cherries wrote:

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:they shouldn't be allowed to drill so close to the shore in the first place.

Oil is where you find it.

they shouldn't look for it there in the first place,not every natural resource has to be exploited.even if you wanted to,why not leave it there for future generations who might have a safer way of extracting the oil,they might thank you for it.

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:they shouldn't be allowed to drill so close to the shore in the first place.

Oil is where you find it.

they shouldn't look for it there in the first place,not every natural resource has to be exploited.even if you wanted to,why not leave it there for future generations who might have a safer way of extracting the oil,they might thank you for it.

Because we need it now.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

Seth wrote:

bit_pattern wrote:The environmentalists blew it up to force cap and trade on our freedoms. It was an inside job, people, wake up!

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-k ... e_job.html

Problem is, it's not all that implausible, given the actions of some of the radical green groups, though suicide has never been part of their planning, mostly they are cowards. Still, all it takes is one zealot...

It takes one to know one.

Having worked a good deal of my life in the environmental movement I find your comment that "mostly they are cowards" both offensive and entirely untrue. I would challenge you to offer some evidence for this claim and until you do it'll stand as false.

Your claim that it "isn't implausible" flies in the face of the realities of pulling off such a stunt and shows deep ignorance of the manner in which offhshore oil rig security is conducted and the exceedingly difficult task it would be to penetrate it successfully in order to cause an explosion such as rocked BP's rig.

The comment is dumber than dumb and is nothing but uninformed empty rhetoric aimed at demonizing those who work in defense of our environment.

Clueless commentary serves no good end.

NamelessFaceless wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
Libertarians like Seth don't think this way, as is evidenced by many posts in other threads in this forum.

To Libertarins, resources are there to be exploited regardless of the risks it may pose to life, limb, and property or the environment. It's an ancient philosophy that dates back many hundreds of years to the time when we thought the world was endless and boundless and simply there for the taking, driven hard by the Christian belief that Man was put here to aggrandize himself by exploiting any and all resources regardless of where they might be found. It's a philosophy that's been outmoded by science and physical realities and myriad necessities of modern life. Unfortunately, some still cling to it, which has a name, blind ignorance.

I don't want to derail this thread, and I certainly don't have time to debate politics, but this is not an accurate representation of Libertarian philosophy on the environment. I don't know Seth and I certainly can't speak for him either, and maybe the two of you just have a history that's lost on me, but libertarians generally believe that property owners are better protectors of the environment than government. In the case of pollution, like this BP spill, the property owner, not the taxpayer, is responsible for cleaning it up. Even in this case, BP has a vested interest in stopping the leak and cleaning it up quickly and properly. Failure to do so would only increase the amount they have to pay out to victims.

NamelessFaceless wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
Libertarians like Seth don't think this way, as is evidenced by many posts in other threads in this forum.

To Libertarins, resources are there to be exploited regardless of the risks it may pose to life, limb, and property or the environment. It's an ancient philosophy that dates back many hundreds of years to the time when we thought the world was endless and boundless and simply there for the taking, driven hard by the Christian belief that Man was put here to aggrandize himself by exploiting any and all resources regardless of where they might be found. It's a philosophy that's been outmoded by science and physical realities and myriad necessities of modern life. Unfortunately, some still cling to it, which has a name, blind ignorance.

I don't want to derail this thread, and I certainly don't have time to debate politics, but this is not an accurate representation of Libertarian philosophy on the environment. I don't know Seth and I certainly can't speak for him either, and maybe the two of you just have a history that's lost on me, but libertarians generally believe that property owners are better protectors of the environment than government. In the case of pollution, like this BP spill, the property owner, not the taxpayer, is responsible for cleaning it up. Even in this case, BP has a vested interest in stopping the leak and cleaning it up quickly and properly. Failure to do so would only increase the amount they have to pay out to victims.

Seth wrote:First, I didn't accuse the "environmental movement" of being cowards, nor would I. I suggested that it was not implausible that "radical green groups" and by that I mean the ones like ELF and ALF, who are nothing more or less than domestic terrorists, have a motive for causing such a disaster and that it is not implausible that they would do such a thing if they could figure out how and could find a patsy to cause it to happen. Second, anyone who builds bombs, commits arson, destroys property or attacks individuals in violation of the law, while hiding their identity to escape prosecution is a coward, and I will call them cowards if it pleases me to do so.

Seth wrote:

Your claim that it "isn't implausible" flies in the face of the realities of pulling off such a stunt and shows deep ignorance of the manner in which offhshore oil rig security is conducted and the exceedingly difficult task it would be to penetrate it successfully in order to cause an explosion such as rocked BP's rig.

