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BP Set to Smother Oil Leak With Mud
BP is carrying out the final tests on its so-called "top-kill" plan to choke off an oil leak described as the worst in US history.
The energy giant's chief executive said the company would not make a final decision until later on Wednesday on whether to go ahead with the manoeuvre, which has been given a 60 to 70 per cent success rate.
It had been hoped that BP would begin the procedure, which involves smothering the leak with heavy drilling mud and cement, earlier in the day.
Such a method has never been tried out 1,500 metres underwater.
Patience is running out and anger has been growing over the oil giant's inability to stop the oil leak that sprang more than a month ago after an offshore drilling rig exploded on April 20.
Eleven workers were killed in the blast and by the most conservative estimate, 26.5 million litres of crude have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling Louisiana's marshes and coating birds and other wildlife.
Leak could worsen
But the top kill procedure could also make the leak worse.
Engineers were doing at least 12 hours of diagnostic tests on Tuesday, checking five spots on the well's crippled five-storey blowout preventer to make sure it can withstand the heavy force of the mud.
A weak spot in the device could blow under the pressure, causing a brand new leak. The mud could also tear a new hole in the leaking well pipe.
BP has been drafting plans for the top kill for weeks but had to delay it several times as crews scrambled to assemble the equipment at the site 80km off the coast.
A flotilla of rigs, barges and other heavy machinery stood ready there on Tuesday with a stockpile of some 50,000 barrels of the heavy mud, a manufactured substance that resembles clay.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said chances of the top kill succeeding were 60 to 70 per cent, while Kent Wells, a BP senior vice-president, said the procedure could be delayed or scuttled if Tuesday's pressure readings were poor.
Wells said it could take anywhere from a few hours to two days to determine whether the top kill was working.
If it succeeds, BP plans to inject a stream of cement to permanently seal up the well and may also install a new blowout preventer.
BP has had limited success with a mile-long tube it installed more than a week ago to siphon up some of the oil, capturing more than 1.9 million litres but also allowing untold amounts to escape into the sea.
Once the results of Tuesday's diagnostic tests are in, BP said, it will consult with government officials, including scientists with the Minerals Management Service (MMS), before deciding whether to press on with the top kill.
Investigation ordered
But the MMS has been accused of having too cosy a relationship with the very oil companies it is supposed to have oversight of.
Ken Salazar, the US interior secretary, on Tuesday ordered an investigation into whether the rig involved in the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was properly monitored by the MMS.
The investigation follows a report citing workers from the MMS - which is under the interior department - accepting gifts and possibly allowing oil workers to fill out their own inspection reports.
The report found it was commonplace before 2007 for MMS employees at a Lake Charles, Louisiana office to receive gifts including sporting event tickets and hunting trips from energy companies.
"This deeply disturbing report is further evidence of the cosy relationship between some elements of MMS and the oil and gas industry," Salazar said in a statement.
Salazar, whose interior department has been criticised in recent weeks for not doing enough to prevent the oil rig explosion, said he had directed the agency's acting inspector-general, Mary Kendall, to look into whether MMS employees adequately inspected and enforced standards on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
He also asked the inspector to determine if the improper behaviour outlined in the report had continued since he took office at the department.
The report said a confidential industry source accused some MMS inspectors of allowing energy company workers to fill out their own inspection forms for their platforms, but investigators have so far not been able to determine if any of the files they reviewed were fraudulent.
Tougher requirements
An inspector-general report released in 2008 found that MMS employees at another office received gifts, as well as used illegal drugs and had sex with workers from the oil companies they were supposed to oversee.
In response to the scandal then, Salazar instituted new ethics rules after he took the helm of the department in 2009.
Salazar and Kendall are set to testify before the House of Representatives' Natural Resource committee on Wednesday on the oil spill.
Barack Obama, the US president who on Friday is set to tour the oil-affected region for a second time, is expected to announce tougher safety requirements for off-shore oil drilling on Thursday, an administration official said on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, US officials expanded a fishing ban in the Gulf of Mexico by more than 20,000 square kilometres amid the spreading oil slick.
Some 140,000 square kilometres of water - an area slightly smaller than the size of Greece - are now closed to fishing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, but added that 77 per cent of the Gulf remains open.
Source: Agencies
68 Comments so far
Show AllLatest from the Gulf:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKx6bkhLCc
Things get interesting/scary as hell about the four minute mark.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/50368
http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com/2010/05/major-change-down-below.html
It looks like the BOP has finally eroded enough under pressure that it and the drill casing have disintegrated. Multiple sea floor vents around the main drill site were reported just before the main event.
BP is coming under wide criticism for looping the tape to conceal what is now happening.
Top kill/Junk shot is no longer an option.
Deep, Deep shit time folks...
deep, deep shit time folks............
no shit?..........................
