Tag: BP Oil Spill

I’ve been checking on Linda Leavitt’s twitter account http://twitter.com/ WhoDat35 for news of the effects of the ongoing BP oil spill, and I suggest you bookmark this-  she’s a tireless lover of all things Louisiana coastal, and the locals have been tweeting her some great links.

The oil has started to wash up quite a bit more on the sugar sands of Alabama-  I knew Alabama had Gulf of Mexico coastline, but I didn’t realize that they had such beautiful sand beaches until this oil spill.   Many concerned people are contacting Leavitt in astonishment that the oiled beaches have not been officially closed yet to beachgoers, and not only are people sunbathing,  that they’ve seen children actually swimming in this stuff.

A month ago, in Louisiana, Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputies were blocking reporters and bloggers from seeing the oil washed up on Elmer’s Island, at BP’s request.  But the tourist beaches were still open.

Mac McClelland and John Hazlett end up kayaking into the spill area to see it 524/2010/

http://motherjones.com/environ…

At the turn to Elmer’s Island Road, a deputy flags us down. Can’t go to Elmer’s; he’s just “doing what they told me to do.” We continue on to Grand Isle beach, where toddlers splash in the surf. Only after I’ve stepped in a blob of crude do I realize that the sheen on the waves and the blackness covering a little blue heron from the neck down is oil.

The next day, cops drive up and down Grand Isle beach explicitly telling tourists it is still open, just stay out of the water. There are pools of oil on the beach; dolphins crest just offshore. A fifty-something couple, Southern Louisianians, tell me this kind of thing happened all the time when they were kids; they swam in rubber suits when it got bad, and it was no big deal. They just hope this doesn’t mean we’ll stop drilling.

The blockade to Elmer’s is now four cop cars strong. As we pull up, deputies start bawling us out; all media need to go to the Grand Isle community center, where a “BP Information Center” sign now hangs out front. nside, a couple of Times-Picayune reporters circle BP representative Barbara Martin, who tells them that if they want passage to Elmer they have to get it from another BP flack, Irvin Lipp; Grand Isle beach is closed too, she adds. When we inform the Times-Pic reporters otherwise, she asks Dr. Hazlett if he’s a reporter; he says,  “No.” She says, “Good.”

Where the tourist beache aren’t, the access is harder to come by-  see the June 11 kayak visit they made to Grande Terre, http://motherjones.com/rights-… ,  where BP’s contracted clean up crews were using some sort of cross between a paper towel and a sham wow, dozens of them laid across the sand, to blot up millions of gallons of oil from the beaches “where the oil stretched as far as we could see in deep, dark pools.”  

Because it is Saturday Night and we all needed a humor piece-  

There is a blog that was published 2 hours ago uhm, ….  somewhere else. It is called “About that third leak”    It was wreckomended.

It uses pics and video from a breathless ABC news report and tells us:

But we have not seen them installing a valve and closing it on, from the video above appears to be the very worst leak?.

No video has been released of the third leak valve installation operation therefore no-one can trust, but verify, that they have dealt with this effectively.

Geebus H. Cricket on a Swamp Canoe.

I’ll start close to the source of the oil and methane gas coming out – the wellhead, with the BOP and riser pipe, and work my way out.  

This is the first leak.  It is coming out of the bent over riser pipe and the drill pipe inside of that, at the wellhead above the Blow Out Protector.   Hold up your thumb.  That’s one. 1.

6/1/2010 The Plume Coming off the bent riser pipe near the BOP top. & Sawing machine working on pipe.

This is the second leak.  They capped it first.  Hold up your index finger. That’s two. 2.

Drill pipe leak

Look familiar ?  Back atcha.

re: The broken off piece of drill pipe. This was inside the riser pipe but sticking out further. It was near the top of the water originally.  Know why it’s bigger on the end ?  That’s a joint where pieces join together. It came apart there.   They used different sizes of pipe in the well.

This is the “third leak.”  It’s at the middle of the riser pipe. Technically, it’s the 2nd in line going from the well out the pipe.   It was the end that was attached, then broke loose, from the Transocean oil drilling rig floating above the surface on the Gulf waters. It’s 5000 feet long, and it folded as it bent over and landed on the ocean floor. Where it folded, it has kinked, broken, and leaked. There is one pipe inside the other, and both were leaking, which meant the cement failed on the well casing bore hole.  It has the “sippy tube” collection device in it here.  Hold up your pinkie.   That’s three. 3.

