Gulf Oil Leak Plugged? 611
RobHart writes "The LA Times is reporting that the Gulf oil leak appears to have been plugged by the 'top kill.' 'Thad Allen, who is coordinating the government response, says the well still has low pressure, but cement will be used to cap the well permanently as soon as the pressure hits zero.'"
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
So you hold the CEO personally responsible for this mishap? If that's the case, then I don't think anyone gets to complain about how much money CEOs make.
I mean, if I were the head of BP and every decision that was made pointed directly at me, then I'd for sure want a bajillion dollars a year.
That's a lot of pressure to be under.
I mean, what if that BP truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a family of 4? That's on me, right?
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what Officers and Directors indemnification insurance is for.....
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean, what if that BP truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a family of 4? That's on me, right?
Yes, it is exactly on you. That is supposedly the entire reason CEOs are paid so much. The whole "responsibility" and "buck stops here" thing. What kind of a coward wants to be in charge of everyone, but take no responsibility for anyone?
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends (Score:5, Insightful)
if you had a policy which ignored industry and federal and state and local standards on driver hours per week or hours per day, and it was reasonable to conclude that your policy played a role in the driver falling asleep, then yes.
If, on the other hand, you had a policy which reinforced (or even outdid) the safety procedures, and despite quality employee and contractor screening, despite training, despite good policy, something bad still happened (individual negligence or simply bad luck), then no.
In short, management's role is reducing the likelihood of major disasters. Did they do their job? I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the next few years will include a number of investigations to figure that out.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
Not responsible for the mishap, responsible for the inadequate response. Keeping officials away and not trying to solve the leak *period*, but trying to solve the leak by extracting the oil.
Victory for Obama! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:5000 barrels? (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought the 5000 barrel estimate came from BP, but the article lays it at the feet of the Coast Guard, BP's willing PR lackey,...
There. Fixed that for ya'.
The lack of leadership on the part of the federal government, and the Coast Guard in particular, is a national embarrassment.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually - that's almost exactly it. Right there. If it is shown that this resulted from systemic faults or negligence on the part of BP management, and is something that results from decisions of the "Very High Up" - i.e. safety shortcuts, speed at the expense of safe(er) procedures, known faults with safety equipment and/or a culture of "get it done fast".
Things that management knew about, condoned, encouraged or "looked the other way", then I believe we should hold the CEO and entire personally responsible. That is (one of the many things) that is wrong with corporate culture in the world now. All the profits and percs of a "human" and none of the responsibility. I think if the CEO and board of corporations were held personally responsible then we'd see a lot less screwing of the public. I'm all for that and the "corporate death penalty".
If you were the CEO of said trucking company, and encouraged or looked the other way when your drivers were falsifying log books, driving extra hours, and ignoring the safety concerns of your maintenance contractor, and your tired driver plowed into a shopping mall with a tanker truck of propane because he was tired, then yes I DO hold you responsible. If that's not the case, and the guy was just an idiot or had too many tacos at lunch and got distracted, then no.
I generally consider myself to lean libertarian - but what we have now in the US is too many cases of privatizing profits and socializing losses/screwups - and that to me is the worst of all worlds.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, what if that BP truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a family of 4? That's on me, right?
Yes, it would be, but only if your negligent business decision made the event happen; like demanding an exceedingly long work day, crazy shift work, or revolving door employment.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:2, Insightful)
But the unsucessful "solutions" till this one, and the damage that happened and will still happen for weeks or months because no appropiate measures taken aren't accidents
That's pretty unfair. Do you think you could have come up with a better solution and deployed it in less time than BP did? Do you think it's that easy to cap a failed oil well under 5,000 feet of water?
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an insane amount of engineering that had to go into this. Getting it wrong would have been an even bigger disaster.
For some excellent discussions on all of this, head over to http://theoildrum.com/ [theoildrum.com]
Re:Too early (Score:5, Insightful)
Hindsight can be a cast-iron bitch sometimes.
Re:relief well ... bet on it (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because the relief well doesn't have anything to do with, you know, being a relief well.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
That's pretty unfair. Do you think he's an undersea oil well engineer with the resources of the company the size of BP?
Easy has nothing to do with it. They weren't prepared and got publicly caught with their pants down and little intention of pulling them back up anytime soon. If they can't fix it 5000' maybe they shouldn't be drilling at 5000'.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
So you hold the CEO personally responsible for this mishap? If that's the case, then I don't think anyone gets to complain about how much money CEOs make.
