Another Gulf Oil Rig Explodes 423
A few readers have noted that another gulf oil rig has exploded. This one is off the coast of Lousiana. So far all the workers are accounted for, but they are in immersion suits waiting for rescue.
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Another Gulf Oil Rig Explodes
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All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Drilling Moratorium (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling seems like an overreaction now...
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
slashdot = stagnated
Yeah, it's kinda funny how a news aggregator doesn't seem to post news before any other sites, isn't it?
Re:BP (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget the 'giving ourselves a bonus' bonus. Handing out bonuses is hard work.
Re:Drilling Moratorium (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gee Wally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways, fires happen all the time on oil rigs, it's nothing new, or even exceptional: "The U.S. Minerals Management Service reported 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries, and 858 fires and explosions on offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from 2001 to 2010." [wikipedia.org]
Oil industry accidents are now 'newsworthy' (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember after the massive earthquake in Haiti, the news started reporting earthquakes about once a week? Accidents and casualties are nothing new to the oil industry.
Re:Fuck The Ecomaniacs (Score:5, Insightful)
Clean coal? I hate to tell you this... No, actually, I love to tell you this. Clean coal is a lie.
You would get more energy out of coal if you were to filter the radioactive particles from it and use that in a nuclear reactor than if you had burned the coal normally.
All that ash and coke, full of mercury, heavy metals and other toxic stuff has to go somewhere, It either goes in the air for us all to breath or it gets stored and eventually makes its way into our soil and water supply.
CO2 sequestration can not work, you are talking about pumping billions of tons of gas underground into pockets in the rock. This has been shown to cause minor earthquakes, those earthquakes will eventually result in a blowout event, a blowout event will kill everyone in the area as the CO2 suffocates everyone, similar events happen all the time in Africa with natural CO2 sources.
Nuclear? sure, but we need to reprocess waste instead of storing it, preferably inside the reactor.
Solar? sure.
Wind? Ok, but it is unreliable so you can't rely on it for than a relatively small amount of the grid power.
Clean Coal? make me laugh.
Re:Cap (Score:4, Insightful)
The Chilean mine is for gold and copper. You might argue that it's even less important than "energy", or that it's more important, or that it provides some sort of "economic energy" or psychological energy, or whatever. But good luck getting gold and copper anywhere else (other than recycling).
Re:Bah. (Score:1, Insightful)
And you appear exceptionally intelligent.
Not get the fuck off this stagnated site so the rest of us don't have to read your shitty posts.
Re:Gee Wally... (Score:3, Insightful)
That would have had no effect. This rig already existed, stopping new construction of rigs would have made no difference except that when the moratorium ends you have workers that are out of practice.
Tags (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a yougottobeshittingme tag missing in the article.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, safety standards for places like mines and oil rigs go down when the people appointed to head the inspection agencies for mines and oil rigs were former executives for mine and oil companies. And even if a new guy gets in charge, it can take a long time before their changes take any effect.
Re:Lousiana, Louisiana, what's the diff? (Score:1, Insightful)
If you LIVED in Louisiana and heard it pronounced by a fair amount of the people there, you might actually think it WAS spelled "Lousiana". Or "LEW-see-ann-ah".
Re:your next car should be electric (Score:1, Insightful)
The only thing that the left and right can agree on is that we should never need to make any real change that actually changes our day-to-day lives.
Re:your next car should be electric (Score:4, Insightful)
my personal preference is that we use up foreign oil while it's still relatively cheap. when it hits $500 barrel, then maybe we should tap into offshore wells and sell some back to OPEC for 20x what we paid for most of theirs.
in the mean time we should probably focus on perfecting blow-out preventers.
just mah opinion.
