rigorousintuition.ca

Well, BP is now saying the following, FWIW:

'We've significantly cut the flow' of oil from damaged rig
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/bp_offi ... antly.html

BP's chief executive Tony Hayward straight talking here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8658344.stm

poor guy looks worn out..

crikkett wrote:If there are formations that you cannot drill into and live, and this is one of those formations, then this is the fault of the people who tried to drill into the formation anyway.

You can't really know what you're facing until you drill the well. If we never tried anything new without being completely certain beforehand that it was safe, then we'd still be squatting in caves eating raw food.

Wow. "This was not our accident" and "if necessary, defending the shoreline" kinda spoiled Hayward's reassurances. (I didn't watch the whole thing.)

Ninakat, you beat me to it. I really hope it's true. Too bad it's already bigger than the Valdez.

Sepka wrote:

crikkett wrote:If there are formations that you cannot drill into and live, and this is one of those formations, then this is the fault of the people who tried to drill into the formation anyway.

You can't really know what you're facing until you drill the well. If we never tried anything new without being completely certain beforehand that it was safe, then we'd still be squatting in caves eating raw food.

While there is a certain amount of truth to your statement, it is also the "logic" of the mouse as he reaches for that morsel of cheese in the trap.

via Cryptogon:

Oil Slickonomics
By David Kotok - May 3rd, 2010, 9:00AM

Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no “good” here.

The Bad.

Containment chambers are put in place and they catch the outflow from the three ruptures that are currently pouring 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf every day. If this works, it will take until June to complete. The chambers are 30-foot-high steel configurations that must be placed on the ocean floor at a depth of one mile. This has never been done before. If early containment is successful, the damages from this accident will be in the tens of billions. The cleanup will take years. The economic impact will be in the five states that have frontal coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

The Worse.

The containment attempts fail and oil spews for months, until a new well can successfully be drilled to a depth of 13000 feet below the 5000-foot-deep ocean floor, and then concrete and mud are injected into the existing ruptured well until it is successfully closed and sealed. Work on this approach is already commencing. Timeframe for success is at least three months. Note the new well will have to come within about 20 feet of the existing point where the original well enters the reservoir at a distance of 3.5 miles from the surface drilling rig. Damages by this time may be measured in the hundreds of billions. Cleanup will take many, many years. Tourism, fishing, all related industries may be fundamentally changed for as much as a generation. Spread to Mexico and other Gulf geography is possible.

The Ugliest.

This spew stoppage takes longer to reach a full closure; the subsequent cleanup may take a decade. The Gulf becomes a damaged sea for a generation. The oil slick leaks beyond the western Florida coast, enters the Gulfstream and reaches the eastern coast of the United States and beyond. Use your imagination for the rest of the damage. Monetary cost is now measured in the many hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some thoughts about markets and impacts.

Usually, the first estimates in any crises are too low. That is true here. 1000 barrels a day is now 5000, and some estimates of spillage are trending higher. No one knows exactly. The containment and boom mechanism is subject to weather cooperation as we can see this weekend. Soon we are entering the hurricane season. The thoughts of a storm stirring up the Gulf, hampering any cleanup or remediation drilling effort and creating a huge 10,000 square mile black stew is frightening to every professional in the business.

This will be a financial calamity for many firms, not just BP and its partners and service providers. Their liabilities are immense and must not be underestimated. The first estimate of $12.5 billion is only a starter.

Thousands of small and independent businesses as well as larger public companies in tourism are hurt here. This is not just about the source of half the nation’s shrimp. That is already a casualty. It’s also about the bank loans for the $200,000 shrimp boat and the house the boat owner and/or his employees live in and the fact that this shock piles on a fragile financial system that is trying to recover from a three-year financial crisis. Case study, my fishing guide in the Everglades splits his time between Florida and Louisiana. His May bookings in LA have cancelled. His colleagues lost theirs and their lodge will be empty. They are busy trying to find work in the clean up. For him, his wife and eleven year old daughter, his $600 a day guide fees just went “poof”. When I asked him if he thought he had a legal claim on BP, he said he hadn’t thought about it yet but it gave him pause. As we suggested above, the $12.5 billion loss estimate is only a starter.

Federal deficit spending will certainly rise by tens, and maybe hundreds, of billions as emergency appropriations are directed at larger and larger efforts to clean up this mess. At the same time, federal and state revenues tied to Gulf-region businesses will fall. My colleague John Mousseau will be discussing the impact on state and local government debt in a separate research commentary.

We expect that the Federal Reserve will extend the timeframe that we have come to know as the “extended period” in the making of its monetary policy. We do not expect the Fed to raise interest rates at all for the rest of this year, and maybe well into next year. We expect to see the deterioration of the economic statistics for the US to reveal the onset of this oil-slick crisis in May, and the negative impact will intensify during the summer months. A “double-dip” recession probably has been made more likely by this tragedy.

