Oil

jburd641

Explorer
Jan 16, 2008
410
22
Port Charlotte, Fl.
As far as this movement to boycott BP, thats an emotional reaction to the problem. The only thing that will be hurt by doing that is to cause the independent BP station owner to suffer.

This is a shame for the small retailer. The problem for most Americans is this is a disaster that we can't really do anything about. Natural disasters are something we deal with quite well. We react with saddness and horror but this causes anger. We need something to lash out at because, rightfully so, we know this didn't have to happen.
I know it's tough on the little guy but I can't look at that logo without anger. I won't donate this time either. BP needs to dig deep and pay up.
 

MarkBNJ

Piney
Jun 17, 2007
1,875
73
Long Valley, NJ
www.markbetz.net
I don't agree at all with correlating citizens consumption of oil with BP's shortcuts in its grand haste for profit. While many Americans remain oblivious to environmental concerns and continue to use the gas guzzler as transportation, it is still BP that bypassed safety standards, and handed out pay-outs to pass safety test. For a company that makes tens of billions of dollars yearly it is criminal to not follow as strict guidlines as they can. The profit would have fallen only slightly to follow stricter guidelines and ultimately saved the planet from an event that may well take on pandemic effects.

The problem with this is that you imply there is a standard, safe way to drill for oil at that depth, and that if BP had only followed "safety guidelines" none of this would have happened. That isn't true. Why are they out there drilling for oil at those depths? Like most Americans, you want your oil and no risks and I have to tell you, all the low-risk oil is pretty much gone.
 

46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
8,837
2,143
Coastal NJ
Why are they out there drilling for oil at those depths? Like most Americans, you want your oil and no risks and I have to tell you, all the low-risk oil is pretty much gone.

Not really. There are sizeable reserves on land and in shallow water locations, but those have been closed to drilling, about 85% worth, and are not even mentioned on the MMS web site. Everything is OCS. Just politics as usual.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Total_oil_mean_08_0001.png
 

Piney Boy

Explorer
Sep 19, 2005
365
1
Williamstown, NJ
The problem with this is that you imply there is a standard, safe way to drill for oil at that depth, and that if BP had only followed "safety guidelines" none of this would have happened. That isn't true. Why are they out there drilling for oil at those depths? Like most Americans, you want your oil and no risks and I have to tell you, all the low-risk oil is pretty much gone.

Mark,

I really don't think you know me well enough to state "how I want my oil..." I have driven a four cylinder for well over over a decade and taken public transportation for a similar time frame. I've taught leave no trace & minimization of carbon footprint classes and worked on Katrina cleanup crews. Working for America has been the driving force of my adult life, and part of that mission includes protecting cultural and natural resources. Never assume you know someone from a simple online post. Futher, your implications extend well beyond what I posted in the first place.
I have no illusions thinking deep sea drilling is easy or low risk. Safety Guidelines are just that, guidelines. However, all indications are that this accident occured because of lax maintenance on BP's part, which failed to function when needed. It also appears some regulatory officials looked the other way because of BP "gifts." All who are caught up in this web should be punished. My original point being that any individuals consumptions, even if its over indulgence and wasteful, is in no way correlated with this tragic event. Not one single American caused BP to skimp on maintenance for the sake of money, nor did they bribe public officals to look the other way.
 

mudboy dave

Explorer
Oct 15, 2008
950
19
42
atco
opentrailsnj.org
While many Americans remain oblivious to environmental concerns and continue to use the gas guzzler as transportation, i.

