Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are working on the oil problem.

And they have the most advanced technology in the world.

These minds are so brilliant, and the technology is so great, that they can locate a huge supply of oil that is more than ONE MILE under the surface of the ocean.

They can establish a mammoth oil rig in the middle of the sea. They can overcome all of the obstacles inherent in dropping a drill bit in ONE MILE of water. ONE MILE!

They can figure out how to sink a pipe in the ocean floor and then drill through rock. They can then figure out how to extract oil and get up to the surface.

They can do this in an efficient and cost effective manner.

But they can't figure out how to plug a hole.

PLUG THE FUCKING HOLE ALREADY YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

...some sort of trash solution. I understand those solutions. I don't understand how they do those things you list, that they do on a regular basis. It just doesn't seem like they're applying the same level of "smarts" to the solution that they do to the thing that brings in so much money for them.

I could be wrong but that's what it seems like. So far their solutions have seemed feeble. I'd like to think that anyone performing a service which involves action which could have such dire consequences would also dedicate a little of that brainpower to an equally-elegant "plan B" for when the turd refuses to flush.

PB

"It just doesn't seem like they're applying the same level of "smarts" to the solution that they do to the thing that brings in so much money for them".

... all those items you listed took a big deal of effort and time in planning and development.

The problem is not with the smarts involved in the drilling. The problem is that these assholes were allowed to drill without having a motherfucking plan B whatsoever.

The core issue is that the Plan B interfered with their entitlement to profit, and as such it was never considered. Now we are seeing that ugly bitch of Murphy's Law saying "heeeeeeeyyyy whassup guuuuuuys."

See the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo&feature=player_embedded

Hay absorbs the oil completely. Then it could be used for energy later.

for the worst..they plan on spreading it at the shorelines and even putting it in the water should the oil reach their beaches..but they already have it sitting on their beaches in the ready..

Hay that's been completely saturated by seawater, with oil gushing out at thousands of PSI, not so much.

they'll soak up the oil - and look good doing it

hay is needed for other purposes.

They're trying to figure out a way to "stop" it without making it so they cannot still get at the oil. Y'think?

The goal is not to permanently plug this source.

Then so be it.
Stop the oil...at whatever cost to BP. They can deal with the failed site at a later date.

their jobs, every politician local and national they bought off and plug the hole with them.

Russia has an old-fashioned and highly effective option for sealing oil leaks. Alexander Moskalenko, head of GCE, a Russian oil consultancy, tells the Moscow Times an underwater nuclear explosion could be used to bury the leaking oil well. The suggestion is not as bonkers as it sounds.

According to the Russian newspaper Komsomol Pravda, the Soviet Union used the method five times to seal off hydrocarbon spillages. The first time was in 1966, near Bukhara in Uzbekistan, when a 30-kiloton atom bomb was used to blow out and seal a burning gas well. (The bomb used in Hiroshima was 20 kilotons.)

The idea is simple: the explosion buries the problem under tonnes of rock, sealing off the flow of oil. According to Pravda, some of these nuclear bomb civil engineers are still alive:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/62992,news-comment,news-politics,deepwater-horizon-gulf-mexico-oil-spill-should-bp-nuke-the-leak-like-the-russians

It's not that they don't know how to plug it; it's that they don't know how to plug it in a way that does less damage to the environment than what the well is doing already.

used to find and drill for the oil used to fix the fuck up.

Manwhile, all we can do is watch in frustration.

By this I mean that many people within the oil industry have seriously studied this and considered and documented possible solutions.

possible solutions, why have they tried just one? Is this the 'best' they had? :eyes:

This is absolutely -- I can't even think of a word of how disgusted and outraged I am As I know you are. I hate those fucking pricks. Beyond Petroleum my ass. :grr:

I'm not an engineer, but I've worked closely with them. I know how they think. They are heading in the wrong direction with this. Believe me, these people can come up with a solution if they move in another direction.

The focus must be moved to plugging the hole rather than getting the oil to the surface.

it, then I'm sorry. On the contrary, you're obviously taking this as seriously as it warrants. They're probably moving in the direction BP is telling them to -- start with the cheapest approach that might work and will look good to the public, and if that doesn't work, we'll go from there.

Meanwhile, Rome is burning.