We are at the highest level of cash in our US stock accounts that we have seen in over a year and a half. We expect a market correction will present entry points at lower stock prices. We have exited the financial sectors, including the insurance ETF. We now worry about the banks that are exposed. We do not own the major oil stocks now. Some of them face enormous liability payments.

In addition, the offshore-drilling energy sector will face much-increased and more costly regulation. Deepwater and all offshore drilling in the US has been set back for a generation, just as Three Mile Island set back nuclear power development for decades. No politician can win an election now with a permissive view on drilling. Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill” now condemns her to political marginalization. Off shore drilling has lurched to the top of the political agenda in this November’s election cycle.

Readers may be interested in following events on the NOAA website: http://response.restoration.noaa.gov .

David R. Kotok, Chairman & Chief Investment Officer, Cumberland Advisors, www.cumber.com

Perelandra, thanks for that image above. That's really too scary to comprehend, but I've never been much of a denialist so I suppose I need to embrace the potential horror.

I'm in NC and obviously not in the imminent danger that people along the Gulf coast are facing, but I'm already concerned about this spreading to the point where it affects the environment here. Specifically, I'm wondering what the prospects are of a hurricane spreading the oil inland. It would be devastating enough to have the shoreline ruined, but what about 100 miles in?

I've tried to do a little research today but haven't come up with any information about what the implications are of a hurricane or strong storm whipping through an oil spill. If anybody here has insight (and links!), I'd very much appreciate it. Meanwhile, I'll continue researching...

From a technical legal standpoint, BP is responsible for nearly everything that occurs during a drilling operation. If I took a leak over the side and MMS saw me, BP would be responsible for the fine (yes, it's against regulations to pee into the GoM). Now if the drilling contractor (Transocean, for example) were to spill diesel during a refueling operation, BP would be off the hook for that--one of the few exceptions. There is some confusion as to whether cement plugs had been placed in the well, and whether or not the BOP stack was still operational (at some point during the process, the equipment is going to be removed after the well is abandoned temporarily--this is standard practice): http://blog.iongeo.com/?p=1961

One of the accepted paradigms in oil well drilling is that every now and then, Gaia is going to kick you in the ass. The industry tries its best to prepare for the unexpected (do not think it doesn't for one moment, the costs of not doing so are enormous, this disaster clearly demonstrates this), but Mother Nature always comes up with new ways to show us who is boss. I always thought it was her way of telling us not to do this.

Sorry, nk. It's going to be very bad, I'm afraid.

Cross-posting:

crikkett wrote: Gaia isn't at fault when a man walks off a cliff convinced that his wax-and-feather wings will prevent him from falling to his death.

Exactly. And this is more like the man taking millions of people with him over the cliff.

That's why we shouldn't let anybody do certain things. Like nuclear power plants. You hear the same logic from people -- "oh, the technology is proven! It's 99.99% safe!" Maybe, but that .01% is a real ass-kicker.

Some things simply should not be messed with.

I feel that way about GMO's. Who the FUCK decided to let companies like Monsanto start playing God like that?

Who the FUCK decided to let companies like Monsanto start playing God like that?

The Corporations decided. Then, they bought the politicians who could make it so.

Perelandra wrote:Sorry, nk. It's going to be very bad, I'm afraid.

It seems so. That trailer for the documentary on the Exxon Valdez talked about a storm spreading the oil out into the Gulf of Alaska. Doing a little research into that storm, I found the following:

For the first few days after the spill, most of the oil was in a large concentrated patch near Bligh Island. On March 26, a storm, which generated winds of over 70 mph in Prince William Sound, weathered much of the oil, changing it into mousse and tarballs, and distributed it over a large area.

link

But the article doesn't seem to talk about any inland damage. I'll continue looking for more info about environmental damage inland. It just seems logical that if a storm with "winds of over 70 mph" distributed the oil over a large area, that a hurricane would be much more devastating, potentially dropping oil from the skies quite a ways inland.

ninakat wrote:
But the article doesn't seem to talk about any inland damage. I'll continue looking for more info about environmental damage inland. It just seems logical that if a storm with "winds of over 70 mph" distributed the oil over a large area, that a hurricane would be much more devastating, potentially dropping oil from the skies quite a ways inland.

I don't know, I'm no climatoligist, but I am guessing that you don't have to worry too much about an 'oil rain,' since oil doesn't evaporate at the same rate as water. However, that said, there hasn't been an oil spill of this magnitude in such a hurricaine-prone area before, afaik. But it does seem to me that the oil would be left behind in the water, much like salt gets left behind as seawater evaporates.

I think the thing to be worried about is the spread of the slick, all the way up to NC, if Perelandra's map is accurate.

Here's another article that sums things up. The question really boils down to which scenario we'll end up facing. At this point, there's still hope they'll stop or severely decrease the flow, and/or the oil pocket will end up being somewhat smaller than anticipated and run out before the worst case scenario can happen. Good luck to the engineers.

Oil Spill: Here's the Inside Scoop