I truly hope I don’t have to read this again tomorrow with a taste of bitter irony:
BP’s top-kill plan has been devised over more than a month by what BP calls a dream team of engineers from the oil industry and from such government agencies as the Energy Department, the Minerals Management Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.
They better be able to “plug the damn hole.” It’s a pretty sophisticated engineering feat they are trying to pull off:
Huge ships and drilling rigs now crowd the surface 5,000 feet above the blown-out well. Two rigs are drilling relief wells but are not expected to complete their work until August. Parked in the middle of everything is the command vessel for the top-kill operation, the 312-foot Helix Q4000. Close by will be the 381-foot HOS Centerline, one of the largest supply ships in the world, capable of pumping 50 barrels of mud a minute. Two other backup ships carrying mud will be nearby.
All the work at depth is performed by the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), numbering 12 by latest count, and operated from the surface ships while BP engineers monitor the process from Houston…
…On Tuesday, the BP engineers began diagnostic tests on the blowout preventer. This is a critical phase in which the company will learn how much pressure must be overcome when the drilling mud is injected into the well. It could also lead them to abort the maneuver.
“We’ve got a crack team of experts that are going to pore over the diagnostic data,” Wells said. “There is a remote possibility that we would get some information that it wouldn’t work.”
If all goes as planned, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard the HOS Centerline will pump mud at 40 to 50 barrels a minute to the Q4000 command vessel, then down a newly installed pipe to the gulf bottom, and then through flexible hoses into multiple portals in the blowout preventer.
What happens next would be all-important. The mud would have to go somewhere. The hope is that so much of it would be forced into the blowout preventer that, even as some of it surged up the riser pipe and into the water along with oil and gas, much of it would go to the bottom of the well. The well would lose all pressure and would become static. Later, BP would inject cement down the wellbore to permanently seal the well.
And, of course, it could backfire and make things worse. But they have to try. They can’t just wait until August when the relief well will be complete.
You know, Earth Day grew out of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. I hope the youngins create something comparable when this is all over. Not that it will ever be all over. You can see the damage here.
This is incredibly sad. What will the relief wells do anyway? Ease pressure and reduce the amount being of oil being released? Two and a half months for a partial fix? So much damage has already been done.
Keith had the ex CEO of Shell on who was questioning why they hadn’t brought over the super tankers from the other Gulf which literally have the capacity to patrol in a grid and ‘suck’ up and store the oil. It seems a no brainer to bring them in…
I’m reminded of the Challenger disaster and how they brought in a crack team, one of which was Richard Feynman who solved the problem. Richard’s gone now, with all the wonderful things his mind brought to us, but I can’t help but wonder if his son, who’s over at MIT, couldn’t have helped this dream team.
The Machiavellian optimist side of me frames this event, long-term, as a positive event, long-term. A generationally-orienting moment, or at least a visualization of what we’re doing to the Earth in so many different ways every day. I always figured we would need a couple of “climate Pearl Harbors,” as Joe Romm calls them, before we got serious about changing our energy system. Maybe this is one.
The problem is that the epochal change in public opinion you envision is contrary to the interests of our social betters. This isn’t 9/11 where a bloodthirsty pack of empire-minded neocons stood ready at the levers of power. In that case they were quite happy to sell a video-game war on the moslem menace to a supine populace. People are gonna have to get on their feet and do something about it. Which most people don’t really want to do, however bad they feel about some poor oil-covered birds.
Nothing good is going to come of this.
For the eight-millionth time, I don’t care about BP’s supposed technical advantage in deep water. I certainly hope they plug the well, but the crisis here is already far beyond the gusher. Everywhere I go I see someone acting like an expert by saying there’s not much we can do, the Admin is smart to avoid responsibility, the problem is too large, blah blah blah.
I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE POLITICS! I don’t even care if proposed mitigation option A) is no better than B) and C) is totally unproven and blah blah blah. USE THEM ALL. USE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.
If a slow moving blob were moving towards Houston, smothering everything in it’s path, would we be having discussions about how these carnivorous blobs are tough cookies and the high-tech and greedy dwarves who released this demonic menace really have the edge in dealing with this apocalyptic type scenario? That geez it’s hard to coordinate a response to something so big and there’s going to be some bureaucratic shortfalls and let’s push for resignations etc.
USE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. SPARE NO EXPENSE! Get 10,000 national guard on the scene manning boom. Get 100 supertankers in to suck sea-water. I don’t care if it’s inefficient or unproven or whatever the fuck people lecture each other about. EVERYTHING WE HAVE MUST BE TRIED TO STOP THE DAMAGE. I’m not saying nuke the wellhead. I’m saying if it’s obvious that something won’t do harm worse than is already happening, get on it. YESTERDAY. I don’t give a shit about “the president is smart to remain calm, what you want him to do, strap on a wetsuit and seal the well with ice-breath” or whatever. That would be nice! But what I expect is for the authorities to reflect a true and vital set of public values, which in this case is that irreversible and incalculable damage is being done every second to the public commonwealth and that it is the very highest priority of our society to do everything we can, no matter how ineffective, to stop or at least reduce the damage.
And you know what, ultimately it is still important to do this even if we have good reason to believe that our utmost effort will be largely fruitless (which I don’t necessarily admit in this case). Even if it is fruitless, it is still of sacred importance that we (but especially our leaders) recognize and honor the stakes by doing everything they can.
Because if they don’t get this thing plugged, the hole in the administration’s reputation for competence is gonna be as big as the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.
Sorry, I love Obama. I worked my ass off to get him elected. I’m fine with his appointments and proud that he got health care through. However, I’ve been terribly disappointed by the way the administration has failed to own this problem. They didn’t create it, and they can’t fix it, and it’s not fair – but Obama’s the president, and he owns it. Part of the problem is messaging, and part is real.
The private sector may be needed to deal with the gushing wellhead, but the surface response needs to be coordinated and run by federal disaster response officials who know what they are doing. We shouldn’t have people from southern Louisiana saying they’re called because oil is 10 miles offshore and they couldn’t get an answer. We shouldn’t have multiple people saying boom is laid wrong and maintained wrong. We shouldn’t have Louisiana requesting specific resources for specific problems and being unable to get them – not without a timely and public explanation of why.
Obama needs to own this and take charge of it, because he already owns it whether he wants to or not.
And NPR is saying the order to stop drilling was not in writing??
Link
My criticism is that they are not visible and visibly effective on the ground, and they have not taken visible ownership of the problem of protecting the coast.
Delayed again, Wednesday morning.