Showing posts with label Gulf of Mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulf of Mexico. Show all posts

Friday, May 10, 2013

Ignoring risks, Shell gears up for production of world's deepest offshore well

Well, fuck the residents of the Gulf of Mexico, the wildlife and sea life there. More deepwater drilling, deeper than before despite the risks. We never learn from our history, we always repeat the same mistakes.

Thursday, May 9, 2013 by Common Dreams
Deeper Than Deepwater: Shell Plans World's Riskiest Offshore Well 
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer


Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell announced Wednesday that it will soon begin development of the world's deepest off-shore oil well, in the body of water that is home to the world's largest oil spill—BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010—the Gulf of Mexico.
 
 The well will be drilled almost two miles underwater in the Gulf, which is still reeling from the aftermath of the BP Deepwater disaster that spewed 4.9 million barrels (210 million gallons) of oil from the busted Macondo well over the span of three months. (reports are that it's still spewing oil)

In comparison to BP's Macondo well that began at about 5,100 feet below the water—a precarious operation that ended in catastrophe—Shell's new well will begin at almost twice that depth: 9,500 feet under water. The site of the well, the "Stones field", is 200 miles south-west of New Orleans. Shell's other deep water project, Perdido, at 8,000 feet below the surface, is the well's only rival.

In addition, as the Guardian reports, although Shell's new well is unparallelled, it is not without company:
It comes a day after ExxonMobil said it would start work on a $4bn (£2.6bn) project to develop the Julia oilfield, also in the North American ocean basin, and weeks after BP delayed development of its biggest Gulf of Mexico project – Mad Dog Phase 2 – citing rising costs. [...]
[Shel] has several other projects nearby, including its 900 meter-deep Mars field, where it is adding new infrastructure, plus its Appomattox and Vito discoveries.
Shell is expected to begin production at Stones by 2016.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Whistleblower: BP Oil Platform Faces 'Present and Imminent Danger'

Saturday, March 17, 2012 by Common Dreams
Whistleblower claims about BP's Atlantis filed this week argue against Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's claims platform is safe

A whistleblower who has a standing lawsuit against BP has argued this week that the company's Atlantis Project, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, faces "present and imminent danger."

The whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott, is a former BP contractor on the Atlantis. His lawsuit says that BP failed to keep required records of the safety systems for the Atlantis.

Back in 2010, Food & Water Watch, which joined Abbott's lawsuit, warned that the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster foreshadowed another Gulf of Mexico disaster caused by BP's Atlantis platform. At that time, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said, “We have evidence that Atlantis is unsafe and is in danger of creating an even worse spill than the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion.”

* * *


The Times-Picayune: BP Atlantis whistleblower alleges imminent safety threat for first time
BP Atlantis in 2006 (photo: munchicken) 
A whistleblower is alleging for the first time in a yearslong lawsuit against BP that its massive Atlantis oil platform operation off the Louisiana coast faces present and imminent danger. 
Kenneth Abbott first complained in 2009 that BP had failed to keep required records of the design of pressure-relief systems and other safety mechanisms onboard the Atlantis. [...] 
[T]he U.S. government joined in some of his claims when an independent reviewer justified many of Abbott's complaints. But BP, and later the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, determined that the lack of safety records did not pose any imminent threat. 
Abbott's latest filing in the Houston court this week argues otherwise. [...] 
[T]he Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released a report in March 2011 that declared the Atlantis rig safe, in spite of its failure to maintain proper records on board.

* * *

WASHINGTON - April 22 - Following Tuesday's explosion on the Deepwater Horizon Platform, leased and operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico, the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch is warning of the possibility of a similarly tragic disaster involving the company's Atlantis Project- one of the world's deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platforms, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. 
Last year, a whistleblower and former company contractor alleged that the Atlantis platform has been operating without a large percentage of the engineer-approved documents needed for it to operate safely. An independent engineer later substantiated these concerns, concluding that a BP database showed that over 85 percent of the Atlantis Project's Piping and Instrument drawings lacked final engineer-approval, and that the project should be immediately shut down until those documents could be accounted for and are independently verified. 
"The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon platform is an urgent reminder of the calamity that could occur if BP's Atlantis platform is operating without the approved documents necessary for ensuring its safety," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "This accident and the recent Massey mine disaster in West Virginia underscore a complete lack of regulatory oversight over the operations of the fossil fuel industry." 
BP has denied the whistleblower's assertions regarding Atlantis, going so far as to write a letter to Congressional staff saying that they are "unsubstantiated," even though internal documents show that in August 2008, BP management was aware of the problems and believed that the document deficiencies "could lead to catastrophic Operator error." An investigation conducted by the company's Ombudsman in April 2009 seems to substantiate the charges, although the investigation's results did not become known until this month. BP has never acknowledged that the Ombudsman conducted an investigation of the project's document deficiencies. 
"BP's recklessness in regards to the Atlantis project is a clear example of how the company has a pattern of failing to comply with minimum industry standards for worker and environmental safety," said Mike Sawyer, an Engineer at Apex Safety Consultants, who verified the contractor-turned-whistleblower's concerns about the company's lack of proper documents. 
In March 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with overseeing the nation's offshore oil and gas platforms, announced that it would investigate these allegations in response to a letter from Representative Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and 18 of his colleagues calling for an investigation and a report on the findings issued to Congress. Food & Water Watch brought the situation to Representative Grijalva's attention in October of 2009. 
Last week, Food & Water Watch submitted a letter to MMS detailing the key issues that need to be addressed with MMS's investigation, highlighting the recently-surfaced information about BP's own Ombudsman investigation. The organization called on MMS to conduct a thorough investigation of the situation, including interviewing the contractor-turned whistleblower who unearthed these potential safety hazards, and to penalize BP to the fullest extent of the law. 
"The accident on the Horizon platform further highlights the importance of MMS's investigation of the Atlantis Project, as well as its regulation of offshore drilling activities in that area. As energy companies push to open more of the Outer Continental Shelf, MMS needs to make sure that companies like BP are operating safely and adhering to the law. If the agency does not adequately do so with its investigation of the BP Atlantis Project, the House Natural Resources Committee needs to hold oversight hearings and ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform is not replicated," said Zach Corrigan, Food & Water Watch's senior staff attorney. 
Read Food & Water Watch's full timeline of the problems associated with the BP Atlantis Project here.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Taylor Energy wells still leaking in Gulf after 8 years

Published: Saturday, February 11, 2012

Ben Raines, Press-Register

A cluster of leaking wells in the Gulf may have released as much as 1.2 million gallons of oil since 2004, when they were damaged during Hurricane Ivan, according to a report from the Skytruth environmental group.

The group’s estimate is 100 times higher than a U.S. Coast Guard estimate of 12,720 gallons provided by the agency on Thursday.

Coast Guard officials said their calculation was based on “daily reports” filed by the wells’ owner, Taylor Energy Co. LLC.

Though the well has been leaking for 2,662 days, there are only 714 reports in the federal record, said Paul Woods, with Skytruth. For instance, he said, the company apparently filed just three daily reports for the month of July 2011.

Taylor Energy officials did not return calls seeking comment.

Woods said that his organization’s estimates were made by compiling the periodic spill reports filed by Taylor Energy and examining satellite images showing a persistent slick on the surface of the Gulf since 2004.

Skytruth filled in the gaps left by the missing reports by looking at satellite images of the slick and calculating an average daily flow rate for each of the eight years the well has been leaking.

Using those flow rate calculations, Skytruth came up with a range for the amount of oil leaked somewhere between 250,000 and 1.2 million gallons of oil.

Coast Guard officials said the agency had access to data from additional overflights made by Taylor Energy that are not available to the public. When asked, they were unsure how many overflights had been made by the company since the spill began. But officials said they believe flights have been made nearly every day since 2008.

On many days, officials said, Taylor reported “no observable oil.”

When calculating how many gallons of oil had been spilled since 2004, Coast Guard officials said the agency entered a zero for those days rather than an estimate of the average ongoing leak.

In general, Skytruth contends, sheens are only visible when the Gulf is calm. Waves above about 3 feet — a common occurrence in the Gulf — break up the oil before sheens can form.

