Tag: gulf of mexico

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill IS NOT OVER

According to this exclusive report on CNN, the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles west of Panama City, FL is a toxic sludge composed of speckled droplets of dispersed oil… moving east.


[H/T Ryan Bartek]

While the right-wing media machine diverts our attention to the “Ground Zero Mosque” and “anchor babies,” our magpie brains are forgetting about the Deep Horizon disaster. More importantly, we’re forgetting about the genesis of this disaster – the rampant deregulatory culture, the lax safety procedures – which, we might say, are features of the contemporary media culture as well, which chases sham political controversies instead of concentrating on matters of true importance.

Holy Crap That’s a Lot of Money: 34 Billion in Fines

The Guardian reports quite a heavy bill for BP, and this may really set a buzz for the President’s fist Oval office speech tomorrow.

BP is facing a bill of up to $34bn from the Gulf of Mexico disaster after US senators demanded the oil company deposited $20bn into a ring-fenced account to meet escalating compensation costs.

The sum dwarfs many analysts’ previous estimates, shared by BP, that put the cost of the clean-up effort and payment of damages to affected communities, such as fishermen, closer to a total of $5bn.

Shares in BP nose-dived by more than 9% today as investors took fright at the demand by the 54 Democratic senators, who represent a majority in the US upper house. The company is now worth almost half what it was before the accident of just under two months ago.

BP already faces up to $14bn in civil penalties, payable under US environmental law, assuming the leak is plugged in August. These punitive damages are directly linked to the size of the spill – already estimated at being up to eight times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 – with BP liable for up to $4,300 for each barrel-worth spilt.

Senate leaders insisted the $20bn ring-fenced account should be exclusively for “payment of economic damages and clean-up costs” and should not be seen as a cap on BP’s other legal liabilities. With punitive damages pending too, the theoretical total of $34bn is equivalent to more than half the corporation tax paid by all British companies last year.

Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, and other directors of the company, will meet Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday prepared to offer concessions in the hope of taking the sting out of mounting political attacks on the company.

BP will be in “listening mode”, willing to cut its next dividend, worth about $2.5bn, possibly paying the cash into the clean-up fund. It will also reiterate its commitment to paying all legitimate claims arising from the disaster. But the company does not believe that the demand by the senators to stump up $20bn is justified.

read the rest at the Guardian

Take Overs, Bond Values, Stock Drops, and BP’s Future

With all this oil in the Gulf, all the terrifying pictures, footage, and reports its easy to forget the real victim here. That’s right, I’m talking about a sensitive affluent little business with a previously bright future, British Petr-  I mean Beyond Petrolium. Once the most profitable company in the entire history of the world, BP now faces stock slides, falling credit and bond ratings, and a possible death by cannibalism.

The downturn began on Tuesday, after BP’s “top kill” plan failed to block a massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico by pumping mud into the well.

But BP’s bonds continued to fall even as its shares recovered on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, rating agency Fitch has cut the firm’s credit rating marginally, and threatens further downgrades if the cost of the oil leak rises further.

Fitch cut BP’s rating by one notch, from AA+ to AA, although this is still one of its highest investment grade credit ratings.

Borderline junk

The other two main rating agencies – Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s – also still rate BP’s creditworthiness highly, at Aa1 and AA respectively.

Yet bond markets are now pricing BP’s debts at levels comparable with much riskier “junk” rated companies.

The oil company’s main five-year dollar bond was trading on Thursday at a yield of 5.5% – some 3.25% more expensive than the interest rate that the US government would have to borrow at.

Yet before the weekend, the same BP bond was trading at a yield of 3.5%, meaning its borrowing cost has jumped by 2% as a result of the failure to plug the oil leak.

One City analyst told the BBC that the bond markets’ fears made no sense, because BP has so little debt.