Well, uh, yes? Fact: CEO's make about a bajillion dollars a year, give or take a few million. The job is so cushy that they can run a company into the ground in 6 months, and still retire in luxury after getting fired. Right now, the risk is exclusively carried by worker bees who actually do stuff - they're the ones who get hauled in front of a jury when something goes wrong, regardless of what idiotic policies were put into place by the CEO.
I mean, what if that BP truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a family of 4? That's on me, right?
If you put in a policy that mandates overtime, no break on overnight gas trucking and 24 hour driving shifts, then yes, it is on you.
At the very least what needs to happen is that everyone in a position to make executive decisions about how the well is drilled and how the equipment is maintained and monitored needs to be hauled in front of a grand jury to investigate whether there was criminal negligence anywhere, or if there was a knowing disregard of standard safety and accident mitigation procedures. The spill has a chance to cause $1 trillion in damages over its lifetime of existence (the economy tied to the Gulf of Mexico is estimated at $250B), and you're damn straight that I want people in jail for that. They all have the right to due process, but they don't get to cause that much damage and then simply get off by saying "shit happens". No it doesn't, especially not if numbers like that are involved.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Thank God (Score:3, Insightful)
Regulators don't work - the companies just buy them off directly or indirectly.
The only thing that works is accountability.
Of course, they'll buy off the prosecuters too.
Maybe the best thing we can do in cases like this is publish the home address of the individuals responsible and let nature take it's course.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
Well if they can't drill it at 5000', maybe you shouldn't be driving your car?
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course he can. Just like 99% of the general population that thinks that there is some big conspiracy as to why BP's CEO didn't just snap his fingers and have the solution appear at the bottom of the Gulf that instant. BP is going to be rolling in the money thanks to this spill and the cleanup effort!
Re:glad to see this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Victory for Obama! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too early (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it takes a long time to prepare. They did start preparing this right away. It was only ready now.
And relief wells don't collect oil from the same reserve. They intersect the original well and fill it up with mud from the bottom.
Re:Too early (Score:5, Insightful)
guess which one took the longest
I'll take "What is BP had to get permission from the feds" for $500 Alex.
Re:Victory for Obama! (Score:3, Insightful)
I like the quote from yesterday's /. thread... it went something like:
We just had extremely unlucky timing with Louisiana disaster response.
If Obama had been president during Katrina, he would have done everything possible to save those people.
If Bush had been president during the Deep Horizon spill, he would have done everything possible to save that oil.
Props to the originator
Not so bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Now it's plugged with mud. With the flow much reduced, concrete can be put in.
One hurricane season and the mess will be gone. 8 to 14 hurricanes [rigzone.com] are expected in the Atlantic region by the end of the year.
Relief wells will be drilled; after all, there's definitely oil down there. The reservoir will be pumped out.
Everybody will be a lot more serious about blowout preventers.
More equipment for dealing with such problems will be on standby in some Gulf port for decades to come.
No big deal.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can't fix it 5000' maybe they shouldn't be drilling at 5000'.
True. So let them drill in shallower waters. Oh wait...that might ruin someone's "view".
Re:Too early (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporations - all profit, no responsibility. What's not to love, right?
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, right now, CEOs are both highly overpaid and free of responsibility. Which one would you prefer they relinquish?
With great power comes great responsibility... this is the rule I want enforced.
Re:Too early (Score:2, Insightful)
"So why not go straight for the plug and tell everyone what a hero they are for saving the day?"
Because with a diversified huge multinational, there is no such thing lose lose scenario.
They have no urgency to do so. BP, being a diversely investment huge multinational and 4th largest worldwide company, in the medium and long term, is not affected by this one bit whatsoever. A small or large leak would have been villified equally by the environmentalists; at some point the fubar is so bad, people just want it over, and are insensitive to the number of gallons spilled as the story drags on. A large leak with minimum impact would be PR'd one way (which this may be turning into already). If it turned bad, then national policy shifts to other energy investments BP has, which are *more* highly profitable (solar, geothermal, etc.) and far less regulated.
Call me cynical, but the less offshore oil drilling on land which was recently announced, which BP lacks leases on or is threatened with, the more offshore they can do, esp. outside the economic zone of 200 some miles, which BP is one of the leaders in the tech. They may have fubar'd this well, but this will push regulation on land and near offshore drilling, pushing BP to dominate the market further outward.
iow, it increases regulation IN the US economically controlled areas against oil drilling, favors BP's tech for unregulated drilling, and pushes more to the patent portfolio if or when the US implement a more non-oil policy. Prices, in turn, are more controlled by deep water well drilling, and less smaller players get in on the now or soon to be defunct domestic increased drilling agenda. BP has more control of the western market, all they have to do is monitor the output by OPEC and the big companies, of which they are one. The smaller players are eliminated. They don't have the tech or capital to go deep water, and the onshore plans are gutted by the public "outrage."
