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Unchecked Oil Flow Would Cause Disaster ‘Heretofore Unseen by Humanity’
If BP fails to plug its ruptured offshore oil well, intense underground pressure would be enough to pump vast quantities of thick brown crude into the Gulf of Mexico for months, even years.
If even BP's backup plans fail, it would cause a pollution disaster "heretofore unseen by humanity," said one expert.
It is this rapidly accelerating realization that is giving BP's attempt Wednesday to cap the well new political and environmental urgency.
The worst-case scenario is hoped and believed to be a continued flow of 5,000 barrels per day, and by some estimates vastly more, until August, when BP completes "relief wells" to intercept the damaged well.
But, experts say, there are no sure things when operating equipment a mile under the water and 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.
Professor Tad Patzek, who heads the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, gives the relief well a 90 percent chance of success. But he'd rather not consider the other 10 percent.
"As a petroleum professional, I don't even admit the possibility that that might be possible," he said when asked about a failure to stop the flow. "That would be an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity."
Patzek estimates at least 20,000 barrels of oil and an equal amount of gas would flow daily for years from the reservoir, which he estimates to hold roughly 50 million to 100 million barrels.
"That is something that is not acceptable by any standards or measure," he said. "If BP cannot deal with the relief well, there will be somebody else that will, and that would happen sooner rather than later."
David Rensink, the incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, similarly said that BP's Macondo prospect likely contains enough oil to keep flowing from the broken undersea well for a very long time.
"It would take years to deplete. You are talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels of oil in it," he said in a statement provided by the group.
A spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute - the oil industry's biggest trade group - said the relief well effort is certain to succeed. "Will the first relief well work? We don't know. That is why they are doing multiple relief wells," said API's Cathy Landry.
BP on Wednesday began a "top kill" that involves pumping heavy muds into the well to block the flow. It is believed to be the most promising effort yet, but has never been tried at such depths. It is expected to be one to two days before it is clear whether the has measure worked.
The company is also weighing other plans if it fails, including another effort to place a containment dome over the leak.
Stopping the flow has become a consuming priority for the White House, which faces growing criticism even from some Democrats over the ongoing catastrophe. Pressure on the White House is matched, if nowhere else, at the sea floor.
Patzek said the amount of pressure in the oil reservoir is at least 12,000 pounds per square inch and perhaps higher, while the pressure at the sea floor is around 2,300 pounds per square inch. "These are immense pressures," he said, "by any standards."
President Barack Obama is playing an increasingly visible role; he's planning a press conference Thursday, where he is slated to announce new safeguards to accompany offshore development.
And Friday he travels to Louisiana, his second trip to the Gulf Coast since the spill began, to assess efforts to counter the disaster.
- Posted in
100 Comments so far
Show AllI didn't remember who gave me the
booming 101 video.. but thank you whoever it was
It was the best F...... video that I have ever F......
seen.
That was egg2001, on another CD post about the BP catastrophe.
Here's the video, for those who haven't seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx8kMXufu3w
It's been unchecked for five weeks already--you wonder how dumb can they be--appears even this question of stopping oil from a broken pipe still remains unanswerable--Reminds me of Humpty Dumpty had a big well, Hunpty Dumpty had oil to sell but all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't save a gallon without loosing ten.
Nationalize BP America and seize every asset they have. Good enough for the War on Drugs, good enough for the poor rednecks, coon asses, Cajuns, African-Americans and Vietnamese down there in the northern Gulf of Mexico! Ah hell, start more wars in North Korea and Iran. Give me some 'hope & change'......PLEASE!!!!!
I passed a BP station during rush hour today when the pumps are usually busy. The only vehicle in that 8-pump facility was a motorcycle. The rider was perched on the saddle, under the canopy, waiting out a sudden downpour.
Are people paying attention? Getting pissed? If that top kill trick doesn't work, I'm going to change my route. A 500 yard no-fly radius should do it.
Thats the attitude, all those other oil companies
are gooders. Lets all get in our cars and go
somewhere else.
Lets acupuncture some more, and more, and more.
Ask yourself why BP is now attempting to seal the well 6 weeks after the fact?
This is criminal activity and the Obama Admin is every bit as culpable.
As far as I am concerned Obama, Bush, Clinton, Poppie, (and if Reagan were alive he would be on my list) all ought to be sharing the same jail cell where they can live out what is left of their worthless lives serving the prison population on their knees.
They might get to like it. I'd kill em.
Thank you, was thinking the same thing myself. The sight of the Obama-CorpWeasel makes me want to barf.
Obama made possible the waiving of several environmental impact statements required by law for BP and others to drill baby drill. The EIS and other safety related rules are part of the overall process Obama and Bush before him provided waivers for--the only problem is such waivers are ILLEGAL. Obama is just as big a criminal in this fiasco as BP's CEO.