BP owes £14bn in total debts, whereas stock markets currently value the company at £84bn.

read more at the BBC

With a looming bills, suits, and fines to stack on the one billion dollars the company hs already spent on the disaster, and a 1-5 thousand dollar fine per barrel, one has to wonder how this company could fend off its competitors who would like nothing more to consume their business. Check out their new ad, and take a good look at it’s narratar, BP CEO Tony Hayward, because he might not be the face of the company for long.

BP Saw Stuck on BP Junk

Just when you thought this Bad News Bears nightmare was over, BP’s diamond studded saw became stuck while it was cutting through the riser today during the latest attempt to halt the flow of oil in the Gulf. I’m waiting for them to remind us it has never been tried at this depth, but how could that completely flummox them while cutting a riser?

Apparently the answer to that question is that it didn’t. The real problem today was that the blade had become dulled on the various contents of the pipe, most probably the same junk BP has been shooting into it for a week. Good Lord!

CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, JOSEPH BERGER and HENRY FOUNTAIN report,

A technician involved in the effort said that the wire saw had cut less than halfway through the riser when it stopped being effective. The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the work, said that it appeared that there was other material in the riser — including, perhaps, some of the objects pumped into the well during the failed “top kill” procedure last week — that was dulling the saw.

“It was cutting at a rate far less than it should have,” he said.

The technician said that rather than trying again with the saw, the plan now was to use a large shear to cut the riser. The shear, which is about 20 feet long and nearly 10 feet high, was used to make an earlier cut in the riser about 50 feet from the wellhead.

read more at the New York Times

More on Junk: Clogging the Blow Out Preventer

Oil Drum reports,

Admiral Allen, who is the Government head of the effort to cap the flowing well in the Gulf, and to oversee the cleanup operation, commented this morning that the well had reached a point where the internal pressure difference between the mud pumped in and the reservoir pressure was very low. However, with the relatively high volume of leakage that was passing through the BOP, the plan now included a try at blocking some of that leakage path by injecting debris (for which likely read rubber strips and small spheres) in the hope that these will lodge in the flow path within the BOP and reduce the leakage of fluid.

read more,

Topkill Might Be Sorta Kinda Maybe Working? Part II Adding Junk

So it turns out that viewers at home marveling at how much ‘mud’ was spewing from the leak were right, apparently something wasn’t working. The force of the mud was not enough to bring down the well pressure, which is the bench mark that starts the application of concrete. They have resumed pumping the mud, but are now injecting junk, or ‘bridging material’ into the mix. They have also been introducing junk and various other jamming materials into the BOP hoping to lower the pressure that way.

So it sounds like BP wasn’t able to force the mud deep enough into the well to plug it, but due to risks they probably started this process with the lowest estimated pressures to keep the pipe intact. Let’s see what happens when they put some weight on the pedal.

CNN Wire Staff writes,

“This whole operation is very, very dynamic,” Doug Suttles, the company’s chief operating officer, told CNN’s “John King, USA.”

“When we did the initial pumping (Wednesday), we clearly impacted the flow of the well. We then stopped to monitor the well. Based on that, we restarted again. We didn’t think we were making enough progress after we restarted, so we stopped again.”

The light-brown material that was seen spilling out of the well throughout Thursday was the previously pumped fluid from the “top kill” procedure mixed with oil, he said.

read more at CNN

Oil Well Has Stopped the Flow of Crude, Temporarily

BP’s latest effort to plug a leaking Gulf of Mexico oil well has stopped the flow of crude, at least temporarily, the US Coast Guard says.

The British energy giant began pumping heavy mud into the gusher on Wednesday, hoping that the mud would cap the steady stream of millions of litres of oil.

Thad Allen, the head of the Coast Guard, said early on Thursday that oil is no longer coming out of the well. But he said the well still has some oil pressure, which could theoretically cause a weak spot in the pipe to explode.

BP will now pump cement into the well to permanently seal it off.

Lisa Novak, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, later said that Allen “did not declare success.” But “things are going according to plan,” she said.

BP officials struck a more cautious tone. Bob Dudley, the company’s managing director, said in an interview with US broadcaster CNN that the “operation is proceeding like we expected.” The company is expected to issue a full update on Thursday afternoon.

read more at AlJazeera English,

Topkill might be sorta kinda maybe working?

