Saturday, May 29, 2010

So Much For the "Top Kill"

BP's "Top Kill" hasn't worked out as advertised.

I am not an engineer, I just play one in the "Blogsphere"...

Just kidding.

No, I am not an engineer... but I have contacts in the energy industry that are... and to a man the story was the same - the only possible solution for this situation is the relief well being drilled as we speak... and that will not be ready for at least another 60 to 70 days at a minimum. Problem is, that is not guaranteed to work, either.

So, we are back to my "What If" scenario. What if TPTB cannot get this thing shut in for months or years?

For the BP haters... this could have happened to any major Oil company. The engineers on site made a series of bad decisions - that's what people do on occasion, they make bad decisions. Cops shoot innocent bystanders (bang!), juries send men to prison for life only to find out 30 years later the DNA does not match (oops!), physicians misdiagnose and surgeons leave sponges and spoons inside patients bodies (ouch!), car accidents (crash!), Chernobyl (boom!), unwanted pregnancies (how'd that happen?), bad marriages (love is blind... and marriage is an eye opener).... people make mistakes.

Where this goes from here is anyone's guess.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is what is and it will never change...

We are in this together and there in lies our strength and our weakness...

Good Luck!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydJGWPUT--I

Anonymous said...

According to Matt Simmons, "it's time for BP to move aside and bring in the military, to put a bomb down the hatch. Also for super tankers to move in and begin pumping the oil that's on the bottom, before the storms arrive".

Tough decisions all around. Looks like too many folks asleep at the helm, in all directions.

Seems to me, that we ALL need to cut back on our oil consumption and begin changing our ways of living on this Earth. After all, aren't we ALL guilty in one form or another? I'm hearing this more and more!

Thanks for what you do.

rainman

bureaucrat said...

The Gulf oil continuing spill wasn't quite as innocent as I think you make this out to be. We have three entities: BP, Transocean and Haliburton, every one of them demanding to spend less. A brand-new MBA could have seen the problem with "who is really in charge" quickly erupting (and it did erupt), especially with the time and pressure that oil rig crew was under. Not to mention they had 800+ engineers involved in the drilling and fixing the subsequent blowout.

They gamed the Federal government all along to skip over all the necessary validation of their BP "what if" scenarios -- they muzzled the regulators, who were just as wrong as they were. This was a botched job from beginning to end, because the world demands the oil "be got." A retarded porpoise could have done a better job.

The military has no experience in oil well operations. That would be a double-botch.

Anonymous said...

If the relief drill ( has that every been done? ) is effective THEN,best case is 5000 bpd for 99 days (Apr.21-July29)= 495,000 barrels. Worst case if you go by MSM latest est. 19,000 for 109 days would be 2,071,000 barrels. ( provided the thing stops).

Valdez was 250,000 barrels.

SNAFU


peace

Dan said...

Bur,
There were lots of missteps that compounded on each other, but no malice.

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

Jeff:

My fellow NY'er!

"It is what it is."

Besides the other 3 words on Wall Street "Buy. Sell. F**K!" Those 5 have to be next in line for most common usage.

Thanks. I needed that. It seems I am always the one saying - "Look... it is what it is..."

bureaucrat said...

I gave BP way too much credit ... from Yahoo News ...

"Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, whose district encompasses Grand Isle, told Yahoo! News that BP bused in "hundreds" of temporary workers to clean up local beaches. And as soon as the president was en route back to Washington, the workers were clearing out of Grand Isle too, Roberts said.

"The level of cleanup and cooperation we've gotten from BP in the past is in no way consistent to the effort shown on the island today," Roberts said by telephone. "As soon as the president left, they were immediately put back on the buses and sent home."

bureaucrat said...

Anyone with a shred of common sense knows if you have a pipe sticking out and it breaks with no way of shutting it off, you better take VERY GOOD care not to break off the thing that can stop the roaring oil from coming out. The Iraqi invasion in 1991 showed that when they set the Kuwaiti oil fields all ablaze, and blew up the rigs on top of the wells, there were few ways left to stop the oil from shooting into the sky.

The BP dummies knew they had a special situation in deep, highly pressurized, hot-cold water where there was no margin for error. They pushed that rig's people and had too many cooks running things. They chased away the regulators (my people) via politics. Damn management again.

Gov, Jindal looked like an absolute fool on TV this morning (a Republican who supports business at all costs, and hates the big government he so desperately needs now).

Stephen B. said...

"Gov, Jindal looked like an absolute fool on TV this morning (a Republican who supports business at all costs, and hates the big government he so desperately needs now,)."

I beg your pardon? He needs big government for what exactly, f'ing things up even more?

bureaucrat said...

If you haven't seen Jindal on the news this weekend saying the Federal government needs to either do more or let Jindal/the state do what they need to do (with equipment he'd already be using if the state actually had any emergency equipment ready -- Republicans never believe business can ever do anything wrong, so those states are never prepared for anything).

Both Jindal and the Libertarians are not ready for prime time.

Dan said...

Bur,
Louisiana is the crookedest state in the union, so, of course they will have the most problems. Then on top of that you have the imperial federal government where the feds tax state citizens then turn around and give it back to the states as grants with strings attached. The system is designed to make the states weak and subservient.