Endpipe, riser + drill, sippy tube

Here is a drawing that shows how the bent over riser pipe with the drill pipe inside of it looks on the ocean floor.  Leak 1 on at the top of the BOP.  Leak 2 where the pipes bent on the seafloor, and they used a sippy tube to experiment with collecting the oil, but it says “tophat.”   Leak 3 is the very end, or beginning, of the pipe, where they capped it.  The end farthest from the well has the smallest leak.  It is not a government or BP conspiracy.  It’s hydraulics.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…  The science of liquids.

Graphic of the bent pipes from the well laying on the sea bed.

On Tues, June 1st,  they started sawing on the bent over pipes coming out of the top of the Blow Out Protector on top of the well head on the seafloor.

They used one of these

Rotary Pipe Saw

And then they used one of these

Diamond Rotary Pipe Saw Machine and Clamp On Bracket  

And when that didn’t work, they went to THIS.  

Mother of All Pipe Shears

Eventually, they sawed, crimped, and nipped all the pipes off the Blow Out Protector, leaving a single big riser pipe stub coming out of the top, which looks like a tree stump painted white. (The smaller drill pipe coming from the well is inside this. Both pipes are leaking. ) The rough edges of the riser were ground down with another polishing tool.     Then later last week, they lowered a collection cap “Lower Marine Riser Package” over it, after they fitted it with a rubber gasket.

Here’s stumpy getting his edge polished 6/3/2010

LMRP CAP -illustration by BP

LMRP BOP CAP #4  webcam voyage to the bottom.

Yes, it leaks.

BOP CAP #4,  IN SITU  Saturday June 5, 2010

Hold up your thumb.  

In the shape of an “L” on your forehead.  “Lost”

There is only one leak now. 1.  The other 2 leaks were in the pipe pieces they cut off.

See how easy that is ?

And this is how we knew the leak was releasing a lot of oil, BEFORE May the 12th.  

Government satellite of the Louisiana Mississippi Delta, picture April 29, 2010. This was published by NOAA/NASA on the internet and subsequently picked up by Louisiana State University ES Lab and republished on their website, with permission to republish.  

The size of the area may be estimated.  There are formulas which can be used to calculate how much oil spreads out how far.  On the internet.  What you see is like looking down on top of a funnel cloud here, only one dimension.   There is more.

They knew. In April.  There is no way the Commander in Chief the President did not know this was going to be a large spill a few hours after the flaming, smoking hulk of Deepwater Horizon toppled into the sea.  It looked like a monster Tiki torch.  Once it stopped burning, the oil and gas was not coming to the top anymore, but in the water.  BP knew. The rig survivors knew.  The MMS knew, they had the plans for the well on file, which would indicate how much it was going to produce per day, by its design. The Coast Guard knew. The blogs knew.

Did they want to admit the potential, right off ?  Of course not.

The MSM was, of course, reluctant to admit that everything was going to go to slow motion hell.

There is a ship called the Enterprise, with a pipe going down to that LMRP BOP CAP,  attempting to process the oil they manage to bring to the surface. It can process 15,000 barrels a day of oil maximum.  This might be half of what is coming up out of the well.  It might not be.  The #4 CAP won’t capture all the released oil/gas.  Without a way to shut it off precisely, totally, and quickly at the bottom, in case of emergency,  the oil gathering ship above doesn’t have a way to safely emergency disconnect in case of a sudden gusher of violent gas, aka a bubble or “kick,” which did in the first well drilling rig.  So it’s a sloppy connection, by design.

Nobody is happy about this, but who wants to see the Enterprise go up in a fireball.

The well bore hole is thought to be badly damaged because the cement liner failed. (thanks, Halliburton, you b*stards.)   Without an intact borehole, this thing could get very dicey suddenly.  This is why they are not attempting to put another Blow Out Protector on top. You can shut it off at the top for a while, but you want to be able to then PLUG it much farther down before the BOP shoots off like a cork.  

Some of the plume you are seeing in the picture is methane gas coming out of liquid solution and expanding rapidly.  It is getting flared off at the surface ship, what doesn’t turn into methane hydrates at the bottom of the Gulf because of the extreme pressure and cold temperatures.  Methane is not going to wash ashore onto the Gulf, and a lot of the crap coming from this well is methane. That is the good news.

I am not trying to minimize the severity and danger and ecologic catastrophe of the situation, I have been one of the ones trying to push the alarm button from the beginning.  I have lots more screen captures of that webcam, and thank Heavens that Rep. Markey got after them to show us something.

But can we dispense with the crazy rumors about some “third leak” now ?  