“We think this points to a systematic underreporting by the Coast Guard of small and medium spills. It also shows the problem with allowing the polluter to report how much they’ve spilled,” Woods said. “Just because the sea is too rough for a sheen to form doesn’t mean the well quit leaking that day. How can the public gauge the risk of drilling if a spill reported as 12,000 gallons is actually many times larger?”

The hundreds of incident reports on the Taylor spill filed with the National Response Center — the federal agency tasked with documenting oil spills — also contain widely divergent estimates of the amount of oil present on the Gulf’s surface from day to day.

For instance, a report from 2004, shortly after the leak began, describes a sheen 4 miles long and a half-mile wide. Federal officials estimated that sheen contained about a quarter of a gallon of oil. Meanwhile, a report from July of 2008 described a sheen of identical size, but here the federal estimate was 336 gallons of oil.

Federal officials said estimates of the amount of oil contained in a sheen are imprecise due to factors including the thickness of the sheen, the size of waves, and the natural weathering of oil exposed to the air.

During the BP oil spill, high-resolution satellite images showed a sheen associated with the Taylor spill that was about 10 miles long. Using a standard method of estimating how much oil is present in a sheen based on work by scientists at the University of Florida, Skytruth reported the slick contained a minimum of 3,157 gallons of oil.

At the time, Coast Guard officials estimated the Taylor wells were collectively leaking 14 gallons a day. At that rate, according to Skytruth, it would have taken about seven months for 3,157 gallons to collect on the Gulf’s surface, an impossibility given that oil sheens typically dissipate in a matter of hours or days due to waves and evaporation.

On Thursday, the Coast Guard estimated that the Taylor wells were now leaking about 3 gallons a day. The agency reports the average sheen at the site now is about 7,000 feet long and 500 feet wide.

The wells were damaged when a mudslide during Hurricane Ivan destroyed the platform they were connected to. The Coast Guard said Taylor has stemmed the flow somewhat by using three containment domes. Oil collects inside the domes and is sucked out by a ship on the surface every few days. In addition, the company has sealed some of the wells by drilling relief wells and killing them with cement.

Woods said the amount of oil coming from the nine broken wells was tiny compared to the BP spill. But, he said the public should take note that Taylor has been unable to stop the leaks seven years after they started.

The national Waterkeeper Alliance filed a federal Clean Water Act suit against Taylor Energy earlier this month.

“This is in shallow water, 11 miles off the coast, and it has taken this long to clean up. Imagine if this happened in deep water. We saw how long it took to shut in the one BP well,” Woods said. “Now imagine if we had a similar problem with a deepwater platform with 28 wells attached to it. We don’t think anyone is planning for that kind of problem.”

Friday, March 25, 2011

Another Gulf Oil Spill Shows Need for Better Oversight

Friday, March 25, 2011 by Facing South
by Sue Sturgis

There's growing frustration along the Louisiana coast over the lack of answers about the origin of a new oil spill in the Gulf.

First reported over the weekend, the oil has been washing ashore in places along a 30-mile stretch of the coast from Grand Isle south of New Orleans west to Timbalier Island. About a half-mile of shoreline in total has been affected, according to the Coast Guard.

The agency has notified Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners of Houston that preliminary samples of oil collected from Elmer Island west of Grand Isle match those from one of the company's wells damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the company -- which disclosed spilling less than 5 gallons of oil in its report to the National Response Center, where spills are logged -- questions whether it's responsible for all of the oil washing ashore.

"We do not believe the spill along the coast is the result of our operations," said Anglo-Suisse CEO John Sherwood. "However, when the Coast Guard informed us that this might be the case, the responsible thing to do was mobilize."

That raises the question of whether the company significantly under-reported the spill -- or whether there is another source for the oil.

Earlier this week, Jonathan Henderson with the Gulf Restoration Network flew over the area from Timbalier Bay to Grand Isle to take a closer look and described what he saw:

We came across an area of obvious weathered oil and an oily sheen. This area, surrounding the Hercules platform, appeared to have oil coming up from below the surface. Still, with the amount of sheen visible on the horizon, we were not convinced that this area was the source or at least not the lone source. We continued east toward Grand Isle, then headed due south until we came across a massive amount of new oil including huge oil patties, streamers below the surface, and plumes. We also noticed some sort of activity by crew boats and a huge vessel that appeared to be a storage tanker for crude oil.

Henderson said it appeared that oil was coming from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, a major oil transfer station in the Gulf. Also pointing to problems at LOOP was an analysis of satellite imagery by Skytruth.

While the exact origin of the spill remains under investigation, the incident highlights the ubiquity of oil contamination in the Gulf.

According to National Response Center data analyzed by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB), 3,638 toxic releases were reported in Louisiana in 2009 -- including more than 50 million gallons of oil.

Equipment failure led to about 56 percent of accidents reported. And even though there was relatively little tropical storm activity in 2009, hurricanes still accounted for 31 percent of the accidents. But many of the reports cited 2005's Hurricane Katrina and Rita and 2008's Gustav as the cause, indicating damage from those storms had yet to be repaired.

Offshore oil operation are not the only source of oil pollution in the state, either: LABB reports that state records shows that Louisiana's 17 oil refineries averaged 10 accidents a week from 2005 to 2009.

Environmental advocates say the latest spill points to the need for better federal oversight of the oil industry. The current regulatory system relies on the polluters to turn themselves in and accurately report what they've spilled -- even though they're subject to fines based on the amount released. At the same time, as Skytruth has noted, the companies know it's unlikely state and federal regulators will dispatch anyone to check on an incident, especially if it's relatively small.

Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement recently issued its third permit for deepwater drilling in the Gulf since last year's BP disaster and implementation of new safety standards. However, environmental advocates say this latest spill shows the need for even better oversight.

"This newest failure of industry and government again reinforces the need for a Regional Citizens Advisory Council that will have the resources to ensure that response plans are adequate and properly executed when necessary," said GRN's Henderson.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Obama Administration Approves Fourth Gulf Deepwater Drilling Permit

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by The Hill
by Andrew Restuccia

The Interior Department announced Tuesday it has approved another Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling permit under a series of beefed-up safety standards.

BOEMRE Director Michael Bromwich said Tuesday the administration has “growing confidence” in the industry, noting that more approvals are pending. It’s the fourth such approval for the type of project that was halted in the aftermath of last year’s Gulf oil spill.

The approval comes a day after Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) approved the first deepwater exploration plan in the Gulf since the spill, a key step in moving forward with new drilling in the region.

Pro-drilling lawmakers and the oil industry have railed against the administration for the slow-down in Gulf drilling permits since the oil spill. But the administration has stressed that it is working diligently to process applications, but it will not issue permits until companies can show they are capable of containing a massive well blowout.

BOEMRE Director Michael Bromwich said Tuesday the administration has “growing confidence” in the industry, noting that more approvals are pending.

"As we have seen, the rate of deepwater permit applications is increasing, which reflects growing confidence in the industry that it understands and can comply with the applicable requirements, including the containment requirement,” he said in a statement. “We expect additional permit approvals in the near future.”

The permit BOEMRE approved will allow Exxon Mobil to drill a new well in 6,941 feet of water about 240 miles off the coast of Louisiana. It's the first of the four deepwater drilling permits approved by BOEMRE since the spill that would allow new drilling.

Exxon Mobil had received approval to drill the new well prior to the spill, but the project was halted in the aftermath of the disaster. The company had to receive approval from BOEMRE under a series of new safety standards put in place in the aftermath of the spill.

It’s the first permit to be approved by BOEMRE that will use an oil containment system developed by the Marine Well Containment Company. The Marine Well Containment Company is a coalition formed by major oil companies to develop undersea containment technology.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Gulf oil wells 10 miles from Deepwater Horizon site leaking since 2004

(I'll bet BP takes this story and runs with it. "See, it's not just our fault!"--jef)

++++++

By Ben Raines, Press-Register
Sunday, February 13, 2011

While the Deepwater Horizon well has been capped since July, another group of wells about 10 miles away has been leaking oil into the Gulf since 2004, according to federal records.

Citing litigation, federal officials refused last week to answer a series of questions about the ongoing leaks, including how many wells are involved, how much oil has escaped into the Gulf and whether any fines have been issued to Taylor Energy Co, LLC, the company that owns the wells.