So while BP has lost about $20 billion at least and about a quarter of their market cap (due to questions of liability), they'll make that up in about 2 quarters at most, and the long term will reap more benefits. They'll gladly exchange half of year of fallout for years of future profit, instead of years of competition from smaller players. The smaller players, don't forget, have a good chance of undercutting the domestic market, and with the US sucking up 20% of the worldwide market for oil, that would have cut into big oil profits significantly.
Note, I'm not saying BP doesn't care about the leak, meaning that I do believe they want to cap it, they didn't have the same urgency whose business is going to be crushed; theirs will actually profit from their own error. But to believe there is a right or wrong when it comes to companies (and governments who stand by) of this size is a huge mistake. YOU have a moral compass. You (rightly) see this leak as abysmal. BP individuals do as well. But in the collective of the company, it moves to a different overall will than an individual.
Re:Ixtoc and BP disaster comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
Rachael Maddow had a blurb on this yesterday. It showed how similar techniques (including "top kill") were used in attempt to plug the leak, then the leak was finally killed by another well drilled, with a devastating impact on the environment, about six months after the fact.
What lessons can we learn from this? First and foremost, this drives the point home that one of the first priorities is that oil should be relegated to plastic making, and not an energy source.
Nuclear technology may not be perfect, and the biggest problem with it is that it isn't goof-proof. If a group of drunk contractors pass out on the job when putting together a solar cell array, it likely won't affect much other than the head of the guy the cell array fell on. Nuclear plants need to be engineered to be as moron resistant as possible, because both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by "cockpit errors". Hopefully Gen III and Gen IV reactors will go a long way to address this.
This is not to say that other energy sources are not relevant, but until fusion gets able to be used on a production basis (as in multi-gigawatt reactors), the only real solution for dense areas without access to large amount of real estate is nuclear breeder reactors.
Of course, there are other ways to help with energy. I've seen some research on generators which turn water into hydrogen and pass the stuff down a pipeline to an electricity generation station nearby a metropolitan area where it is burned. This minimizes energy loss over long distances as opposed to power lines.
In any case, this BP disaster just further reinforces the point of getting off of oil and onto other energy sources.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:4, Insightful)
So you don't use plastic products either? You don't use goods that are transported on trucks that consume oil? You never walk over asphalt roads?
Re:relief well ... bet on it (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of the relief well is to relieve pressure on the main well and then seal it safely.
Do you realize what kind of political fallout BP would receive if they were actually wasting time trying to salvage the well?
Re:Too early (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there was a chance that it could make the situation worse. They were trying things first that if they went wrong would not make the problem worse.
I guess I'm a little more cynical than this. I assumed they were trying things that would cost them the least money first.
In theory, those are the same. Factor in the potential cost of failure alongside the cost of the procedure itself. The top kill probably costs less than many of the other methods (a 93-ton, four-story-tall concrete dome can't be cheap), until you factor in the risk and cost of failure (top kill can make more oil leak, which in turn makes future attempts more expensive).
Re:the goal was never (Score:3, Insightful)
Could you explain to me if they could quickly and easily shut down the well what is the point of having the leak continue until another well is ready? That's a lot of oil being wasted in the ocean (evaporation, treated, burned, ect.) and a lot of expense in both PR and 'faking' other solutions.
Your telling me somehow that month long PR nightmare turning into congressional committees to investigate and fine the company so that they can-- what did you propose? -- Extract the oil from sea water for profit?? You're telling me that is more economically beneficial to them then shutting the well down quickly and easily as you believe they can, thus having no public outcry and a 4 day story on the loss of life, and then drill a new well a month later and then get all that oil INTACT?
You honestly believe BP's CEO is sitting at the end of a table making an evil finger pyramid saying: "MUuHaahahaha, my ridiculously circuitous plan is now nearly one quarter complete. Now we just have to extract all this oil from the ocean's surface which my evil engineers who assisted in putting the bottomless pit in the Emperor's throne room insist is much easier than extracting it from a well using a pipe."
Re:glad to see this (Score:3, Insightful)
Because there's only 1 pipe into which the straw can be inserted.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not inclined to tar and feather the CEO when something goes wrong. But when something goes catastrophically wrong, and takes months to come to a resolution, and is due to poor safety or operational prudence, then yes, SOMEONE needs to be held responsible, and I think that someone is at the top, not the bottom.