Galen, this was the thing I feared the most -- that the erosion of the riser due to the constant high-pressure blasting of sand, rock, oil and gas would cause the riser to disintegrate and become an open gusher. Very early on, in a moment of rare honesty, a BP spokesperson slipped and said that this was the thing BP feared the most - erosion from constant sand-blasting; then you never heard anything more about that possibility from BP.
This article, which says that the "top kill" could cause a new "leak," is a supreme understatement, I think. It could cause a volcanic-like open gusher; at least that's my understanding from reading posts by people in the industry who are not being quoted in the MSM.
I have no confidence that BP knows how to kill this monster.
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin
Good God almighty. Does the volcano scenario mean even a relief well won't work? If that's the case, then this Oil Deluge could last for decades and be the dark exclamation point on the end of American empire. Every American who travels outside the U.S. will have to hang their head in shame. The ocean conveyor currents will gradually carry that oil up the eastern seaboard. No telling what it will do to the Caribbean. The pirates of yore, in all their bloodthirsty cruelty could never have imagined a level of greed so wantonly evil that would have befouled the very seas they sailed. What a poisonous country the U.S. has become. We're all (through action or inaction) like sloppier, grubbier, less competent little death camp Sonderkommando trying to carry out every lawless corporatist Final Solution our psychotic fascist oligarchs can imagine: A nation ruled by "little Eichmanns" whose Sturmtruppen--from Detroit to the oil/terror wars--have kicked in too many doors on too many homes and killed too many innocent men, women and children. But that's not enough so now we have to slash open the very arteries of the Earth itself.
All I see for the Amurkan "future" is for Amurkans to turn on and devour each other--very much as Charles Manson predicted in one of his rants that seemed psychotic until the times caught up with it. Even on Planet of the Apes the ape society, while a caricature of the ruthless human societies before them, didn't destroy their environment the way the humans did. So we're worse than the Planet of the Apes. Have a double gin & tonic and contemplate that for a while. Then behold, as Amurkan "conservatives" soon call for the fast-tracking of offshore drilling off the mid-Atlantic seaboard "since the damage is already done." Yeah, we can sure as hell turn the planet into a great big toxic chemical waste dumpsite and the sanest people will suffer the worst. I know I am.
Galen...
thanks for the video link, as I'm astounded.
Grasping for a shred of hope (no, not that kind of hope) here, in wondering that given the date on the feed, is it possible that the huge billowing clouds are a result of the pressure tests they were conducting yesterday?
Damn, if that is not the case, it is no wonder that they are still on hold with doing the already-desperate top kill procedure.
That's why we need an independent entity, not affiliated with BP to ensure complete transparency of the disaster. Maybe Bush depended too much on his 'gut,' but Obama clearly doesn't have any.
And...
If the top kill was an option early on, why wasn't it done: presumably, so BP could try to save it's investment--all with the approval of this administration.
By his inaction, and not pulling the reigns away from BP from the very beginning, Obama doomed his political career, and possibly even the coast (let's hope not the planet).
Worse, he may go down in infamy with BP. What an incompetent A-hole our president turned out to be.
anagram of mud:............dum.
Looks like BP is behaving in a way that informed observers of such British and other "Western civilized" types would be expected to behave putting the moron back in the oxymoron of Western civilization.
AD
Stall, lie, obfuscate, cover-up.
Well, maybe they can mozey up to Alaska and see if they can fix
YET ANOTHER BP oil spill TODAY.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64P04U20100526?source=email
Obama and BP. Quite a legacy.
Salazar and Obomber have found their scapegoats, the MMS.
It was Obomber who appealed and defeated the Environmental Organazation's suit to prevent this Well due to Salazar Policy of exempting offshore Wells from Environmental Impact Studies.
Exactly, which makes it even more dishonest that Obama's doing one of his infamous, "wha?, not me," like he does with everything.
I'm convinced the guy is the most corrupt president in US history, even beyond Nixon because I honestly believe he's exploiting his position as president in large part for his own personal wealth.
If we think that BP execs are criminal and should go to jail, does anyone think that Salazar is any better. I don't know what it would take to clean out this filthy nest at the Interior Dept. Maybe we should assign Department of Interior execs including Salazar to work as full time on site safety inspectors stationed on the oil rigs they have permitted. Then they would beg for prison. Hard time in a Federal minimum security prison is not enough punishment.
All I can say is, regardless of my loathing for BP and my disgust for Obama, I hope this works.
I agree, but find myself in the disturbing position of hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
Me, too. This is a hope-killer, that's for sure.
Just a reminder that hope is what you have when you don't have a plan.
I thought that was faith.
I think so as well. Hope is for when you have a plan that is probably not going to work, but there's a chance that it will.
Faith is for when you have a plan that will not work without a miracle from the FSM, or one of those fictional gawds.