:)

that they have wreaked upon the rest of us. :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr:

they can't see what the fuck they're doing because the $$ in their eyes are blinding them to the simple, effective solutions.

I don't think they are real bright either. I think they are a bunch of fucking idiots.

Even if it did plug the leak.

:shrug: The first time I heard someone suggest nuking the leak, I thought it was a completely insane and delusional idea.

Well, I still think it's insane...

go ahead.

Thank dog that private corps don't have them or we'd all be in a fix.
They would have to ask the military to do it for them.
Last resort I would hope.

Take a deep breath, and consider what you are saying.

Seriously, take some meds.

Given the choice between allowing that hole in the Earth's crust to continue spewing AT LEAST 250,000 gallons of raw, deadly crude oil into the Gulf every 24 hours, and given a chance to seal it with a very small nuclear device, sadly, I would have to choose that drastic course of action. I hope another viable solution quickly appears. Desperately so. Unfortunately, the entities responsible for this disaster did not have back-up, emergency plans. That, unfortunately, was not in the operating budget.

the clock to control the damage.

because the leak would worsen. I've read something to that effect and it sounds plausible. There's also the problem of the drilling site being next to USAF dumping grounds for unexploded ordinance.

"But they can't figure out how to plug a hole."

Plugging the hole is fucking easy.

Stopping the gush while still being able to salvage the rest of the oil, without spending millions drilling a new hole, is difficult.

;)

They are dancing around the problem because they don't want to spend more money to regain the oil.

I got your point. :)

trying to salvage the oil over trying to stop the leak?

I.e. is there a way to stop the leaks that is not being taken because they couldn't use the pipe anymore?

Because the relief well they're drilling to stop the leak could later be used to extract the oil.

Stopping the leak saves the oil for later extraction. Letting it spew uncontrolled produces oil they can't sell.

The economics of "stop the leak" are aligned with the environmental goal of "stop the leak".

Maybe the threat of hard prison time for BP executives will change the perception of what their job is.

It's a hole, with liquid under high pressure coming out of it. That's what it is. A man made hole.

Maybe this will work?



:)

I love that stuff.

Y'all are right.

They want the oil, really bad.

The assholes are so greedy they lost all respect for life itself.

But this problem has been anticipated and discussed. They need to change the direction of their thinking FROM getting the oil to the surface TO stopping the flow.

This is one big pocket of oil.

Dollar signs are dancing in front of their eyes.

They own the government, they are not afraid of it.

They know nothing will happen to them, whatever happens.

I just want to drag the assholes in the water, let them feel like the wildlife is feeling now.

they laid off their most creative thinkers --- to improve their financials.

fucked the gulf already.

And the managers of these brilliant people do the things they want to hear from them and cut corners on the rest.

into the hole a few hundred feet

so your idea is not far fetched.

I still think it can be clamped off somehow, but they would have to get down below the surface of the ocean floor to expose whatever pipe is remaining under there.

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

maybe he and Tawd can do something...put their heads together.

BP appears to be stalling, winging it until they can figure out a way to get the oil.

This is sickening to watch.

I get the impression of "stalling".

is illegal in some states :rofl:

end and we can't prevent it...

Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard!

They don't want to release photos images or details because it might point to easily to blame, so they CLAIM the brightest are working on it.

I ask, because there's been speculation about it, and the response I got was rational -- it would seem like an insane liability. But these guys haven't been shown to be exactly liability averse at very many points along the way. Is there anything to this suggestion or not? (these are just comments I captured at the Times-Picayune website a week or so ago, but that kind of got my attention at the time)



Times-Picayune graphic animation thread
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x285078#285477

The sea bed near the gusher is going to be compromised by the gusher. So they have to start the hole a long ways away, and then drill sideways. Steerable drill bits and wells that turn corners are pretty standard these days on both land and ocean oil wells.

That being said, the relief well could later be used to extract the oil, once the gusher is capped. However, that's the case no matter where they start drilling the relief well.

:hi:

there is money being lost you know

In capitalism companies concentrate on ways to bring in revenue. They don't think of preventing loss of revenue. When they do think instances where they might lose revenue they don't use scientists, engineers or experts to prevent the event from happening. They instead jut hire lawyers to limit their liability. THAT'S their answer to non-revenue events (accidents) in a corporation.

