Posts from — May 2010

PBS has updated their Leak Meter again. As they explain, since BP is now, in fact, recovering 5,000 barrels per day with their tube, and the live video showing not much in the way of an impact on the oil coming out of the broken pipe, the minimum on the Leak Meter has been raised to 25,000 barrels per day [1,050,000 gallons/day].

BP now says they don’t know how much oil is coming from the well, but we know that BP lies and the US government swears to it.

Once again, since they stopped mucking about with the BOP, what exactly has BP done that would stop the oil from gushing out of the ground? All of their actions have been geared towards getting refinery-ready crude into a tanker.

So, that number might be a bit low, by about 120 million gallons, but who’s counting, certainly not the US government.

The AP is reporting that BP is capturing 210,000 gallons/day with its tube. I think AP has confused the report that BP thinks that 210K is the maximum capacity of the tube. That is 5,000 barrels, and supposedly the amount of oil gushing from the Well from Hell.

Note that the Leak Meter has been adjusted to account for BP’s claims about diverting oil.

Of course we would know if we could watch the spill. The Times-Picayune reports on that possibility: Live feed of BP oil spill in Gulf will be posted on congressman’s website

After a demand from Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., for a live feed of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to be made publicly available on the web, BP officials said they would release the feed and it will be shown shown on Markey’s committee website at www.globalwarming.house.gov.

Don’t hold your breath while waiting for it, because, while the T-P thought it would be available on Tuesday, it still wasn’t there this morning. [update: Spillcam has a URI now, but it seems overloaded at the moment.]

The New York Times says that Scientists Fault U.S. Response in Assessing Gulf Oil Spill

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean.

What a surprise, the Obama administration has done little to repair the damage of the Hedgemony to agencies that are involved in science that doesn’t go boom and kill people. There has been no major shift to depoliticize the government agencies, and many Bush appointees are still in place.

The US government lacks the capability to monitor what is happening in the Gulf. The Navy is down to one Deep Submersible Vehicle and it is classified. Woods Hole has the Alvin which was built for the Navy and then retired to Woods Hole. Alvin is what is available and, if you can find a vessel capable of launching and recovering it, it fits in a C-5 for rapid transport.

It’s time for people to come to grips with the reality that the Hedgemony has transformed the US government into a “can’t do” organization in regards to anything but the military, and the military isn’t in such great shape. This is what the taxpayers received for the trillions in deficits that the Republicans spent.

Rick at the Independent News has an open letter from Chasidy Fisher Hobbs, Coastkeeper of the local Emerald Coastkeeper, Inc., a coastal environmental group. Apparently there have been angry words exchanged over the fact that the beaches aren’t covered in oil, and accusations of over-reaction.

It is pointed out that we don’t know what is going on, and the “facts” keep changing. We have a surface spill the size of New Jersey in the Gulf, and Bob only knows how much oil beneath the surface that could show up anywhere along the Gulf Coast from Texas to the Keys.

Rick also noted that Escambia County finally decided that it should start testing the water: Official statement on Water Quality

The plan is to take one sample on Pensacola Beach and the following week take a sample from Perdido Key and return to Pensacola Beach the following week and so forth as we proceed through the summer and fall season.

They understand that they are going to have to find the money to do the testing so they can say the water is safe to swim in, otherwise people are not going to accept assurances that you can go to beach. A lack of money is really hampering local efforts, and it takes forever to get approvals. BP is proving to be not unlike FEMA after Katrina.

McClatchy reports that Gulf oil spill may be 19 times bigger than originally thought

Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., earlier this month made simple calculations from a single video BP released on May 12 and calculated a flow of 70,000 barrels a day, NPR reported last week.

On Wednesday, Wereley told a House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee that his calculations of two leaks that are on videos BP released on Tuesday showed 70,000 barrels from one leak and 25,000 from the other.

Congress is asking the right questions, and seems ready to demand some answers, while the Executive just defers to BP.

The other big question was: does size matter? To which all of the scientists responded, of course it matters. You can’t formulate a solution, if you don’t know the extent of the problem. For example, if you know the size of the pipe and the volume of the output for a given time period, you can calculate the pressure.

BP says it is calculating the flow from the surface area of the spill, at the same time it is dumping massive amounts of dispersant into the flow to prevent it from getting to the surface, so it obviously knows it is lying.