Um, evidently it's not all that hard to blow up an oil rig, given that it happens accidentally from time to time. All it takes is someone willing to commit suicide who's willing to take a job as a roughneck, which I noted would be a departure for our home-grown eco-terrorists, who are generally too cowardly to put their own lives on the line, much less actually work for a living doing hard work, much less proudly declare their identities as martyrs for the cause they hold so dear. Eco-terrorists are fucking cowards, one and all, it's just that simple. They deserve to be sent to prison for life, and hopefully will be.

Seth wrote:

Clueless commentary serves no good end.

Good point. Why is your commentary here clueless?

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

NamelessFaceless wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
Libertarians like Seth don't think this way, as is evidenced by many posts in other threads in this forum.

To Libertarins, resources are there to be exploited regardless of the risks it may pose to life, limb, and property or the environment. It's an ancient philosophy that dates back many hundreds of years to the time when we thought the world was endless and boundless and simply there for the taking, driven hard by the Christian belief that Man was put here to aggrandize himself by exploiting any and all resources regardless of where they might be found. It's a philosophy that's been outmoded by science and physical realities and myriad necessities of modern life. Unfortunately, some still cling to it, which has a name, blind ignorance.

I don't want to derail this thread, and I certainly don't have time to debate politics, but this is not an accurate representation of Libertarian philosophy on the environment. I don't know Seth and I certainly can't speak for him either, and maybe the two of you just have a history that's lost on me, but libertarians generally believe that property owners are better protectors of the environment than government. In the case of pollution, like this BP spill, the property owner, not the taxpayer, is responsible for cleaning it up. Even in this case, BP has a vested interest in stopping the leak and cleaning it up quickly and properly. Failure to do so would only increase the amount they have to pay out to victims.

Apparently unknown to you, shortly after the Exxon-Valdez disaster in 1989, the Congress passed a law that limits corporate liabilities for environmental damages and economic losses to $75 million.

BP is responsible for paying the entire cost of cleanup efforts, as you note,

The facts of the history of environmental degradation and despoilation throws any contention that property owners are better at protecting the environment than is the government right out the window. Property owners have shown a consistent and wilful disregard for environmental values. The fact that EPA's Superfund program identified 10,000 toxic waste dumpsites left behind by private operators, a thousand of which were deemed to be in need of immediate cleanup, is proof enough that this is indeed the case. Other proofs abound.

Big Oil Fought Rules Requiring Equipment To Prevent Blowouts

First Posted: 05- 4-10 06:03 PM | Updated: 05- 4-10 08:31 PM
By Marcus Baram
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/0 ... 63439.html

For over a decade, the oil industry has aggressively fought safety regulations intended to prevent accidents and blowouts on offshore oil drilling rigs.

Among the provisions opposed by oil giant BP and drilling contractors are those regarding equipment and procedures that are being closely examined for their role in the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers.

The International Association of Drilling Contractors, a trade group which includes Transocean, the firm that operated the Deepwater Horizon rig, objected in 2000 to a proposed requirement to use blind-shear rams, a type of blowout preventer which seals out-of-control oil wells by pinching off the pipe. Due to a failure of that device on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig's crew was unable to prevent the massive gush of oil that still spews from the bottom of the ocean.

Claiming that the rate of accidents and incidents "is approaching zero," the group tried blunting the agency's argument that many previous incidents could have been ameliorated if the equipment had been used.

"We believe this trend is sufficient to obviate the need for MMS to mandate installation of this equipment," reads the group's letter to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which has oversight of offshore oil drilling.

In addition, the group stated that it surveyed its members and found that the number of rigs that need to be re-fitted with blind-shear jams was actually double the MMS's estimate, and thus would prove too costly.

According to an MMS cost-benefit analysis, the requirement to install the equipment would benefit drilling contractors and oil producers from $0.8 million to $39.8 million due party to the avoidance of future blowout-related damages and costs

In 2004, the Offshore Operators Committee objected to MMS rules regarding minimum blowout prevention systems, requesting that testing of the devices be reduced from 10 minutes to 5 minutes.

In 2006, BP objected to MMS proposing a "best practice" for cementing techniques in deepwater drilling operations, emphasizing that operators should have "flexibility" when it comes to the critical procedure, which seals up the drilling hole and the gaps between the hole and pipe. As HuffPost has reported, possible flaws in Halliburton's cementing work on the Deepwater Horizon may also be to blame for the accident. As FireDogLake (http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/44349) reported on Monday, Halliburton seems to have been aware of the risks posed by faulty cementing work, citing a presentation by the oil services giant last November.

As HuffPost first reported last week, BP, Transocean and other members of the oil industry vigorously objected to new safety regulations proposed by MMS last summer, which would have required them to submit their safety and environmental management programs to an audit every three years.

