BP oil disaster: Who made it that way?

I read the article.

What you dont seem to understand is this is NOT a traditional "leak", nor is it a "spill". It is an uncontrolled "blowout"'. Blowouts are disasters from the beginning, and US policy has little control over that.

In shallower waters, the Dutch equipment may work as well as anything.

I can tell that you really dont know much about the offshore oil production industry.

Or have you just eaten a snake for breakfast and want to piss on the US??

I will agree that our government isnt much to brag about, and I would like to think there was a good reason the Dutch equipment was rejected..

The article is made up BS. It is mostly fiction.

This is fiction.

The Dutch offered the equipment for sale. BP bought all the equipment the Dutch had on hand. BP also bought all the equipment Costner's company had. And they have brought in equipment from Norway and Sweden also. Bp has already spent billions on equipment and crews to throw at the problem.

BS the equipment is being used to clean up the oil.

This too looks like fiction. My newspaper reported that it was the US excavating companies that objected. However it is very doubtful that these sand berms are going to do much of anything except protect a tiny tiny island.

Your misinformation is a disaster.

They communicated to whom?

That contradicts the sworn testimony of a number of witnesses. According to the survivors Schlumberger crew was on the rig that day. They had done some tests a few days before the blow out and remained on standby to do a cement log if the pressure tests indicated there was a problem with the cement. When the pressure tests held the Schlumberger crew was told they weren't needed and they could go home. They left on a regularly scheduled flight 11 hours before the blow out. A cement log at this point was not in the well plan and not required by regulation. The procedure they were following that day was the procedure that was outlined in the approved well plan. There was no plan to do a cement log unless the pressure tests indicated a problem. You don't know what caused the well to blow and you know even less about what might have been done differently to prevent what happened. If they ever succeed in drilling a relief well and if they succeed in filling the well bore with mud via that relief well and killing the flow, then they may someday be able to make a determination as to what went wrong down in the hole. At that point they will be able to also bring the BOP to the surface and inspect it.

That is your speculation based on your unsubstantiated facts.

There were two mud engineer from M-I SWAKO who were monitoring the mud displacement at the time of the blow out and explosion. According to a fellow Swaco employee (compliance technician) who talked to the mud engineers just before the blow out there was nothing abnormal or any indication of a problem 20 minutes before the explosion when he left the mud room. The Swaco mud engineers died in the explosion. The technician who testified was lucky enough to complete his duties just before the incident or he would have been among the dead also. The Transocean driller and asst driller and tool pushers also died.

Yes it killed the men in the drill room and the mud room. Most of the men killed were in a position to know if the condition of the well was dangerous and had the authority to halt operations if safety was a concern.

Incompetence may well have played a role. Lots of things if done differently may have produced a different outcome. Who knows mistakes made on the drill floor that night may have contributed, but it all happened so fast there may never be any way to know what happened just before the blow out because everyone in a position to know died. Some things may be discovered when the well is controlled and somethings may never be determined. What is pretty clear is nobody was expecting the rig to explode, burn and sink. The fact that the rig almost immediately was engulfed in flames and there was essentially no time for anyone to do anything but abandon ship is really the root cause of why this is still an ongoing catastrophe. Without the explosion and fire and sinking of the rig this would have been managed one way or the other without much ado a long time ago.

-jim

They, according to the information I have from several sources, told this to the "company man", which it oilfield jargon for the BP employee on board who is in charge of all operations.

None of us "know", but that will come out in the final evaluation. What we think we know is that they had been circulating salt water instead of weighted mud, and that they had been taking pressure kicks. If you have enough hydrostatic head on the kicking formation, you can control the kicks and not go to full blowout, in most cases.

That is my speculation based on what has surfaced so far.

If the Schlumberger story is true, then they at least were expecting trouble.

But I agree with you in the sense that this situation needs a complete investigation, and the true facts and results need to be made public.

Actually we DO know that. It was BPs operation, BP was in charge, and BP is responsible. They made the mess, by default.

You seem to continue to use the word "spill" . The Exxon Valdez was a "spill". This is an uncontrolled blowout.

"Tegger" wrote in message

Here is a quote from a message I received.. I think all the names are removed to protect the poster. The article below and comment just below are pretty technical, but it helps understand that human error and greed caused the explosion in the gulf. I don't know if the BP man on site was killed or not. The comment just below is from a friend from my job in Houston with a drilling mud company.

I can sure see why SJ left. I was a drilling fluid engineer in Cook inlet offshore in Alaska when the mud man on the tender I was on said the slugging pit was almost solid and they were getting ready to slug the hole and come out (bring the pipe out so they could put another bit on the string). I went over to the barite (weighting material) bin and checked the PH - it was 14 and I checked the slug tank and it was the same. I ran to the top of the barge to the Rig Toolpusher and told them not to come out of the hole. If we would have pumped that slug down we could have had a blowout. He stopped the operation at once. It turns out that the boat that delivered us the barite had hauled cement before our load and had not cleaned their bins. We dumped thousands of lbs of barite overboard that night and the operation and perhaps lives were saved. When I came back to Houston the Dist. Mgr. from Alaska offered me a lot more money to come back. Of course my wife did not want to actually move up there and we did not go. This report about SJ is very very revealing. A note - one has just a few minutes to live if you must hit the water up there(Alaska).