Seems like they were relying on faith after all...
This will go over 99% of everybody's head (goes over mine too).
But it's written for drillers by drillers and IS exactly what we are talking about here. The difference is this describes how to kill it with the rig intact, not at 5,000 ft under the water.
http://www.jwco.com/
technical-litterature/p06.htm
litter-ature?
~~~~~~~~~~~
Sounds like the relief well is our only hope!!!!!
http://tinyurl.com/368ll3a
there's the live cam
prepared to get pissed off and depressed all at once......
No worries, Obama is going to fly over and look.
Yes, using wax wings and shoes to walk on oil with, no doubt.
That should help everything--a good photo op.
i believe there are now multiple leaks happening or the footage is fixed: probably both....
the odler footage from youtube shows a huge crater while the "current" footage shows no crater....
notice the huge crater in the youtube video: and notice the weird "creature?" at 1:04 -1:09 moving from the bottom right to the bottom left....
live cam: with no crater
http://tinyurl.com/368ll3a
older footage from yesterday: with the crater
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKx6bkhLCc
that wasn't a weird creature.............it was the ghost of a fish.
Why not stuff those responsible in the hole ?
Best idea I've heard yet. I'd give it a 60 percent chance of preventing another crime of this nature. Not to mention the boost in my own morale.
"Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us."
~Henrik Tikkanen
If they exist.
Or forgive us.
It sounds like, from the lack of any reference to it, that maybe the interview with Tony Hayward wasn't on local TV back in the homeland. But I saw him here and he was peevishly chastising the reporter for the questions and saying something along the lines that "no one knows what's going to happen. It's 5000 feet, under the water, no one's ever done anything like it, we have no idea."
While all along I'm screaming repeatedly at the TV "Then what the &^c% were you doing there in the first place if you don't know what the &)%k you're doing!"
But he sure did sound like a little boy whining about having to do something too hard, and sooo unfair.
You said it. If no one knows, why were they there in the first place. The Daily Show did a perfect segment on this. Stewart acted like a New Yorker who was hired to get a guy to the moon. When the astronaut got to the moon, and they asked to get him back, the New Yorker guy says, hey, you just asked me to get the man to the moon. You never said anything about getting him back. Hilarious.
If my memory is correct, many years ago around LA, they started to get seismic activity and land subsidence. It was figured out that, as they pumped the vast oil fields dry, they were beginning to collapse in on themselves. I believe they started pumping in sea water to refill the voids. That was in oil fields relatively near the surface.
Picture, if you will, a vast cavern of oil, many miles deep in earth's mantle, emptying itself, leaving a vast void to fill.
A major collapse that deep could create a huge earthquake and a tsunami of Biblical proportions, perhaps sending a mass of oil and sea water mix miles or hundreds of miles into the interior.
A disturbance that deep in the mantle could also promote volcanic action of epic proportion.
As the old Chinese curse goes, we DO live in "interesting times."
Brilliantly worded Minitrue.
How many Scientists and Geologists knew this and warned these malevolent, rapacious oil conglomerates of this very fact, and the calamity which has occurred in the Gulf? God help these people and the sea life. They had "NO!" F'n right drilling that far down, tinkering with the Earth's crust. Mother Earth, she is now weeping in disgust.
A chosen few are destroying this planet, every F'n square inch. However, there is no need to worry. Not when the credulous sheep have feckless inane programming, Dancing with the Stars, Idol etc. keeping them comfortably dumb.
This is like the Titanic going down, but instead of manning the life boats the people, sheople remained on board, waltzing about as if nothing had happened.
God help us!
Uh, sorry to burst your balloon, but oil/gas deposits are not held in "huge voids", rather it is held in inter-crystalline voids, much like dry sand at the beach which can hold a lot of water without increasing its volume. You are thinking like Jules Verne. There is no ocean at the center of the Earth.
Land subsidence due to oil/gas/water extraction as noticed in LA, Houston, Tucson etc, is not dramatic, but rather a gentle slumping that takes years and needs sub-millimeter GPS positioning to even observe it. There is no rapid disturbance, no tsunami-generation, no earthquake mechanism associated with this subsidence.
And cripes, the Gulf of Mexico is hundreds of miles away from the nearest volcanic zone. So tell us again how you figure a volcanic eruption will occur in an area that doesn't have any?
Please, read any child's book on modern geology before you mock the intelligence of the reader.
No, the LA subsidence was not dramatic and they did take remedial steps to halt it.
This blowout is far beyond anything we have experience with. I am not an oil geologist, but I have read more, differing, reports concerning the oil being blown out in the Gulf than you can shake a stick at. Considering the difficulty they are having, and the amount of ecological destruction they are creating, getting the oil sands to produce, I wonder if the close to thousand barrel leak might not be coming from, as Monty Python used to say, something completely different.
