5000 barrels a day of oil (210,000 gallons) leak off the coast of Louisiana

[Kalicokitty]

yea... but almost all of civilization's population 200 years ago wasn't centered in major metropolitan areas which are completely void of natural resources.

we NEED oil to keep the masses alive

If we woke up tomorrow and it was gone, all of it, everywhere without warning, yes it would be rough, but not the end of the world.

If woke up tomorrow and found we only had 5 years worth left, we'd be just fine.
If faced with no other choice, we'd transition to other things during that 5 year period fairly easily.

 

[dmt]

'President Barack Obama will tonight dispense with all restraint and fully exploit the BP oil spill to push the nightmare globalist agenda of a green economy, a carbon tax on human emissions, and an army of environmental enforcers to implement total big government tyranny.

Obama will announce the acceleration towards an agenda firmly supported by the transnational oil corporations that he is claiming to be reigning in – a post-industrial revolution characterized by artificial scarcity, soaring gas and electricity prices, and a carbon tax that will cripple the economy and drastically lower the living standards of American citizens, completely eviscerating the middle class.'

Read more: Obama To Push Nightmare Carbon Tax In Oval Office Speech

il say it again DISASTER CAPITALISM aka problem, reaction, solution, d

 

[HillBillMt]

intresting, if ya take the time ta look let me know,,,
http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2010/05/smoking-gun-bps-deep-horizon-mess
http://adropofrain.net/2010/05/rumor-schlumberger-exits-deep-horizon-hou.

, , , , , HHB

 

[White-rhino]

'President Barack Obama will tonight dispense with all restraint and fully exploit the BP oil spill to push the nightmare globalist agenda of a green economy, a carbon tax on human emissions, and an army of environmental enforcers to implement total big government tyranny.

Obama will announce the acceleration towards an agenda firmly supported by the transnational oil corporations that he is claiming to be reigning in – a post-industrial revolution characterized by artificial scarcity, soaring gas and electricity prices, and a carbon tax that will cripple the economy and drastically lower the living standards of American citizens, completely eviscerating the middle class.'

Read more: Obama To Push Nightmare Carbon Tax In Oval Office Speech

il say it again DISASTER CAPITALISM aka problem, reaction, solution, d

And it has come to pass. How much more theft at gunpoint will it require to control the weather? Answer (same as the last) - just a little more.

Anyways, it's nine-o-clock, time to turn the big light on....call the coal plant and tell them to throw in another shovel full

 

[rabid]

The following didn't come from 'Above Top Secret' so some of the alarmists on here may not fully appreciate (or accept) it

Drilling guys opinions about BP Deepwater Horizon spill flow rates and causes

Posted: June 8th, 2010 by: h-1
This aliilaali guy is improving fast, so I wanted to share his opinions about what the flow rates probably are, and also shelburns (under the fold), and what they could max out as, as well as what he thinks the causes are. He puts this in a nice theoretical congressional investigation context, but it’s just his opinion. Ie, he’s using this as a writing device. That is, please don’t take this as actual testimony. I’m saying this clearly because sometimes people just don’t get humor and mistake it for fact.
But I think this is a fair overview from a guy who does this for a living in deep water, and almost, ideally, might help serve as a basic reality check for some of the wilder ideas that are probably starting to float around the internet right about now. Source is theOildrum.com BP Deepwater Oil Spill – The Oil in the Water, Seeps, and an Open Thread thread.

aliilaali on June 8, 2010 – 1:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
idle thoughts on flow rates…..seems like folks putting out numbers high as 200,000 BOPD …other are crunching 100,000 BOPD ……these are very high numbers and all I can say is IMHO we are not lucky like the Saudi’s…..these numbers are what we wish we could get from a well in the GOM… producers have been searching for wells that can put out such numbers for 30 odd yrs and it just hasn’t happened yet …if a BP engineer is called to testify under oath today to congress…..IMHO the conversation would be roughly similar to...