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Smoking Gun in BP's Deep Horizon Mess

May 2010 - 11:31 Thom's nationally syndicated radio show

This hasn't seemed to have gotten much circulation yet, and I think it really needs to. Seems that a crew from Schlumberger, on contract to BP, hightailed it off the platform at their own expense 6 hours before the blowout because BP refused their recommendation to shut down the well. This lends more credence to Thom's suggestion that corners were cut because the bigwigs were coming for a visit.

"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 personnel 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."

No, what led to the event itself was pretty remarkable. And yes, leaks are pretty common, but this is more than a leak. This is a pretty dramatic failure of a whole lot of things all at once.

Not really.... while I agree that it would have been a good thing to have the Europeans in and helping, I think the sheer volume of oil involved here makes just about any attempt at skimming to be a drop in the bucket.

Now, if you want to argue that the government did a bad thing in turning down the Europeans, that's certainly true. The thing is, the government is _not_ designed to operate quickly, but to operate with lots of checks and balances. This means that it can sometimes take a long, long time to get things done, but on the whole it's a good thing because most of the time we aren't in crisis situations.

--scott

They were displacing mud in the riser when it blew. Displacing the mud with saltwater was done in preparation to placing the final cement plug that would close the well. The bottom of The well had been cemented and pressure tested. As far as anyone knew the well was stable and sealed off.

The story is unlikely to be true. The Schlumberger crew was standby in case they needed to do the cement log. Schlumberger crew had no way of knowing anything about the condition of the well. They weren't involved with any of the drilling operations and they didn't do any testing on the well. That crew was standing by in case the pressure tests showed the cement job had a problem. When the 25000 psi pressure test showed the cement was good they were sent home.

BP is responsible for the oil that is spilled and the cleanup under US law. Even if it turns out that halliburton or transocean were negligent and caused the blowout BP is still responsible and it is BP's problem to collect whatever costs they can get from some negligent third party.

-jim

Some of the stock gurus are saying to stay away from service company stocks right now. The whole industry is likely to take a black eye because of what has happened and what is happening.

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote in news:i0al77$qpl$ snipped-for-privacy@panix2.panix.com:

Wrong. The Dutch equipment is /specifically/ meant to eliminate enormous volumes of oil.

But the primary point here is the absolutely moronic refusal of the US government to allow ANY oil recovery AT ALL except by actually removing the water from the Gulf and placing it in an on-shore storage facility.

It was /criminally/ stupid. Had Lisa Jackson taken the Dutch up on their repeated offers, oil very likely would not have reached the shore.

Lisa Jackson and Barack Obama are idiots. They care more about unions and politics than protecting the environment. And hey, YOU guys voted for them!

This means that it can sometimes take a

Sorry, but that's a silly argument.

Good new for all the experts in this newgroup who know more about the oil disaster and clean up than BP and the US Coast Guard. There is now a Xprize available.

I can hardly wait to read about how some newgroup geek saved the Gulf Coast.

Ed

Yesterday on tv news, I saw/heard some people are using wet/dry vacuum cleaners (bought at Lowe's or wherever stores) to help clean up oil on the water. cuhulin

BP oil spill Corexit dispersants suspected in widespread crop damage.

Not only are they killing the Gulf of Mexico and Marine Wildlife and making people sick, it seems they are killing the crops, trees, and who knows what else too!

I live 140 miles North of the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina ripped ten shingles off of the roof of my house and blew three trees down across my street. Sheesh, what is next? cuhulin

Well, hell, if that is the only item of disagreement, we dont disagree at all.

You and any number of fools can agree with any nonsense you want to but your agreeing doesn't make any of it true. The statement that "the US government is refusing to allow ANY oil recovery AT ALL except by actually removing the water from the Gulf and placing it in an on-shore storage facility." is simply not true.

Breaking: Obama shuts down 33% of the country's oil refining capacity

cuhulin

Whatever you say, Jim

"hls" wrote in news:3pudnc1v-fhSrbPRnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

US law requires that any water removed from the Gulf must have 15ppm, or less, of any pollutants when returned to the Gulf. In other words, water taken must be 99.9985% pure, or it can't be put back.

The US lacks any of its own shipboard equipment that is capable of doing an on-board clean of water to such purity. As a consequence, oily water had to be removed to an on-shore facility that /is/ capable of purifying water to the degree required. This means that the recovery ships cover about ten times the mileage the Dutch ships would cover, and clean a tiny fraction of the water the Dutch ships could, if allowed to.

Not only environmental law stands in the way. So does the Jones Act, which places restrictions on foreign vessels from operating in US waters. The government didn't want to temporarily waive that law for the sake of the environment. Says a lot about the mindset of those in charge of the country, doesn't it?

It has nothing to do with what I say. The prohibition of dumping oil into the sea is governed by International treaties:

According to international marine law the regulations for Dutch simmers are the same in Europe as they are in the Gulf of Mexico.

The USCG enforces the MARPOL regulations in US waters. The Coast Guard has issued a directive back in May that skimmers in the Gulf may return water back into the sea. The rule is that as long as it is discharged in front of the skimmer it won't be considered a violation of Marpol regulations.

-jim