This is a disaster of global proportions, and unfortunately, the wingnuts are winging it.
Sink Holes after liquid removal from the earth is extremely common.
They swallow up homes and autos in many places some expand yearly.
The Madrid fault line which follows the Missippi River was the biggest North American Quake in recorded history only around 200 years ago.
The whole Missippi River reversed flow for a week.
Sink holes are not oil reservoirs. Sinkholes form like caves, where running water dissolves minerals out of the surrounding rock. Oil reservoir formation is a totally different, and unrelated process in a totally different type of rock, at vastly greater depths.
What is the connection with the New Madrid earthquake? The Mississippi "reversed flow" for a few hours between Islands 10 and 8, not a week, when the thrust fault caused a dam. Conventional wisdom today states that the dam created an "upstream wave and retrograde current" which will appear to untrained observers as a river running backwards. A good read here: http://www.showme.net/~fkeller/quake/lib/enigma.htm
long beach subsided many meters before they got it under control.
http://solidearth.jpl.nasa.gov/PAGES/tect03.html
quote
Total subsidence in Long Beach reached as much as 9 m before the land surface was stabilized by an integrated program of fluid injection to balance the extraction. The amount of subsidence at Long Beach was close to linearly proportional to the amount of petroleum extracted. Subsidence over petroleum extraction zones can also cause significant damage to extraction infrastructure itself, including expensive well failures
unquote
9 meters is about 29.5 feet.
when oil or fluid is removed from the pore space in a rock mass the rock mass consolidates under its own weight. the fluid is "incompressible" where as the crysal matrix of the rock with the fluid drained is "compressible".
Check. But nowhere do we see a catastrophic collapse that would be required to generate felt ground motion. The settling was gradual, and was, in the case of Long Beach, aseismic. No earthquakes, no tsunamis.
Underground mining - in areas of low cover and weak rock over the mine, also cause sinkhole collapses.
Just how much BP is costing Americans and others is a question of global proportions
BP now has a huge contract in Iraq made possible by the illegal invasion and occupation.
The ongoing war crimes and occupation of Iraq have resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of American lives and more suffering for the people of Iraq than we cold ever imagine here in the good old USA.
Then there are the war costs of over $3 Trillion for Iraq and $1 Trillion for Afghanistan payed by the American taxpayer. This has become the biggest corporate subsidy in world history. And other than MIC profits, these war dollars leave our economy.
Afghanistan and the oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia are the next move on the global chessboard of Big Oil and their investors.
And more than likely the public will absorb the long term costs of the Gulf blowout, or rather the hole punched into hell.
Seizing BP's assets would be a more realistic way of handling their damage liabilities for the Gulf region. If the oil affects other countries, they need to be compensated as well.
While history has isolated Hitler as the primary figure responsible for Nazi horrors, he was just representing the interests of German corporations.
quote: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
Benito Mussolini (Italian dictator, 1883-1945, and hung by partisans)
check out this url for ideas on how to deal with BP executives:
http://www.custermen.com/ItalyWW2/ILDUCE/Mussolini.htm
too bad we can't hang our current fascists in the country today!
How can a "method has never been tried out 1,500 metres underwater" be "given a 60 to 70 per cent success rate" ? Such things never happen like that in the I.T. world even with relative knowns. As usual, make up a flimsy statistic on a totally unknown in the oily world. Why do I get the feeling that by 2012 we will be hearing the news that Global Peak Oil has already started in 2010?
I fear that, eventually, everyone in the world is going to wake up oily in the morning.
re: the live cam.............
isn't technology ironically decadent? we can watch a contributing factor to the planet's 'sixth great extinction' from the comfort and safety of our own armchairs............
We need a reporter to ask the order in which these various methods -- throw mud in, throw golf balls in, throw money in -- were chosen. Was BP's first option to rescue the well, which cost it good money to drill?
There was never a chance or option to "rescue" the well.
It was a bad actor and total loss that could only be capped, and then plugged & abandoned.
You know, if they would have just asked an independent inventor, I would have told them to fashion a great number of lead weights, pencil thin, ten feet long, tapered at the ends to points, and teflon coated. Each one of these devices, easily manufactured, must weigh enough and must be streamlined enough to counteract the violent flood of oil coming up the pipe. Each one drops down through the well's upward flood to the very bottom of the well where the oil is flowing in through cracks in the rock. Enough of them on the bottom and the oil slows to a small gusher, which makes it easier to cap the well. A few more and the well slows to a trickle. BP can then stop up that well as much as they want, or they can return it to production.
But our society would rather have a horrid disaster than pay one inventor. That's also the precise reason why climate change isn't getting fixed.
It reminds me of a 1920s Wall Street mogul who let her own son die because she was too cheap to pay a doctor to come over.