Posts from — May 2010

CNN says that Frustration grows over oil spill

(CNN) — Saying BP has “from day one, frankly not fulfilled the mission it was supposed to fulfill,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar expressed frustration Sunday with the delay in stopping an underwater oil gusher 33 days after an oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I have no question that BP is throwing everything at the problem,” Salazar said. “Do I have confidence that they know exactly what they’re doing? No.”

But he and other federal officials likened the task to an “Apollo 13” mission.

Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, told reporters that while BP has failed to meet its own schedule for stopping the gusher, their schedule was probably not feasible from the outset given that the tasks involve construction, mobilizing equipment and fabricating devices.

BP’s effort is being directed by their legal department, not engineers. Once you accept that reality everything falls into place. If BP was actually trying to stop the leak, they wouldn’t have had two containment structures built, they would have been working on stopping the leak.

They have the same pipe that is used in the riser available, and could have devised a shut off valve that would be added to the pipe in days, not over a month. The manifold system for the mud has been in place from the beginning, but hasn’t been used at all.

It is long past the time when this operation should have been taken over by someone who actually wants to stop the flow of oil.

A lot of people have enjoyed the announcement that Chicken costumes are banned at Nevada polling places, as they are considered to be directed at a specific candidate, Sue Lowden.

The chicken costumes were just plain mean… and totally appropriate political speech, given that Lowden has been attempting all kinds of things rather than admitting what is clearly on tape. She thinks she’s Bill O’Reilly.

Of course, people have been having a snark-fest with the words of wisdom from Rand Paul, and he is certainly deserving of the ridicule. However, given that he is running for a seat that the voters of Kentucky gave to Jim Bunning, twice, I don’t think it will have much impact on the voters. Paul doesn’t even make it into the scouting reports for the farm teams of the league of crazies that Jim Bunning stars in.

Jonathan Tilove, a business reporter for the Times-Picayune lets the world know that BP is sticking with its dispersant choice

BP has told the Environmental Protection Agency that it cannot find a safe, effective and available dispersant to use instead of Corexit, and will continue to use that chemical application to help break up the growing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP was responding to an EPA directive Thursday that gave BP 24 hours to identify a less toxic alternative to Corexit — and 72 hours to start using it — or provide the Coast Guard and EPA with a “detailed description of the alternative dispersants investigated, and the reason they believe those products did not meet the required standards.”

The real reason is that BP already bought a warehouse full of Corexit, which got dirt cheap after several countries banned it for toxicity, so, they have no interest in buying or using anything else, no matter who tells them to do it.

McClatchy reports on the impact of the oil on Grand Isle

GRAND ISLE, La. — The first wave of oil swept onto the beach. The tourists swept out.

The few people who bothered to visit Grand Isle Beach Friday came out of morbid curiosity, to see the proliferating drips and blotches and puddles and pools the color of Coca-Cola.

“My God, our beach should be crowded, the start of a big weekend,” said Lynette Anderson, surveying the ruinous mess along the surf line. “We kept hoping it was going to miss us. Should have known better.”

The gooey, adhesive stuff portended an economic disaster for Grand Isle, the only inhabited island on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Tourists keep this beach town alive. The tourists had vanished.

A town of 1500 that needs the summer tourists to survive, and their beach is covered in oil just before the season begins. It will take years to clean the beach, and the locals can’t wait years. If you get hit with a hurricane, you can come back, but not pollution.

Rick of the Independent News said that people in Destin have heard that BP and the state are talking to charter boat captains about job retraining. I think that what they heard about was the program that hires local boats for use in the operation, which does require some training. I’ll wait a few days, and if the shark-gnawed bodies of BP representatives start coming on-shore, I’ll accept that it was about job retraining.

No matter what happens, Southern Republcans are as predictable as buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio.

Sean Reilly reports” Alabama, Mississippi senators push for easing of drilling moratorium

WASHINGTON — Gulf Coast senators are pressing federal regulators to resume processing permits for off-shore drilling in shallow waters, saying that a moratorium imposed earlier this month is too broad.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today, the lawmakers said that shallow-water wells mostly involve “natural gas resources with less environmental risks, and these wells are drilled in predictable and mature reservoirs.”

If the moratorium, which was imposed earlier this month in response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is not lifted soon, most of the approximately 57 shallow-water rigs in the gulf “will be unable to work,” the letter states.