Reuters reports,

BP remained cautious about the outcome of the much anticipated “top kill” procedure, as did President Barack Obama, whose credibility stands to suffer if one of the country’s worst environmental catastrophes does not end soon.

But the fact that the London-based energy giant was able to launch the complex maneuver around midday and keep it on track in the first hours was a welcome respite from a string of failures and setbacks in the 37 days since a rig blast triggered the disaster.

Undersea robots were helping to inject heavy fluids and ultimately cement pumped down about a mile to the sea-bed well, while BP chief executive Tony Hayward and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu monitored operations together in Houston.

“The operation is proceeding as we planned it,” Hayward said in a media briefing four hours after launching the top kill strategy.

“It will be another 24 hours before we know whether or not this has been successful,” he added.

The embattled CEO stood by BP’s 60-70 percent odds of success. But top kill, a routine procedure on the surface, has never been attempted at such depths, prompting one industry expert to predict less favorable odds.

“You have got some of the smartest guys in the business trying to figure this out, but it has never been done before,” David Pursell, partner at Houston investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co, told Reuters Insider.

“I think the odds have to be 50 percent or less,” he added.

Obama said that if successful, BP’s plan to cap the well should greatly reduce or eliminate the flow of hundreds of thousands of gallons (liters) of crude billowing into the Gulf.

If it fails, “there are other approaches that may be viable,” he said on a trip to California.

Obama, who has told aides to “plug the damn hole,” will head to Louisiana on Friday for the second time since the April 20 rig blast that killed 11 and unleashed the oil.

If the top kill fails, the next approach would be to install a containment device over the broken blowout preventer, a structure at the top of the well on the ocean floor, said BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said at a briefing with the Coast Guard Wednesday.

It is still unclear how much oil is flowing from the well, but it is already shaping up to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history and a long-term threat to a rich ecosystem.

The disaster is also reshaping the U.S. oil industry. Obama is expected to announce on Thursday that he will continue to hold off issuing deep water drilling permits off the Gulf of Mexico, but allow permits to be issued for shallow water drilling, a government source told Reuters.

The oil’s destruction of critical habitats continued to spread, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal saying that more than 100 miles of the state’s 400-mile coastline were now affected.

PIVOTAL DAYS FOR OBAMA, BP

These days may be critical for BP and Obama.

BP’s reputation and its big presence in the United States is at stake and investors, who have wiped $50 billion off BP’s market value since the start of the spill, will watch closely to see whether the latest attempt to seal the well works.

BP shares seesawed in London trading on Wednesday, with investors boosting the share price about 2.6 percent at one point before it closed up 1.4 percent. BP’s announcement that it had launched top kill came after London markets had closed.

read more at Reuters

“The longer it goes, maybe the better news that is,”

GREG BLUESTEIN writes for the Associated Press,

A live video stream Wednesday showed pictures of the blowout preventer, as well as the oil gushing out. At other times, the feed showed mud spewing out, but BP said this was not cause for alarm.

A weak spot in the blowout preventer could blow under the pressure, causing a brand new leak.

Gene Beck, a petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M in College Station, said the endeavor would likely fail quickly if the mud could not overcome the pressure of the oil.

“The longer it goes, maybe the better news that is,” Beck said.

Frustration with BP and the federal government has only grown since efforts to stop the leak have failed.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, both outspoken critics, led a boat tour around the oil-fouled delta near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Some 100 miles of Louisiana coastline had been hit by the oil, the Coast Guard said.

Through the Mississippi’s South Pass, there were miles-long passages that showed no indication of the oil, and the air smelled fresh and salty. Nearby fish were leaping and tiny seabirds dove into the water.

read more

Topkill Underway

It looks like BP will go ahead today with it’s Topkill option in an effortt to plug the oil geiser in the Gulf of Mexico that has been leaking millions of gallons (42 gallons makes a barrel) of oil for over a month now. They plan to use ‘mud’ and concrete to create 400 tons of force to contain the leaking pipe. Bill Nye gives a pretty good description of the process on CNN.