As the fallout settles from here, we are going to see a handful of guys vilified, but they will be the ones that died on the rig. Nice little closed circle. The Officers in BP will walk away with nothing more than a lashing from the board of directors and the stock holders.
Re:glad to see this (Score:3, Insightful)
Just saw this quote:
"You want a witch hunt? Start by looking in a mirror."
*sigh* So true... This blame game has grown so very tiresome.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:1, Insightful)
How can you prevent it from happening without realizing where the break from correct procedure was, even if it goes all the way to the top? You must place the blame (in the most rational and objective manner possible) in order to properly diagnose the problem.
well it's $6.60 all ready... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well here in the UK petrol/gasoline is 1.20 GBP / litre, there are 3.79 litres to 1 US gallon = 4.55 GBP / gallon, x 1.45 (pounds to dollars) and we're at $6.60 /US gallon in my local gas station, so I don't see $8 / gallon so far off, that's only about another 18% rise.
Re:That's a relief (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair to you, perhaps you've never been out in open water and don't understand just how big something like the gulf is. You're not just looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil, you're looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil and billions of gallons of water.
Re:Victory for Obama! (Score:3, Insightful)
It might do, at that.
The current price for unleaded gasoline in Germany is about 1.40 euros per liter [aaireland.ie], and it was up to 1.57 euros in the summer of 2008. That makes the current price about $6.60 US per gallon, and the peak just over $9 per gallon.
Because of these horrendous fuel prices, the German people suffer terribly. They are forced to drive tiny, ugly, uncomfortable econoboxes with weak, underpowered, dreadful engines. Germans look with barely-concealed envy at the spacious, high-quality, fuel-spendthrift U.S. automobile.
I cannot doubt that Germany's automakers desperately want to earn the same financial success and worldwide reputation enjoyed by their American counterparts.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
It is almost impossible to have your hands "clean of oil". Food production and transportation uses lots of fossil fuels. Especially meat.
But it is possible, as a society, for us to decide we don't want offshore drilling. In fact, I suspect that if oil companies were made to pay fair damages to everyone affected by accidents, and pay real penalties to governments (Federal, a handful of states, and possibly countries like Mexico and Cuba) for ecological damages, they would not find offshore drilling worth the risk. Instead, just watch as lawsuits against BP don't come close to making the affected parties whole. The court system will protect BP as long as they've followed some basic safety regulations. As if the damage sustained by all these other parties was akin to an "act of god".
My point is that it's absurd to say that nobody can oppose offshore drilling if they participate in the economy in any way. You just have to be willing to live with consequences of stopping it (a somewhat reduced standard of living across the board due to higher prices on just about everything; less economic activity in the Gulf region; more oil importing and less oil exporting; but also less pollution everywhere; more economic incentive for energy efficiency; less sprawl).
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget the billions they have pledged in funding for research into handling this better in the future.
I find it so strange people keep claiming BP is running from the bill when BP has done all it can to limit the problem, both now and in the future. People seem to forget that BP is one of the biggest energy companies in the world (3rd I think) and are drilling all over the planet, if they fail to handle this spill or try to run away from it they will lose contracts around the world.
Re:Too early (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why they didn't just do this in the first (or even second) place.
In essence, they did. They started drilling a relief well, constructing the containment dome, and preparing for a top kill more or less all at the beginning. Apparently the blowout preventer needed repairs before it could accommodate the top kill attempt. Also, they needed to asses the situation, as a damaged piping and well system could be made worse by trying to pump against the pressure - worst case you could end up with oil coming to the surface through surrounding rock outside of the well casing and uncontrolled. So they prepared (too slowly in my opinion) more than one option and tried the safer and faster ones first.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
Well if they can't drill it at 5000', maybe you shouldn't be driving your car?
Good point!
Let's all work to reduce our oil consumption. I drive a fuel efficient economy car, and avoid disposable plastic whenever possible, but I'm sure there's more I can do. I'm sure there's more you can do. I'm sure there's more the EPA can do to get companies to use more sustainable practices and consume less energy.
That was your point, wasn't it? That if we want to avoid doing dangerous things like drilling for oil in mile-deep water, we need to reduce oil consumption as much as possible. That we all need to take responsibility, and thus take reasonable but decisive action at all levels.
I hope it wasn't some crap like "if you use any petroleum products at all you cannot suggest that we should drill less oil."
Re:glad to see this (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because we don't properly acknowledge that there's enough blame to go around ten times over. We let the guilty spin the issue into one of someone else being technically more guilty in some sub area.