Federal officials said a cleanup agreement between the government and Taylor Energy “is the subject of a pending lawsuit concerning the release of details about the decommissioning project.”

Taylor officials did not return calls seeking comment.

A Taylor Energy production platform near the mouth of the Mississippi River was toppled by a mudslide during Hurricane Ivan, according to federal reports. The platform was tied to 26 wells, though it is unclear how many are leaking. The company is reportedly in the process of drilling relief wells to staunch the flow.

The ongoing leaks gained national attention during the BP spill after the government released highly detailed satellite images of the Gulf’s surface. Skytruth, a watchdog group that uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, first called attention to the ongoing spill.

In response to a Press-Register story about the leak, the Department of Interior and the U.S. Coast Guard suggested at the time that the leak volume was as small as 13 gallons a day.

But John Amos, president of Skytruth and a former oil industry engineer, reported the slick associated with the Taylor spill was 10 miles long June 18. Using a standard method of estimating how much oil is present in a sheen on water based on work by scientists at the University of Florida, Amos reported the slick contained a minimum of 3,157 gallons of oil.

“If the Coast Guard is right and the average leak rate was 14 gallons a day, it would take 225 days at that rate to accumulate 3,157 gallons of oil on the surface,” Amos said Friday. “That means no biodegradation, no waves, no current, no thunderstorms to break it up. It is simply not plausible that oil collected on that spot for 225 days.”

Since 2004, hundreds of incident reports on the Taylor spill have been filed with the National Response Center, the federal agency tasked with documenting oil spills. Those reports contain widely divergent estimates of the amount of oil present on the Gulf’s surface from day to day.

For instance, a report from 2004, shortly after the leak began, describes a sheen 4 miles long and a half-mile wide. Federal officials estimated that sheen contained about a quarter of a gallon of oil.

Meanwhile, a report from July of 2008 described a sheen of identical size, but here the federal estimate was 336 gallons of oil.

“We’re losing confidence in the NRC data, as to whether those official estimates are doing a good job of informing the public about what is happening offshore,” Amos said. “How much oil is coming out of Taylor’s wells, that’s a good question.”

Federal officials refused to answer the question last week.

Leak rates are important during ongoing oil spills, such as the Deepwater Horizon incident, as federal penalties are based on how much oil is spilled.

The Clean Water Act fine associated with the 3,157 gallons estimated by Skytruth on June 18 would be more than $80,000. Federal officials declined to address whether any fines have been levied against Taylor.

The Press-Register could not find any record of Taylor fines during an examination of criminal and civil penalties assessed in the Gulf oil field by the federal government between 2003 and 2010.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Heart of Corporate Darkness

The Gulf of Mexico, It Dead
By STEPHEN MARTIN
‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead’ 
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

It really is so very difficult to attempt to understand what is going on in the World today, though perhaps the point as made by Karl Marx; that the priority is not to understand the World but to change it is valid - and we certainly live in time of change - sense of ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi’?

This small article seeks to examine what amounts to Political horror; that horror which is Corporatism become synonymous with ‘Ecocide’, and describable as ‘Heart of Darkness’.

These small quarters write as a ‘Prole’, sense of George Orwell’s abbreviation of ‘Proletariat’; and it is certainly the case that Orwell had a sublime consciousness. His concept of ‘Inner Party, Outer Party and Prole’ holds approximate sense of Gini Co-efficient today in most parts of the Western World - as does his vision of ‘Geopolitical Power Block’ as ‘supra National’; sense of ‘Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania’, express prescience?

The Proletariat, and indeed the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ or ‘Proletariat in rags’, are growing in number daily in the Western World given the shrinkage of the middle classes under the onslaught of Economic Depression - and are increasingly liable to be viewed as ‘superfluous’ accordant the growth of power of ‘Inner Party’ as ‘Masters of the Universe’ or ‘?bermenschen’?

‘Population Control’ is a euphemism as can be employed by ‘Philanthropists’ who see themselves as ‘?bermenschen’, and to whom ‘Genocide’ concerning the elimination of ‘Prole’ as ‘?ntermenschen’ is but only a further step along the Corporate line in an Orthodoxy demanding seeing others as less worthy of Life - and as to be so ‘constrained’?

So it goes.

It is a questionable proposition that the engineering of an Economic Depression constitutes Population Control?

The horror!

These small quarters write expressive of a psychophysical consciousness which is reflective of a neurophysiological integration, involving an ‘anamnesis’ as put by Socrates, and within context of a ‘Paradigm’ as would be determined by Empiricism. It is ultimately through Empiricism that Corporatism as an Orthodoxy has been spawned, much along the lines of ‘Dialectic’ as enumerated by Marx concerning relationship to means of Production determined by Science as a fruit of Empiricism - as it is also through same Empiricism as paradigm Corporate that a mere Prole is not ‘meant’ to use words such as ‘psychophysical’ or ‘neurophysiological’ - as Orwell in his concept of ‘Newspeak’ acknowledged?

The point being made is that the ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not only ‘out there’ in Cartesian sense of particular best laid scheme being played with ‘matter’, but is also ‘in here’ sense of best laid scheme being played with ‘mind’?

The point is also that the ‘Inner Party’ as Stateless Bastards imposing Orthodoxy for gain ‘Utilitarian’ have a variety of ways of ‘grinding’ Man down through the imposition of illusion directed at destroying Hope; or at the very least rendering it capable of being described as ‘audacious’?

Asking the ‘right questions’ in a Panopticon comes with the risk of being ‘unintelligible’ or labelled ‘derogatory’ - such the control as they who would have wrong questions asked have attained – never mind the truth that ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’ as Pope stated?

The pragmatism of the Corporatist Age in which we currently ‘live’ will surely be viewed in the future as being ‘Dark’ as Lichtenberg proposed; and in such illumination the Horror of the Age as illusion imposed will necessarily be faced and recognised for the denial it was?

‘Grundrisse’ as outlines critique of Political Economy is Marx’s prescience concerning the inevitable effects of concentration of wealth as a polarisation of power- and the degeneration of Capitalist Democracy to Corporatism?

That ‘History is written by the ‘Victorious’ was illustrated through alternative interpretation expressing a transcendence of such ‘paradigm’ by Howard Zinn - as an iconoclast concerning Orthodox American History?

For as there are certain Men as cannot be ‘ground down’ sense of Illegitimum non carborundum, and who retainthe right to have own opinions, idiosyncratic or offensive as they may be, but whose consciousness constitutes the attempt at ‘CounterPunch’ against Corporatist illusion in the denial of denial; so there is orthodox propaganda founded in a cynical pragmatic of the materialism which Corporatism has come to represent at the level of hegemony?

Squeezed out to the margins through technologically enhanced Hegemony of Orthodoxy; the narrative of those as are able to refuse reduction to the cynicism of pragmatism and deny imprisonment within the paradigm of illusion yet remains a vital sign of ‘Political Life on the Planet’ -though there exists an ongoing effort to render such not only ‘illegitimate’ but ‘unintelligible’? Corporatism ‘works’ by means of invisible restraint as of ‘unwritten rule’ concerning what is palatable, what is acceptable, what will be ‘rewarded’ - and in the final analysis what is comprehensible?

As Orwell put sublimely in 1984:
“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
For we all exist in a ‘cage’ do we not, such as ‘Yellow Submarine’ as song sung of represents ‘imprisonment’ of sensibilities, and for some such a ‘tubular cage’ is more constraining, and not just in the singularity of ‘One Dimensional Man’, as Marcuse put, but also by way of multiplicity; as in the context of ‘Realpolitik’ the imperative exists of division, as of by way of the Roman maxim which has rationale of ‘conquering’, by way of illusion become as between ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’ concerning the power of ‘Inner Party’ - and as there can be ‘cages within a cage’?

The Corporatist Orthodoxy demands a uniformity which has the inevitable developmental line of marginalising Humanity through abrogation of Life as denial of Truth in the propagation of Death - as the acceptance of Lie as an unconsciousness; as in ‘no need to think’?

The tragedy of such Darkness’ as would be even at ‘Noon’ sense of Koestler, is that such cage will become ever more confining but yet would be ‘unseen’ under the illusion which is expressive of ‘power of mind over mind’.