Re:Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
What safety standards have diminished exactly? I can believe they might have retarded the implementation of newer or more strict standards but not removed any of them. Please tell me where this is so I can lobby my congress critter to put the life saving measures back into play.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between malfunctioning alarms and very sensitive alarms. If there's a tiny little problem that could turn into something (even remotely) potentially catastrophic, it needs to be fixed. If people ignore it, that's because of a bad safety policy or being dangerously understaffed. Both of these are easily fixed if capable people are in charge, and both of these are inexcusable in this kind of environment.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, there are so many sensors and so strict procedures in place that alarms go off like mad if there is even a tiny leak somewhere...
Only if they're not required to fix every one of them.
If the system is that sensitive, they're probably supposed to be, or they may actually be, fixing something every time an alarm goes off.
You know, in order to prevent explosions.
Just sayin'.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, there are so many sensors and so strict procedures in place that alarms go off like mad if there is even a tiny leak somewhere...
Only if those tiny little alarms happen quite a lot, and when no action is taken as a result. If you get a tiny little alarm once a week which is responded to promptly, professionally, and in such a manner that the alarm is silenced because the problem was properly fixed according to the strict procedures... I can't see how that would be an issue.
not news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:your next car should be electric (Score:3, Insightful)
you are part of the problem
And you an excellent example of how not to solve it.
No statement about the environment should begin with any word other than "I", as in "I own a car but only drive once a week or so", "I bought a smaller house downtown so I can walk to work and do almost all my shopping on foot--I stay fit as an added bonus!" and "My smaller house costs a lot less to heat. Basically I save a lot of money by living a more sustainable, urban lifestyle, which gives me more time for my kids."
The problem with the approach that you're taking is that it is clearly driven by your own desire to tell other people what to do. Lead by example, not by hectoring.
And if this post irritates you and makes you want to produce an antagonistic response that just proves my point.
[All the above "I" statements are true, by the way.]
Re:your next car should be electric (Score:4, Insightful)
I entirely agree. US politicians yelling about how we need to drill more to make ourselves more energy independent are selling false goods. Even if we tripled the amount of oil that we were producing domestically, it would still be a small fraction of the oil that the country uses, and would at best reduce prices by a few pennies per gallon. It would earn big piles of money for a relatively small number of people in the oil industry, and the rest of us wouldn't notice anything different.
We should consider the rest of that oil as a strategic reserve, in case one day we really need it, or somebody else really needs it and is willing to pay out the nose for it.
which can be phased out (Score:2, Insightful)
to solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, etc...
with absolutely no effect on the consumer, who doesn't have to know or care where the electricity comes from when he plugs his car in the wall
Re:Fuck The Ecomaniacs (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not that much of a spin. The GP's point is completely correct. If self-described environmentalists (actually just anti-nuclear activists) hadn't scared the American public away from a nuclear-based energy policy with scientifically bankrupt scare tactics, the United States would rely far, far less on fossil fuels today (probably almost exclusively for cars by now) and the chances of oil rigs exploding would be lessened by the fact that there would be far less oil rigs in the first place.
Not only that, but extracting oil from deep-water drill sites would probably not yet (if ever) be cost-effective for the prices wrought by demand and so the major Gulf spill of 2010 quite possibly would never have happened either.
So while they're not directly to blame, it's not a huge stretch to draw a line between the lies and ignorant actions of past anti-nuclear activists and the environmental disasters happening all the time in our fossil fuel draining little world.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. The only way to get oil to explode is to vaporize it, mix it with air in the exact right concentration, and then set it on fire - and forget the movies, a cigarette is not going to do it; your car needs a spark of 20,000+ volts for reliable inginiton, and it's using a near-optimal concentration of fuel vapor, and that's easily-burning gasoline vapor, not crude oil.
Something is very wrong here.
no it's just people cutting corners to save cash (Score:5, Insightful)
no it's just people cutting corners to save cash sometimes it's cheaper to pay on then death of a working then to pay the cash to make it safer it's time for some big time fines for doing that.
Except, I bet you WILL .... (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll keep reporting each and every one, now that the Obama administration is on a mission to push through new legislation promoting "alternate energy". After a few of them, they should have the public alarmed enough to agreeably pass things taxing them for their carbon footprint and much more....