The right wing hates it when corporations are held accountable. They love it when they are able to hide behind laws, laws they purchased by owning political prostitutes who wrote laws just to protect them. But these same right wingers whine like babies when a suspected terrorist 'lawyers' up. Don't they see their inconsistencies? That requires thought.

It's just going to take 3 or 4 months to do it.

is not a solution.

It took years of research and testing for engineers to develop the technology and techniques to drill oil on the ocean floor.

Right now they have to try to improvise solutions with unproven techniques which carry the risk of making the oil leak even worst. They thought the containment domes would work, but it turned out to be a failure. The same could be said with any other improvised solution they can come up with, and those ones have a higher risk of damaging the well even more.

were performed and no risk abatement strategies were put into place prior to digging.

I can assure you that is not the case.

We can assume such studies, if they were done, have now been proven wrong.

However, it is the only one they have that will actually work, which makes the fact they scrimped on saftey equipment even more of an outrage.

"With a bang or a whimper" . . .

Nah . . . with oil drilling --

Wasn't that Obama assuring us a while ago that these oil rights today don't spill??!!

To give the appearence they are doing something.

However, that will take 90 days, and if they don't pretend like they are trying something else people get angry at them, which people should be for fucking causing the catastophre in the fist place.

Everything they are trying right now is public relations excercises to make you think they are trying.

and other than setting off a nuke (which has its own issues), I believe it is the only plausible solution.

and animal-life, even beyond what we can picture now, will perish!

hmmmm....

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plug holes when well heads blow off. They don't just go through all this expense without coming up with contingency plans for failure.

I never said it was a trivial problem, and I'll forgive your fingers for telling me to shut up.

And the contingency plan was to use ROV's to manually activate them, but that failed.

Now the plan is to drill a relief well to plug up the hole on the bottom.

If there was another way of capping the well, they would have already done it by now but it isn't that simple.

without any regard for how hard that work is, or what it actually takes. There were plans for how to prevent disasters like this and how to fix them when they happened, and they haven't worked as planned. That is what it is like to be in science and engineering, and the fact that you apparently don't understand that makes it really obvious that your career has never involved tackling a problem as difficult as the one these people are currently solving.

You don't need to forgive me my rudeness, but you could try showing some gratitude to the people you are crapping on, for doing the work necessary to put gas in your car and heat your home in the winter, and for being the ones whose 80 hour work weeks will ultimately fix this leak.

The company fully understood the risks of drilling that deep. They estimated the probability of the blow out happening. They came up with several mitigation plans.

They determined the probability of their mitigation plans actually being successful.

They then determined their financial risk if the plans were not successful.

They determined through a cost benefit analysis that they would make more money, proceeding with known risk, than by not proceeding.

Don't talk to me like I'm a goddamn idiot.

You have know idea what type of meetings I've been privy to.

Giant environmental intervention. That's an utterly brilliant hypothesis.

I'm sorry if I was talking to you like you were an idiot before... I clearly had no idea what kind of mind I was dealing with.

Put me on ignore. I have no desire to argue with you.

If I conclude that you are no longer worth my time I will ignore you on my own.

If you want to ignore me that is your right. The cost to you is your right to respond to my arguments, as you will no longer see them.

The choice is yours.

Just like in the financial crisis were caused by banks not correctly calculating the risk. They had detailed risk models and costs benefit analysis, but they ended up being flawed and bankrupt themselves.

Sometimes even the best thought out plans fail.

quite profound.

:)

I always like to think of what people can do collectively when mounting a "wartime effort". WW2 has many examples of resourceful people coming up with magnificent machines and solutions quickly.

The Manhattan Project for one. The resources that sucked up were staggering. They built a whole city in Tennessee in Oak Ridge just to produce nuclear material for the Manhattan Project. They were designing Oak Ridge as it was being built and they had to have the foresight to get it right the first time.

The example that resonates with me the most is the story of the development of the P-51 Mustang, which went from concept to flying prototype in 90 days!

Before PC's, before CNC, before high tech. You would have a hard time achieving anything like that even today, even with all the rapid prototype and lasers and CADCAM and production capabilities currently commonplace in manufacturing these days.