After a congressman intervened, BP has agreed to allow the live video feed to continue as they attempt the procedure. In related news, the LA Times reports a series of health risks related to the cleanup, and a new leaked memo from BP based upon the 3 little pigs paints a picture of a company that values profits over safety.

And finally, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida is demanding that the President seize control of the disaster response if BP is unable to perform the Topkill. Let’s all cross our fingers for the coast.

Top MMS Official Chris Oynes Steps Down

Juliet Eilperin writes for the Washington Post,

Chris Oynes, who oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for 12 years before being promoted in 2007 to associate director for offshore energy and minerals management, informed colleagues in an e-mail that he will step down. He has come under fire from former MMS officials for being too close to the industry he regulated.

The news came as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled a series of reforms to change the way the department conducts onshore oil and gas drilling.

He said they would “establish a more orderly, open, and environmentally sound process for developing oil and gas resources on public lands. The BP oil spill is a stark reminder of how we must continue to push ahead with the reforms we have been working on and which we know are needed.”

read more at the Washington Post

The Skinny on the Straw: Partial Control of Oil Gush

JEFFREY COLLINS and JASON DEAREN write for Associated Press,

HAMMOND, La. — In a significant step toward containing a massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said a mile-long tube was funneling crude Sunday from a blown well to a tanker ship after three days of wrestling to get the stopgap measure into place on the seafloor.

Yet even as the company reported the success after weeks of fruitless efforts, scientists warned oil that has already spewed into the Gulf could have dire consequences for the environment. Computer models show the black ooze may have already entered a major current flowing toward the Florida Keys, a researcher told the Associated Press on Sunday.

The contraption used by BP was hooked up successfully and sucking oil from a pipe at the blown well Sunday afternoon after being hindered by several setbacks. Engineers remotely guiding robot submersibles had worked since Friday to place the tube into a 21-inch pipe nearly a mile below the sea.

Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice president for exploration and production, said during a news conference that the amount being drawn was gradually increasing, and it would take several days to measure it. Company spokesman Mark Proegler at the joint spill command center in Louisiana had initially said the tube was containing most of the oil coming from the pipe, which is contributing an estimated 85 percent of the crude in the spill.

Previous attempts to use emergency valves and a 100-ton container had failed to stop the leak that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, threatening sea life, commercial fishing and the coastal tourism industry from Louisiana to Florida. BP PLC has also been burning small amounts of floating oil and spraying chemical dispersants above and below the surface.

The tube’s success gave crews partial control of the leak for the first time in more than three weeks. Still, Wells offered a tempered response to the news.

read more at Associated Press

‘Concept can now be considered proven,’

MSNBC reports,

Following a setback Saturday in its tube strategy to contain the flow of oil in the Gulf, BP was giving it another shot on Sunday.

Natural gas was siphoned out Saturday and then burned off when it got to the surface. Oil also entered the tube but a glitch stopped the strategy before any oil could make it all the way to the surface.

“The concept can now be considered proven,” a source close to the operation said shortly before BP said a new attempt was under way.

The fix involves guiding undersea robots to insert a 4-inch tube into a 21-inch pipe, known as a riser, to funnel the oil to a ship at the surface.

BP said Saturday it was confident its latest experiment using the mile-long tube would capture much of the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

read more at MSNBC

BP Has a Fix?

JASON DEAREN and JEFFREY COLLINS write for the Associated Press,

Oil has been spewing since the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 people and sinking two days later. The government shortly afterward estimated the spill at 210,000 gallons – or 5,000 barrels – a day, a figure that has since been questioned by some scientists who fear it could be far more. BP executives have stood by the estimate while acknowledging there’s no way to know for sure.

BP said Sunday it had a glimmer of success in its latest effort to stem the leak. The company said engineers used a mile-long tube to funnel some oil to the surface from the gushing well before it became dislodged.

