truthout. "[Retired Coast Guard Adm.] Thad Allen stood up at Tyndall Air Force Base the same night that they sprayed dispersant on the oil in front of Destin and he said we are going to use local fishermen in each local area to do the jobs, even beyond the cleaning of the oil. The day after he said that at Tyndall ... every one of the Carolina skiffs is loaded to the hilt with boom. Nobody else got reactivated."

Yerkes expressed his frustration further. "They are lying about this whole thing and it's got me in an uproar," he said. "I'm by myself. I'm the only one willing to stand up. I have a lot of friends who want to stand up and speak out. They know the Coast Guard and BP are lying, but they won't talk because they are getting paychecks and don't want to jeopardize that. They are saying they are finding new oil all the time, but the Coast Guard claims they are testing it and saying it's safe. I know for a fact they are not testing it and we watched and heard C130s fly every night in July."

There is a clear pattern that VOO workers in all four states are consistently reporting:

* VOO workers identify the oil.
* They are then sent elsewhere by someone higher up the chain of command.
* Dispersants are later applied by out-of-state contractors in Carolina Skiffs (usually at night), or aircraft are used, in order to sink the oil.
* The oil "appears" gone and, therefore, no additional action is taken.

"There are surfers coming in with oil on them," Yerkes continued, "There are divers telling us it's on the bottom. We have VOO workers coming in after finding oil three inches thick atop the water as of last week and they go back out there and it's gone."

"There are stories of people getting notes on their cars, verbal and phone threats. I don't want to become one of those people. I'm trying to heighten my profile so they don't want to mess with me," Yerkes added. "I want the truth to come out so the public knows. I'm trying to make BP and the government come out and tell the facts instead of lying to the public about what is going on. I want to know how much dispersants they are using, where all the oil is and the effects these are having on all of us. Somebody is lying and we want the truth."

t r u t h o u t | Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil

this would be nice to have independent verification simply because it's so far at variance with the official lines on the matter of oil, where it is and how it's being cleaned up. there's not a whole lot of press about blasting it with dispersants from planes and sinking it instead of cleaning it up.

oil drum monitorings:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Continuing to Wait - and Open Thread

roachboy · 08-18-2010, 12:02 PM

the claim that the oil had simply vanished seemed absurd at the time it was made.
then there's the story above about the emphasis placed on making the oil invisible rather than cleaning it.
and it turns out, seemingly, that the oil has in fact gone somewhere--and the corexit too. and that somewhere--it is not good.

Quote:

Scientists dispute White House claim that spilled BP oil has vanished

• US government challenged over claims oil has evaporated
• Tests show oil is affecting phytoplankton and staying on seabed

The White House is facing a growing challenge over its claim that most of the oil from the Deepwater disaster has disappeared from the Gulf of Mexico, as at least three independent teams of scientists reported new evidence of oil persisting deep under the surface of the sea.

Earlier this month government scientists reported that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.

But University of South Florida scientists, returning from a 10-day research voyage, said they found oil on the ocean floor in the DeSoto canyon, a prime spawning ground for fish far to the east of BP's rogue oil well.

Preliminary results suggested that oil was getting into the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants at the bottom of the Gulf food chain.

"The idea that this could have an impact on the food web and on the biological system is certainly a reality," David Hollander, a marine geochemist, told the University of South Florida radio station. Smaller organisms would be likely to be affected the most, he added.

"Fish eggs – if they're in that environment – they may not be consuming it, but it's like paint in the air. You breathe it at low concentrations for a long enough time, you're still going to have that response."

Scientists from the University of Georgia also disputed the White House claim, releasing their own analysis suggesting 70% to 79% of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico remained in the water. "The idea that 75% of the oil is gone and of no concern for the environment is just absolutely incorrect," said Charles Hopkinson, a marine science professor at the university.

The journal Science is also weighing in, with a research paper on a large and apparently long-lasting deepwater plume of oil in the Gulf following the spill.

And the Gulf Coast Fund, a citizens' group, maintains that oil is still washing ashore in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. "Just because the oil is no longer on the surface, it does not indicate the area is healthy," said Wilma Subra, a chemist advising the group. "We've received reports from residents all along the coast who continue to see oil on and off shore, as well as reports of hundreds of dead fish, crabs, birds, dolphins, and other sea life."