The tragedy of America contemporaneous is of the Darkness of a Panopticon, such as the Heart of Corporatism would ‘pump up the volume’ to point of incapacitating level; as in where Man cannot hear himself or herself think – and so gives up the ghost’ concerning the imperative of consciousness?

Concerning Politics as ‘moral economics’, there is a Manichean aspect; given the acknowledgement of ‘morality’?

These small quarters seeing the trend contemporaneous in Western World as being primarily evil, as evident in the infliction of sufferance epitomised by Corporatism.

At present these small quarters can only speak as a ‘mushroom’ kept in a particular darkness the intent of power of mind over mind. In such darkness there exists as ‘foodstuff’ a certain kind of ‘shit’ which defines the demanded illusion of ‘geopolitical power block’. The unity of such power block is expressed in the currency, or money which is believed in, and controlled as of the exercise of a hidden taxation - to the ‘wetting of the beak’ in Mafia parlance by the ‘Inner Party’ as International Financier?

That ‘The Heart of Corporate Darkness’ is to be found within a ‘Continuity of Memoranda’ relating to identifiable horrors is the proposition of this small article.

In mind here is the ‘Ford Pinto Memo’ as real and demonstrable - and a Memorandum as must exist somewhere concerning the ‘Gulf of Mexico’, which summates the mechanics of deliberation concerning disaster as a series of pragmatic calculations within an obscene and warped Orthodoxy, realised in the denial of Life?

Increasingly mere ‘Proles’ such as these small quarters are being ‘asked’ to ‘suspend disbelief’ in the face of a crafted illusion which is wreaking ‘havoc!’, given ‘unleashing’ of the Corporatist ‘Dogs of War’; where ‘War’, as in the multiplicity concerning context of restraint apropos ‘cage’ above, is a polymorphous horror: ranging from a wrought Economic Depression with its ‘collateral damage’ of millions impoverished, to the abuse of military force against Nation with its ‘collateral damage’ of millions killed, to the destruction of Ecosystem with its ‘collateral damage’ of millions of lives lost - as considered across a wondrous diversity of species.

America, Iraq and the Gulf of Mexico exemplify respectively.

The horror!, the horror!, the horror!

Yet the manifold forms of Warfare as ‘Racket’ are not just for Mind, they are ultimately for Soul, such the ‘what it is all about’ concerning the pump of the Heart of Darkness - as every beat of dark bastard heart leads to further sufferance reflecting breakdown of ‘Life’; which in the case of America means making a mockery, to point of tragedy, of the best Political Constitution which the World has yet seen, through the destruction of ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ evident through impoverishment of the Citizenry - and the diversion, under Orthodoxy, of precious resources to a Military Industrial Complex which projects ‘Empire’ fearful to point of ‘shock and awe’ under such pitifully perverse illusion as the imposition of Democracy by force in an Irony far from sublime as the grubby racket it represents by way of expropriation?

The horror!

Americans need not look far to see what such horror as irony means; for every American Citizen reliant on Food Stamp to survive, every American Citizen under threat of foreclosure and homelessness, every American Citizen living in fear of losing livelihood, is a testimony to the Obscenity of the Orthodoxy of Corporatism which would continue to propagate cruel illusion denying the horror of such actuality?

Welcome to the ‘Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave’ - such the ‘Doublethink’?

It is not without meaning that the last two published articles by these small quarters this exemplary Journal of Democracy have ended with one particular extract from the Political Constitution of the United States of America as an understanding of what Corporatism represents way of what it can deny - and what is held to be self evident.

For what is held as self evident these small quarters is the destruction of America by an enemy within as would be unseen; the takeover of power to issue money as a ‘permit’ being as a fatal blow to Democracy, as cannot be hidden despite the truly expensive efforts of Corporatist illusion to deny what is become so clear as it is so tragic, - and given awareness of the concept of ‘opportunity cost’?

It is become inevitable, such the Dialectic as reflecting the mechanics of deliberation as can be epitomised in a Memorandum; and as continuity demands consideration of Memoranda, that in America today there is a tragedy of homelessness, a tragedy of businesses closing, a tragedy of immiseration through impoverishment as unemployment and dependency upon food stamp represents; a tragedy which is of the ‘cages within cage’ of Corporatism - given the prevalence of fear, almost Universal such context as the beat of a ‘Heart of Darkness’ inevitably pumps out sufferance form of the destruction of Constitution by way of a Panopticon condemned to destroy Truth?

The horror!

It is a tragedy as would be unseen, unmentionable to the pathological state of ‘mind’ become dominant which is as Corporatism representing the ‘ascendancy’ of an Orthodoxy through which an Oligarchic Collective ‘survives’, as within such ‘Gutenbergian Galaxy’ become digitised, as per McLuhan, such medium contains a message indeed, and it is fearful as it arises from ‘Darkness’ - as of ‘enough never being enough’, such the greed as driven maniacal as abrogative of Humanity - or as Satanic as would destroy the Joy which the ‘Gift of Life’ represents?

Less than Zero’ such the ‘Luciferian Burn’ as the avoidable death of People in a Ford Pinto become magnified in the avoidable death of Life in the Gulf of Mexico as vehicle of the ‘buy in’ to illusion - form of trust extended or as permit granted? It is a tragedy of continuity as in a denouement expressive of the degeneration of ‘Citizenry’ and ‘Democracy’ by a ‘Coterie’ as constitutes Oligarchic Collective; it is a tragedy of the slow but sure strangulation of the breath of Life to the point beyond whimper whence last gasp of despair concerning materialism exists; at the end of the ‘day’ sense of the termination of the period of sunlight direct, such tragedy is of ‘cide’ can be summative; as in the ascending scale of obscenity represented by, ‘sui, ethno, geno, eco’ to such suffix.

Rather than ‘side’ as within humane context of debate as prefix of ‘for’ or ‘against’, the ubiquity of ‘cide’ as a suffix context of inhumane Warfare is a tragedy of expropriation, arrogation and abrogation, such the sadness that mere Corporatism can eliminate Democracy in the marginalisation of Humanity to point of ‘hollow man’ become dominant - such the ‘patter of rat’s feet over broken glass’. -T.S. Eliot was in his own way above and beyond the mechanics of deliberation?

Corporatism is a tragedy because it is unnecessary; because it is an avoidable abrogation of potentiality, because as simply put in colloquial vernacular: ‘it don’t have to be this way’?

The challenge for Corporatism is to sustain and perpetuate a life denying illusion which calls into ever greater question the ability of Man to refuse to believe the evidence of his or her own eyes. The dynamic or dialectic is of the suspension of disbelief given a growing disparity between the illusion as would be imposed, and the day to day reality for the ever growing Majority as truly suffer ‘impoverishment Utilitarian’. Orwell saw within such challenge a form of illusion he described as ‘Doublethink’, encapsulated within the slogans:

‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, andIgnorance is Strength.’

The motivation for adoption of life denying illusion is as simple as the biological ‘rationale’ for the diversity of parasitical life; it is material gain and the occupation of a comfortable niche with minimal expenditure of effort and provision of return. It is ‘survival’ as an imperative experienced as ‘superseding’ the need to speak up, sense of as Neimöller wrote - for all those who give up the right to ‘speak up’ experience an inevitable execution through joining the ‘chorus’ of a Moritaten, or ‘Ballad of Death’ concerning ‘consciousness’?

If humble parasites such as leeches could speak and dream, such would tell of Corporatism as a ‘rise’ above mere hematophagy and the feed upon lifeblood of an individual host; such would tell of money and power and corruption, and control and manipulation towards the end of ever greater expropriation from a greater diversity - as of all other life become as ‘host’?

Such a horror of the Necrotrophy as has destroyed the American Dream?

The Ford Pinto Memorandum is a testimony to the mechanics of deliberation which epitomises Corporatism as Orthodoxy. ‘ It is ‘Life’, Jim, and just as we have come to know it’’ more the horror, such as a ‘Trek amongst the Stars’ it is not; but closer to the scatological ravings of perverse degenerates such as coprophagiacs become as Hegemony; such the ‘existence’ for Man when lunatics take over an asylum. Because the reduction of any life to mere dollars and cents in concept of ‘worth’ is obscene, and reflects a level of perversity to which the sadness of Coprophagia as a state of perverse degeneracy could represent ‘improvement’?