Even though I drive a Saturn right now which gets 36 mpg on the average (gas is to expensive). I'm one of those that will continue to use guzzlers. It's my hobby, I love old cars and trucks and feel safer in them than my saturn. My families saftey is alot more important than fuel effiency. I can't wait to get another 79 ford so i can convert it over to a chevy drivetrain and when I do its gonna be a 496 getting at tops 3 mpg. but at the same time I'll still have a treetable motor at about 700 hp.:D
 

Piney Boy

Explorer
Sep 19, 2005
365
1
Williamstown, NJ
Even though I drive a Saturn right now which gets 36 mpg on the average (gas is to expensive). I'm one of those that will continue to use guzzlers. It's my hobby, I love old cars and trucks and feel safer in them than my saturn. My families saftey is alot more important than fuel effiency. I can't wait to get another 79 ford so i can convert it over to a chevy drivetrain and when I do its gonna be a 496 getting at tops 3 mpg. but at the same time I'll still have a treetable motor at about 700 hp.:D

Different strokes and all that Dave :D. Living in a free society lets us all make up our own minds, and environmental sustainability goes beyond the cars we drive. All any of us can do is try and live what we feel is the right life for each of us.
 

MarkBNJ

Piney
Jun 17, 2007
1,875
73
Long Valley, NJ
www.markbetz.net
Mark,

I really don't think you know me well enough to state "how I want my oil..." I have driven a four cylinder for well over over a decade and taken public transportation for a similar time frame. I've taught leave no trace & minimization of carbon footprint classes and worked on Katrina cleanup crews. Working for America has been the driving force of my adult life, and part of that mission includes protecting cultural and natural resources. Never assume you know someone from a simple online post. Futher, your implications extend well beyond what I posted in the first place.
I have no illusions thinking deep sea drilling is easy or low risk. Safety Guidelines are just that, guidelines. However, all indications are that this accident occured because of lax maintenance on BP's part, which failed to function when needed. It also appears some regulatory officials looked the other way because of BP "gifts." All who are caught up in this web should be punished. My original point being that any individuals consumptions, even if its over indulgence and wasteful, is in no way correlated with this tragic event. Not one single American caused BP to skimp on maintenance for the sake of money, nor did they bribe public officals to look the other way.

There has been no official conclusion that lax maintenance caused the accident, just a lot of speculation in the press. There has been some evidence put forth that the chain of command on the rig was not clear enough, and that the experienced drillers disagreed with the "company man" who was overseeing the job as to the real risks of the gas buildup. That sort of thing happens all the time, unfortunately, and it doesn't necessarily indict BP as a company. The only way to ensure that accidents like this don't occur is to forgo drilling in places like that. Drilling in places like that is very risky, and the ROI on the investment is far from certain, and the only reason they are doing it is the price of oil is very high. The price of oil is very high because the commodity is becoming rarer and demand is rising. Demand is rising because we global consumers want all the benefits of petroleum regardless of where it comes from. So I'll stand by my point.
 