The industry's objections extended to measures intended to help clean up after an oil spill. Claiming that the petroleum industry had funded the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to $1 billion, the American Petroleum Institute wrote a 2000 letter to the Department of Transportatino, stating:

The petroleum industry should not be expected to pay for further OSTLF prevention expenditures for sources outside the petroleum industry, particularly since the petroleum industry's oil spill record has improved so much over the past decade.

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:they shouldn't be allowed to drill so close to the shore in the first place.

Oil is where you find it.

they shouldn't look for it there in the first place,not every natural resource has to be exploited.even if you wanted to,why not leave it there for future generations who might have a safer way of extracting the oil,they might thank you for it.

Because we need it now.

cherries wrote:

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:

Seth wrote:

cherries wrote:they shouldn't be allowed to drill so close to the shore in the first place.

Oil is where you find it.

they shouldn't look for it there in the first place,not every natural resource has to be exploited.even if you wanted to,why not leave it there for future generations who might have a safer way of extracting the oil,they might thank you for it.

Because we need it now.

there are other places which can be explored for oil.

oil is a limited resource too and it's better to look for other sources of energy considering the environmental impact fossil fuels have,it's already being done all over the world and on a massive scale too,better invest in these sustainable sources.

oil will always be needed and your doing future generations no favour if you wait until oil dries out and then only look for alternatives.

lordshipmayhem wrote:

NamelessFaceless wrote:Great. Looks like it's heading my way. Meanwhile our governor is telling us "it's in God's hands."

http://www.pnj.com/article/201004280100/NEWS01/4280329

Tell your Governor to get it out of God's hands and bloody well do something...

aspire1670 wrote:

lordshipmayhem wrote:

NamelessFaceless wrote:Great. Looks like it's heading my way. Meanwhile our governor is telling us "it's in God's hands."

http://www.pnj.com/article/201004280100/NEWS01/4280329

Tell your Governor to get it out of God's hands and bloody well do something...

I heard that the Libertarians were going to mobilise for collective action to clean up the oil but in the end they decided the oil would clean itself up when exposed to the light of freedom and economic rationality.

Seth wrote:

aspire1670 wrote:

lordshipmayhem wrote:

NamelessFaceless wrote:Great. Looks like it's heading my way. Meanwhile our governor is telling us "it's in God's hands."

http://www.pnj.com/article/201004280100/NEWS01/4280329

Tell your Governor to get it out of God's hands and bloody well do something...

I heard that the Libertarians were going to mobilise for collective action to clean up the oil but in the end they decided the oil would clean itself up when exposed to the light of freedom and economic rationality.

It will. After all, it's an organic substance and will eventually decompose.

Oh, you wanted it to happen RIGHT AWAY....Sorry, not how chemical decomposition of oil happens. Drop back by in about, oh, 20 years or so, it'll be difficult to tell it ever happened. You environmentalists are so IMPATIENT. Try taking the long view.

Gulf rig owner had safety concerns

DALLAS -- Transocean Ltd., which owned the drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, eliminated bonuses for top executives last year over concerns about safety problems at the company.

The company said in a regulatory filing on April 1 that it eliminated the bonuses to stress safety after four workers died on rigs last year. It wanted to give executives more incentive "to promote ... the avoidance of future fatal accidents."

On April 20, the company's Deepwater Horizon rig, which it leased to BP PLC, blew up and sank. Eleven workers were killed and the accident spawned a huge oil spill that is now endangering wildlife and businesses along the Gulf's coastline. Transocean's chairman and CEO told shareholders in a letter in March of a "thorough review" of safety practices.

Louisiana’s dread: From wetland to wasteland

This is probably one of the biggest environmental disasters in American history, unfolding in slow motion before our eyes. ”— Leilani Münter, National Wildlife Federation ambassador

NEW ORLEANS, May 5, 2010
1 of 3 Oil Well Leaks Capped; Dome Heads to Gulf
Rate of Oil Gushing into Ocean Not Expected to Change, However; Crews Hope Containment Dome will Reduce Damage

Macdoc wrote:The greenie villains revealed

and about as realistic as the right wing noodling about sabotage.

Seth wrote:
It will. After all, it's an organic substance and will eventually decompose.

Oh, you wanted it to happen RIGHT AWAY....

Seth wrote:
Sorry, not how chemical decomposition of oil happens. Drop back by in about, oh, 20 years or so, it'll be difficult to tell it ever happened. You environmentalists are so IMPATIENT. Try taking the long view.

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Posted: May 5, 2010 10:19 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f- ... 64163.html

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service (see at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washi ... ref=slogin) found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."

Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

Seth wrote:Good idea, but impractical in the short term, and by short term I mean the next 100 years. The current vehicle fleets alone guarantee the need for oil for the next 50 years alone, and turnover of other oil-fueled infrastructure will take even longer. You see, the economic cost of shifting even to natural gas is enormous, and can't be done all at once, and further, the technology does not exist yet that will allow us to dispense with oil, and likely won't for a century. The changeover will come, but it must perforce come gradually, as the economy can afford and absorb the costs of abandoning a mature fuel system and the costs of building a new one. And not just the economic impacts need to be considered, the sociopolitical impacts are just as important, and create a substantial amount of inertia against sudden change.

cherries wrote:oil will always be needed and your doing future generations no favour if you wait until oil dries out and then only look for alternatives.

Seth wrote:Well, that's one way to accomplish it, at terrible cost. But we're in no immediate danger of running out of oil, as I said, so there is no need to abandon it precipitously, which would cause massive economic dislocation and harm.

piscator wrote:----- Forwarded Message ----
Sent: Tue, May 4, 2010 7:57:18 PM
Subject: Horizon Explosion explanation

>>Subject: Horizon Incident
>>
>>Good description of what happened from an interview....

This well had been giving some problems all the way down and was a big discovery. Big pressure, 16ppg+ mud weight. They ran a long string of 7" production casing - not a liner, the confusion arising from the fact that all casing strings on a floating rig are run on drill pipe and hung off on the wellhead on the sea floor, like a "liner". They cemented this casing with lightweight cement containing nitrogen because they were having lost circulation in between the well kicking all the way down.

The calculations and the execution of this kind of a cement job are complex, in order that you neither let the well flow from too little hydrostatic pressure nor break it down and lose the fluid and cement from too much hydrostatic. But you gotta believe BP had 8 or 10 of their best double and triple checking everything.

On the outside of the top joint of casing is a seal assembly - "packoff" - that sets inside the subsea wellhead and seals. This was set and tested to 10,000 psi, OK. Remember they are doing all this from the surface 5,000 feet away. The technology is fascinating, like going to the moon or fishing out the Russian sub, or killing all the fires in Kuwait in 14 months instead of 5 years. We never have had an accident like this before so hubris, the folie d'grandeur, sort of takes over. BP were the leaders in all this stretching the envelope all over the world in deep water.

This was the end of the well until testing was to begin at a later time, so a temporary "bridge plug" was run in on drill pipe to set somewhere near the top of the well below 5,000 ft. This is the second barrier, you always have to have 2, and the casing was the first one. It is not known if this was actually set or not. At the same time they took the 16+ ppg mud out of the riser and replaced it with sea water so that they could pull the riser, lay it down, and move off.

When they did this, they of course took away all the hydrostatic on the well. But this was OK, normal, since the well was plugged both on the inside with the casing and on the outside with the tested packoff. But something turned loose all of a sudden, and the conventional wisdom would be the packoff on the outside of the casing.

Gas and oil rushed up the riser; there was little wind, and a gas cloud got all over the rig. When the main inductions of the engines got a whiff, they ran away and exploded. Blew them right off the rig. This set everything on fire. A similar explosion in the mud pit / mud pump room blew the mud pumps overboard. Another in the mud sack storage room, sited most unfortunately right next to the living quarters, took out all the interior walls where everyone was hanging out having - I am not making this up - a party to celebrate 7 years of accident free work on this rig. 7 BP bigwigs were there visiting from town.

In this sense they were lucky that the only ones lost were the 9 rig crew on the rig floor and 2 mud engineers down on the pits. The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they all managed to get in the lifeboats with assistance from the others.

The safety shut ins on the BOP were tripped but it is not clear why they did not work. This system has 4 way redundancy; 2 separate hydraulic systems and 2 separate electric systems should be able to operate any of the functions on the stack. They are tested every 14 days, all of them. (there is also a stab on the stack so that an ROV can plug in and operate it, but now it is too late because things are damaged).

The well is flowing through the BOP stack, probably around the outside of the 7" casing. As reported elsewhere, none of the "rams", those being the valves that are suppose to close around the drill pipe and / or shear it right in two and seal on the open hole, are sealing. Up the riser and out some holes in it where it is kinked. A little is coming out of the drill pipe too which is sticking out of the top of the riser and laid out on the ocean floor. The volumes as reported by the media are not correct but who knows exactly how much is coming?

2 relief wells will be drilled but it will take at least 60 days to kill it that way. There is a "deep sea intervention vessel" on the way, I don't know if that means a submarine or not, one would think this is too deep for subs, and it will have special cutting tools to try to cut off the very bottom of the riser on top of the BOP. The area is remarkably free from debris. The rig "Enterprise" is standing by with another BOP stack and a special connector to set down on top of the original one and then close. You saw this sort of thing in Red Adair movies and in Kuwait, a new stack dangling from a crane is just dropped down on the well after all the junk is removed. But that is not 5,000 ft underwater.

One unknown is if they get a new stack on it and close it, will the bitch broach around the outside of all the casing??

In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a shitty cement job. The wellhead packoff / seal assembly, while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away.

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