The Mississippi Press reports that BP told feds it could handle oil spill 60 times larger than Deepwater Horizon. Looking at BP’s submission in the article I was reminded of a well-known Sidney Harris New Yorker cartoon. The Feds accepted a plan that essentially says “a miracle will happen” to deal with it.

Lots of stuff on clean-up, but nothing on stopping the oil from gushing out of the ground.

Thanks to years of anti-science bias by Republicans and Blue Dogs, NOAA says many maps key to oil cleanup are outdated. NOAA hasn’t been adequately funded for years, and is less capable than in was in the 1990s. In an era of GPS and satellite imaging, NOAA has maps that haven’t been updated for a decade because they haven’t had the money to do it. We have fewer weather radars, fewer weather offices, and fewer weather radio stations, because Congress has been cutting NOAA funding and preventive maintenance has been canceled.

The Coast Guard has also lost ground:

WASHINGTON — The massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill is growing despite BP’s effort to siphon some of the spewing crude from its ruptured deepwater well, the U.S. Coast Guard official leading the cleanup warned Tuesday.

BP doubled its estimate of the amount of crude being captured by a mile-long recovery tube to 2,000 barrels per day — but what percentage of the spill that is remains uncertain. BP has said it thinks that 5,000 barrels of crude a day are leaking from the well, but some scientists have said the figure could be 10 times greater or more, and a video made public Tuesday after the tube was placed inside the broken pipe shows clouds of crude oil still billowing into the sea.

Meanwhile BP is keeping data secret

WASHINGTON — BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers’ exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say that data is crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe.

Moreover, the company isn’t monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in gulf.

BP’s role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.

CBS ran into BP’s secrecy effort: Heavy Sludge Oozes into Marshes of Louisiana

CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports it’s an ominous sight. The oil is thick and black and stretches about a quarter mile down a beach. It goes beyond the booms into the sensitive marsh lands which are home to migratory birds.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal flew over it Tuesday.

“This wasn’t just sheen, we were seeing heavy oil out there,” Jindal said. “This wasn’t just tar balls. It shows you how quick the oil showed up.”

When CBS News tried to reach the beach, covered in oil, a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest. Coast Guard officials said they are looking into the incident.

The US Coast Guard is threatening to arrest US media for covering the pollution of US wetlands by a British corporation. Think about it.

While the tar balls on Key West came from somewhere else, the Oily brown pelican found in Destin came from the gusher. For those who don’t know, Destin is a coastal town in Okaloosa County very near the Walton County line.

Have some “oil” humor with a Joel Pett cartoon. He’s based in Kentucky, and he gets it.

McClatchy says that Tar balls, new forecast raise fears oil spill reaching Florida

KEY WEST, Fla. — Park rangers discovered 20 “tar balls” on a Key West shore and spotted oil residue farther west in the Dry Tortugas Tuesday, stirring fear that the first sign of the massive BP oil spill had washed up on a Florida shore.

NOAA and the Coast Guard say “don’t worry, be happy, this doesn’t prove anything” to avoid getting into a screaming match with BP lawyers. The problem is that BP will use any excuse to slow down court cases and to cast doubt, which is why no one is going to say anything until they have evidence that can be introduced in court to support their statement.

McClatchy also announced that Bill Nelson, my generally useless Democratic Senator [as opposed to my totally useless Republican Senator] has teamed up with Barbara Boxer and “convinced” BP to release more video – Gulf oil spill videos: See all four views released Tuesday.

Of special interest are the third and fourth videos as they represent the same leak, but number three was before the tube was inserted, while four is after. You can see the huge difference the tube makes… well, maybe if you squint… try inverting your screen…

In other news, Robot subs deployed in search for oil under gulf’s surface

MANATEE, Fla. — Scientists at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium on Monday were in the process of launching the first of three torpedo-shaped robots equipped to hunt for oil underwater in the Gulf of Mexico.

The robots, measuring about six feet long and with little wings, have in the past been used to search for red tide, but now will be hunting for oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to Gary Kirkpatrick, a Mote senior scientist.

Monday, Mote was in the process of launching one called “RU22.” It is on loan from Rutgers University, he said.

Its findings will be reported to the U.S. Coast Guard, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which are tracking oil spilled from the runaway Deepwater Horizon oil well.

In addition to oil, the instruments are designed to look for the dispersants that BP is using, because it is also a dangerous chemical. The microsubs are semi-autonomous, not remotely operated. If you are a Florida car owner you can support Mote by buying the “Reef” license plate.