Congress: do you believe the rate is 5,000 BOPD
BP ENgg: i hope not….if its 5000 i’ll crack some balls in the geology and reservoir dept…and I wont be getting any yearly bonus drilling such wells this far out in the sea
Congress: do you believe its 20,000 BOPD
BP Engg: congressman you’re not as stupid as you look …and my bonus will come in good this year then
COngress: do you beleive its more than 30,000 BOPD
BP Engg: if you want me to sign something …i will need you to put 30,000 as the flow rate …that’ll cover my ass good and proper
Congress: do you believe its 40,000 BOPD
BP Engg: theoretically its possible…but I can only hope for such good luck in the Mississippi delta

Congress: do you believe its 50,000 BOPD
BP Engg: congressman it's only 1 well and its not in the middle east
Congress: do you believe its more than 75,000 BOPD
BP Engg: come now congressman …..i have better things to do than answer such stupid questions.
Congress: was this a particularly dangerous well to drill or did they drill too deep and extend their engineering resources beyond limit
BP Engg: ahahahha…congressman these depths are not extreme…in fact this is a very shallow well compared to what I have been drilling for the past 15 yrs
Congress: so not a difficult well to drill…not particularly deep …hmmmmm..didnt exceed engineering tolerances on the equipment ……i don’t understand what happened then
BP Engg: drilling best practices were not followed ….and drilling DW doesn’t excuse such lax approach to work …
Congress: I have heard some disturbing rumors about this well in march and April ….loss of well control and stuck pipe
BP Engg: congressman you lose control of wells all the time….stuck pipe happens all the time..infact I am drilling two wells right now ….one has stuck pipe as we speak ….the second one we lost a lot of mud….we are trying to pump in heavy right now to get things back on track …so sue me
Congress: what about these disturbing rumors of leaky pipes in the BOP
BP Engg: definitely disturbing this ….would’ve cost tops one lost day …most likely around 15 hrs to have gotten things ship shape with the BOP ..can’t imagine why they would risk failing hydraulics on an exploratory well….
Congress: so that it …its the BOP that is at fault (thinking hes nailed it)
BP Engg: congressman …a BOP under best practices should never be considered a line of defense….if you need a BOP then you have already screwed up ….drilling mud is primary and best means of well control…a BOP is a hail mary pass during the last 3 seconds of the 4th quarter when you need a touchdown ..things should not come to that …..ask any football coach
​

So again, the opinion here is that poor drilling practices, unsafe practices, failure to engage in proper safety procedures and tests etc, are the real problem.
Next we have shelburn’s views of flow rates from the same comment thread, roughly the same conclusions only with a bit more fine grained analysis:

shelburn on June 8, 2010 – 4:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Summary – My best estimates is that the current leak rate is about 25,000 bpd in a range between 20,000 and 35,000 bpd.
But the total spilled oil is not the 1,200,000 barrels (900,000 to 1,800,000 barrel range) that the media would get by multiplying the rate times the number of days. It is probably considerably less, maybe about 620,000 barrels (300,000 and 1,000,000 barrel range). This is allowing for about 50,000 barrels recovered and at least 90% of the oil prior to the DWH sinking being burned off.
Why the difference? And my convoluted way of getting there.
One of the things that most people seem to miss is that the leak through the BOP has been growing with time.
The original estimate by the government a couple days after the DWH sank was 1,000 bpd based on the size of the oil slick. At this time the slick was small and they weren’t using subsea dispersants.
About 4 days later (Apr 28) they increased that to 5,000 bpd also based on the size of the slick.
I have no reason to believe these estimates weren’t reasonable at the time although there was probably oil being absorbed into the water column that wasn’t being accounted for.
Estimating from oil spills gets more difficult as the spill get larger, the oil breaks into separated strands and dispersants are added. Oil slicks, like mixed phase, turbulent flow is very difficult to gauge accurately. Error rates in the range of +/- 50% are common.
The next estimate was based on a May 11 video of the end of the broken riser released by BP. Professor Wereley of Purdue who estimate 72,179 bpd from the riser and threw in 25,000 from the kink in the riser for a total of over 97,000 bpd. He presented this to the media and on May 19 to a Congressional committee. They made his work public and it was full of errors. I won’t keep beating that dead horse but I wrote some previous comments about his errors. But using his particle velocity measurements (that is his field of expertise) I came up with a range of 8,000 to 24,000 bpd – 16,000 bpd (+/-50%)..
The task force has estimate 12,000 to 19,000 bpd, but they also had one group saying up to 25,000 bpd. We don’t know the date of the spill information or video clips they used. I’m not comfortable with the 12,000 to 19,000 range as that is inside the error range I think is reasonable considering the quality of the data. I’ll go with the 12,000 to 25,000 range.
When BP cut off the riser they estimated an increase of 20%.
Those are the data points we have to work from – very poor and lots of unknowns.
We know from the pressure readings at the BOP that there was a restriction through the BOP that dropped the pressure by 5,000 to 6,000 psi. There was also a pressure drop across the kink.
It was visually apparent that the leak at the kink dramatically increased from nothing in early pictures to a couple small leaks a few days later to about 4 or 5 sizable leaks before BP cut off the riser so we know there is a considerable increase due to erosion.
I tried to make a rough graph of the increase of flow rate over time with this very poor data but it suggests a logarithmic curve with a very high rate of increase in the beginning which decreases with time. This would seem to support some common sense factors. Erosion of the leaks will drop as the volume of the leak gets larger in relation “circumference” of the holes, the driving pressure will drop as the volume increases and there might be a drop in formation pressure.
Taking a wild guess it appears that the increase from the task force report until the date of cutting the riser could be in the order of 10%.
If we try to compile this we get a time line like this:
April 23 – 1,000 bpd (+/-50%) – US government from spill
April 28 – 5,000 bpd (+/-50%) – US government from spill
May 11 – 16,000 bpd (+/-50%) – Wereley modified by me
May 20? – 18,500 bpd (+/- 35%) – task force (date of data unknown)
June 5 – 21,000 bpd (+/-40%) – before risers cut based on log curve growth
June 5 – 25,000 bpd (+/-40%) – after riser cut based on BP’s 20% increase
Because BP is recovering 15,000 bpd and there is still flow through 2 or 3 relief valves that appear to be about 4” dia plus some leakage at the bottom of the cap I feel safe in putting the bottom limit at 20,000 bpd.
And I think the flow rate is probably close to or at its maximum barring any additional damage to the plumbing. Further erosion will probably be offset by decreases in formation pressure.
By the way, BP has never made a public estimate of the flow, every time the media attributed a flow rate to BP it was actually from NOAA or the USCG. That was confirmed by Admiral Allen on Monday.
​

 

[Justin_Credible]

The only real humor in what you posted is the harsh reality that BP regulates itself and does whatever the hell they want to.

 

[danut]

i really don't think you want to torch off a nuke underwater. read up on test shot baker back in the late '40's, nuclear depth charges and such. the radioactivity from the explosion stays concentrated locally due to the blast being surrounded by water, and is EXTREMELY hazardous. blowin one off as deep as this well may change things a bit ... but do you want to take the chance? as bad as crude oil is washing ashore, it beats "hot" fallout.

I said a small device.

And I don't believe it would be 100% clean.

My thinking is that it may be the last chance we have before it kills the entire planet.

If this thing dumps enough oil to kill oxygen production we are gone.

In that case the radiation would be a small cost.

 

[gingerale]

I think we also have to blame alot of insatiable need for oil on the american people and the american auto manufactures. Pushing the need for ever more sources of oil to feed "the machine" was bound to cause a disaster from human error.

bro, do some more research. fuel is only ONE of MANY things oil is used for. the plastic keyboard you are typing on this second was made with oil, your plastic monitor you are reading this on was made with oil, so dont try spreading blame around. ALL of us are to blame for oil usage, and when that many people are involved in something, when oil is so useful and frequently used for everything, BLAME is USELESS. what we need to do is ACCEPT THAT OIL USE IS INEVITABLE (because it is for the foreseeable future) and then work towards solutions to made oil usage safe, clean, and as renewable as possible, while also working on ways to transition as much as we can off of oil dependency.