Repeat. Some of the plume is methane.  Methane isn’t going to wash ashore.

Don’t worry about the plume size coming from some jackwipe ABC video. This is the same channel that gave us the “Path to 9/11” and Mickey Mouse.  See how there is a dispersant wand at the supposed giant, mysterious “third leak?”   WTF, as they are only applying dispersant at the wellhead near the BOP.  That’s where the biggest plumes have been.   What utter tripe.   Worry about the volume of oil, the pressure, and the rate of flow.  Worry about the visible sheen of oil now covering about a third of the Gulf. Or the oil patches that have been documented or will be.  Worry about protecting the cleanup workers from toxins.  Worry about the wildlife and plants and fish and birds. Worry about the deteriorating well bore.  Worry that the government and BP in collusion,  jointly lowballed the initial amount of the leak by a huge factor to the public.  Worry that anybody believes that ABC couldn’t find somebody to explain this to them, and that they are busy spinning an alternate CT storyline already.  I saw the old “industry expert” peddling this “Government is still hiding a Secret Leak” routine on cable television.  One blogger said, paraphrased,  “he used to be a real industry expert. Something has happened with age. I hope there is someone to look after his affairs now.”

Facepalm.  

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photos taken as screenshots off of live webcam feed as provided by BP to the American people because of Rep. Markey, and definition and color bumped by me.  some photos by NASA and NOAA, LSU/ESL, or from the Unified Command US government website which had the BP graphics.  UC JIC also has a good twitter feed which leads to other links. http://twitter.com/oil_spill_2010

Oil Drum is the recommended blog to continue to find explanations as to what may be going on, along with satellite photos from NRL Monterey, NASA, and NOAA.  http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/nex…

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Friday news dump-

Bp Tony falls on his sword-  will anyone be surprised ?  But to an American named, of all things…..  Dudley?

We won’t have bp Tony of Deepwotter Spinmeister to slosh around anymore. Damn.

Things I couldn’t make up if I tried, continued, BP Oil Spill category, day 47 :

From the Florida Department of Tourism, Friday, June 4th, 2010

Pending castastrophe special:

http://www.visitflorida.com/fl…

Florida Travel Update

Updated June 4, 2010 1:45 p.m.

There have been confirmed tar ball sightings in widely scattered areas east of Pensacola. Additional impacts

are expected in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties within the next 72 hours.

At this time, there are no beach closures. Florida’s 825 miles of beaches, 1,260 miles of coastline and 14 seaports, including cruise ships, remain open for business.

At this time, Florida’s state waters remain open to recreational fishing. On June 5 and 6, both residents and nonresidents of Florida may fish for saltwater species around the state without a license. Go to http:/www.MyFWC.com/Fishing for more information.

VISIT FLORIDA believes that planning your Sunshine State vacation should be the beginning of a great experience.

If you’re concerned about any potential impact from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we encourage you to check with local destinations in order to get the most up-to-date information. To make it easy, we’re providing you

links below.

For the state’s official response to the oil spill: http:/www.dep.state.fl.us/deep…

For official trajectory and forecast information, visit NOAA’s site.

If it gets noticeable, we’ll just go to catch and release

BP and Your Federal Government, welcome you to the Gulf of Mexico’s Dia de los Cortadores de Pipa celebration for the first day of Hurricane Season.  

His Tools Are Bigger Than Your Tools

And the sooner he can get this done:

ROV moving under the BOP with headlights as pincer arm prepares to grasp pipe for the saw to cut

*

*

June 1, 2010. Tues afternoon.   BP Starts Cutting the Pipes coming out of the BOP of the Deepwater Horizon.  Oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon, day 41.

*

The Sooner he can go on to getting his life back.

Poor Baby.  BP CEO Tony Hayward laments the distraction that 2 million gallons of oil a day can cause when it hits our nation’s biggest marine nursery for subtropical fish, mammals, and birds.

video transcript:

BP CEO Tony Hayward:  “We’re sorry.

We’re sorry for the massive disruption this caused to their lives.  I…. we’re….  there’s no on who wants this thing over more than I do.  I want my life back .”

narrator:   Life here may never be the same. The water and all that lives in and around (shows oiled pelican) could be harmed for years.  So on this holiday weekend some people in New Orleans protested.

bullhorn:  we’re trying to clean up this mess

woman with umbrella:   I’m  filled with anxiety every night and I hope that BP executives feel the same way, unfortunately I doubt that they do.