As Rick Outzen reports on BP’s gift for Florida’s media buy:

BP is giving Florida $25 million for advertising —the same amount it gave the state to help local governments fund their preparations for the BP Oil Spill. Am I the only one who sees the games being played here?

The ads will minimize the risks and help BP in its defense against government fines and lawsuits. It won’t help counties that are depleting their cash reserves.

Before the state’s tourism machine starts buying those ads, they should check the news, because the Coast Guard News [not officially associated with the US Coast Guard] reports Coast Guard Responds to tar balls in Key West. I checked and the major news organizations have confirmed the report.

The surface oil may have just reached the Loop, but it looks like some of the mass of oil that is below the surface has been in the Loop for days. Of course these tar balls could be from any of thousands of wells in the Gulf or a crude oil tanker, as readily as from the Well from Hell that is spewing thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf every day, which is why we have to wait on tests.

The Panhandle has a little less to worry about today because they have screwed around so long that the oil is headed into the Loop Current, which means that Florida’s reef system, the Keys, and the Atlantic Coast are now in danger from the oil.

Because it is so significant to Gulf hurricanes, those of us who track the storms are familiar with the Loop. It is a warm water current and deep which is like a gas station for hurricanes. The Weather Underground has a primer on the current, which becomes the Gulf Stream after passing through the Florida Strait.

Today’s NASA image of the oil spill makes it rather obvious that oil is being sucked into the Loop. Dr Jeff Masters agrees: Oil enters the Loop Current and is headed to the Florida Keys.

This spill is large enough that it can destroy the state’s barrier reef, with plenty available to destroy Louisiana’s wet lands. I guess South Carolina will have to cancel those ads talking about Myrtle Beach being “oil free”, as there is no guarantee for any coastal area from the Gulf to Great Britain that borders on the Gulf Stream.

Looking at Alan Bowman’s modules via Elayne, I was planning to put up the “Fish” with a black background.  Badtux has the penguin module running in his sidebar.

When I watched the resource use during preview I decided against it.  No need to take up bandwidth telling people what they already know – that oil well is poisoning the Gulf.

The BBC records the official US response to BP’s success in putting the tube in place: US says BP move to curb oil leak ‘no solution’

… a joint statement by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said the latest technique was “not a solution to the problem and it is not yet clear how successful it may be”.

It added: “We will not rest until BP permanently seals the well head, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole.”

There is standard military shorthand for that sort of statement: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over!

As a professionally suspicious person for years, I wonder if BP’s legal case may be altered if this is a “proven well”, rather than an “exploratory well”? Is there some advantage gained by BP on its balance sheet? Everything they have done is designed to capture a significant amount of oil in a tanker on the surface, not to stop the flow.

The manifold that will be used to inject the “junk” to plug the BOP was in place from the beginning and I would assume that the “kill mud” to pump into the well on the follow up is readily available, as is the cement to seal it. So what has been the point of these containment structures and the tube? They cut the pipe and installed a plug to block the third leak, so why not move down the pipe and take care of the second leak the same way?

There has to be a reason for why they are doing things this way.

You may notice that the Hurricane sites have shown up on the Right Sidebar although the season doesn’t officially kick-off for another couple of weeks.

There is the possibility of a tropical event forming this week, off the Yucatan Peninsula. That would certainly make activities interesting at the drilling site.

The first name for this year is Alex.

I have three versions of what BP has finally managed to accomplish below the fold. I considered including the AP version, but you can get BP press releases at a lot of places, so why give the AP a link for their version?

My take is that while this “tool” will suck up some gas and oil and reduce the amount flowing into the Gulf, it is more about recovering crude to be sent to a refinery than controlling this well. Using a wet-dry vac with a 2-inch hose might slow the rate at which your basement is being flooded by the 6-inch water main, but it isn’t going to stop it.

In case you haven’t noticed the thread in BP’s efforts, they are based on recovering oil, not on stopping the leak. They have been at it for a month and sticking a hose into the riser is the best they could come up with?

[Read more →]

This has been going on for nearly a month and BP is finally managing to make headway in the media coverage through the use of dispersants injected into the oil well below the surface. This means the oil doesn’t make it to the surface, and isn’t providing the media with the “visuals” it feels are necessary to continue covering the story. The oil is still there, but you need cameras under water to see it.

As the Times-Picayune reports huge underwater plumes have been found.

Researchers Vernon Asper and Arne Dierks said in Web posts that the plumes were “perhaps due to the deep injection of dispersants which BP has stated that they are conducting.”