In contrast, there just doesn't seem to be much sense of urgency for cleaning up this spill. It seems just plain half assed. We are in the middle of a scandal we will be studying for years - to determine how the response could have been so poor. Kinda like the half assed post mortem for 9-11. We will be reading for years how the government or BP or others closely connected to this disaster were simply not up to the task. Probably because those that control the money did not see fit to use that much to come up with a solution. The responsible companies/contractors and our government seem to be the only people we should reasonably expect to bankroll such an effort. It would be nice if Donald Trump or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or T. Boone decided to underwrite it, but that's highly unlikely.

I think it's a question of will. There just aren't enough people in responsible positions to rally a oil spill task force to fight this problem.

We Americans can achieve real greatness when our heart is in it. I think this lack of will to attack this thing with the collective effort it deserves simply is not to be found.

To put it another way, I would bet that if Richard Branson or Roger Penske were faced with fixing this problem, they could do it quickly and effectively with the power of the corporations they have at their disposal.

In WW2 the car companies ceased auto production and built planes and tanks and other war material. All our currently idle manufacturing and engineering talent and facilities could solve this spill, if they were so marshaled. Just unleash all the corporate drones on making something excellent with a important purpose for a change, instead of being called to gyp customers by making products built to fail instead of last as long as they should. Get the "can do spirit" that helped us win WW2 instead of this corporate dithering as they figure out a way to make the most money from this disaster, which may or may not have anything to do with actually fixing it. I would not be surprised if some corporate sociopath has already determined that exacerbating this disaster will actually make them more profits! Yes! Yes! The time when this problem is solved will coincide with the time needed to maximize profits and extract as much money from probably the American taxpayer as possible.

Boy, I sure am cynical when it comes to corporate behavior, aren't I?

-90% Jimmy

I'll give you a clue: it was an oil well that blew out in 1979 off the coast of Mexico, under similar circumstances. It took them 10 months to close it in spite of the fact that it was in a region of the Gulf only 164 feet deep. It ended up being the second worst oil spill in history. (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/05/one_gulf_oil_spill_went_for_ne.html)

The reason we are in deep shit with deepwater horizon has nothing to do with "collective will" or BP or its engineers wanting to be remembered as the worst climate villains in history. In case it hasn't occurred to you they don't stand to benefit from the PR, or from being asked to foot the bill by the government. All of those counter examples you posted were public initiatives. I though you didn't want any money going to BP from the government over this? Am I confused about your position, or about your desire to have American taxpayers cleaning this up?

It really pains me to be taking the side of the oil company on this. My recent professional life has been dedicated to lithium battery research, and I hate offshore drilling. If it were up to me oil would be strictly a culinary item. But this thread is such an unmitigated black hole of stupid that I absolutely have to. Halliburton sucks for drilling this far of shore: that was fucking irresponsible, and BP sucks for not doing a better job of operating the well: again, irresponsible. But don't try to tell me that there is some corporate conspiracy to let the well bleed out. That's no better than the Fox news line that Greenpeace blew the thing up to stop offshore drilling. Its complete nonsense.

D23MIURG23's post #108 is a linked response to my brilliant post #85. D23MIURG23 said in that post:

"The reason we are in deep shit with deepwater horizon has nothing to do with "collective will" or BP or its engineers wanting to be remembered as the worst climate villains in history. In case it hasn't occurred to you they don't stand to benefit from the PR, or from being asked to foot the bill by the government. All of those counter examples you posted were public initiatives. I though you didn't want any money going to BP from the government over this? Am I confused about your position, or about your desire to have American taxpayers cleaning this up?"

Uh, my post got nothin' about government money going to BP over this. Are you sure you're not melding my thoughts with the other previous posts? But I do like your condescension. It's helps to illustrate your clear superiority over the rest of us.

I've got a saying I made up myself; "The less you know about how to do something, the easier you think it is to do." I created this saying in response to probably the Challenger disaster; "Why don't they make space shuttles that DON'T BLOW UP on launch?" Can you picture real rocket scientists hearing that and saying; "Why yes, I think they've got it. We should have built a space shuttle that won't blow up! Eureka! Call the boys in the lab."