If we properly assigned blame, even just enough to bar them from ever participating in politics again, to every politician who took bribes or let themselves be influenced to go against the will of their constituents we'd end up with better politicians. They're out there somewhere, hidden behind the hordes of sell-outs. Instead we get suckered into trying to decide if the republicans or the democrats are more guilty and forget to punish the individuals we caught breaking the law.
Similarly for "the corporations". Punish any attempt to influence a politician or law enforcement officer (or EPA investigator, etc) as you would bribery. Seize all assets related to the transaction and punish the offender for perjury.
If we actually enforced our existing laws so many people are guilty (of real crimes - that you and I would be punished for) that almost our entire governing and financial sector would be gone.
I wish we'd stop letting them misdirect us.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
Well if they can't drill it at 5000', maybe you shouldn't be driving your car?
Or maybe we should all be paying a bit more to drive our cars.
The world doesn't run out of oil just because we can't drill for it in the middle of the fucking ocean. It just runs out of *cheap* oil.
Oil companies really don't have any business drilling where they can't contain a gusher. The cost of the fix and the cleanup is going to so greatly exceed the projected cost of drilling the well that the project should never have been considered in the first place. Bankrupting the company does not make shareholders happy.
Re:glad to see this (Score:3, Insightful)
All such products I've ever seen need to "set up" first, before they become structural. For some products this only takes seconds, but that's not going to work here. Also, "gas mixed with the foam expands the foam itself" is orders of magnitude below what you'd need here - not even close.
BP has plenty of good engineers. They did think of the obvious stuff. The "top kill" is a simple, straightforward answer. I wonder why it wasn't ready earlier, but they may have started on this day 1, and it just took this long to prepare the appropriate ships and get them into position - moving heavy loads across the sea doesn't happen at internet speed.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
Astonishing. You really think that's the ONLY reason not to let them drill closer to land, considering the topic we are discussing?
pebble bed reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor [wikipedia.org]
recent tech from germany, many generations technologically removed form the 1960s era tech all of our china syndrome fears are based on
air cooled, passive safety system. there is no failure that can cause an accident, because anything and everything can fail and nothing bad will happen: you can just walk away from a pebble bed reactor, they are foolproof
the only issue is terrorism (not as in bombing the plant, but as in stealing fissile material and placing it in times square), so you need a really good inventory security apparatus
nuclear+electric cars is obviously the solution to our environmental, energy, and geopolitical problems
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started (Score:3, Insightful)
> If you had $300 million, i'd rather it go to one individual where $100m was being taxed back, than say 30,000 individuals that are living in a low income tax bracket where their taxation rate is minimal.
I can think of at least 30,000 people in that equation who'd disagree with you.
Re:Ixtoc and BP disaster comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Chernobyl was "cockpit error" if we redesignate it to be something like:
Flying the plane 6 feet off the ground at just above stall speed and disabling all the "too low! pull up!" alarms, the stick shaker and the emergency anti-stall system and then turning off the engines to see if there was enough residual hydraulic pressure in the system to deploy the landing gear, in a plane that featured an emergency throttle up that deployed the air brakes for several seconds before the engines went to full power.
There was considerable human error in the Reactor 4 disaster, but it was hardly a textbook "cockpit error" situation.
Re:glad to see this (Score:5, Insightful)
"Real" engineering is not like your geek job. When the rig blew, people died, and others needed immediate rescue to survive - and BP was there for that. There were several in-place preventive measures as part of the disaster prevention plan, but they failed - largely due to poor management culture endemic to BP, where warnings from the guys on the rig were ignored. BP certainly deserves blame for that. The same cultural problem led to the gas pipeline blowout, if you remember that.
Efforts to plug the well started immediately, and as there's no way to know what will work, several parallel efforts were all started. Lots of silly /.ers who seem to think this is like fixing a down server are asking questions like "why didn't they drill the relief well first, since that's the only permanent fix". They did start the effort to drill the relief well immediately; it will be done in August IIRC. This isn't a down server - real engineering work is required here, real heavy equipment must be designed, built, shipped to a port, loaded, and shipped out to the middle of the gulf at 15 knots.
The "top kill" effort was started as soon as the problem was understood - it just takes time to do stuff like this.
Re:glad to see this (Score:3, Insightful)
You could have them, but the cost would be prohibitive. That cost has to be borne somehere, and it's likely be passed on to consumers.
Imagine if fuel in the USA rose to even half of UK prices? There'd be a lot of howling - and it would mostly come from people who are happily bashing BP and playing the Monday morning quarterback in this thread.