If there were ever a message demanding the cesation of an oil-based economy, this is it; and such a move will be forced upon humanity by nature at some, soon, future point anyway, which is to say we must start the transition NOW.
Please, everybody, try not to buy any gas at BP.
We need to boycott BP.
Leave off the "at BP" too. We're up against a big monster, and it is ourselves and our consumption.
That doesn't relieve BP of its monstrous negligence.
You know BP will just sell the oil to some other company which will sell it to the public. The retail segment of BP in the US is not all that big. It is the production arm that makes the real money. BP can sell its oil anywhere in the world. A US consumer boycott will go nowhere in lessening the company's profits. They will just sell in Europe or China or some other place.
I respectfully disagree. American consumers could put a serious dent in BP's bottom line if they stopped buying their products. While this punishment isn't the same as putting these corporate criminals in prison, it does offer some form of punishment. Minimally, they will have to reinvent themselves under another brand. That will cost them time and money and since money is the be all, end all for these corporate criminals, it does represent a modest form of punishment.
Spoken like a good liberal democrat, boycott BP
use the good oil companies, not the bad ones
I am going to get in my car and drive to another
gas station.
Reminds me of the "feel good" vote for Obama
Exactly. Get rid of your car, and refuse to have anything to do with car-oriented suburban developments like shopping malls.
Sadly, the way the country has developed around suburban type communities, most people outside big cities need their cars to go to work, school and to shop. Many people cannot give up their cars until more work is done on public transportation and on planning for mixed-use zones which include stores, homes, businesses in the same walkable sector. But if one can do without a car, one should.
I am fortunate to live where a car is rarely necessary, although many many people choose to own and drive bloat cars on a daily basis. I don't think they know or care about how this habit fosters militarism and pollution.
Joe
That alternative is to continue to reward these reckless criminals at BP by continuing to purchase their products. Only a rube or baboon would do such a thing.
Everybody! quick over to Exxon! :(
>^^<
"The worst-case scenario is hoped and believed to be a continued flow of 5,000 barrels per day..."
Wow! I can't believe anyone is putting forth this number anymore! 5,000 b/d is not even a best-case scenario; WTF, it's probably not even a standard deviation on the amount gushing from this hell-hole!
The "experts" cited in this article are shills and cons! This is not meant to undermine the severity of this disaster, but we must be vigilant against oil industry prevarication.
I had the same thought. I guess they think if they keep repeating the 5000 b/d number enough, people will believe it.
That is plan A.
This disaster overwhelms me with sadness. The photographs of the coated creatures are devastating.
For me, this catastrophe is emblematic of the end of life on our little planet as we have known it.
And Shell Oil soon will begin deep-sea oil drilling in the Arctic? Brilliant!
We inappropriately named homo sapiens—possessing no sapientia whatsoever—are committing suicide, and we're taking as many species along with us as possible.
I can only imagine what this year's hurricane season will do to our ever-widening, ever-deepening Louisiana gushings!
Were he still alive, Kurt Vonnegut would merely nod. All his warnings—his life's work—have gone unheeded.
"We could have saved ourselves, but we were too damn cheap":
There's still time to carve this in enormous letters on the side of the Grand Canyon as our collective final message to the intergalactic aliens who one day will find our dead, plastic-and-oil-coated, radioactive orb, wondering just what went wrong with this once gloriously beautiful conglomeration of stardust.
No investigation or indictments will come from this farce. If this disaster was the first one, I would call it a tragedy, but thirty some odd years ago a similar event happened in California.
Obamageddon is running a screen for the oil companies. He will protect them even if it means his removal from office.
Impeach Obama now.
Its a waste time "impeaching Obama", they'll just fill his seat in the White House with another sorry excuse for a human being.
What a complete turkey this guy turned out to be. I mean, god, he's just got NUTHIN.
I'm with you. Impeach the scoundrel.
Trading must be fast and furious considering the changes coming.
Yep.
There's very little talk about this being an ELE (extinction level event) and it's probably unlikely but the fact that's it's even possible should wake us up. People, if we can't plug this up our happy little planet, yes I said planet, will be dead within a couple of years. If this leak can be stopped we need to make sure every human being knows how close we came to extinction. No more off shore oil drilling ever! Put anyone who can be held liable for such a catastrophe in jail, BP execs, regulators, Dick Cheney.
Do you think this post is hyperbole? See this link:
http://pesn.com/2010/05/13/9501651_a_volcano_of_oil_erupting/
FEMA is ready and waiting to roll:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209259-Florida-Gulf-oil-spill-Plans-to-evacuate-Tampa-Bay-area-are-in-place
Have fun!
The oil and gas deposit that BP has released through their criminal negligence could be as large as 20,000 square miles and under unknown pressures. Everything we have been told by BP, the corporate media and Washington are calculated lies.