Re:Bah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Second time suggests that sector of industry is corrupt to the point of endangering everyone. If you have property near a filling station, petroleum pipeline, tank farm, transfer site, refinery, or anything else involved in processing petrochemicals, it is time to start agitating for some third party safety audits to make sure that your property's value isn't about to get blown to smithers.
I'm not saying that your stuff is directly at risk. But if we have another explosion, pipeline leak, or similar event anywhere within USA jurisdiction, your property values will get tarred by a very broad brush. Anyone at risk of this needs to get politicking for some kind of review that will assure potential buyers that they won't be shafted by their petrochemical neighbors.
BTW, there is absolutely no need to lay this kind of thing off to enemy action. Not when 8+ years of ineffective oversight coupled with corporate "long term" planning that fails to look beyond next quarter's profit and loss statement are more than adequate to account for these incidents. (I was about to say "accidents", but it appears that these are far from accidental. They look much more like the productive of short term greed multiplied by long term stupidity.)
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Industrial accidents kil, maim, and injure thousands of people every year.
There need be no conspiracy. Shit happens, sucks to be the victim, but that doesn't make it anything special.
Re:as the world economy improves (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bah. (Score:3, Insightful)
At first glance, you appear to be the exact type of person the Bruce Schneier was trying to warn when he said:
I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." (http://www.schneier.com/essay-304.html)
Here's a little education, if you please:
Second time suggests that...
Two data points do not a trend make. People who try to force conclusions from such limited data often hold opinions of limited value.
Also, there are hundreds of reported accidents in the U.S. oil industry, every year. You (and whoever modded you "insightful") are ignorant because most accidents don't make front-page news. The vast majority spill little or no oil, and cause little or no environmental damage or economic loss, and the operating companies pay cleanup costs plus fines for what damages do occur.
This rig explosion, unlike the Deepwater Horizon incident in April, is a very MINOR oil spill, with no worker casualties and minimal economic impact. If the rig featured in this news story had exploded back in March, before Deepwater Horizon's big spill seeded us with fear of globally-catastrophic oil spills, the article would never have made national headlines, because nobody would have given two shits.
And in another few months, maybe a year, you and the rest of this over-excitable country will completely forget that they were ever scared of catastrophic oil spills.
I'm not saying that your stuff is directly at risk. But if we have another explosion, pipeline leak, or similar event anywhere within USA jurisdiction, your property values will get tarred by a very broad brush. Anyone at risk of this needs to get politicking for some kind of review that will assure potential buyers that they won't be shafted by their petrochemical neighbors.
Where did you get this idea, that the US population is on the verge of living in fear of filling stations and refineries? IF a series of massive catastrophies struck, and IF they were all confined to the oil industry, and IF it all happened near populated areas, and IF they all happened in a short enough period of time, then you might start to see property values changing. But absent that kind of chain of unlikeIy events, I don't see it.
See, the thing you might be missing is, oil spills have been happening occasionally but regularly for about the last century or so. Refinery explosions and filling stations fires, explosions, etc. are nothing new, either. And it's not like people aren't aware of them--if there's a body count, or a big economic impact, there's usually at least a local news stories. Absent some kind of new, ongoing threat that happens close to where people live, why would anyone start caring much more than they do, right now?
BTW, there is absolutely no need to lay this kind of thing off to enemy action. Not when 8+ years of ineffective oversight coupled with corporate "long term" planning that fails to look beyond next quarter's profit and loss statement are more than adequate to account for these incidents. (I was about to say "accidents", but it appears that these are far from accidental. They look much more like the productive of short term greed multiplied by long term stupidity.)
Ah. I see. You're a paranoid conspiracy nut. Sorry, go ahead, you were saying?
Re:Bah. (Score:2, Insightful)
First time is an accident,
Second time Coincidence,
Third time is Corporate Deregulation.
There, fixed that for you.