BP Describes Race to Fix Well as Obama Warns of Oil Damage

[flamingdem]

Source: New York Times

But the biggest leak, at the end of the riser pipe, which Mr. Fryar said was the source of most of the spewing oil, cannot be shut off this way. The company intends to address that leak by lowering a containment dome over it and then pumping the oil to the surface. That effort is still at least six days away, Mr. Fryar said. Another containment dome, for the third leak, which is on the riser near the wellhead, would follow two to four days after the first.

The root of the problem appears to be a towering stack of heavy equipment 5,000 feet below the surface of the gulf known as a blowout preventer. It is a steel-framed stack of valves, rams, housings, tanks and hydraulic tubing that is designed to seal the well quickly in the event of a burst of pressure. It did not work when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

Mr. Fryar and Charlie Holt, BP’s drilling operations manager for the gulf, described an audacious plan to confront the blowout preventer problem. In this approach, they would seal the well by cutting the riser at the wellhead, sliding a huge piece of equipment called the riser package out of the way and bolting a second blowout preventer atop the first one.

The risk in attempting such a maneuver — which would be performed, as all the undersea work has been, by robotic submersibles tethered to support ships 5,000 feet above — is that the pressure of the oil rising from the well could be overwhelming, and the well could gush oil at a far higher rate. Mr. Fryar said a pressure gauge would be installed soon to determine if it was safe to attempt the operation.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/us/03spill.html

---

The mind boggles. Someone needs to get all of us on the streets about this to prevent continuing ecological disasters and work on all of it as a nation and as a human race! There is no end is sight on this and the arrogant sobs who took this risk may not be capable of handling this ... so what do we do wait until they screw up again??

[tekisui]

1. People are unreccing information on the oil leak?

This is a wake up call for all of us.

[flamingdem]

2. And all CNN talks about is the dumb bomber, this is a huge catasrophe yeesh nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

28. I suspect we have paid infoltrators, whcih is why I rec what i can,

[Botany]

3. Who are they kidding?

"In this approach, they would seal the well by cutting the riser at the wellhead, sliding a huge piece of equipment called the riser package out of the way and bolting a second blowout preventer atop the first one."

Under 1 mile of water w/ the oil under huge pressure?

Shove Dick Cheney into that pipe and see if that fixes it, o.k.?

[The Stranger]

18. I agree. That is a fucking asinine proposition.

[flamingdem]

4. This comment from the timesonline reflects what I'm fearing

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114015.ece

comment:
The reality is that this spill may well not be contained not for 3 mos. but 6 mos. As things are now, oil will reach all around the Atlantic, including into European waters. I can see good portions of the Atlantic being slick with oil.

If the piping blows, that is it. We are done. People are not seemingly getting it, are they? If that hole blows, we do not have the means to stop it. The US Navy's subs are designed for nautical warfare, not for plugging holes. At the moment, the oil is coming out at 1 ton/sq inch. Even if you could get a device close enough to it to cap it, you'd need to contend with the force of pressure as well as the heat. The current effort on BP's part to create some caps is with the piping still somewhat intact in mind. They will seek to cap the piping.

If the hole blows and detaches what's left of the piping, there is no known means to cap the hole. At 1 mile in depth, where you cannot see anything and have nothing that can handle the depth like it can even at .5 mi, what are they going to do?

All our technology over the past 200 years has had one focus, with little exception, in mind: developing the surface world. We are way behind on developing or working in the sub-sea-surface world. The only machines we have to manage the sub-sea-surface have been made to do two things mostly: fight and explore. Some have been designed to plunge holes into the sea-bottom, but not to un-plunge them. We cannot come up with the right technology in time to save our bacon from this disaster.

If those pipes blow, and if it's true they blew the first time due to a mix of natural gas and oil (and heat), then it's likely they will, and thus it is entirely possible the whole Atlantic and part of the Pacific will end up covered THICK in oil. There will be no way to clean it up and the oceans will die, along with our planet.

Are you people paying attention?

[Botany]

6. I helped a friend with a water well rig years ago ......

..... getting a tool stuck or broken off @ 40 feet was an all day adventure to get it back out .....
now under 1 mile of ocean and the oil coming up from thousands of feet under the sea floor?