The irony being that Corporatists exist on the premise of People ‘eating’ the shit of Propaganda; sense of illusion being swallowed as Orthodoxy accepted - and evidence of Man as has own eyes denied?

The Ford Pinto Memorandum concerned Corporate product as designed, built, marketed and branded which had a design flaw which meant an increased risk of the product bursting in to flames in a collision. Given recognition of this flaw, some sad bastard of Corporatist Orthodoxy sat down and ran calculations of contingency within margins of levels of confidence, ultimately expressed in levels of ‘bottom line’ of dollars and cents reaching a conclusion in terms of ‘EMV’ or ‘Expected Monetary Value’ concerning ‘recall and replace’ or ‘recompense for fatality/injury’ as part of a ‘decision tree’. The answer being as History demonstrates, such the discovery of what ‘life’ can mean in a paradigm of Obscene Orthodoxy.

Every person burned to death - or lucky enough to escape with ‘degree of burn’ - in such a product of Corporatism contributed to a profit as would be maximised under costs minimised - so the Orthodoxy goes.

The hypothetical ‘Gulf of Mexico Memorandum’ posits a development of the above horrific obscenity, written by an even sadder bastard than the author of the Ford Pinto Memorandum.

Why sadder?

Because the calculations concerning the ongoing tragedy of ‘Deepwater Horizon’ would have to reflect an even greater ‘incorporation’ of diversity of life denied, evidenced in bigger figures concerning dollars and cents, such the scale of obscenity as ‘Homicide’ can be represented as ‘mere’ when it comes to ‘Ecocide’; such the failure, such the Denial. We are not just talking of children as passengers or drivers as parents burned alive as the Ford Pinto Memorandum ‘incorporated’; we are talking of the diversity of species encompassed by an ecosystem ‘incorporated’ as a cost, sense of dollars and cents, and as can determine the choice between a number of courses of action -where ‘denial’ is the inevitable outcome of obscene Orthodoxy.

The hypothetical Gulf of Mexico Memorandum represents the ‘Big League’ of Corporatist Orthodoxy; commensurate with resonance of the illusion as to ‘Where has all the money gone?’ realising Genocide in an Economic Depression as disastrous illusion become ‘Where has all the Oil gone? in an Environmental Catastrophe of Ecocide as illusion would seek to deny – such the ‘Too big to fail’ premise as the illusion of Corporatism demands the inevitable imposition of sufferance and denial, variant only the prefix of the ‘cide’, such the obscenity.

But yet the failure of Corporatist Orthodoxy is all too evident, sense of the loss of life, sense of the magnification of expenditure of resources gone in to the support of illusion, sense of the Depression being as denial of Life - and of the Joy which it is as a wondrous gift.

The horror!

To reiterate a point made in a recent article by these small quarters, the drill of Corporatism as an Orthodoxy died in the Gulf of Mexico, and that is not tragic, but long overdue. What is truly tragic is the horror of the sacrifice it has taken to bring about the death of such Orthodoxy as an assassin of consciousness; for it is a sacrifice which many lives, and not just of Man, have yet to ‘enumerate’ - sense of acknowledgement of Truth as the absence of denial?

Citizens as People of America, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, are beginning to open their eyes to what this current ‘evolutionary trajectory’ represents - as they are beginning to see the illusion of Corporatism for what it represents as the denial of Life?

At a pragmatic level given sense of horror reflected in ability to hypothesize, concerning the continuity as of ‘Memoranda’, what this means for Orthodoxy is that People have to be eliminated – and for People read Citizenry; read Majority; read ‘Prole’?

To parallel of a journey to the Heart of Darkness, way of the river of the Mississippi rather than the Congo as in Conrad’s Novella, and as in a Memorandum as somewhere exists as parallels ‘Ford Pinto Memorandum’:

‘The Gulf of Mexico. It Dead’

-How such horror expressive of an Obscene Orthodoxy such as Corporatism has come to prevail in a Nation which has a Constitution enshrining:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
is a right question, as ‘they’, sense of Inner Party, would have not asked – as they indeed would not have the consequences of such truths as above find meaning in ‘Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’?

As a fact becoming increasingly self evident, such the horror of the pump of the Heart of Corporate Darkness.

The horror! The horror!

Monday, August 16, 2010

President goes for a swim in the Gulf – or does he?

By Guy Adams | Monday, 16 August 2010

President Barack Obama wanted to convince America that the Gulf of Mexico remains open for business. But perhaps he didn't want the world to catch another glimpse of his hairless chest.

So when he and his daughter, Sasha, took a dip in the sea off Florida this weekend, only the White House photographer was allowed to capture proceedings.

The official picture was intended to provide evidence that the region's beaches are back to normal. Yet it soon emerged that the private beach on which it was taken, off Alligator Point in St Andrew Bay, north-west Florida, isn't technically in the gulf.

Cynics complained that the supposed family holiday was more of a whistle-stop press tour. Barack, Michelle and Sasha Obama, plus their dog, Bo, spent just 27 hours in the important swing state. The first family went on a boating trip yesterday that saw them catch a view of local porpoises. On Saturday, they played crazy golf and Sasha, 9, scored a hole-in-one off the first tee.

***

(I don't know, looks like it's in the Gulf to me. I mean, it's in a bay that's almost landlocked but it opens into the the Gulf.--jef)

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

New Oil Leak Reported as Barge Crashes Into Oil Well in Gulf of Mexico

(sigh...)

***

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - The US Coast Guard dispatched emergency teams Tuesday after a boat crashed into an oil well off the coast of New Orleans, reportedly sending crude spewing some 20 feet into the air.

The wellhead, located about 65 miles (104 kilometers) south of New Orleans, was ruptured when it was struck by a dredge barge being pulled by a tug.

The Coast Guard said it could not immediately confirm reports that a giant fountain of oil was now spewing from the damaged wellhead, which was situated only six feet (1.8 meters) below the surface of the sea.

A strike Coast Guard team from Mobile, Alabama had been dispatched by boat to the scene as well as a helicopter from New Orleans with a marine pollution investigator on board.

"There have been reports of oil from the elision and we are investigating those reports to mitigate any environmental concerns," petty officer William Colclough, a Coast Guard spokesman, told AFP.

"The oil spill liability trust fund has been enacted to provide monetary support for any clean-up operation."

Unrelated to the massive gusher recently capped by BP deep down on the seabed, the incident did occur in a nearby part of the Gulf of Mexico and could require clean-up vessels to be redeployed if reports are confirmed.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Chevron Drills Down 30,000 Feet to Tap Oil-Rich Gulf of Mexico (ca. 2007)

(Look at this 3 year old article I found in a WIRED magazine in a box in my closet. Tell me if it sounds familiar, but in another reality. Chevron is no different from BP in their corporate stomp on everything attitude, but it seems like their deep water well was quite a bit more successful and less damaging than BP's efforts.--jef)

***
Pumped Up
The Cajun Express has bored the deepest offshore well in Gulf history.
By Amanda Griscom Little | 08.21.07

Photo: Michael Sugrue

"Isn't this transcendent?" Paul Siegele shouts as he presses his nose to the window of a Bell 430 chopper hurtling through a sky thick with rain and pitchfork lightning. We're flying over the Gulf of Mexico, above some 3,500 oil production platforms, and Siegele is pointing them out with the verve of a birder — here a miniature oil rig known as a monopod; over there a drill ship almost as big as the Titanic; still farther out, platforms looking like huge steel chandeliers that dropped out of the storm-shaken clouds.

Siegele has reason to be giddy. He works for Chevron, and his team is sitting on several new record-breaking discoveries in the Gulf, a region that many geologists believe may have more untapped oil reserves than any other part of the world. On this trip, the 48-year-old vice president for deepwater exploration has come to a rig called the Cajun Express to oversee final preparations before drilling begins on the company's 30-square-mile Tahiti field.

Looming like an Erector set version of Hellboy — with cranes for arms, a hydraulic drill for its head, and a 200-foot derrick for a body — the rig appears at once menacing and toylike. But the real spectacle is below the surface: A drill is plunging down through 4,000 feet of ocean and more than 22,000 feet of shale and sediment — a syringe prodding Earth's innermost veins. That 5-mile shaft will soon give Chevron the deepest active offshore well in the Gulf. Some land drills have gone deeper, but extracting oil from below miles of freezing salt water and unyielding sediment creates a set of technical problems that far exceed those faced on terra firma.

