SPILL BABY SPILL!

[goodboy]

<>

Repeat it. Over and over and over.

[ladjf]

1. One wonders why failsafe shutoff valves are not installed on all

deep water oil wells. But, why would any Oil Company go to the trouble to spend money that didn't directly apply to what they believe to be the "bottom line".

The gravest threat to life on Earth is the uncontrolled business operations all over the planet. Will the human race ever reach the point of understanding the seriousness of that threat?

I think not.

[jfkraus]

4. It had one.

It failed.

[ladjf]

11. Whatever it had wasn't adequately designed and tested.

And until a shutoff device can be PROVEN to be reliable, not one deep water well should be allowed.

[localroger]

16. Proven how?

If your suggested test regime is to blow up the drilling platform and drop it on the valve being tested, good luck getting that approved.

They test these valves to very high overpressures and all kinds of wear and loading forces, but they are made of ordinary matter designed by engineers who aren't God. Your statement basically translates "no offshore drilling ever." You can make a good case for that but "the valve was badly designed" is not that case. No machine built by humans can be proven to be 100% reliable over any possible unanticipated failure mode. Is it supposed to be the last thing standing after the next asteroid lands on it and vaporizes the whole area? Engineers have to draw a line somewhere, and on things like this it's often not clear where that line needs to be drawn. After this I'm sure someone will send out a memo saying "more strength needed," once the situation has been evaluated. Yes, it's an expensive way to learn the lesson, but unfortunately in practical field engineering it's the only way. And if you think they're just going to leave all that oil lying at the bottom of the Gulf while the price goes through the roof, well, you're not living in the real world.

[DainBramaged]

20. This is DU, they still believe in the tooth fairy here......

:fistbump:

[ladjf]

22. I don't believe in the tooth fairy. But, I do believe that if humans

are going to operate in dangerous environments, everything possible should be done to assure the safety of those who might be impacted by catastrophic accidents whether it's in a coal mine,
deep water wells and vehicles of transportation just to name a few.

I'm trying to work toward solutions. You seem to be trying to prove that I'm an unrealistic idiot.

[localroger]

25. You don't seem to have any understanding here

SRSLY this is not a coal mine. Do you really think an oil company with a multi-billion dollar investment in a platform like this wouldn't do everything in its power to avoid such a disaster? Do you really think they would skimp on a thing like a ten thousand dollar valve at the bottom of a billion dollar structure? I repeat, this isn't a coal mine and the problem isn't the same. We know how to mine coal. We know how to mine it safely. The assholes who let those miners die were being cheap because they knew better ways of doing things.

The people drilling deep water oil wells are doing something totally new. It hasn't been done for 200 years and we don't know about all the canaries and ventilation shafts we need. I can promise you that if you think cheapness is the reason the rig blew up and the valve is failing then you don't know bupkis about the oil industry. You cannot imagine the amount of money that is lavished on these things. I've never been out on one, but work closely with people who have and I know a few who've worked on them. The companies know these are isolated envronments where unpredictable things happen. They don't skimp on supplies and specs. They have no reason to. When you have built a billion dollar oil rig it would be stupid to cheap out on a $10,000 safety valve if you really thought a $100,000 valve would do better. The thing is, that $100,000 better valve doesn't exist -- yet. Nobody thought it was necessary to invent it. After this disaster, you can bet a lot of new valve designs will be forthcoming and they will be snapped up by the people who need them.

I'm normally the first to jump on the evil business criminal conspiracy, but the fact is this is not about business; it's about engineering and what is possible, and you seem to think something is possible that isn't. If we took the attitude you suggest toward everything we would still be crapping in chamber pots and tossing them out the window after dark. I'm not specifically defending the oil industry here; it's full of rotten ruinous bastards. But progress does demand that we take risks sometimes, and if our standard for moving forward is that no risk is permissible then we might as well throw away our clothes and start rooting for berries.

[ladjf]

32. My thought was that even if the necessary valve cost many

billions to develop, it would have been worth it. It appears to me that the oil companies went ahead with drilling with insufficient regard to safety.

Big oil is profiting obscenely. They can afford it. Perhaps now, after this accident, they might
get off of their greedy asses and spend the money of figure out how to automatically shutoff a runaway deep water oil well.


http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/27/big-oil-made-over-600-billion-during-the-bush-years-but-invested-bupkis-in-clean-energy/

[4_TN_TITANS]

35. "like a ten thousand dollar valve"

I'm in the valve business (for petroleum, chemical, nuclear, pharma,etc.) I wouldn't trust a 10 grand valve for this kind of job. There's a very good chance that valve was made by my company or a division of it. It's more likely that stress or rupture in the pipeline caused the valve to fail.