Piney Boy

Explorer
Sep 19, 2005
365
1
Williamstown, NJ
This article from the AP shows some of the downright disgraceful actions that have come to light with BP’s disaster response plan. For me, this reads like a devils resume of ineptitude. America, and the world, deserve much better.
AP IMPACT: BP spill response plans severely flawed
VENICE, La. — Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.
Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.
The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.
BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.
"BP Exploration and Production Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan," the oil giant stated in its Deepwater Horizon plan.
In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.
Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., says there are "3,000 acres (of wetlands) where life as we know it is dead, and we continue to lose precious marshland every day."
There are other wildly false assumptions. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume based on the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.
The Gulf's loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida's southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn't mentioned in either plan.
The website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp. — one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill — links to a defunct Japanese-language page.
In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds will be cleansed of oil.
And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn't apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the response.
This week, after BP reported the seemingly good news that a containment cap installed on the wellhead was funneling some of the gushing crude to a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new new set of plans mostly aimed at capturing more oil.
The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cap, using a special incinerator to burn off some of the recaptured oil and bringing in a floating platform to process the oil being sucked away from the gushing well.
In other words, the on-the-fly planning continues.
Some examples of how BP's plans have fallen short:
_ Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore — a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.
"The vessels in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively," one of the documents says.
BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks — and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between.
The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.
_ BP's site plan regarding birds, sea turtles or endangered marine mammals ("no adverse impacts") also have proved far too optimistic.
While the exact toll on the Gulf's wildlife may never be known, the effects clearly have been devastating.
More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.
In Louisiana's Barataria Bay, a dead sea turtle caked in reddish-brown oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins also have washed ashore. So have countless fish.
There weren't supposed to be any coastline problems because the site was far offshore. "Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected," the site plan says.
But that distance has failed to protect precious resources. And last week, a group of environmental research center scientists released a computer model that suggested oil could ride ocean currents around Florida and up to North Carolina by summer.
_ Perhaps the starkest example of BP's planning failures: The company has insisted that the size of the leak doesn't matter because it has been reacting to a worst-case scenario all along.
Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak has grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble — to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.
___
While a disaster as devastating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can't be solved in advance, or even foreseen, BP's plans do not anticipate even the most obvious issues, and use mountains of words to dismiss problems that have proven overwhelming.
In responses to lengthy lists of questions from AP, officials for BP and the Interior Department, which oversees oil rig regulator Minerals Management Service, appear to concede there were problems with the two oil spill response plans.
"Many of the questions you raise are exactly those questions that will be examined and answered by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into BP's oil spill," said Kendra Barkoff, spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. She added that Salazar has undertaken transformational reforms of MMS.
Said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo from Robert, La.: "We expect that a complete review of the regional response plans and planning process will take place as part of the overall incident investigation so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. Thus far we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us much to learn from."
A key failure of the plan's cleanup provisions was the scarcity of boom — floating lines of plastic or absorbent material placed around sensitive areas to deflect oil.
From the start, local officials all along the Gulf Coast have complained about a lack of supplies, particularly the heavier, so-called ocean boom. But even BP says in its regional plan that boom isn't effective in seas more than three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often bigger. And even in calmer waters, oil has swamped vital wildlife breeding grounds in places supposedly sequestered by multiple layers of boom.
The BP plans speak of thorough resources for all; there's no talk of a need to share. Still, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said his shores were left vulnerable by Coast Guard decisions to shift boom to Louisiana when the oil threatened landfall there.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser and others have complained that miles of the boom now in the water were not properly anchored. AP reporters saw evidence he was right — some lines of boom were so broken up they hardly impeded the slick's push to shore.
Some out-of-state contractors who didn't know local waters placed boom where tides and currents made sure it didn't work properly. And yet disorganization has dogged efforts to use local boats. In Venice, La., near where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, a large group of charter captains have been known to spend their days sitting around at the marina, earning $2,000 a day without ever attacking the oil.
But perhaps the most glaring error in BP's plans involves Lutz, the professor, one of several dozen experts recommended as resources to be contacted in the event of a spill.
Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published.
 

mudboy dave

Explorer
Oct 15, 2008
950
19
42
atco
opentrailsnj.org
Heres what I find "funny" about the whole deal, it can be brought down to very minimum by crimping the freaking pipe with the hydraulic shears that were down there. wonder why it hasn't been done yet?
 

46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
8,837
2,143
Coastal NJ
Heres what I find "funny" about the whole deal, it can be brought down to very minimum by crimping the freaking pipe with the hydraulic shears that were down there. wonder why it hasn't been done yet?

The pressure within the pipe is 6200psi, pressure in the shallow water wells is around 80psi. It would probably just blow out somewhere else. This will probably end when the oil is all expended.
 

mudboy dave

Explorer
Oct 15, 2008
950
19
42
atco
opentrailsnj.org
The pressure within the pipe is 6200psi, pressure in the shallow water wells is around 80psi. It would probably just blow out somewhere else. This will probably end when the oil is all expended.
It would take less that an hour to try. I still think teh US government is either A) too stupid or B) wants the oil.
 

bobpbx

Piney
Staff member
Oct 25, 2002
14,153
4,257
Pines; Bamber area
It would take less that an hour to try. I still think teh US government is either A) too stupid or B) wants the oil.

