Lesson From the Gulf: Stop Drilling

[tekisui]

Source: Boston Globe

WITH THE Deepwater Horizon oil spill getting worse, President Obama should rescind his decision to expand offshore drilling.

For two weeks, the Obama administration has told us that 5,000 barrels of oil were leaking from the exploded BP rig each day. But Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald has said that satellite imagery indicates the leak could be up to five times worse, 26,000 barrels a day. MacDonald told The New York Times, “The government has a responsibility to get good numbers. If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.’’ Comparing the leak to war, MacDonald told the Washington Post, “We’re fighting a battle against this spill, this leak. Any military person knows that good casualty reports are the key to victory.’’

Yesterday, National Public Radio reported numbers worse than that. Steve Wereley, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor, told NPR that his analysis indicated that the spill is anywhere from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. Separate analyses by Timothy Crone of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and by Eugene Chiang, an astrophysics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, largely agreed with Wereley.

Chiang said the spill could be as little as 20,000 barrels, still four times the government estimate but as high as 100,000 barrels a day. In any event, he said the government’s estimate is “almost certainly incorrect.’’

BP, despite its $6.1 billion in profits in just the first quarter of this year, has been saying it has no technical capability to measure the leak, with one executive even claiming, “there’s just no way to measure it.’’ Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution offered to go to the disaster site and measure the oil flow, but said this week that BP told them not to go.

(snip)

Despite Obama’s declaration the mineral agency under his administration, according to the Times, has continued to approve at least 346 drilling plans without permits from agencies that assess environmental impacts. It has issued at least five final drilling permits in the Gulf since last week. This is an environmental disaster and a governmental process so out of control that it mandates an offshore drilling moratorium by Obama. Anything less shows that we are nowhere beyond petroleum.

more: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/15/lesson_from_the_gulf_stop_drilling/


more: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/15/lesson_from_the_gulf_stop_drilling/

[Go2Peace]

1. Not all drilling, but definitely deep well drilling. Risking our oceans is not acceptable

I don't care what kind of new "safeguard" measures might be implemented. Until they can guarantee 100% that this will not happen again we should not drill those holes. Period.

Playing the statistics game with such high stakes. Some things are too important to chance. Imagine taking a 5% chance with your loved one's life. For what amount of money would you do that (and if you would you are one sick individual).

I guarantee that there is a greater than 5% likelihood of one of these deep wells having a major spill if we drill them for 20 years. Why is that acceptable? Maybe because we have become convinced to gamble with our natural heritage? How did we get to that point?

And if we are to that point, doesn't that make us a little bit like the corporate execs we complain about? Do we have our own price point at which we are willing to gamble other people's lives and risk whole regions of the ocean?

Our values are breaking down little by little. It takes less and less to get us to compromise what should be uncompromisable. We need to recognize that.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. I'm not a friend of oil but hardly any other country has problems

I begin to wonder whether the rig in the Gulf was sabotaged?

[karynnj]

3. From some articles, at least some countries have more stringent regulation

It was mentioned that Norway requires a type of remote shutoff provision that the US said was not needed because it was too costly. In addition, reports are that the companies did measure the build up of methane and knew something was wrong, but did not act (may be because they didn't know how) to deal with it.

[ljm2002]

6. Sabotage is very unlikely at those depths...

...unless you think the crew on the Deepwater Horizon were involved, which seems even more unlikely given that they would be endangering themselves.

Of course there have been other blowouts such as the one in Australia last year:

Huge Australian Oil Spill Raises Questions

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/04/eveningnews/main5527406.shtml

The question is one of risk. It may be true that 99% of rigs never experience this kind of a blowout. The problem is the catastrophic nature of the 1% that do. When assessing risks, one must always take into account the worst-case scenario. You cannot base all planning on the most likely scenario, which is what BP did, basically believing their own hype that the likelihood of a disaster was vanishingly small. Oops. Worse, they claimed to have plans in place to deal with a disaster. Now it turns out they haven't a clue how to do that. So why in the hell are they drilling at those depths when they cannot contain it when something goes wrong?

Well nothing like questions after the fact.

[csziggy]

7. Does any one know what percentage of the blowouts or problems

Were wells that Halliburton or Transocean were involved with? If they have a pattern of being less stringent with their procedures, they should not be allowed to work with deep wells.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

8. yes, Halliburton and Transocean should be banned

[tekisui]

10. Quest for oil leaves trail of damage across the globe

No one's tallied the damage worldwide, but it includes at least 200 square miles of ruined wildlife habitat in Alberta, more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater spilled into the rainforests of Ecuador and a parade of purple-black oil slicks that skim across Africa's Niger Delta, where more than 2,000 polluted sites are estimated to need cleaning up.

"The Gulf spill can be seen as a picture of what happens in the oil fields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa," Nnimmo Bassey, a human rights activist and the head of Environmental Rights Action, the Nigeria chapter of Friends of the Earth, said in an e-mail.

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the USA," Bassey added. "In Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments."

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/16/94126/quest-for-oil-leaves-trail-of.html#ixzz0o6LEq0YA

[HughMoran]

4. ...at least until they can prove that they know how to deal with accidents

I don't think any more drilling should be permitted until they know what the fuck they are doing. No more hair-brained schemes after the fact.

Edit: oh, and they need to require the acoustic safety valve - the blow-off preventer clearly doesn't work.

[VMI Dem]

5. I think a big check from the oil industry will do all the talking.

[disndat]

11. Agree absolutely. nt.

[Forkboy]

9. Kick

Jackson is one of the best editorial writers out there. Always a good read.

[IndianaGreen]

12. BP is lying, and the government knows it

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hp

[tekisui]

13. I think the dispersants sole purpose is PR.

Break it up and keep it below the surface. Each make it harder to photograph and present images to the public.

Those who argue that a more accurate estimate is irrelevant are only protecting BP and the government. BP has 7-8 live camera feeds on the leak at all times. They could easily release some more recent images and other over various times. If there was any lessening in the flow, I am sure they would make that evidence public.