Minutes after we land on the Cajun Express, Siegele gets some bad news from Ron Byrd, his weather-beaten site manager. "The junk basket is stuck way down there on some debris," says Byrd, who has captained offshore rigs for more than 30 years. The junk basket is an 8-inch hunk of iron that runs up and down the entire length of the drill hole on a piece of wire, scraping the well clean before sensitive production instruments are dropped in. It's a particularly important device when drilling offshore, because the presence of the ocean pushes debris, mud, fossils, and other muck into the hole.

Siegele, who is a lanky 6' 3" with a mild, professorial manner and a boyish mop of brown hair, winces almost imperceptibly. "Just a little bump in the road," he mutters. Technically, it's a million-dollar bump. The crew will spend 48 hours fishing the jammed tool out of the hole, halting all other activity on a rig that costs over $500,000 a day to run. But this is chump change to Siegele, who has an annual budget of more than $1 billion. "If snags like this didn't happen so frequently," Siegele says, "you'd probably let them get to you."

It's just another high-priced mishap in the world of ultradeep-sea drilling — the newest, riskiest, and most technologically extreme drilling frontier. Today, deep-sea rigs are capable of reaching down 40,000 feet, twice as deep as a decade ago: plunging their drills through 10,000 feet of water and then 30,000 more feet of seabed. One platform sits atop each so-called field, thrusting its tentacles into multiple wells dug into ancient sediment, slurping out oil, and then pumping it back to onshore refineries through underwater pipelines.

It's a business where huge sums are lost (two years ago, BP suffered a $250 million blow when a hurricane took out one of its platforms) but even more can be made. The mother lode of oil in the deepwater Gulf is so significant that Tahiti and other successful fields in this region are expected to soon produce enough crude to reverse the long-standing decline in US oil production of about 10 percent per year.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the "lower tertiary trend" containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market. It was hailed as the largest publicly reported discovery in the past decade, opening up a region that is perhaps big enough to boost national oil reserves by 50 percent. A mad rush followed, and oil companies plowed more than $5 billion into this part of the Gulf.

It was a burst of good news for the oil industry. Today, many of the world's largest fields — from Ghawar in Saudi Arabia to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska — are facing retirement, and the ultradeep frontier holds the industry's best hope for big new discoveries. But there are still big questions to be answered before Jack starts filling gas tanks: How well will oil flow from these prehistoric rocks? Can Chevron's equipment handle the increased temperatures and pressures at these depths? Can engineers successfully pump the oil back to shore?

In November, a sister rig to the Cajun Express will putter over to the Jack field, and Chevron will "spud" a preproduction well in search of answers to these questions. "There's no guarantee that the rewards in this field will outweigh the risks," says Siegele, slumping. But then he sucks in a breath of salt air and straightens up. He's got to brief a group of drilling engineers on the plans for Chevron's grand venture into Jack.

Chevron runs its offshore drilling operations out of a gleaming Houston skyscraper that recalls the nose of a double-barreled shotgun aimed skyward. Geologists work in cavernous visualization rooms with floor-to-ceiling monitors depicting digital renderings of the Gulf waters and seabed. Chevron has long bet that there's oil in these regions and has bought from the Department of the Interior almost twice as many federal leases to drill in the ultradeep waters of the Gulf as any other company.

One of Chevron's top geologists, a Jerry Garcia look-alike named Barney Issen, pulls an image of the Jack field up onto the monitors. "To you, this may looks like a dog's breakfast," he says, pointing to a multi colored morass. But the data is actually a finely detailed 3-D map of the ocean, seafloor, and sediment below. It will allow Chevron to locate promising spots to drill and then provide a guide for the engineers who operate the production process remotely.

To make this map, Issen and his team deployed ships that cruised through the Gulf, popping off air guns — underwater cannons that emit a gigantic burp into the ocean, bouncing sound waves off under water rock formations. Hydrophones (aquatic microphones) tethered to the vessels recorded the response, taking in hundreds of thousands of recordings simultaneously. These allowed the company to determine the composition and shape of the rocks below. Chevron needed to use masses of microphones to compensate for the distortions caused by a layer of salt as jagged as the Swiss Alps beneath the seafloor in the ultradeep regions of the Gulf. That mineral, unfortunately for the geologists in Houston, acts like a fun-house mirror for seismic sound waves. Issen compares sorting through the data to "peering through a thick wall of mottled glass and trying to count the freckles of someone on the other side."

Once the map was assembled, the Chevron team at the Houston office pored over the data and searched for sandy layers of sediment under domelike caps of shale. These signify the location of a potential reservoir because oil consistently rises through permeable sediment to the highest point it can go, collecting under unyielding shale mounds. Once these promising spots are found, the maps are used to chart the drill's optimal point of entry: the place where it's least likely to hit a nasty fault line or air pocket that would throw the whole well off. Finding the sweet spot is like dropping a baseball from 5 miles in the sky and hitting home plate — at night.

Then you have to hope you've found a highly porous and permeable oil bed. Most people think of oil as floating in big pools under layers of rock. But it's actually embedded in the rock, sort of like water in a sponge. "When you drive the drill down, you're going into porous rock that can be either kinda squishy or kinda rigid," Siegele says. Squishy is better, but as rock ages, it typically become tighter. That's why industry members were flabbergasted by the Jack well test that revealed high porosity. It's also what gives the Jack field, and the lower tertiary in general, the potential to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil — while earning Chevron a ton of money .

The galley of the Cajun Express is a prisonlike cafeteria of stainless steel and gray linoleum crammed with engineers in blue coveralls devouring their meals. Today the menu is bratwurst, cheese fries, and twice-baked potatoes. At first glance, it's hard to believe this is the setting for a proposed Food Network special on the high-caliber cuisine 140 miles offshore. But the grub is lip-smackingly good.
The Cajun is equipped with other perks: an Internet café, a gym, and a movie theater — but these luxuries are hardly used. Few of the men have the energy for entertainment or exercise after working a 12-hour shift on the drilling floor — hauling great vats of mud used for drill lubricant, welding broken iron casings, or repairing robotic submarines that fix problems with seafloor equipment. The living quarters, which house up to 150 workers, are the size of walk-in closets, filled with cot-sized bunk beds that fold out of the walls.

"When you're here, you're pretty much working or sleeping," says Siegele. Stout salaries make up for the extreme conditions: Entry-level tool pushers make about $60,000, and high-level geologists and engineers can earn in the mid six figures. Added bonus: a massive testosterone rush. "This is the best big-boy toy you'll ever find," says Chevron spokesperson Mickey Driver.

The first task for the men on the boat is to make sure that the rig stays in one place. In shallower areas, rigs can be anchored to the sea bottom — but it's dangerous to moor a drilling vessel in ultradeep water. The motion of the ocean and the fierceness of the currents at those depths make it too cumbersome. Plus, vessels need to be able to move to safety in the event of a hurricane. Ultradeep drilling rigs are kept "on station" by so-called thrusters — engines on each corner of the rig that are programmed to respond to a GPS system tracking both the drill's target on the seafloor and the ocean currents. The thrusters constantly push and pull, doing an extreme version of what you do if you're standing in shallow ocean water: constantly shifting your weight to stay balanced as the waves ebb and flow.

Dropping a drill down through more than 1 mile of water and 4 miles of earth isn't easy either. The drill string is composed of hundreds of 90-foot sections known as joints that are dropped into the water by an automated mechanical arm and successively screwed into each other. It took more than three days to assemble all the joints in the drill string that pierced the Jack field.

Once the rotating drill bit begins its journey down through miles of sediment and pierces the seafloor, it encounters another set of problems caused by the changing terrain. The test well for the Jack field drilled through nearly a dozen geological layers — ranging from hard bedrock to sandy sediment to empty voids. These rapid shifts from one level of pressure to another can disturb the rotations of the drill, causing it to get stuck or veer off course. Pressure is good — it's what naturally forces the liquid crude up the length of the well and into the barges and pipelines that send it back to shore. (The layer of shale over the oil-bearing sands acts like a brick on top of a water balloon — the fluid wants to surge upward.) But, at the very bottom, farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it, there's enough pressure to implode a human head — or, more pertinently, to crack iron casings.

