“My challenge to you, the average citizen, is simply to care. Believe me, I’d love to hang up my tweetin’ trousers sometimes. I’ve already posted 440 tweets about bp and I’m ready to write about other things, but we can’t let BP slide. We have to keep shining a light on them. Look at the way they’ve acted thus far! Do you think they’re going to change now that the well is capped? They are going to keep trying to play it down, shirk their responsibilities and in the meantime, they’re going to pursue bigger and potentially more dangerous drilling operations. We have to pay attention, we have to care or this could happen again.”
“The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the ‘Library of Congress’ to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One ‘Exxon Valdez’ is reasonable shorthand for ‘enough oil to fuck shit up.’”
A Smoking Gun in BP's Deep Horizon Mess?
BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.
SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.
SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the “company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.
6 hours later, the platform explodes.
Via @felixsalmon and Thom Hartmann.
And here’s the video of the 70,000 barrel per day leak, via The Sietch
This is based on the Coast Guard’s estimate that 5,000 barrels of oil would leak for the 90 days that it will take to dig the relief well and stop the leak (90 times 5,000 = 450,000). However, NPR reported last night that “sophisticated scientific analysis of sea floor video made available Wednesday by the oil company BP shows that the true figure is closer to 70,000 barrels a day.”
“[I]n Soviet times such [underwater oil] leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: ‘The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.’ It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn’t work once.”
“The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.”