In a news release, the company said it halted the process early Sunday after the setback, but a tanker at the surface managed to capture some oil and gas brought up by the tube. Engineers were trying Sunday to get the tube to work again deep beneath the ocean.

read more

DRAT! Oil Leak Gets Worse Again?

Suzanne Goldenberg writes for the Guardian,

Marine scientists were carefully viewing footage of oil and gas billowing out of a ruptured well on the ocean floor today, to try to deliver the first reliable estimates of the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – it could be as much as 70,000 barrels a day.

The video could help resolve the increasingly contentious debate about the scale of the disaster, and the oil companies’ willingness to give access to any information.

BP has claimed repeatedly there is no way of measuring the scale of the leak. The US Coast Guard, meanwhile, has stuck to an early estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

Independent marine researchers have suggested the spill could be much larger.

National Public Radio in the United States last night reported that the well is spewing up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every four days. Nearly 11 million gallons of oil were spilled in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground, oiling beaches and poisoning marine life for generations. NPR said scientific analysis of newly released video footage from the ocean floor suggested the gusher was 12 times more powerful than estimates offered so far by the Coast Guard or BP.

Its analysis was conducted by Steve Werely, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry, a method was accurate to 20%. That puts the range of the oil spill from 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day.

Werely told The Guardian he based his estimate on techniques which track the speed of objects travelling in the flow stream.

read more at the Guardian

BOP Not Fool Proof

JEFF DONN AND SETH BORENSTEIN (AP)

HOUSTON — Cutoff valves like the one that failed to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster have repeatedly broken down at other wells in the years since federal regulators weakened testing requirements, according to an Associated Press investigation.

These steel monsters known as blowout preventers or BOPs — sometimes as big as a double-decker bus and weighing up to 640,000 pounds — guard the mouth of wells. They act as the last defense to choke off unintended releases, slamming a gushing pipe with up to 1 million pounds of force.

While the precise causes of the April 20 explosion and spill remain unknown, investigators are focusing on the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon rig operated by BP PLC as one likely contributor.

To hear some industry officials talk, these devices are virtually foolproof.

But a detailed AP review shows that reliability questions have long shadowed blowout preventers:

Read more from the Associated Press:

Some Call it Groundhog Day… We Call it WHEN HISTORY ATTACKS!

Lots of things get recycled. Like our historical amnesia.

From Timothy Egan in the May 5 New York Times‘ Opinionator:

On energy, amnesia is the American way. Things lumber along, 300-million-year-old fossil fuels are pulled from deep inside the kingdoms of desert despots and shipped to our shores. It’s slow-motion suicide, of sorts, to the planet — and I’m no worse or better than anyone else who uses oil for everyday comforts — but we don’t see the wounds until a spill brings it all home.

Totally. As you may remember from our About Us page,

Santayana said: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This may be truer for America than anywhere else, because we pride ourselves on dismissing the past, moving forward, progress. In America, the past just gets in the way, and has to be torn down like an old building.

We think this time is different. This time, the past has blocked our way, and is threatening to tear us down instead. We chronically bubble our economy, import our energy and use it inefficiently, and waste our water resources.

Egan is absolutely right when he says:

Suddenly, alarms are sounded. Brows are furrowed. Promises are made. This time, with fears that the Gulf spill will be even larger than the one in Alaska, lessons will be learned, yesiree. But soon enough, we’ll go back to planting trees on Earth Day, feeling good about recycling — Hooray for us! We’re green and cool — while resuming the old routine. That is: a nation with five percent of the earth’s population consuming about 23 percent of the world’s oil output, glug, glug, glug.

That’s what we said:

But crisis is nothing new to Mankind: every couple of generations, the same portents of Apocalypse gather – only to be swept under the carpet when the warnings of imminent destruction are perceived to be from the radical fringe, crying wolf.

Let’s face the music and dance.

But don’t fret! You and Timmy are the lucky ones – now there a lot more ways to make things go.