Meanwhile, Rear Admiral Mary Landry, lately famous for shepherding the Lost, er, BP’s hapless spokesperson Doug Suttles, thru the official press conferences,  has been put back on duty with the Coast Guard to prepare for Hurricane Season.    http://www.deepwaterhorizonres…

Just as Attorney General Eric Holder announces a criminal investigation into what BP was doing, and the President issues another sternly worded statement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

“We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response.” Holder said in New Orleans.    

The president said that if laws are insufficient, they’ll be changed. He said that if government oversight wasn’t tough enough, that will change, too.

Laws, schmaws.  What about policy. Who opened more coastal offshore areas to bidding leases?  And enforcement of existing safety checks. Who’s MMS signed off on the well design ?

This from the same guy who couldn’t find anybody doing anything criminally wrong with Jack Abramoff’s old unindicted co conspirators, nor from the mercenary and CIA rendition & torture crews since his boss has been in office.  Did I mention that Abramoff was a long time lobbyist for foreign energy interests ?

It’s all good !

Pass the candles.   Prepare the offerings.

_____________

edit update 5:30 pm PDT:

  Per the Alabama Dept of Health pdf link in the first comment, oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill has now officially reached the coastline of Alabama, near Dauphin Island,  closing the offshore oyster beds, and fishing grounds of that state.  You can beach, but don’t get in the water or swim, and seek medical advice if you have trouble breathing.   They didn’t say what legal advice to seek if you have trouble earning a living.

Warning. Not. Snark. BP has hired the former press secretary for ex VP Dick Cheney to be their new spokesperson for US media relations.  Anne Womack Kolton, formerly of the Brunswick Group , also defended Dick Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force,   http://emptywheel.firedoglake….   and ran public affairs in the Dept of Energy under George W Bush.

from Brunswick

http://www.prnewswire.com/news…

Before joining the Department of Energy, Ms. Kolton was Director of

Public Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she was the

primary spokesperson on issues and policy related to financial markets,

financial institutions and financial education. She has extensive

on-the-record experience with the media, particularly those covering energy

and finance. Ms. Kolton also served as an advisor to  Securities and

Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, as a White House

spokesperson and on major state and national political campaigns.

Cheney, The Treasury, and the SEC.   Perfect.  If Darth Cheney didn’t have his sticky little fingers in it directly before, he does now.

Phillippe Cousteau, Jr., the grandson of French explorer and ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau:

BP’s oil spill is humanity’s latest strike against against the World’s oceans, according to Phillippe Cousteau Jr., an explorer and host for Animal Planet and Planet Green.

Phillipe Cousteau, Jr., actually dove into the oil, dispersants of this BP soup mix.

Phillippe Cousteau, Jr. was on “Real Time with Bill Maher” this past Friday and spoke of what the country’s worst in oil spill in history will mean for oceans that are already suffering from pollution and overfishing.

This video is not embeddable — see it here.

Philippe Cousteau, Jr., the ecologist grandson of Jacques, joined Bill Maher on Real Time last night to give his assessment of the Gulf of Mexico, where he has been working to help clean up the oil washing ashore from the the open offshore oil well. While he seemed confident that there was a way to fix the problem, he stressed that the ocean ecosystem will not fix itself. . . . .

Maher asked about the situation in Louisiana, where Cousteau had been working for the past weeks- his answer was not incredibly optimistic. He did have a direct answer for people who believe the ocean is strong and healthy enough to fix itself:

“I could cut my leg off, I could cut my arm off, I could gouge my eye out, I’d still probably survive, but not very well, and that’s what we’re doing to the ocean. It’s the life support system of this planet. We’ve been dumping in it, we’ve been polluting it, we’ve been destroying it for decades, and we’re essentially maiming ourselves… ”

Speaking about massive annual dead zones just off the U.S. Coast, Cousteau lets us know that we have exceeded the tipping point:

Turned on the tube, there’s a live press conference with  Rr. Admiral Landry and BP’s Spokesperson Doug Suttles.

Top Kill is officially Not Working.  

Suttles

“We’ve tried and it scares everybody that we haven’t succeeded in getting this stopped.”

No. Kidding.

Admiral Landry.

Obviously we’re very disappointed in today’s announcement.

We will continue with a very aggressive response posture (to get this under control)

Have directed BP to to move forward with the next option, LMRP.  

(added later quote) The real solution has been and continues to be the relief well.  

Mmm, hmm. Yes.

They think that if they can get a good seal over the top, the LMRP  Cap, lower marine riser package Cap, might work, which is the option they are going for next.