The letter was released late this afternoon by Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Oxford, who signed it along with the state’s other senator, Roger Wicker, R-Tupelo. The remaining eight signers include Alabama Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, and Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, according to an accompanying news release.

It’s an election year and the scum wants to get their campaign cash. They just don’t care that oil companies have destroyed the economy of the Gulf Coast, once bought, they stay bought.

Rick over at Independent News doesn’t even pretend to be polite any more when reporting BP statements. BP now says that they are only getting 92,400 gallons [2200 barrels] through their “siphon tube”, not the 210,000 gallons [5000 barrels] they reported yesterday. I’m sure they have a wildly improbable reason for this claim, like every other. [BTW, the 210,000 gallon/day figure for the 3-inch tube is in line with the flow rate for a standard 2½-inch fire hose, just under 150 gallons/minute.]

From McClatchy’s story – Gulf oil spill: New figure on leak’s size will come ‘next week’

BP’s announcement implicitly criticized Werely’s higher estimates. BP said that the riser, the pipe between the wellhead and the drilling platform, is 19.5 inches in diameter, but the accident damaged it and reduced its diameter by 30 percent, and a drill pipe trapped inside it reduced the flow by 10 percent more, the company said. “Thus, some third party estimates of flow, which assume a 19.5 inch diameter, are inaccurate,” it said.

The only way they would know that damage had cause a “30% reduction” would be if they knew what the actual flow was and compared that to the flow of an undamaged riser. They have maintained that they are too busy to actually measure the flow. BP just throws around numbers to confuse the issue.

So, we’re having a discussion of alternative energy sources in comments and I was out looking for various things that I have heard about, when I came upon this article, LS9: Genetically Modified E. Coli that Secrete Drop-in Diesel, which is the sort of thing I was seeking.

Down in the article which is discussing the company, LS9, more than its process, I noticed this:

Add one more factor in LS9’s favor: one of its founders is Chris Somerville, the director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley and one of the major scientific figures in biofuel. He’s also close to Energy Secretary Steve Chu and Steve Koonin, the head scientist at the DOE. The three were behind BP’s $500 million donation to Berkeley and the University of Illinois to study biofuels.

So, the two guys that have been tagged with watching what BP is doing, Chu and Koonin, have connections to BP. I don’t remember this being mentioned when they were assigned to the job.

Congress has apparently remembered that it has oversight responsibilities. They seem to remember when there’s a Democrat in the White House, and forget when it’s a Republican. Since it is become obvious that the executive branch has been following BP’s lead on the Gulf Gusher, it’s good that Congress remembers.

CNN reports that Experts testify on grim ecological fallout from Gulf oil spill

Washington (CNN) — The damaging effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be felt all the way to Europe and the Arctic, a top scientist told a congressional panel Friday.

Other scientists and researchers — invited to brief members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — warned that the thousands of barrels of oil still gushing into the Gulf are contributing to a potential ecological disaster of unknown proportions.
…

Safina argued that BP was using the dispersants as a public relations tool, so cameras can’t see the extent of the oil slick.

In other news at CNN, after a month, the White House finally decides it should do something, so it create a “blue ribbon committee”: Obama forms bipartisan commission to investigate oil spill

Washington (CNN) — President Obama has issued an executive order establishing a bipartisan commission tasked with investigating how to prevent future oil spills, two sources familiar with the announcement said Friday.

Obama named former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency William K. Reilly as commission co-chairs.

Bob Graham is good news. He was the governor of Florida, as well as a Senator, and he isn’t fond of polluters. He is a very intelligent man who is known for his meticulous notes, which he used to great effect when the CIA claimed he had been briefed on the use of torture.

If you are feeling really masochistic, go tell academics from a totally different field that you know more about their subject matter than they do.

Apparently BP’s science type is a geologist, as makes perfect sense, and he has been ignoring the advice of oceanographers and marine biologists who specialize in the Gulf of Mexico. As there was obviously no intention on the part of BP to listen, the only reason for contacting these people was to check off a box on a form to prepare for a trial.

Ben Raines of the Mobile Press-Register writes that Mobile scientists’ warnings about oil dispersants ignored by BP, Coast Guard

Mobile-area scientists warned BP PLC officials and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen a week ago that the use of dispersants both on the surface and underwater at the Deepwater Horizon well could have grave consequences for the Gulf ecosystem.

The scientists, Bob Shipp of the University of South Alabama and George Crozier of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said they felt their concerns were ignored at the time.

BP did not respond to the Press-Register’s questions.