Brooke Alexander API spokes' whore

[flamingdem]

8. Maybe Maggie Thatcher could lead the way tally ho! nt

[RKP5637]

9. This is the most realistic analysis I've seen to date. Some of the media has reacted with

the attitude of "Oh yeah, it will just be fixed." One of the great travesties IMO of the world today is we act as if there is a solution for everything. Someone will fix it... and IMO that is a foolhardy approach. I'm certainly not an expert here, but as I understand it the cost of a $500K acoustical shutoff valve was waived because of the cost, and while other countries mandate acoustical shutoff valves, the US waved the requirement... a foolhardy approach IMO.

[flamingdem]

10. The story may be the impossibility of doing anything to stop this

and the reality that there is much more at stake than anyone wants to talk about right now.

[caseymoz]

13. What can I do when I pay attention?

Say the world has another year maybe two. What the hell can I do now? I have to say, the last two weeks have read like the first hundred pages of a cautionary doomsday novel, complete with an arrogant, heartless, greedy corporation bringing us to the brink of destruction. Who would have thought it could be something as old-world as oil, and not say, genetic engineering?

I could actually see the minds of science and technology around the world being marshaled to solve this problem: coming up with wild plans, and failing. I can see them, in desperation, even trying to nuke it, which will likely make the whole thing worse.

I can pay attention harder, but even if I do, what can I do about it anyway? I can vote against the conservatives in the next election. I had been doing that already for twenty years, maybe they'll finally go down wholesale this time. Unfortunately, people in this country hardened their hearts and heads starting in 1980. De-regulated capitalism needed a crisis in faith to falter. I hope it hasn't happened at the cost of the human species.

I guess I can wonder if Hollywood is going to complete their blockbuster movie about this before the world ends.

[icee]

21. What you have to do is the same thing that all of us will have to

do. This WILL NOT be a passive project, writing and/or calling Senator Nitwit's office, or posting prose on blogs. It will take real action, some so overt it will go beyond the comfort zone of liberals. If this is not done, the enemy will take it all.

[caseymoz]

22. You mean if this poisons the oceans?

I'm not going to be brought in on any engineering project that stops this. I could do whatever I can to see that the government isn't in denial about this. I am.

[icee]

24. That would be good. That would be an overt action on your

part. You could monitor the government's action in not sweeping the oil under the rug. Real investigations have to be done here. Transocean has to be taken out, and BP powered down. As far as Haliburtion, I can't write here what needs to be done to these dirtbags. I wish we knew flow-rates better. Good luck.

[Skip Intro]

5. The mind does boggle, and words fail, witnessing a catastrophe, growing by the hour.

I can seem to do no more than read successive reports in silent dismay.

[dixiegrrrrl]

27. This may provide more info. Lots of people find it useful.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6424

[flamingdem]

7. Oil spill crisis a setback for BP and its chief executive (putting it mildly)

* You've got to wonder if the tenor would be different if the globs were heading towards Cornwall.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/02/AR2010050203651.html?hpid=topnews

Oil spill crisis a setback for BP and its chief executive

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 3, 2010; A06

On the day he got news that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, BP chief executive Tony Hayward received a series of crisis updates in his London offices. The rig belonged to Transocean, but BP had leased it to drill an exploration well and BP bore legal responsibility for any consequences.

The grim updates were interspersed with long silences. One person there said that on several occasions, Hayward asked, "What did we do to deserve this?"

Twelve days later, Hayward is grappling with the widening oil slick from the damaged well -- an environmental crisis for the Gulf Coast states, a political crisis for U.S. offshore drilling and a corporate crisis for one of the world's biggest oil giants.

"This accident not only sets back BP, but could hurt it for years," said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer.

On Sunday, the third anniversary of his becoming BP's chief executive, Hayward began his day in Houma, La., flew to a convention center in Mobile, Ala., where a new oil spill command center has been set up, and then went on to Venice, La. There, he planned to meet with local officials and others worried about the slick menacing the shore.

On Monday, he will be in Washington, running the gantlet of federal officials and members of Congress, many of whom are eager to tar BP with blame for the incident. Before the accident, he had expected to be in the United States giving a speech and promoting a climate change bill. Now, he will face questions about whether BP underestimated the risk and consequences of a well failure.

"Whatever else this is, it's a massive blow to confidence," said a senior BP insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk publicly.

The price tag for the disaster increases day by day. The company says it is spending $6 million a day on response efforts. Drilling a relief well will probably cost more than $100 million. The Defense Department says it will hand BP the bill for paying Louisiana National Guard troops, and the Environmental Protection Agency says it will charge BP for air monitoring. Covering damages to coastal fishermen, tourism businesses and residents could cost billions more. BP will pay 65 percent of these costs; its lease partners Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui will pay 25 and 10 percent.