 

[gingerale]

My thinking is that it may be the last chance we have before it kills the entire planet.

If this thing dumps enough oil to kill oxygen production we are gone.

this oil reservoir contains approx 2.5 billion barrels of oil, or 105 billion gallons. the pacific ocean alone contains 187,189,915,062 billion gallons of water. even if the entire reservoir emptied out, it would only fill up 0.0000000005609% of the pacific ocean, let alone the entire world's ocean. thus there is no way its going to kill off all life in the ocean or anything close. but it most certainly WILL cause some great damage to the certain areas of the ocean and may even alter currents (and weather patterns.)

all of that oil isnt going to spread out evenly over the ocean. first it will concentrate in huge masses in the gulf, having various effects, anything from certain species being killed off or moving out and never come back (just like what happened in alaska after valdez), or up to multiple species extinction or even the collapse of the regional food chain. (unlikely, but possible, and it would be catastrophic for us as well as them.) oil will for sure wash up on many of the pristine beautiful beaches and destroy a lot of natural habitats, likely at least some marshes in louisiana, florida, etc, and basically just wreck a lot of shit in the gulf region, which up until now was one of the most diverse and beautiful sea ecosystems on the planet. then if enough leaks out, perhaps oil will even enter the gulf stream and then all sorts of hilarity will ensue, since it could travel all the way to the coast of the UK, and pass straight through prime northeastern, northern atlantic fishing grounds along the way, probably wrecking everything in its path.

nobody is sure exactly what's going to happen, but one thing is for sure: THIS IS A DISASTER OF EPIC PROPORTIONS and we will be seeing lingering effects from this for decades to come.

for you prospective businessmen, now's a good time to look into what it would take to open an inland shrimp farm--a previously booming industry that recently suffered contraction due to low shrimp prices in recent years. think that's about to change? we haven't even begun to see any of the effects on pricing that will be a direct result of this disaster. and many prices will likely linger high for quite some time, decades even. we don't wish for disasters to occur, but what's done is done, and perhaps now someone can make some good of it.

 

[rabid]

gingerale--can you please post your source for this quote:

"this oil reservoir contains approx 2.5 billion barrels of oil,"

I've searched quite a bit and come up with 50 million (50,000,000) BBLS of oil and gas condensate for the Macondo reservoir. Which is considerably less than 2.5 billion BBLS.

Source:http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6531 (which has some damn good info)

Thanks bro

 

[JackTheGrower]

I gathered from watching Democracy now that this well is above the expected production levels.

Also I take it the first relief well is almost drilled? The second is coming along.

I gathered that it won't stop the "Leak" or "Spill" as it is called but it may slow things down a little.

We are still looking to the end of Summer if I am not mistaken.

 

[s13sr20det]

 

[rabid]

It would have to be just a bit above "expected production levels" since the total worlds reserves are half of gingerale's 2.5 billion barrels for the Macondo reservoir

source:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html

Total world reserves of recoverable oil = 1.34 billion barrels (as of Jan 1 2009)

 

[mriko]

the plastic keyboard you are typing on this second was made with oil, your plastic monitor you are reading this on was made with oil, so dont try spreading blame around. ALL of us are to blame for oil usage, and when that many people are involved in something, when oil is so useful and frequently used for everything, BLAME is USELESS. what we need to do is ACCEPT THAT OIL USE IS INEVITABLE

Ever heard about Dupont de Nemours ? THose are the fuckers who pushed for industrial cannabis (hemp) in the US in the early 20th century. Why ? Because many of the things you can do with oil can be done with the hemp plant. Dupont got it outlawed because they saw it as an unacceptable threat to their new-born nylon fiber and other oil-based plastics & chemicals. Oil use is not inevitable.