Congress is due to examine the White House claims at a hearing tomorrow on the fate of the 5m barrels of oil that leaked into the Gulf from BP's well. The energy and commerce committee will also look at official claims that Gulf seafood is safe to eat.

BP might not be able to execute the final kill of its well until September, said Thad Allen, the US Coast Guard's former commander, recently retired.

Allen said that BP and government officials had yet to agree on a way to pump cement into the bottom of the well without putting too much pressure on a cement seal at the top. Engineers are assessing whether to install a new blow-out preventer or a new system for relieving pressure on the cap at the top of the well.

The debate about the fate of the oil is a product of the strategic decision taken by the BP and the Obama administration to tackle the oil offshore and prevent the waste penetrating Louisiana's ecologically fragile wetland; the move involved spraying nearly 2m gallons of chemical dispersants on the oil, some of it at depths of 1,524 metres (5,000ft).

The approach means that scientists are now operating in uncharted waters. BP's well caused the biggest offshore oil spill but never before had response teams used such outsize quantities of dispersants and at such depths.

The efforts to end the problem also led to fears that the chosen cure, in this case the chemical dispersant Corexit, was more dangerous than the ailment. Scientific research had suggested that Corexit made organisms more vulnerable to the toxic components in the oil.

The uncertainties about the long-term consequences of the oil spill have complicated efforts by BP and the Obama administration to move to a long-term response plan. The administration is demanding new pressure tests before it gives the go-ahead for the completion of a relief well.

BP said it was winding down its claims operation, and that today would be the last day it would consider claims from anyone suffering economic losses through the spill. All new claims would be overseen by Ken Feinberg, an independent administrator appointed to oversee the $20bn BP escrow account. BP said its team had so far paid out $368m to claimants.

Scientists dispute White House claim that spilled BP oil has vanished | Environment | The Guardian

ring · 08-18-2010, 12:40 PM

I've been waiting for these articles to appear.
All along I know I've been lied to, and the obfuscation machine
regarding any real data reaching the general public,
has been humming along, well well oiled.

The amount & the type of dispersants used, has been a concern of many with half a mind.

The government/corporate behemoth has a seemingly tight stranglehold.
That article in post #557: Yes it would be good to have independent verification.

BP must have had the government's blessing
to do its bang-up job of keeping reporters away from the beaches? Yes?

Is it just me, or did that woman doing the press report from NOAA, look nervous,
and frightened?

roachboy · 08-19-2010, 11:40 AM

oopsie daisy.

Quote:

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Print
News Release : WHOI Scientists Map and Confirm Origin of Large, Underwater Hydrocarbon Plume in Gulf
August 19, 2010
Media Relations Office
93 Water Street MS #16
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(508) 289-3340
media@whoi.edu

August 19, 2010, 2 p.m.

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have detected a plume of hydrocarbons that is at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The 1.2-mile-wide, 650-foot-high plume of trapped hydrocarbons provides at least a partial answer to recent questions asking where all the oil has gone as surface slicks shrink and disappear. “These results indicate that efforts to book keep where the oil went must now include this plume” in the Gulf, said Christopher Reddy, a WHOI marine geochemist and oil spill expert and one of the authors of the study, which appears in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers measured distinguishing petroleum hydrocarbons in the plume and, using them as an investigative tool, determined that the source of the plume could not have been natural oil seeps but had to have come from the blown out well.

Moreover, they reported that deep-sea microbes were degrading the plume relatively slowly, and that it was possible that the plume had and will persist for some time.

The WHOI team based its findings on some 57,000 discrete chemical analyses measured in real time during a June 19-28 scientific cruise aboard the R/V Endeavor, which is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the University of Rhode Island. They accomplished their feat using two highly advanced technologies: the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Sentry and a type of underwater mass spectrometer known as TETHYS (Tethered Yearlong Spectrometer).

“We’ve shown conclusively not only that a plume exists, but also defined its origin and near-field structure,” said Richard Camilli of WHOI’s Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department, chief scientist of the cruise and lead author of the paper. “Until now, these have been treated as a theoretical matter in the literature.

“In June, we observed the plume migrating slowly [at about 0.17 miles per hour] southwest of the source of the blowout,” said Camilli. The researchers began tracking it about three miles from the well head and out to about 22 miles (35 kilometers) until the approach of Hurricane Alex forced them away from the study area.