BP's share will come straight from its own pocket. "We are self-insured as a matter of policy -- you cannot insure these kinds of risks," a BP spokesman said.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King said Sunday night that he told BP representatives to stop circulating agreements offering coastal Alabamians $5,000 if they give up the right to sue the company. A BP official said the offer was part of a "standard waiver" to fishermen that was "inappropriate" and was "swiftly discontinued."

The oil spill crisis is just the sort of thing Hayward had hoped to leave behind when he became BP chief executive.

His predecessor, Lord John Browne, had been a brilliant deal maker and a friend of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's, but BP was often accused of neglecting safety precautions and adding to risks through deep cost cutting. Under Browne, who resigned after revelations about his personal life in Britain's tabloid news media, a fatal explosion took place at BP's Texas City refinery, leaks sprang onto the tundra from a company pipeline in northern Alaska, and a BP production platform in the Gulf of Mexico suffered structural problems that delayed its start date.

In 1990 and 1991, Hayward had been one of Browne's "turtles," company slang for the executive assistants Browne plucked from the ranks of BP's most promising young executives.

But when Hayward became chief executive, he wanted to make changes. A geologist who made his career on the oil exploration and production side of the business, Hayward didn't seem to share Browne's passion for greening the company image. Browne spruced up BP's logo and said that it stood for "beyond petroleum" not "British Petroleum." Hayward, who recently closed a BP Solar manufacturing facility in Frederick, said alternative energy projects had to make economic sense.

"The bit about 'beyond petroleum' being dead and buried is nonsense," he said. But, he added, "it's a business as opposed to an advertising slogan."

He wanted to change the corporate culture, in part by cleaning house. Hayward inherited 650 senior executives, but he pared that to 490, half of whom are new to their jobs and one third of whom are new to the company.

He showed an ability to strike deals, too. He resolved a dispute with BP's partners in its highly profitable joint venture in Russia. He won a contract to boost output from a supergiant oil field in Iraq, where BP had worked decades before. And recently, BP paid $7 billion to Devon Energy to buy deepwater oil and gas assets and leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Brazil.

In an interview in Washington five weeks ago, Hayward called it "a natural fit with our deepwater portfolio." As oil and natural gas fields closer to shore have aged, the oil industry has been pushing out to deeper waters worldwide, and the Gulf of Mexico is typical.

Last year, a BP well was drilled in 4,130 feet of water to a record depth of more than 35,000 feet by the same Deepwater Horizon rig that caught fire April 20 and sank. At a London meeting five days before the accident, Hayward had noted that the giant reservoir it discovered "lies further below the Earth's surface than the summit of Mount Everest does above it."

Hayward's initiatives were starting to yield results. Last week, BP's earnings far surpassed analysts' expectations.

But the good news was blotted out by the oil slick. Over five days, the price of BP shares tumbled about 13 percent, erasing about $20 billion in market value.

In a video filmed in the company's crisis center in Houston and broadcast to employees, Hayward praised the company's strong earnings. "But," he said, "of course they're irrelevant in the context of what has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico over the past week." He said he had felt a range of emotions: "shock and indeed anger when I first heard about it, how could it happen. Tremendous sorrow when it became evident that the 11 people missing had probably died in the initial explosion."

Some of that anger has been directed at Transocean, owner and operator of the rig and the blowout preventer system, which Hayward has called "the fail-safe mechanism" that failed.

But Hayward hasn't tried to deny BP's obligations. In his video, he vowed "steely determination" to control the well, clean up and "do everything we can to understand how this has occured and to ensure that it never occurs again."

[dixiegrrrrl]

29. Notice Hayward does not mention this:

"THIS MARCH OSHA proposed more than $3 million in fines to the BP-Husky refinery near Toledo, Ohio.
OSHA found 42 alleged willful violations, including 39 on a per-instance basis, and 20 alleged serious violations for exposing workers to a variety of hazards including failure to provide adequate pressure relief for process units. Proposed penalties total $3,042,000.

"OSHA has found that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its refineries," said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis. "There is no excuse for taking chances with people's lives. BP must fix the hazards now."
**************************************************************************

March 2010....currently.....STILL fighting OSHA.

[flamingdem]

11. I'm looking for information about how large this deposit is

because no doubt BP is lying about that..

[dipsydoodle]

16. If there's no doubt

then presumably you've got a link to who did the original surveys.