BP assumed that everyone would complain about toxicity, but there is a totally separate issue – hypoxia or oxygen depletion in the Gulf. Even if you could drink the dispersant without ill effect, the clouds of oil droplets they create are toxic in their own right, and the most toxic, like benzene, can’t evaporate as they would if the oil went to the surface. The droplets will collect in gills and on the underwater plants. They will coat reefs. They will cause a bloom of oil-eating microbes that will suck the oxygen out of the water.

Invest 90 is first out of the gate for the 2010 Hurricane Season. If it spins up it will be called Alex.

At 7PM CDT it was located at 24.9N 73.3W, about 500 miles East of Port St. Lucie, Florida, with 25mph winds and a pressure of 1011↓.

The models have no agreement on a path, but it’s observed movement is generally Southwest.

Elsewhere in the tropics the El Niño has faded and a La Niña may be building, which is not good news for the Atlantic, but welcome news for the Southern Hemisphere.

There is an “interesting” weather pattern in the Caribbean near the Yucatan Peninsula, that will have to be watched.

If either of these gets into the Gulf, the yogurt could get very high, very quickly and have a hydrocarbon tang.

According to MSNBC Rand Paul: Obama BP criticism ‘un-American’

WASHINGTON – Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul said Friday that President Barack Obama’s criticism of BP in the wake of the Gulf oil debacle sounds “really un-American.”

Tell you what, Rand, why don’t you start staging photo ops with Don Blankenship, of Massey Energy, and see how many votes that gets you in coal country. Since you obviously know nothing about the Well from Hell, maybe you should take a large dose of STFU, and talk about diseases of the eye.

The New York Times noticed something that has been obvious: Conflict-of-interest fears raised in oil spill tests

Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex. He opted instead to get a waiver so he could send his county’s samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.

Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.

“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.”

I guarantee you that people in the Escambia County government have more than a layman’s knowledge of “conflict of interest” and they have the court records from the trials of local officials to prove it. It is a given that you don’t let the suspect gather the evidence. BP controls all of the record keeping and evaluation of evidence in the incident if locals just go along.

As McClatchy noted Low estimate of oil spill’s size could save BP millions in court. This is all about the court cases, and BP wants all of the evidence “shaded” in their favor. If BP is the largest client of the companies that are collecting the data, who do you think will get the “benefit of doubt” as the data is collected?

Obviously television really sucks because the one thing that everyone wants to watch is clouds of oil billowing out of a pipe a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

The House server went down early, with the Senate not lasting much longer. CNN had to take it down. Al.com can’t keep up. In all I’ve been to almost 10 places that are trying to host it, and none of them can keep up.

Given that the networks are previewing their fall line-ups, things look a bit grim in the media industry.

Some of you may have experienced problems getting here yesterday. My host was experiencing a very weird problem that was slowing things down. They are working like crazy to find the cause. but at this point, based on their feedback, it could be hardware or software or both, and it isn’t consistent,

I apologize for any inconvenience, and my condolences to the families of the guys working on it, because they will be miserable to live with until they know what happened and how to stop it from happening again.

The Furry Catpillager

What plant?

[Editor: Adolf is one of our local garden pests.]

Friday Ark

If you are unclear as to why something happened it is usually helpful to summarize the major events in a time-line. While the preceding event may have no causal effect, it is certain that anything that occurred later definitely didn’t cause earlier events.

All times are in Central Daylight Savings time, the local time for the Deepwater Horizon.

1:00AM – Halliburton finishes its cementing of the well.

8:20AM – the supply ship Damon B. Bankston arrives at the Deepwater Horizon

11:00AM – a Schlumberger team that was to test the cementing is sent back to land without testing.

1:17PM – the process of pumping the heavy mud out of the well to the Bankston begins.

5:00PM – Halliburton informs BP that pressure is building up in the well.

5:17PM – the transfer of the mud stops.

9:00PM – the Bankston is told to expect more mud.

9:45?PM – mud droplets are raining down on the Bankston, and they are told to cast off and stand by.

9:53PM – the Deepwater Horizon is engulfed in flame.

BP spent a lot of money to have a Schlumberger team on stand-by for two days to perform a thorough test of the cementing, and then sent them back to land without doing it.

Just over twelve hours after the cementing was finished, BP started to pump out the heavy mud that was balancing the well pressure.

When the well pressure increased, BP stopped taking mud out, but didn’t pump any back in to balance the pressure. They depended on cement that had been curing for 16 hours.