The study—which was enabled by three NSF RAPID grants to WHOI scientists with additional funding from the U.S. Coast Guard—confirms that a continuous plume exists “at petroleum hydrocarbon levels that are noteworthy and detectable,” Reddy said. The levels and distributions of the petroleum hydrocarbons show that “the plume is not caused by natural [oil] seeps” in the Gulf of Mexico, Camilli added.

WHOI President and Director Susan K. Avery praised the WHOI scientists for their “prudence and thoroughness, as they conducted an important, elegant study under difficult conditions in a timely manner.

Persistent plume
The plume has shown that the oil already “is persisting for longer periods than we would have expected,” Camilli said. “Many people speculated that subsurface oil droplets were being easily biodegraded.

“Well, we didn’t find that. We found it was still there.”

Whether the plume’s existence poses a significant threat to the Gulf is not yet clear, the researchers say. “We don’t know how toxic it is,” said Reddy, “and we don’t know how it formed, or why. But knowing the size, shape, depth, and heading of this plume will be vital for answering many of these questions.”

The key to the discovery and mapping of the plume was the use of the mass spectrometer TETHYS integrated into the Sentry AUV. Camilli developed the mass spectrometer in close industrial partnership with Monitor Instruments Co. in Cheswick, Pa., through a grant from the National Ocean Partnership Program. The TETHYS--which is small enough to fit within a shoebox--is capable of identifying minute quantities of petroleum and other chemical compounds in seawater instantly.

Sentry, funded by NSF and developed and operated by WHOI, is capable of exploring the ocean down to 14,764 feet (4,500 meters) depth. Equipped with its advanced analytical systems, it was able to crisscross plume boundaries continuously 19 times to help determine the trapped plume’s size, shape, and composition. This knowledge of the plume structure guided the team in collecting physical samples for further laboratory analyses using a traditional oceanographic tool, a cable-lowered water sampling system that measures conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD). This CTD, however, was instrumented with a TETHYS. In each case, the mass spectrometers were used to positively identify areas containing petroleum hydrocarbons.

“We achieved our results because we had a unique combination of scientific and technological skills,” said Dana Yoerger, a co-principal investigator and WHOI senior scientist.

Until now, scientists had suspected the existence of a plume, but attempts to detect and measure it had been inconclusive, primarily because of inadequate sampling techniques, according to the WHOI scientists. In previous research, Yoerger said, “investigators relied mostly on a conventional technique: vertical profiling. We used Sentry and TETHYS to scan large areas horizontally, which enabled us to target our vertical profiles more effectively. Our methods provide much better information about the size and shape of the plume.”

The researchers detected a class of petroleum hydrocarbons at concentrations of more than 50 micrograms per liter. The water samples collected at these depths had no odor of oil and were clear. “The plume was not a river of Hershey’s Syrup,” said Reddy. “But that’s not to say it isn’t harmful to the environment.”

No Unusual Oxygen Signals
The scientists benefited not only from new technology but older methods as well. Contrary to previous predictions by other scientists, they found no “dead zones,” regions of significant oxygen depletion within the plume where almost no fish or other marine animals could survive. They attributed the discrepancy to a problem with the more modern measuring devices that can give artificially low oxygen readings when coated by oil. The team on Endeavor used an established chemical test developed in the 1880s to check the concentration of dissolved oxygen in water samples, called a Winkler titration. Of the dozens of samples analyzed for oxygen only a few from the plume layer were below expected levels, and even these samples were only slightly depleted.

WHOI geochemist Benjamin Van Mooy, also a principal investigator of the research team, said this finding could have significant implications. “If the oxygen data from the plume layer are telling us it isn’t being rapidly consumed by microbes near the well,” he said, “the hydrocarbons could persist for some time. So it is possible that oil could be transported considerable distances from the well before being degraded.”

A Rapid Response
The NSF RAPID program, which provides grants for projects having a severe urgency and require quick-response research on natural disasters or other unanticipated events, significantly speeded up the acceptance of the WHOI proposals. “In contrast to the usual six-to-eighteen-month lead time for standard scientific proposals, our plume study was funded two days after the concept was proposed to NSF and went from notification of the proposal’s acceptance to boarding the Endeavor in two-and-a-half weeks,” Reddy said.