[ladjf]

37. It wouldn't matter how much the prototype cost, ie. multiple billions.

The future of deep water drilling depends on it. It needs to be able to automatically shutoff if it senses a failure in the system. The actual mechanism might have to be driven by compressed air, or the outflow of the oil. The device would need to be continually checking for system integrity so that in the event it receives no verification of OK, then it would trigger the shutoff.

In so far as the oil companies are making 20 to 90 billion per year, they could easily pool their resources and develop a reliable prototype. The actual production model could cost as little as a million or so, chump change for big oil.

[DainBramaged]

26. I wasn't speaking to you so here's Johnny..................

:eyes:


Do you understand the concept of this oil rig? It's a drilling rig not a production rig. It's like a gigantic Eiffel tower that isn't anchored but floating partially below water to drill in the deepest parts of the ocean off our coasts.


I really think you need to understand the mechanics of all of this before you attack me for no damn good reason.

[ladjf]

29. I wasn't attacking anyone.

I'm not an engineer. However, for an amateur, I consider myself better posted on the design of oil rigs and the mechanics of working in deep water than most people. By coincidence, I lived in Vicksburg, Ms. during the period the R.G.LeTourneau designed and build some of the first oil platforms. My interest in the rigs caused me to visit the plant often.

I understand clearly the fundamental problem of working 5,000 ft. below the surface. The immense pressure requires very special engineering and makes access extremely difficult.

Let me start over here.

Any oil well will require a reliable shutoff mechanism, i.e. valve.

No oil well should be drilled that doesn't have one.

The science of accomplishing this at the surface level has long since been worked out.

But, at 5,000 feet, there are two different requirements for the shutoff mechanism, (1) it has to be built to withstand and cope with the huge pressure and (2) it must be able to shutoff automatically in the event of any systemic failure.

In light of the fact that the top five oil companies made 600 billion during the Bush years and have continued to profit obscenely since suggests to me that they could have invested a few billion in solving this most central problem, namely, how to shut off a runaway deep water oil well.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/27/big-oil-made-over-600-billion-during-the-bush-years-but-invested-bupkis-in-clean-energy/

My suggestion is first to design a valve that works at that depth and then develop an automation
system to activate it to shutoff when there is a runaway situation. I have in mind the possibility
of a circuit from the surface to the bottom that sends a continuous verification signal to the valve
that causes the valve to remain open. However, if that verification is not received, the shutoff mechanism will kick in an close the well.

How would the verification system work?

If the circuit from top to bottom is electrical and assuming that in an accident such as the current one, the circuit will be cutoff, the receiving end would need enough self-contained power, i.e. batteries to trigger the valve to shutoff. Rather than a pure electrical circuit from top to bottom,
sonar pulses could be used to signal the valve that all is normal or not normal.

Assuming that a large amount of power would be required to actually, physically accomplish the shutoff it might be possible to draw power of the outflow of the oil via venturi es or small paddles.
Other possibilities would be compressed air or large electric, battery powered, motors.

In my opinion, the oil companies, like the mining companies have chosen profit over safety.

Any company making 50 to 100 billion a year can damn well afford to spend more of that profit on
making deep water drilling safe. It's dumb to do otherwise.

[Evasporque]

39. Former Massey mine managers were consultants....

Working on increasing productivity...

<kidding>

[TheKentuckian]

5. When someone tells you something is fail safe you should look out for lightening bolts

and think long and hard why they are bullshitting you. They may not be selling a pig in a poke but the odds are heavily stacked they are.

There is no such thing as fool proof.

[ladjf]

13. Are you saying that a reliable automatic shutoff device is impossible

to build? If so, deep water drilling should cease permanently. I'm not talking about the "perfect device". I'm talking about one that would work 999 times out of a thousand applications.

[localroger]

17. You do realize wells blow out all the time?

This IS the 1,000th time. The other 999 the valves worked.

[ladjf]

21. I wasn't aware that wells "blew out all of the time.". In that case,

the reliability tests are going to have to be done to higher standards. How about 9,999,999 out of
10,000,000?

[localroger]

23. Well, that's an idea

Are you gonna pay for the testing and engineering? Because somebody has to, and it all ends up contributing to the price of oil. And what do you do about the things like this, which simply have no precedent? Things like that are going to happen. We went to the Moon, but we had the Apollo 11 fire first, and we had the Apollo 13 near miss. If you decide to pursue great things it means accepting risk. What is an acceptable level of risk when the reward is "more oil than the Middle East ever had?" You might think zero, but powerful people with more say in the matter than either of us will think differently. Zero is not an answer. So you might want to read some of the books about the Apollo program to see how people react when they're asked to assign risk figures to things that are unfigurable. What is the risk of losing an astronaut in a very expensive very public program? What is the risk of setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire? They are actually very similar things, from an engineering perspective. One thing you will find with great consistency is that "walk off and don't do it at all" is just not a typical human thing to do. Which might not be good. But I'm just saying.