The following presents a logical alternative view:
Just how big is that gusher in the Gulf of Mexico?
http://pesn.com/2010/05/23/9501654_Gulf_gusher_size/
"The numbers suggest the possibility of a Million Barrels of Oil a day spill. (I am not willing to go that far out and prefer to suggest the 350,000 BPD rate)
As was first noted here (PESN Exclusive) the process of this spill is only bringing a small fraction of the oil to the surface. (Initially I suggested to Sterling Allan that it might be only 20% or so.) It probably is only 5%. Research ships have now found massive plumes of oil beneath the sea. The process of fractioning the oil is spreading out the oil separated by molecular weight in the saltwater column density anticlines. The exact volume of oil in these plumes as a percentage of their volume is not known at this time but even assuming a tiny fraction unbelievably large volumes of oil are escaping the well. The reported volume for one plume alone was 1.7 cubic miles. (Do your own math it was 10 miles by 3 miles by 300 feet thick) There were at least 5 similar plumes found.
It is entirely safe to say that this well has been releasing more oil every day than the Exxon Valdez wreck did. Nobody wants to believe the size of the spill. History will settle the matter beyond all question that my math was probably giving a very low estimate of the well output."
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 for the Gulf region. If the oil affects other countries, they need to be compensated as well.
Damage to the Gulf could exceed $1 Trillion and alter the ecosystem for decades.
And what does Iraq have to do with BP's crimes in the Gulf ?
Thanks to a $3 Trillion dollar invasion and occupation paid for by the American taxpayer, BP now has a lucrative contract for Iraqi oil. The American military serves the private interests of Big Oil.
And Washington gave BP everything they wanted by not regulating the drilling process in the Gulf setting the stage for disaster.
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)
However, Mussolini did pay for his crimes.
http://www.custermen.com/ItalyWW2/ILDUCE/Mussolini.htm
BOYCOTT BP
BP gas stations are independently owned and operated, so you are actually punishing folks who have nothing to do with this disaster.
As for 350,000 bpd, shame shame shame. First the flow is partially obstructed, is a mix of gas and oil (not just oil), in non-fixed ratio, in mixed-phase, at a non-constant rate (in the interest of keeping it simple).
The calculation of flow rate is meaningful on a time-weighted-average basis except as a tool for those engineers and physicists who don't work for BP and are working on methodologies to cap this well before plugging and abandoning it.
As our military consumes vast quantities of processed oil (and the waging of wars require even more), and we as a society refuse to sacrifice our own individual dependence on cheap gasoline and petroleum based products, I hope we all look in the mirror before placing blame.
Eleven men are dead, over 700,000 gallons of chemical dispersal agents have been emptied into the ocean, and natural habitats are destroyed in the name of our strategic interests.
I'm not falling for the corporate media line about being addicted to oil.
We all need an energy source, but they have not allowed anything else, so screw them.
Hundreds of alternate ideas and energy sources exist today but don't stand a chance in hell of going anywhere. We are in complete corporate control of the oil companies. The greatest thing to happen to big oil since Henry Ford was when Dick Cheney strolled in as VP, created a secret cartel and turned our military into
cannon fodder so big oil could steal from the weakest oil rich nations of the world. We've never paid more for oil than we do now, and we've never been in worse financial shape in our lifetime. Every drop of oil from the US and everywhere else goes on the open market, leaving entire nations destroyrd by war or environmental disasters.
The entire belief that the only rational choice today is oil is a freaking scam by elites on Wall St. They win and we pay.
Big oil owns the US government, and they have been colluding together for the last 100 years. Every alternate energy invention, every patent, even some public transportation, has been destroyed, confiscated, under funded, or simply dissappeared forever to keep us imprisoned to the oil masters like Cheney and Paulson who live like sultans and kings.
Comments like these make you a prisoner: "they have not allowed anything else" and
"to keep us imprisoned to the oil masters"
Free spirits have legs ...or wheelchairs ...and of course, we have our bicycles.
freepressmyass is right. The u.s. is a prisoner to oil. Many energy saving technologies have been bought and stashed away. They call it black shelving. Millions of people don't live within bicycling distance to their jobs, providing they have one. Are you going to cart that new couch home on your bicycle? There is oil used in the manufacture of that bicycle. Depending on where you live, much of the food is transported thousands of miles after being hosed with herbicides and pesticides. all petro products. Then there are the countless other products made from oil; plastic, rayon, nylon, etc. etc. etc. Oil has a hand on every product whether in production or transportation.
No one is suggesting oil use can be eliminated, but most USANs, if they made even a modicum of effort, could deeply slash their personal oil use. A majority of the poor people in my town - without any of the resources of a middle class person, still mamage to get to work and shopping without owning a car. They live in the city, can walk to many errands, and use the bus or jitney.