These plumes are not benign, they are consuming the oxygen in the water which kills everything in that water. But since people can’t see lakes of oil at the surface, they assume there is no problem.

April M. Havens’s Mississippi Press report shows the “official” reaction:

While [Mississippi Lieutenant Governor Phil] Bryant has heard reports of crude oil-related odors, “I don’t know how that is a great issue,” he said.

“If we see the oil, if we have tar balls, that’s what I’m concentrated on,” he said. “An odor of petroleum might not be something you want to detect, but that is not at my top list of concerns.”

Bryant said he chose to use the opportunity to promote tourism because of the topic and nature of the conference.

“At the same time I’m encouraging tourism, I’m also in meetings with engineers with BP,” he said, noting he tries to strike a balance between preparedness and overreaction.

“I don’t think were sugarcoating this, and we don’t have a Pollyanna expectation,” he said. “But when you’re in a position of responsibility, the last thing you want to do is let fear dictate your decisions.”

Bryant is using the lack of visible oil to downplay the real problem in the Gulf which would hurt his chances to eat from the corporate trough.

Of course, Bryant wouldn’t want the people of Mississippi to think he isn’t ready to burn the US Constitution if someone says “Allah” in public. Part of being a Republican is knowing which paranoid fantasies you should promote, and which real problems you should ignore.

The Times-Picayune has a good article on the tiniest victims of the gusher. While the article focuses on the marshes, if you lose the single-celled life in the Gulf, nothing above it on the food chain can survive.

The Pensacola News Journal has an AP article that asks the question: Oil spill size: How much and does it matter?

Consider: if you have a billion gallons of fresh drinking water and more than 5 gallons of benzene is accidentally spilled into it, it isn’t safe to drink, according to the EPA. Among the many things coming out of that well is benzene.

Consider: methane is one of the worst of the greenhouse gases, and that well is venting huge amounts of methane.

In another AP article we hear from President Obama:

President Barack Obama addressed the issue Friday. “I know there have been varying reports over the last few days about how large the leak is,” he said, “but since no one can get down there in person, we know there is a level of uncertainty.”

We have the submersibles and the instruments to accurately measure the flow from that leak, but but BP and, apparently the White House, don’t want people to know how bad it is. The scientists making the new estimates are basing those estimates on video that the White House has had for weeks. Where exactly does he think that video came from – a sound stage?

Then you have this on MSNBC – BP oil chief: Don’t ban deep-water drilling

HAMMOND, La. – BP’s chief executive has spoken out against a ban on deep-water oil exploration following the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Tony Hayward, speaking to BBC radio, said the problems which affected the Apollo 13 moon mission had not resulted in the space program being halted and plane crashes did not stop people flying.

That set mild-mannered university professor Juan Cole off: BP Trashes Apollo Astronauts, Parrots Sarah Palin; Oil Godzilla heads for Coast

I would note that the only thing lost by the Apollo 13 mission was its moon landing. Eleven people died on the Deepwater Horizon and the people around the Gulf of Mexico are losing their livelihoods during a major economic disaster. The goal of the Apollo missions was scientific knowledge; the goal of Gulf drilling is corporate profits.

McClatchy has an article on the Republican response to the Democratic proposal to raise the cap on liability for an oil spill from $75 million to $10 billion. The Republicans want the cap to be set at one year’s profits.

My suggestion is that we act like capitalists and let the market and courts decide by removing the cap altogether. Limiting liability with a cap is handcuffing the “invisible hand”.  I want Hayward and the rest living under bridges and eating at soup kitchens.  I want them to experience the poverty their actions have caused.

They screwed up the blowout preventer, so it didn’t work. [Strike One!]

They made no provision for hydrate formation in their containment vessel. [Strike Two!]

And now McClatchy reports that BP’s latest bid to cap Gulf oil leak fails

MIAMI — BP failed Saturday to thread a mile-long tube into the broken pipe spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but officials said efforts to break up the oil underwater seemed to be working.

The Environmental Protection Agency gave BP the go-ahead on Saturday to use dispersants, chemicals that break the oil into small droplets and keep it from rising to the surface.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said. “The oil in the vicinity of the well is diminished from previous observations.”

Isn’t that peachy. Because of the dispersants the oil doesn’t come to the surface where it can be contained by booms and skimmed off or burnt. it is emulsifying so it can flow under the booms into the wetlands and kill even more fish, and other sea creatures.