[malaise]

30. Hope you see the dangers of one blow out

It's not worth it. Just watch the proceedings for the next few weeks as the disaster reaches land.

[spanone]

10. i have wondered this same thing...the arrogance of these folks is astounding

they have NO contingency plan for this type of incident? unfathomable

[ladjf]

14. The reason for that situation is not that they are smart enough to

plan for such a contingency. It's that such a device would cut into their profit too much.

Now, if that well spills for eight months into the Gulf, it might kill everything in it. BP would be
sued for multi-billions. A reliable shutoff device would then prove to be cheaper. Further, the loss of marine life and habitat would be priceless. While it is true that the marine life recovered well after the Valdez spill in Alaska, the conditions in the Gulf are not as viable as they were in the Alaska spill.

[localroger]

15. It did, and they are standard

Oil companies really don't like stuff like this happening. In addition to the bad PR and their sunk rig that's profit they were hoping to make leaking out in to the Gulf.

The valves are insurance, and they usually do work. But they're made of ordinary matter by engineers who aren't perfect and it's kind of hard to anticipate the whole damn drilling rig blowing up and falling on your stack, and even if you did anticipate that it's kind of hard to arrange a sure-fire mechanism made out of ordinary malleable steel and stuff that would be ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to survive any catastrophe and remain functional.

The engineers will probably learn from this and build better valves as a result, which will fail in turn when something even more unlikely happens in the future. Meanwhile, we try to keep the ducks out of it.

It's been a semi-open secret in some circles for many years that there is far more oil under the Gulf of Mexico than any of the official sources admit. My wife was a geophysicist in the 1980's and she said it was a very common understanding with in the industry. (It is nowadays believed in some circles that these reserves may have something to do with the asteroid strike 65m years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs, which struck the Mexican continental shelf facing the Gulf.) There might be more oil down there than the entire Middle East ever had, my wife firmly believes that it was being held out for our personal use in the US once we'd depleted the rest of the world's easier reserves.

But it is under deep water, and new techniques will be needed to extract it. We are now in the early stages of developing those techniques, just as techniques for less deep offshore drilling were developed in the postwar years. I suspect the masters of the universe are very much counting on this oil as part of an overall game plan, inasmuch as they ever think beyond the usual 5-year business window.

I read Obama's recent posturing on deep water leases as an announcement that (a) he knows about this, and (b) we're not going to wait for the rest of the world to run dry before exposing and exploiting these reserves. This would be a good thing by traditional energy policy standards, but a bad thing by alternative energy, global warming, and environmental standards.

[zeemike]

2. I know, let's set it on fire.

then it will be burn baby burn.

[pleah]

6. They are now considering that option. n/t

[northernlights]

38. they're already burning someof it nt

[Greyskye]

3. Great meme.

I know I'll be using it. :applause:

[liberal N proud]

7. Every time they use Drill baby drill, reply with spill baby spill

[pleah]

8. .....

Crews to set fire to oil leaking in Gulf of Mexico

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100428/ap_on_bi_ge/us_louisiana_oil_rig_explosion;_ylt=AsxMWf2m59ODBdacn56_k3Ks0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTN1NWZwZHE1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNDI4L3VzX2xvdWlzaWFuYV9vaWxfcmlnX2V4cGxvc2lvbgRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA2NyZXdzdG9zZXRmaQ--

[earth mom]

9. Do Obama & Congress even give a shit about this?

Hell no! :grr:

[G_j]

18. no

[Bluebear]

24. "Obama unchanged on drilling plans despite spill"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8234252&mesg_id=8234777

[taterguy]

12. An inevitable consequence of relying on cars for transportation

Sucks to be us

[Hubert Flottz]

19. oil's well that ends well...

That sucks big-time. Shit Happens Baby Shit Happens!

[madmax]

27. Ah yes, and let the burning begin

WTF it just keeps getting worse.

Time to buy Dawn dish detergent they contribute 1.00 to help clean wildlife affected by this shit.

[AsahinaKimi]

28. Do you think it might be a good idea if

Conservatives who demanded we drill, should spend a few hours working on the Clean up? Do you think Sarah Palin would learn anything?

[SidDithers]

31. That's a picture of Ixtoc 1, isn't it?...nt

Sid

[Hell Hath No Fury]

33. The day Obama annouced --

his plan to open up coastal rilling, I faxed him a copy of my voter registration change from "D" to "Green".

This incident just confirms the correctness of my choice.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

34. Best.Subject.Line.Ever

nt

[tranche]

36. I wouldn't feel comfortable cheering it on. I would point out it's a tragedy.

It just seems like so much self congratulations. It's sad and we need to figure out what to do about our energy needs.

[David Zephyr]

40. Kick.

This is excellent rhetoric and the precise time to employ it over and over and over.

Spill Baby Spill.