Moreover, the closer you get to Earth's core, the higher the temperature of the rocks. At 20,000 feet below seabed, the oil is hot enough to boil an egg. At 30,000 feet, it can reach more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook off into natural gas and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, the water at the bottom of the deep sea is at near-freezing temperatures — between 32 and 34 degrees — creating a dangerous interaction: When the boiling-hot oil hits the freezing-cold water, it could solidify and block the flow, rupturing the pipes. The machinery on the seafloor, therefore, has to be well insulated. Engineers on the Cajun Express have been relying on a fairly primitive method — pumping the casing and substations with antifreeze — but much more sophisticated systems are in the works.

Because so many of the challenges that engineers encounter in the ultradeep can't be anticipated — or found anywhere else — the Jack test rig was populated with so-called Serial Number 001 technologies: one-of-a-kind innovations ranging from perforation guns that are triggered at well bottom inside the casing, creating holes that let the oil gush in and flow upward, to electrohydraulic systems that seal the wells in emergencies. And yet sometimes the solution is plain old creative thinking and duct tape. For example, when a tool got stuck down the hole during one well test, someone suggested just banging a giant hammer against the casing, sending vibrations down that jarred the tool loose.

As consensus grows that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels, extracting oil from the most extreme and costly locations can seem foolishly myopic. If Chevron is going to throw billions of dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn't it make more sense to invest in an inexhaustible, greener technology that's going to have political support a decade from now?
Siegele doesn't think so. He does know that geological limitations will prevent him from drilling much deeper: It's a pretty safe bet that below 40,000 feet, the extreme heat has baked off much of the deep-sea troves of crude. And there are financial limits to this frontier, too. Even as Chevron and other oil giants earn record profits, they also face record expenses. For example, the company has commissioned two new deep water rigs that will be able to drill 40,000-foot wells. But at more than $600 million each, they can't exactly be snapped up on boats.com. "The costs of developing a new oil or gas project are about 65 percent higher today than 30 months ago, and the greatest escalation of costs has been offshore," says Daniel Yergin, chair of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. At today's oil prices of $70 a barrel, the current exploration makes sense. But if oil drops below $40 a barrel, Yergin says, the cost of exploring this high-risk frontier will become prohibitive.

But Siegele is hardly worried. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. "Predicting peak oil," Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, "is almost like predicting peak technology" — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

Siegele takes me to the "crown" of the Cajun Express, a harrowing widow's walk suspended at the top of the drill's 200-foot derrick. The rig below looks like the loneliest place on Earth — a tiny, solitary board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spot fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. "A decade ago, I never even dreamed we'd get here," Siegele marvels. "And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see."


To extract oil from the Jack field, a rig will have to negotiate freezing waters, boiling oil, and seismic uncertainty. Here’s how.
1) Stable platform
Giant engines at each corner of the drilling rig keep everything stable. When the ocean pulls one way, the thrusters push the other.
2) The 6-mile Drill
The drill is made up of hundreds of interlocking 90-foot sections of iron. Buoyant sidings reduce the weight burden on the rig.
3) Point of entry
The drill needs to enter the seafloor at exactly the right point, minimizing the risk of hitting an air pocket or a fault as it goes whirring down. Boiling-hot oil emerges here and collides with freezing water, which means that the underwater pipes pumping the oil back to shore must be heavily insulated.
4) Dangerous journey
The drill must traverse numerous pressure zones, any one of which could knock it off course.
5) X marks the spot
Bedrock mounds, formed by oil pushing upward, signal promising hot spots.
6) Jackpot
The oil is trapped in squishy, porous rock.


Read More http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig_drill#ixzz0uYh8tLy6

Monday, May 3, 2010

Killing the Gulf of Mexico

Unacceptable Risks
By ALAN FARAGO



Did we have to kill the Gulf of Mexico to stop, "Drill, baby, drill"? Before the spill from Deepwater Horizon is contained, Florida will see exactly the environmental catastrophe that kept offshore oil away from Florida's coasts until the November 2008 elections. "Drill, baby, drill!". The question arises: why must the American public "see" an environmental disaster before believing it represented an unacceptable risk all along?

A government official sought to describe the difficulty of containing the spill on account of "the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of depth." There is no tyranny here except the tyranny of idiots. Sarah Palin, in an Iowa campaign stop a week before the November 2008 presidential election, articulated that so-called logic. Her speech started with the recognition that we need to apply new technology to the business of a clean energy future. Jobs, etc. But that wasn't what the crowd was waiting for. "Now is the time for 'drill, baby, drill'", she read from the script-- like a really bad actor telegraphing the punch line. (It is worth noting that President Obama is following the same script of "all of the above" on energy investments, absent the fear mongering.)

This idiocy was also the foundation of Florida's future as imagined during the Bush regnum in Florida--test tube for conservative extremists during two terms of a governor now re-emerging through a surrogate candidate for US Senate, Marco Rubio. You can't make progress, the thinking goes, without accepting the costs-- and evading public disclosure of risks-- of environmental destruction.

Environmentalists in the United States have been on the defensive almost from the first moment that concern for our air, water, and natural resources popped up on the radar of corporate interests. The Sagebrush Rebellion and its acolytes, funded by large conservative think tanks, was an integral aspect of the Reagan years and morphed, eventually, into the bloviators and right wing message machine of the new Idiocracy. "Eco-Nazis" and "eco-terrorists" is how environmentalists opposing offshore drilling and other protections for the planet have been described by propagandists like Rush Limbaugh.

Now that risks materialized in a trashed Gulf of Mexico, environmentalists who have argued for the precautionary principle applied to economic activities may have another moment in the oil-drenched haze. The precautionary principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. But throughout America, corporate America has persuaded the public that "plausible risks" are too expensive to work into the price of goods. In Miami-Dade county, this logic lead limerock miners (for cement) to pollute our drinking water aquifer, without significantly increasing the costs of their good. In the Everglades by Big Sugar; to put the heart of the state onto life support. And throughout the state by well drillers, phosphate miners and the Growth Machine; pretending to diversify the state's economy while magnifying risks.

"BP has not said how much oil is beneath the Gulf seabed Deepwater Horizon was tapping, but a company official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that it was tens of millions of barrels — a frightening prospect to many." (AP, Gulf oil spill swiftly ballons, could move east, May 1, 2010) That spill, the Exxon Valdez, poured its cargo mostly onto a rocky coastline. But at first, BP told the world it was a leak of only 1000 barrels a day. Then it was 5,000.

Now there is concern that the remaining damaged pipe a mile under the sea is restraining the oil flow and an uncontrolled blowout on the ocean floor is possible. According to the Mobile Register, "The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought." ('Leaked report: Government fears Deepwater Horizon well could become unchecked gusher', April 30, 2010)

The sum result of this idiocracy at work is to mis-state the real risks embedded in drilling deepwater offshore oil. For tenderizing the body politick with its fear mongering, right wing extremists should be tarred and feathered with oil from the Deepwater Horizon and paraded in the public square.

In Florida, those public squares would be the instant grow Malls that were built with fraudulent credit to serve demand that did not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of Wall Street bankers and the Growth Machine; the same fevered imaginations that sold the public a bill of goods that sometimes you have to kill pieces of the planet to afford to save it.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Gulf Oil Spill "disaster may become the biggest oil spill ever"

US Military Joins Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Effort
'The Exxon Valdez is going to pale in comparison'


The US military has joined efforts to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico as fears rise about its scale.

Five times as much oil as previously thought could be leaking from the well beneath where a rig exploded and sank last week, US officials said earlier.

The slick is 45 miles (72km) by 105 miles (169km) - almost the size of Jamaica - and heading for the US coast.

A third leak has been discovered, and a fire-fighting expert said the disaster may become the biggest oil spill ever.


"Probably the only thing comparable to this is the Kuwait fires [following the Gulf War in 1991]," Mike Miller, head of Canadian oil well fire-fighting company Safety Boss, told the BBC World Service.

"The Exxon Valdez [tanker disaster off Alaska in 1989] is going to pale [into insignificance] in comparison to this as it goes on."