Within days of being notified of the award, Reddy said the WHOI team reached out to NOAA, offering assistance in the laborious, but important, process of collecting and analyzing water samples for natural resource damage assessment (NRDA). In addition to conducting the work NSF funded, the WHOI team worked cooperatively with NOAA to collect data that will be used to determine damages and calculate a fair settlement for those affected by the massive spill.

“Doing a NRDA cruise is not a trivial effort. It requires a tremendous amount of coordination -- from accommodating additional on-board observers to ensure a chain of custody to arranging for samples to be ferried from the research vessels every few days,” said Avery. “I’m very proud of what this team has accomplished.

“Very good science was done that will make a big difference,” Avery added. “This cruise represents an excellent example of how non-federal research organizations can work with federal agencies and how federal agencies can work together to respond to national disasters.”

While at sea, these scientists, who are experienced in the study of oil spills and natural oil seeps, faced unusual challenges from the extreme heat, water rationing, exposure to crude oil and its vapors, and 24-hour-a-day operations enabled by the URI crew.

Along with their own scientific objectives, the team also bore in mind the advice of top science officials speaking at a June 3 Gulf Oil Spill Scientific Symposium at Louisiana State University, who cautioned researchers about the importance of verification and proceeding in a scientific manner:

“We are all served best by proceeding in a careful, thoughtful, and quantifiable manner, where we can actually document everything and share it publicly,” NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco told those assembled.

At that meeting, US Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt underscored the need for peer review of interpretive results before they are released, saying "There's nothing that throws the community into dead ends faster” than to have [poor] data out there.

Assistant Director of NSF Tim Killeen also echoed the sentiment that “quality assurance and quality control are essential for thorough work.”

“WHOI scientists attending this meeting took this advice to heart and used it as a guiding light for proper dissemination of scientific information,” Reddy said.

Reddy said the results from this study and more samples yet to be analyzed eventually could refine recent estimates about the amount of the spilled oil that remains in the Gulf.

Camilli said he and his WHOI colleagues are considering a new research proposal to look for more plumes.

Reddy said the WHOI team members know the chemical makeup of some of the plume, but not all of it. Gas chromatographic analysis of plume samples confirm the existence of benzene, toluene, ethybenzene, and total xylenes—together, called BTEX at concentrations in excess of 50 micrograms per liter. “The plume is not pure oil,” Camilli said. “But there are oil compounds in there.”

It may be “a few months of laboratory analysis and validation,” Reddy said, before they know the entire inventory of chemicals in the plume.

Camilli attributed the project’s success to WHOI’s wide range of expertise and scientific capabilities. He contrasted that with “what the oil industry does best: They know where to drill holes and how to get the oil to come out. WHOI’s expertise in oil spill forensics, marine ecological assessment, and deep submergence technology development will be essential for our nation as it updates its energy policy and offshore oil production confronts the challenges of deepwater operations.”

Other WHOI members of study team included Assistant Scientist James C. Kinsey and Research Associates Cameron P. McIntyre and Sean P. Sylva. The research team also included Michael V. Jakuba of the University of Sydney, Australia, and a graduate of the MIT/WHOI joint program in Oceanographic Engineering, and James V. Maloney of Monitor Instruments Co.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment.

Last updated: August 19, 2010

News Release : WHOI Scientists Map and Confirm Origin of Large, Underwater Hydrocarbon Plume in Gulf : Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

if you follow the link there's some interesting images and animations on the right.

so the oil didn't just disappear.
what a surprise.

07-20-2010, 01:51 PM	#523 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	problems before the deepwater explosion. nothing happened. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...-problems.html then a few days before things blew up, command of the rig was transferred. there's no conspiracy in this, btw. i just find it kinda interesting. were it not for the maintenance problems, the transfer woulda been unremarkable, and were it not for the explosion and subsequent disaster, all of this woulda been unremarkable. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...8Greenspace%29 but of course it's all very interesting because of what did happen. there's more to the story of the waning days and what happened with the explosion came: Deepwater Horizon engineer testifies about power failures before oil spill - latimes.com on the up side, there are 5 leaks identified around the geyser site now. but the cap is still operating. 5 small leaks have been identified in Gulf well, Thad Allen says \| NOLA.com so the concern now is weather. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-22-2010, 04:49 PM	#527 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	BP admits using Photoshop to exaggerate oil spill command centre activity \| Environment \| guardian.co.uk This is but one of BP's desperate scrambling moves. This whole asset selling/trading business is more complicated yet just as calculated. Hayward will appear to step down, but in reality he will side-wind slither to another position in the same game, but different arena. Last edited by ring; 07-22-2010 at 05:01 PM..