Irie !

 

[MrBomDiggitty]

It would have to be just a bit above "expected production levels" since the total worlds reserves are half of gingerale's 2.5 billion barrels for the Macondo reservoir

source:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html

Total world reserves of recoverable oil = 1.34 billion barrels (as of Jan 1 2009)

Just because a number is posted somewhere doesn't make it accurate. I'd bet the true amount of recoverable oil in the world is much higher.

 

[rabid]

You are correct Mr BD--the world total is 1,342 billion barrels, not 1.34. I'm still trying to find the estimated size of the Macondo field. My apologies to gingerale

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Obama makes a knee-jerk reaction and suspends offshore drilling. Which puts many, many people out of work. But hey, these bastards are trying to feed their families by working for the exploiters of our planet, yes? Who really cares if they are going to be hit with hard times, I mean hey...they are murders, yes?

And others here want to boycott BP. Another brilliant move. Yeah, let's boycott BP so it can help to easy our simpleton minds. It will help things LOTS if we only boycott them and make it rough on those murdering bastards. And fuck that their field workers, boat captains, dock workers, truck drivers, gas station owners, counter people...etc, etc...are trying to pay bills and feed their families. Fuck them and fuck BP!
Those sick fucks should know better than to work for such a murderous group, so fuck them. Who cares if they are hungry and can't pay the bills. Fuck them. And Fuck BP.

(I'm sorry, but IMO a majority of you posting in here are just about as lame as they get. Sharp as a stack of marbles, and could give fuck all about good peoples lives. I put many of you on a mental level on par with what you think of BP...yeah it is easy for you to sit back and throw your stupid shit around, especially when it isn't you that is feeling the pain...sad fucks IMO)

Back to your normally scheduled hate fest, peppered with fine ideas by intelligent people who love our planet and it's inhabitants. The truly righteous folks who are right here in this thread.

*I am on a mission to boycott dumb fucks.

 

[SKUNK420]

(I'm sorry, but IMO a majority of you posting in here are just about as lame as they get. Sharp as a stack of marbles, and could give fuck all about good peoples lives. I put many of you on a mental level on par with what you think of BP...yeah it is easy for you to sit back and throw your stupid shit around, especially when it isn't you that is feeling the pain...sad fucks IMO)

Back to your normally scheduled hate fest, peppered with fine ideas by intelligent people who love our planet and it's inhabitants. The truly righteous folks who are right here in this thread.

*I am on a mission to boycott dumb fucks.

 

[elmanito]

Obama makes a knee-jerk reaction and suspends offshore drilling. Which puts many, many people out of work. But hey, these bastards are trying to feed their families by working for the exploiters of our planet, yes? Who really cares if they are going to be hit with hard times, I mean hey...they are murders, yes?

What do you think what happens with the fish, shrimp, tourist industry etc when another disaster occurs because of the offshore drilling.The oil companies don't even have the expertise or the means to deal with this kind of disasters.You're talking about the loss of jobs in the offshore industry because of the suspending, but the loss of jobs right now in several industries is greater than that you can imagine.It is about time to stop with oil and related products.

Namaste

 

[ROJO145]

Only 30% of the fishing grounds are closed in the Gulf,amazingly that has effected 100% of the fisherman!!Watch the thousands of poor people sit on there asses doing nothing because hey...BP gonna pay dem yeah!!Hell,live 3 ft under water and when a hurricane fills the bowl the Gubment will pay!
The fuckin day after the nets were bein put away,stores were closing,people started counting......to fuckin easy to sit and wait for someone else to pay!
Fuck,times bad where ya live?Move to the Gulf.......somebody gonna pay ya!!!
LOL,fishings down in the gulf,shrimpings down in the gulf,oysterings down in the gulf!!!Funny but it will remain so until they start fucking fishing again!!!!Scallop season opened today in Fla,