Scientists say only a quarter of local marine wildlife survived the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Some 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day were now thought to be gushing into the sea 50 miles off Louisiana's coast, said the US Coastguard's Rear Admiral Mary Landry.

If those estimates are correct, the spill could match the 11m gallons spilt from the Exxon Valdez within two months.

Controlled burn
The scale of the operation to contain the oil spill and protect both the US coastline and wildlife is unprecendented, with the military and other government agencies collaborating with BP - which had hired the sunken rig - and industry leaders.

Welcoming the US military's offer of help, BP's Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the company would take help from anyone to combat the spill, but gave no specifics of what form that help might take.

Efforts to stem the flow are being complicated by the depth of the leak at the underwater well, which is about 5,000ft (1,525m) beneath the surface.

Weather forecasters have meanwhile warned that changing winds could drive the oil slick ashore by Friday night. Its leading edge is now only 20 miles (32km) east of the mouth of the Mississippi.

A coast guard crew has set fire to part of the oil slick in an attempt to save environmentally-fragile wetlands.

The "controlled burn" of surface oil took place in an area about 30 miles (50km) east of the Mississippi river delta.
But Mr Miller warned that burning off leaking oil was not a long-term solution.

"The object of this game is to shut off the flow," he said.

Relief well
Engineers are working on a dome-like device to cover oil rising to the surface and pump it to container vessels, but it may be weeks before this is in place.


It is feared that work on sealing the leaking well using robotic submersibles might take months.

BP is also working on a "relief well" to intersect the original well, but this is experimental and could take two to three months to stop the flow.

President Barack Obama had been briefed on the new developments, and BP has welcomed the offer of assistance from the defence department to help contain the spill.

Seventy vessels - oil skimmers, tugboats barges and special recovery boats that separate oil from water - as well as five aeroplanes were working to spray dispersants and round up oil, BP said.

Burn zone
Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead after the worst oil rig disaster in almost a decade.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said the top priority was "to protect our citizens and the environment".

With the spill moving towards Louisiana's coast, which contains some 40% of the nation's wetlands and spawning grounds for countless fish and birds, it was hoped a "controlled burn" of oil contained by special booms would limit the impact.

Environmental experts say animals nearby might be affected by toxic fumes, but perhaps not as much as if they were coated in oil.

On Wednesday afternoon, BP and coastguard boats swept the thickest concentrations of oil into a fire-resistant boom.

This was then towed to a five-mile "burn zone" set up inside the slick, where it was set alight shortly before nightfall.

5,000 barrels a day from Gulf Oil Spill

Oil spill from rig explosion at 5,000 barrels a day
By the CNN Wire Staff
April 28, 2010

(CNN) -- The estimated amount of oil spilling in an underwater leak from last week's oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico has increased to 5,000 barrels a day, five times more than what was originally believed, a Coast Guard official said late Wednesday.

Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the increased estimate is based on analysis from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She noted that there are "a lot of variables" in calculating the rate of the spill.

Additionally, a third underwater oil leak has been located in the pipeline that connected the rig to the oil well, said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP, who joined Landry at a news conference. Two other leaks were located within 36 hours of the April 20 explosion.

The head of BP Group told CNN's Brian Todd in an exclusive interview Wednesday that the accident could have been prevented, and he focused blame on rig owner Transocean Ltd.

CEO Tony Hayward said Transocean's "blowout preventer" failed to operate before the explosion. A blowout preventer is a large valve at the top of a well, and activating it will stop the flow of oil. The valve may be closed during drilling if underground pressure drives up oil or natural gas, threatening the rig.

"That is the ultimate fail-safe mechanism," Hayward said. "And for whatever reason -- and we don't understand that yet, but we clearly will as a consequence of both our investigation and federal investigations -- it failed to operate.

"And that is the key issue here, the failure of the Transocean [blowout preventer]," Hayward said, describing the valve as "an integral part of the drilling rig," which is operated by Transocean.

A Transocean spokesman on Wednesday declined to respond to Hayward's comments, citing pending litigation against both companies. However, Transocean Vice President Adrian Rose has said its oil rig had no indication of problems before the explosion.

Asked whether the accident could have been prevented, Hayward said, "All accidents can be prevented -- there's not doubt about that."

BP owns the oil well. Before the explosion, Hayward had announced a significant discovery of at least 50 million barrels of oil. "Of course, all of that is completely irrelevant in the context of what we're now dealing with."

Connect the World blog: Should there be a full ban on off-shore drilling?

What crews are dealing with is an oil spill from the explosion that continues to grow in the Gulf of Mexico. A controlled attempt to burn off part of the spill started Wednesday evening, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Landry said the successful burn was completed later Wednesday night.

The burn-off is part of the effort to prevent the spread of oil from an underwater well that was broken open when the drill rig Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank last week. The slick stretched about 100 miles across the north-central Gulf on Wednesday afternoon and had advanced to within 16 miles of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Efforts to cap the well have so far been unsuccessful, Landry said Wednesday. The cause of the explosion remains under investigation, and search efforts have been halted for the 11 workers missing after the blast.

At least one of the victims' families has filed a lawsuit against BP and Transocean, accusing BP specifically of negligence.

"The responsibility for safety on the drilling rig is with Transocean," Hayward said. "It is their rig, their equipment, their people, their systems, their safety processes."
He said that, despite reports to the contrary, BP has not resisted attempts at tightening safety regulations. "We welcome tighter safety regulations. But we'd like them to be applied in a way that makes them practically impermeable."

BP and the Coast Guard planned to corral part of the oil slick using a 500-foot, specially designed boom, and then set it ablaze. The flames are expected to destroy between 50 to 90 percent of the oil in that section, and winds should blow the resulting cloud of smoke and soot out to sea, said Lt. Cmdr. Matt Moorlag, a Coast Guard spokesman.

"It's a historically proven technique, and it has multiple preventative safety measures in place to ensure that that burn area remains controlled," Moorlag said.

The oil spill has the potential to become one of the worst in U.S. history, Landry said Tuesday. The well, about 50 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River, is dumping about 42,000 gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico. BP, the well's owner, has been dropping dispersant chemicals on the slick and trying to shut off the flow using remote-controlled submarines, but has had no luck.

The spill stretched eastward from a point about 16 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River to about 94 miles south of Pensacola, Florida. It was about 30 miles wide at some points. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the slick was expected to hit the southeastern Louisiana shoreline late Friday or before dawn Saturday.

Jindal said the state has asked for 55,000 feet of booms to keep oil away from the marshy, environmentally delicate coast, which is rich in shellfish and wildlife.

"We want to approach this situation the same way we would approach a hurricane or other natural disaster," he said. "We think it's best to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."

The slick left many who draw their living from the water and coastal wetlands "watching and praying," said Tony Fernandez, owner of the Breton Sound Marina near Hopedale, Louisiana.

"For the most part, what we're doing is mostly waiting," Fernandez said. "There's not much that laypeople can do with this." People in the area are closely watching the Coast Guard plans to burn off portions of the slick, he said.

"I guess it's a question of water pollution or air pollution," he said.

Most of the slick is a thin sheen on the water's surface. About 3 percent of it is a heavy, pudding-like crude oil. At its current flow, the spill would take more than 260 days to rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, when about 11 million gallons spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound.

But even if the Gulf spill never compares in size to the Exxon Valdez, it could have serious ecological repercussions if it makes landfall.

Efforts are already under way near the shoreline to deal with that potential scenario, including positioning boom material around sensitive ecological areas. Five staging areas have been set up on land, stretching from Venice, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida.

"If it reaches the shoreline, ourselves and the Coast Guard ... will deal with it," Hayward said. "And we will clean it up, if we get to that position."

He said BP's operation to attack the swath of oil, which is now the size of Delaware, is costing the company $6 million a day.

The remote-controlled submarines are being used by BP in an attempt to activate the well's blowout preventer to choke the flow of oil.

BP also is bringing in another drilling rig that could seal the well, but that effort would take months, according to a BP spokesman.

In the meantime, the company is working on a novel approach to capture the oil -- placing a dome right above the well head. The dome will resemble an inverted funnel, with a pipe leading up to ships waiting at the surface that would take away the oil. That tactic has never been tried in deep water, and a BP spokesman said the dome won't be ready for two to four weeks.