07-23-2010, 07:19 AM	#529 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	Wow, in my eyes, this whole debacle is quickly becoming a symbol of advanced capitalism. __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

07-25-2010, 11:44 AM	#531 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	so much for the greatest ceo in the history of everything: Tony Hayward to quit BP \| Business \| The Guardian i don't see what this solves for anyone anywhere, with the possible exception of bp who get to unload a publicity liability maybe. well, it solves some shit for tiny hayward, who can retire to his yacht now. o the price the captains of industry pay when the corporate persons they control fuck up. retiring to a yacht. i shudder to think on it. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-27-2010, 11:38 AM	#533 (permalink)
aceventura3 Junkie Location: Ventura County	Perhaps to prevent some people from injecting BP into other posts, I am back - primarily to be a nuisance to the flawed ideology littered throughout this thread. BP has been focused on stoping the leak, and from the beginning everyone knew it would take about 90 days. BP has also been working equally hard on PR. The TV spots where obvious. It became clear early on that Hayword was not up for the job - his firing is not surprising. When Dudley assumed the lead role or became the "face" it was clear that he was going to be the next CEO. Again no surprises. The act of genius was when BP agreed to the $20 billion compensation fund to be administered by the government. In one stroke they transferred all the negative implications of compensating victims over to the government. They will not have the on-going negative PR of denying claims. This move was surprising, and surprising how eagerly Obama jumped on it. This will cost him and his administration. BP is planning on selling $30 billion in assets, the company will be leaner - but still produce over 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. And they have taken a $32 billion dollar loss in their latest quarterly earnings, clearing the slate for future clean financial reports. BP still has a long and difficult fight ahead of them, but so far they are making the right moves to save the company and enhance share-holder value. The share price has seen its low, of about $27 per share, now at about $37-$38, the 12 month peak was about $62. Sell Obama, buy BP. __________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

07-20-2010, 03:32 PM	#524 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	Yes. The weather patterns are ripe for their seasonal romp. Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook The Oil Drum folk have been of great service. They've relied on donations to add servers as their traffic has increased.

07-21-2010, 01:15 PM	#526 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	The spacer fluid composition: Method and spacer fluid composition for displacing drilling fluid from a wellbore

07-27-2010, 11:49 AM	#534 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	perhaps it is a flaw to think it is more important that the leak be stopped and the gulf cleaned up and that regulation be tightened in order to both make another such disaster less likely and to enable an actually coherent response to problems when they do occur than to cheer for how bp manoevers to save its corporate person ass. and perhaps it is a flaw to see in the relation between aspects of the petro-capitalist system more a symbiotic matter (state and corporations co-operating all too much) than a private-vs-public thing as you do. perhaps it is a flaw in approach to be interested in actual social systems and how they work rather than being content with looking at mirror images of (conservative) ideological constructs. but they're flaws i'm fine with. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 07-27-2010 at 12:02 PM..

07-27-2010, 12:01 PM	#535 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	^^Chewing your leg off to get out of a trap works if you don't bleed to death. You know the folly of howling at the moon. The noise has been against the cause, which you again defend. I don't get it. __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

