Gulf of Mexico in BP Crosshairs

Oil in GOM: 4.2 Million Barrels and Rising

Undersea remote control vehicle (RCV) damages the ruptured wellhead’s “vent system”

Oil gushed unhindered from BP’s ruptured wellhead after an undersea RVC collided with a makeshift vent system placed above the wellhead to capture some of the crude from the world’s deadliest oil spill. [Watch this space.]

Oil Continues to gush out of the BP’s Black Death Oil Well at a rate of about 69,000bpd (±16 %).

News Links:

• BP forced to remove containment cap in Gulf of Mexico
• Oil gushed largely unchecked from the well on Wednesday
  

Related Links:

• Oil Leak in Gulf of Mexico – New Estimate and Satellite Photo
• Methane in Gulf Million Times Above Normal

• Earth Enemy: Judge Martin Feldman
• Gulf of Mexico Worth More Dead Than Alive: Oil Industry
• World’s Largest Oil Tailing Pond – Satellite Images
• BP Hayward: Frankly, I Couldn’t Give a Damn!
• Oil Disasters

“You can be sure of Shell !”

Shell nixes wind project, UK government peeved

LONDON (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to sell its stake in one of the world’s largest wind farm projects, much to the annoyance of the the UK government, project partners and environmentalists.

Shell is one of three shareholders of London Array, which plans to erect 340 turbines with a combined generating power of 1,000 MW on a 20km stretch along the Thames Estuary, east of London. [The other two are the German utility E.ON AG and Denmark’s state-controlled DONG (!) Energy.

The upstream (search, recovery and extraction of crude oil and natural gas) provides about 70 percent of Shell’s revenues. [The Arguello Inc. Harvest Oil Platform is located about 10 km off the coast of central California near Point Conception. Photo: NASA JPL]

Accused of “hypocrisy” by environmentalists, Shell is the world’s second-largest non-government controlled oil company.

“We’re very disappointed that Shell — which touts itself as a progressive green company — is pulling out of the London Array project and leaving a key clean energy project high and dry,” Friends of the Earth Energy Campaigner Nick Rau said. (Source)

Apart from the obvious, what is it about Shell that people so intensely dislike?

In Europe and most of ROW, I’m told, “you can be sure of Shell!” That is, you can be sure that Shell is the bête noire of the major oil corporations. My colleague who lives in London, England, reminds me about the non-stop demonstrations Greenpeace held against Shell in the late 70s and early 80s. Everyone, understandably, despised Shell: “Out! Out, with Shell!” But What about the other majors like ExxonMobil (the direct descendant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company) and BP (then British Petroleum), the world’s largest and third largest oil and gas corporations respectively? Were/are they really “greener” that Shell? The interesting point was that Greenpeace in London, home of the BP, never uttered a word in anger against British Petroleum.

It’d be interesting to find out why!

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