Doing the Same thing Over and Expecting Different Results?
BP Keen to Be Seen Doing Something, Regardless of End Result
BP executives and their counterparts from Transocean Ltd and Halliburton Co, will appear before Senate panels investigating the disaster. It’s not known whether DOI and MMS personnel as well as certain senators and congressmen who rubber stamped BP drilling would ever be questioned.
The session, at any rate, is expected to be highly theatrical, staged to appease the people.
A euphemistic, watered-down 72-Hour Trajectory Map of the Oil Spill in the Gulf? Is it our imagination, or NOAA making the maps look less life-threatening? Click image to enlarge.
Small “top hat”
BP says it aims to lower a small “top hat” dome, the size of an oil barrel, over the leak and siphon up the oil from the leak to a tanker 1.5km (~ 1 mile) above the sea floor. The original massive metal box, the “big top hat” was too big and that’s why it failed to work.
“There will be less seawater in the smaller dome and therefore less likelihood of hydrate formation,” BP CEO, Tony Hayward, told reporters at in Houston.
Fire-Earth says unless the “top hat” can couple [leech] onto the point(s) at which the leaks are occurring , so as to prevent any build up of crystallized gas hydrates in the vicinity, it’s unlikely to work, and could run into all kinds of additional complication.
In other words, for any “solution” to work, it should be able to siphon up more than 95 percent of the oil that is being leaked, or it’s unlikely to succeed.
Pointing the Finger of blame
A BP executive is blaming Transocean for the blowout because the blowout preventer, designed to prevent the an oil leak, failed to work.
Transocean in turn is blaming Haliburton, a third company involved. It says the blowout preventer did not cause the leak, but two other failures occurred, the well’s cover and the cement that was used to seal it.
Halliburton had reportedly finished cementing the well-cover less than a day before the explosion occurred, which also killed 11 people, the said BP executives says in a written testimony to the Senate investigating panel.
What about other deepwater drilling in the Gulf?
Meanwhile federal inspectors completed examining 30 deepwater drilling rigs prospecting for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but reported no safety problems, Reuters said.
“Throughout our inspections, no deepwater facilities have been shut-in due to safety concerns,” said John Romero, spokesman for Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Department of Interior branch responsible [sic] for offshore drilling safety .
Romero told Reuters that his department at MMS will soon begin inspecting 47 deepwater production platforms that are already pumping crude oil commercially.
“These inspections may take up to a month to complete,” he said.
Dispersant Sink
There’s now nearly as much dispersant sprayed over the Gulf of Mexico as that awful orange-colored fire retardant chemical over the state of California. The problem is the dispersant used in the Gulf is even deadlier than the fire-retardant.
A U.S. Air Force chemical dispersing C-130 aircraft drops an oil dispersing chemical into the Gulf of Mexico as part of the Deepwater Horizon Response effort, May 5, 2010. U.S. Air Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. Adrian Cadiz.
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