07-27-2010, 12:05 PM	#536 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i find this type of conservative "thinking" to be basically dishonest. it bugs me, dishonesty does. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-29-2010, 11:07 AM	#541 (permalink)
aceventura3 Junkie Location: Ventura County	The reason why we might want a person with executive business level experience in government - the nearly $10 billion tax credit being claimed by BP! What are the implications, among others here are two. First, there is the $20 billion compensation fund, BP will put up $5 billion this year and the remainder over the next 3 years. The tax credit is half of this $20 billion fund. Second, there is taxable income and there is cash flow. BP reported a $17 billion dollar loss in the second quarter, but they generated a net positive cash flow of $6.8 billion, which includes $2.1 billion spent on the spill already. They have generate more than enough cash to make their 2010 payment to the fund plus the first quarter of 2011. The cost of the spill is punitive no matter how you look at it, but if you ever wondered why CEO's get paid what they get paid, just keep tabs on how the numbers unfold. So far BP has the upper hand in how they are managing this issue relative to the Obama administration. And, it is funny how again and again, the folks in Washington cry and complain when a company follows the rules - and then want to change those rules after the fact. Just as in this situation with the $10 billion dollar tax credit, they want BP to voluntarily not take the credit. How about having some folks in charge of government who don't get taken to the cleaners on simple deals? __________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." Last edited by aceventura3; 07-29-2010 at 11:52 AM..

07-29-2010, 11:22 AM	#542 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	my expectation, ace, is that one result of this fiasco is that the rules of the game are going to change. you can already see it starting--that's why i posted the article about the changes in liability cap legislation that's being proposed. i expect the rules around drilling are going to be tightened quite considerably. i expect that some of the tax laws will be changed for corporate persons if bp is not careful about how it manages it's "playing by the rules".... truth be told, i'm not terribly optimistic about how far it'll go. and that's not really my interest in the thread. i'm not particularly gathering this information around any explicitly political arguments. there are recurrent themes, questions that interest me, explanations that may arise from accumulation of information around them. i see this as tracking what is happening as much as an information flow as an oil flow. whatever. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-29-2010, 12:13 PM	#543 (permalink)
aceventura3 Junkie Location: Ventura County	Politics aside, I still find the financial response interesting and given the common dislike of math some of these issue will not get the focus it deserves. So, we have BP planning to sell $30 billion in assets when they don't really need to. So why are they doing it? One, they can off-set capital gains against the losses they report. They can end up with paper losses but "cash-flow profits". This reduces tax burden. Two, they make the sale in 2010 before Congress passes any capital gains tax increases or let the Bush tax cuts expire. So if they owe taxes they pay less. Three, given the losses they can off-set and/or the lower capital gains taxes - for simplification assuming about a 33% rate or a third of the profits - if they sell $30 billion in assets that cost them $20 billion, that $10 billion dollar gain on the sale, this year, could mean up to $3.3 in cash for BP, simply based on timing. Not bad for 2 minutes of thought by a CEO. __________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

07-29-2010, 01:16 PM	#544 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i haven't been following this aspect of things, but is bp still having short-term paper trouble? when i saw the sell-off i assumed it was happening to bump their liquidity which i connected in my brain to the credit trouble they had gotten into a few weeks ago. i remember without really remembering (in the way one does when one's looking at other things) that these credit problems kinda disappeared from the press, but am not sure. have you been tracking this? ================================================= aside: later in the afternoon [/COLOR]this report was released today by the national wildlife foundation: Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit - National Wildlife Federation this link will take you straight to the pdf: http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazine...-Disaster.ashx __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

08-05-2010, 07:36 AM	#552 (permalink)
Cimarron29414 Still Free Location: comfortably perched at the top of the bell curve!	I heard a news report yesterday that the federal government is reporting that 75% of the oil is now gone - either cleaned up, evaporated, or eaten by the sea. It seemed hopeful that there might not be any more big oil masses hitting the shore. This is fantastic news. __________________ Gives a man a halo, does mead. "Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

08-05-2010, 08:14 AM	#553 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	for what it's worth i'd like to believe that...and the impression one could press releases and/or yesterday's noaa report, but as time is passing more and more problems are being raised about that information: NOAA report on Gulf oil spill draws criticism for many assumptions fact is that as of now, i don't think anyone really knows what's going on. i certainly don't. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

08-18-2010, 12:40 PM	#559 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	I've been waiting for these articles to appear. All along I know I've been lied to, and the obfuscation machine regarding any real data reaching the general public, has been humming along, well well oiled. The amount & the type of dispersants used, has been a concern of many with half a mind. The government/corporate behemoth has a seemingly tight stranglehold. That article in post #557: Yes it would be good to have independent verification. BP must have had the government's blessing to do its bang-up job of keeping reporters away from the beaches? Yes? Is it just me, or did that woman doing the press report from NOAA, look nervous, and frightened?