This is a newly engineered object, different than what they have used before, which is going to go on top on what they have, with a sort of seal, not a mechanical seal, but a “sealing device” and methanol injection for antifreeze,  that Suttles says “should” capture a lot of the oil.   Will not be a tight fitting may not completely seal off like a flange.

Pipe will be cut with a large crimping device and a big saw to get it ready for its new LMRP CAP.   (this is not being done for the pathetic little “top hat” device they lowered to the marine floor, never to be seen again. this is a new thing.)

Wilberforce correctly anticipated this this morning.   Where I disagreed is that this was happening this am,  is that it is going to take at least 4 days to set up, per the Coast Guard and Suttles, right now.  Landry is saying now, more like 4 to 7 days, because people remember the smaller number, and they hit glitches in trying to execute this, she emphasizes this is cutting edge technology.  They are using the data they gather from the “sippy tube” other end of the broken pipe to help design this.   That is currently what is being shown on the live feed and what was being shown earlier today.  I’ve seen then playing around with cutting on this end before.

I thought they would be too timid and/or cautious to try actually cutting the mess on the top of the BOP, because this will release a huge amount of oil that is currently restricted, which they then must be able to get this new cap securely attached, unfrozen inside,  to capture, but they are going for it. This is letting more of the Genie out of the bottle, and he’s not going to go back in easier.

My intrepretation is that they fear the well casing is not in very good shape and they want to start siphoning asap in case the relief well fails or the vital structures of the well fails, which Adm. Landry said was a possibility earlier this week.  A major hole blow out is only good for the movies.  In really, that is a catastrophe which will be unstoppable until all the oil and gas have leached out, which could take….. years.  

Suttles is also still bullsh*tting people on the Corexit, says the monitoring shows no toxicity.  Says breaking the oil up into tiny droplets will allow the microbes to eat it more easily.  

More like it’s keeping under the surface and swirling around in the Gulf in vast swarms.

Suttles: 12,000 feet deep in the relief well, counting 5000 feet of water, best forecast for the relief well is early August.

This is still a very dangerous and risky operation, and if you are in the habit of praying, start doing it.

______

edit update, here’s a picture from Beyond Pathetic of what I shall be calling Oil Hat Sucker #3

We had the containment “outhouse” box that froze shut, the sippy tube stuck up its bum, the drill mud top kill that didn’t, the junk shot that wouldn’t clog the petrotoilet, and the the forlorn little cap that they sunk down there and never used.  And now,

Introducing BP’s Oil Spill LMRP Lower Marine Riser Package CAP,  aka Oil Hat Sucker #3.    

Which is going to use a pressure gasket with no hardware casing, as a fitting on a 12,000 pounds per square inch oil and methane gas wildcat well 5,000 feet under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

As the spoof twitter bpTerry of spoof twitter bpPublic Relations said yesterday, “I just bought a magic wand, and I’m going to start waving it. ”

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second update.

fixed spelling in blockquote, added sentence by Landry which clarifies the relief well is the way they expect to finally get this under permanent control.   Suttles reiterated that the other oil gathering devices, the caps,  are to test and implement and prevent as much oil as possible from getting loose in the Gulf and washing ashore, while this solution is worked on.

BP’s Tony Hayward is quoted by CNN as being “disappointed”  top kill failed.   Yeah, we are too.  Especially since it was more of a test round and you never did cap off the sippy tube open end.

The CNN guy is so excited he just said the Top Tail Method did not work to kill the well. You could see him wondering if he should correct himself, he just went on.

 

edit update(See Thursday morning update at bottom of diary)

Rr. Admiral Landry granted approval for BP to begin plugging the well. (Wednesday am)

5/26/10  11:53 am CST

http://www.deepwaterhorizonres…

Federal On-Scene Coordinator Rear Admiral Mary Landry, acting on the validation of government scientists and in consultation with the National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has granted approval for BP to begin proceeding with their attempt to cap the well using the technique known as the “top kill.”

This expedited step provides the final authorization necessary to begin the procedure.

Per the Joint Information Center Unified Command,  http://twitter.com/Oil_Spill_2…   “TOP KILL” is a Go at the blown out BP Oil rig a mile under the Gulf of Mexico, and the oil company will attempt to block the well with drill mud pumped in thru new lines connected to the Blow Out Preventer on the well head, which run up to the ships above.

I will be updating this diary during the day as news progress.

I just turned off the television idiots who could not tell me whether or not this was happening.  If there is a delay, it is because BP feels like they are not ready or have hit a technical problem, but the Govt says “go.”