Dave....come on....please. As I read all these comments, I see people in two separate and often distinct camps; those that blame the government, and those that blame BP. This is natural....and probably somewhat helpful to air all the dirty laundry, but both (a) and (b) above are the kind of comments I would expect to see on a blog somewhat less sophisticated than this forum.
 

mudboy dave

Explorer
Oct 15, 2008
950
19
42
atco
opentrailsnj.org
Dave....come on....please. As I read all these comments, I see people in two separate and often distinct camps; those that blame the government, and those that blame BP. This is natural....and probably somewhat helpful to air all the dirty laundry, but both (a) and (b) above are the kind of comments I would expect to see on a blog somewhat less sophisticated than this forum.


/i still place the blame on both ,P and Goverment,that it hasn't been dramaticallyslowed down yet. I look at the actual incident happening as "sh*t happens". I honestly believe though that it could be slowed down if people really wanted it to be. I doubt the goverment lacks the knoweledge lile I suggested in A) but I do believe no one wants to loose this oil well. Don't forget,I work in the oil industry and I support petroleum energy, I do however agree that the CEO of BP is a moron. Just as much as I believe that OBama should be down there camped out showing an effort (not playing golf)
 

bobpbx

Piney
Staff member
Oct 25, 2002
14,153
4,257
Pines; Bamber area
/i still place the blame on both ,P and Goverment,that it hasn't been dramaticallyslowed down yet. I look at the actual incident happening as "sh*t happens". I honestly believe though that it could be slowed down if people really wanted it to be. I doubt the goverment lacks the knoweledge lile I suggested in A) but I do believe no one wants to loose this oil well. Don't forget,I work in the oil industry and I support petroleum energy, I do however agree that the CEO of BP is a moron. Just as much as I believe that OBama should be down there camped out showing an effort (not playing golf)

People lean on Obama a bit too much these days, but then call him the Messiah behind his back, which I do realize is done because they think "he" thinks he is one. Well, this spill proves that he is not one....but people who called him that expect him to be one. I saw the survivors of the rig explosion are meeting with him today...which is a little embarrasing because they bad-mouthed him to no end yesterday.

As far as camping out down there....I don't know....I've thought about that too. But, damn, there are many, many grownups down there now doing the coordination.

PS....you say that..."it could be slowed down if people really wanted it to be".....Dave, don't you think that with every fiber in their body that they want to stop this? What are they gaining by keeping it flowing into the gulf? Even that sound bite by the CEO is being overblown and used just to sell the news. I can understand what the guy was saying......he was saying that just to highlight the fact that this is an all-consuming problem, and he is working hard at stopping it.
 

mudboy dave

Explorer
Oct 15, 2008
950
19
42
atco
opentrailsnj.org
People lean on Obama a bit too much these days, but then call him the Messiah behind his back, which I do realize is done because they think "he" thinks he is one. Well, this spill proves that he is not one....but people who called him that expect him to be one. I saw the survivors of the rig explosion are meeting with him today...which is a little embarrasing because they bad-mouthed him to no end yesterday.

As far as camping out down there....I don't know....I've thought about that too. But, damn, there are many, many grownups down there now doing the coordination.

PS....you say that..."it could be slowed down if people really wanted it to be".....Dave, don't you think that with every fiber in their body that they want to stop this? What are they gaining by keeping it flowing into the gulf? Even that sound bite by the CEO is being overblown and used just to sell the news. I can understand what the guy was saying......he was saying that just to highlight the fact that this is an all-consuming problem, and he is working hard at stopping it.


As far as Obama goes, I'm strictly saying this to at least portray the image that he's doing everything he can. Do I think he can do any better than anyone elsee....hell no. They could crimp that pipe, leave still flowing SOME as a pressure relief and this would slow it down until an actual solution comes up. I still believe there are some of the higher ups that don't want it closed off in hopes of claiming some of the oil.
 
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