A middle class USAn could do the same. Middle-class USANs choose to drive even when public transit is available, USAns choose homes and jobs in unwalkable suburban wastelands where no public transit is avaialble. And while they do all this, USAns choose to buy enormous 5-liter and larger personal cars, the likes of which aren't sold anywhere else in the world, when a small 1.3 liter car (not even avaialbe in the US) would work fine. Heck, they refuse to even go to any store restaurant or movie house that requires walking a couple blocks or climbing a hill from a available parking space. Thus, I have seen lots of fine old businesses either go out of business or abandon my neighborhood for a mall in the suburbs.
And some of us are too crippled to walk or bicycle that far, should we practice starving to death now?
>^^<
Too many of these people remind me of the nazis, if your not fit you die :(
sad
Independent owners need to switch brands ASAP. BP needs to be put out of business. Any other result is not optimal. BP needs to be held responsible for their reckless actions. Otherwise, people will think right wing wind bags are full of crap when talking about responsibility and accountability.
With only 50 million barrels of oil dumped into the Gulf at a fine of $4300 per barrel
the Pentagram can wage it's wars on the world for months! For weeks even...
Since all the grim realities have been thoroughly vetted in previous comments, and we await the outcome of the "top kill", I'm left to wonder wistfully if Superman might yet show up and corral those vast garbage gyres in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, bring them down Gulf of Mexico way and kill three birds with one Super-Junk Shot.
After assembling the world's political and corporate leaders, reading them the Klaatu Riot Act and Ultimatum, and securing their unremitting promise to never let it happen again, of course.
Pardon my frivolousness-- and I hope I haven't accidently given away the plot of Ralph Nader's next work of fiction!
I was trying to fit that line in somewhere; WHERE'S SUPERMAN!!!
Yea Cap't Planet'd just fold up like wet tissue paper. For some reason he can't take natural oil?!?!
go figure
>^^<
This is another stall, delay, drag it out to buy more time tactic by BP and Obama.
It's insulting that the media is making such a big deal about it and people have bought it. I'm no rocket scientist, but this is utterly impossible a mile under the sea floor. Give it up you, pissants. Mother Earth is vomiting up right in your face.
The pathological Liar in Chief and pathological liars at BP will tell us more bs,
from here till the bitter end.
It is beyond my comprehension that in light of this still unfolding mega-disaster, possibly an extinction level event, Obama plans to continue with offshore drilling. As he likes to say (ad nauseum): "This is the moment." Yes, this IS the moment: when we must realize once and for all that offshore drilling simply cannot continue, even if it means that thousands of oil and gas employees will be out of work and that the price of fuel will skyrocket. It's time to make the hard choices. It's now or never. Either we seize this opportunity to stop offshore drilling NOW, or we kill this planet (if we haven't already). This is our wake up call. Yet no one seems to be listening.
Obama thinks offshore drilling can be made safe with more regulation. Yeah, right. Our government is so good at regulatin', isn't it? Like the way the USDA regulates our food, the FDA regulates our drugs, the Mine Safety and Health Administration regulates our mines, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency regulates our nuclear plants. You get the picture.
This completely disgusts me. What in God's name is it gonna take for people to wake the hell up?!
Unfortunately the only thing that will wake them up is higher gas prices...the death of the planet and all its creatures means nothing compared to paying more at the pump.
"What in God's name is it gonna take for people to wake the hell up?!"
Extinction?
"Obama thinks offshore drilling can be made safe with more regulation".
oourprez doesn't think--he is a bought and paid for shill.
It was safe enough with current regulation, the problem was the regulations were not followed.
I mean it's all the same to me. pull the plug I'd love to sit home and enjoy the food riots and mass death. I love those kind of movies. till my power stopped. then I'd go looking for an enviormentelist to throw on the fire, and anothe for the Barbeq ;)
sorry I forgot the name, but he's from Woods Hole and he knows gushers. He said it' about 70- 100,000 barrels a day. don't use bp's numbers!
Anyway if top kill works, there is already enough oil in the Gulf now to have killed it, and to go into whatever currents it may find, and no one knows yet how big a disaster this will turn out to be. But it's the worst oil disaster ever.
It's heart breaking to think about the creatures big and small who used to live there, and to think of what the future will bring.
We've seen mine and oil disasters directly related to a corrupt inspection system. Here is my concern. No doubt that the same lax culture exists in the nuclear energy business. What is it that we don't know about flaws at nuclear plants? It seems likely in the current environment of deregulation or no regulation that we are vulnerable to a nuclear melt down, yet no one is asking the critical question, what is happening with regard to regulation in our nuclear power plants? A nuke melt down would dwarf the gulf oil spill by comparison. It can and will happen.