I like to work from blue sky clean sheet of paper scenario's. I simplified this problem down to The American People vs. the Oil Spill. It's a reasoning technique I stole from an old SNL bit about "What if Napoleon had B-52's at the battle of Waterloo?"

We as a country used to be able to do such things. I fervently believe that if we "find good people and give them their head" the problem could be solved. However, the situation is so hamstrung by the interweaving of Big Oil with our government, that grew intertwined for over 130 years, that the solution I am suggesting is not even in the heads of the people that run our institutions. The special interests have overgrown our ability to respond like ivy overtakes brick walls.

Here's a quote from Teddy Kennedy's eulogy to his fallen brother Bobby;

"This is the way he lived. My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

I am suggesting nothing more than; "America saw an oil spill and tried to stop it."

I hope we nuke it. That would be cool!

-90% Jimmy

PS - LeftyFingerPop, thanks for the compliment. Us DU cretins gotta stick together!

PPS - D23MIURG23 - please put me on ignore. I have no intention of continuing this further. I cede to your inherent superiority.

PPPS - Teddy's eulogy to Bobby is freekin' AWESOME. Think of where America would be now if Bobby won the Presidency in 1968!

If you have some kind of evidence that stopping it should take less time than it has, then why don't you post it?

Sorry about my imputing that you didn't want public money going to BP; I must have been confused by this:

The time when this problem is solved will coincide with the time needed to maximize profits and extract as much money from probably the American taxpayer as possible.

Finally, if you want to bugger off, you can take your straw man about superiority and go. I have no intention of ignoring you, but I've made my points. If you'd like to put me on ignore then go for it, but in the mean time I probably won't be back unless you produce something better than unsubstantiated assertions.

BP chose not to use the acoustic switch.

That was a calculated risk that they took to save $500,000.

Money vs. Risk.

They felt the risk was too low too justify the measly expense of the switch.

It was a CALCULATED decision.

And I'm not going to argue the point that BP did enough to prevent the spill, because you are probably right that they didn't.

My point is that in the aftermath, I don't think BP has anything to gain by dragging its feet, and I don't think they are. My assumption is that at this point they have probably pushed most of their technical people at the problem with a blank check and orders to fix the thing ASAP.

When you are a scientist or an engineer and you are trying to do something that hasn't been done before (like stopping a well a mile underwater) you work along precedented lines; modifying solutions that have been successfully implemented in the most similar situation you have to analogize from. This is what BP did with the containment domes that failed. Ultimately this turned out to be a bad idea, but there were reasons to believe it would work, so from my perspective this was a good first move for BP to try. I'm not an expert in oil recovery, so I don't have any sense of what time frame is good for implementation. If you can give me some evidence that the solutions they are attempting could be proceeding faster, but that BP feels that faster solutions would be financially unfavorable, that would effectively shut me up.

Brilliant!


peace~

:thumbsup:

The problem is plugging the hole in a manner that still allows them to get the oil.

for how to stop a high pressure oil jet a mile under the ocean with surface vessels, submersibles, and remote controlled robots, I'm sure they will get right on it.

:shrug:

Thanks.

seems like they could do SOMETHING for god's sake.

They pay engineers and geologists and crews to locate and extract oil.

They're not going to put big dollars into "contingency planning" and "disaster mitigation techniques" as there's not enough return on the dollar invested.

I mean, these assholes were to fucking cheap to kick in $500K for the acoustic gear.

That's why they're scrambling, trying to play catch-up, cause there IS NO FUCKING DISASTER PLAN BECAUSE THEY CHOSE NOT TO INVEST THE TIME AND MONEY.

They should have looked at all the worst case scenarios and plans before they were allowed to drill. All these oil rigs need to be shut down now. This practise of extracting oil has proven to be very unsafe and needs to stop right now because it is not worth the cost to the planet.

If they warm up the containment structure will it still ice up? They could wrap the thing in water bladders and constantly fill them with acid an sea water. Chemical hand warmers are very simple and effective. Wrap a radiant barrier (space blanket) around the bladders to increase the efficiency.

It wouldn't take much of an engineer to run the numbers and design it. It would have to be more practical than pumping warm fluid from the surface.

I don't think people comprehend the kind of pressures being dealt with here...

inside and outside the bladder. Plastic bags work just about anywhere.