[dixiegrrrrl]

30. Try this..

"The deposit is very large. It covers an area off shore something like 25,000 square miles. Natural Gas and Oil is leaking out of the deposit as far inland as Central Alabama and way over into Florida and even over to Louisiana almost as far as Texas. This is a really massive deposit. Punching holes in the deposit is a really scary event as we are now seeing. "

Halfway down the page, and a hell of a good read all the way thru.

http://pesn.com/2010/05/02/9501643_Mother_of_all_gushers_could_kill_Earths_oceans/

[flamingdem]

12. Janet Napolitano Refutes BP's "Guesstimates" of Leak Size - KOS

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/2/862413/-Janet-Napolitano-Refutes-BPs-Guesstimates-of-Leak-Size

Janet Napolitano Refutes BP's "Guesstimates" of Leak Size - Update
by innereye
Digg this! Share this on Twitter - Janet Napolitano Refutes BP's "Guesstimates" of Leak Size - UpdateTweet this submit to reddit Share This
Sun May 02, 2010 at 10:58:23 AM PDT

The official BP estimate of the leak rate at the bottom of the gulf is as follows:

John Curry, a spokesman for BP working from their Gulf coast central command operations, said the 5,000 barrel a day was a “guestimate.” “There’s a range of uncertainty, and it’s very difficult to accurately gauge how much there is,” he said.

Their original "guestimate" was 1,000 barrels of oil a day, but they have wells that are currently producing over 30,000 barrels of oil a day under controlled conditions. They changed their estimates because of SkyTruth's evaluations of satellite images. SkyTruth says the leak rate is 26,000 barrels per day "at the minimum".

Now Janet Napolitano says it may actually be "tens of thousands of barrels per day".

see below:

* innereye's diary :: ::
*

26,000 barrels per day

equals

1.196 million gallons of oil per day

equals

one Exxon Valdez spill every 9.11 days.

-----------------------------------------------------------

SkyTruth.Org is the organization that, based on their original evaluation of the satellite images, caused the u.s. government and BP to up their estimate to 5,000 barrels per day leakage.

This is their estimation:

http://articles.latimes.com/...

May 01, 2010|By Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times
Tiny group has big impact on spill estimates

SkyTruth first analyzed satellite and radar data on the spill shortly after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank after a fire April 22. It challenged initial estimates that 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing daily from the wellhead nearly a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. Federal officials and BP quickly revised the estimated daily rate to 5,000 barrels.

John Amos, the group's president, also revised the estimate of the rate of oil leaking to 25,000 barrels a day, saying it was a "rock bottom" figure. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

-------------------------

So, if it was an Exxon Valdez spill every 9.11 days do you think that BP and the NOAA would tell us? Maybe. . . but Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano sure would.

-------------------------

from 3 hours ago:

http://online.wsj.com/...

"The worst-case scenario is we could have 100,000 barrels or more of oil flowing out," Salazar said on CNN's "State of the Union."

BP and the U.S. government have over the past week stuck to their raised estimate of 5,000 barrels a day spilling out of the deepwater well.

But Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said on ABC News that the current spill rate could currently be much higher.

"Right now that could be in the tens of thousands gallons per day, of barrels per day," she said.

This is what she is saying:
title=

from the same article:

Friday, industry experts said based on satellite images and standard measuring indexes, they estimate the spill rate at 20,000 barrels a day to 25,000 barrels a day. If those rates are accurate, the spill could already rival the 11-million gallon Valdez slick that economically and environmentally devastated part of Alaska.

Allen said three leaks have now been found at the well.

Asked if the 25,000 barrel a day figures were accurate, head of BP America, Lamar McKay, said on ABC that their own estimates were "very, very uncertain."

Salazar said that he believed BP could stop the leak, but he fears that it may take 90 days to do that. BP is placing a new rig over the leak and will soon attempt to use drilling tools to close the leak.

If the 25,000 barrel-a-day estimate is accurate and the leak lasts for 90 days, that's 2.25 million barrels, or 94.5 million gallons.

94.5 million gallons is over 9 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

title=

The shaded area from the Valdez spill would fit across the entire gulf of mexico with some room to spare. This is what has already been poured into the Gulf of Mexico.

title=

If 9 times the Valdez spill amount is placed into the gulf, then we will see an outflow of oil on an unprecedented scale moving up the coast of the Atlantic Seaboard.

gulf stream oil spill

This image shows warm water as it actually flows from the gulf of mexico up the atlantic seaboard.

If this "Current Worst Case Scenario" is correct, we will see coastline contamination up the entire Atlantic Seaboard up to Virginia Beach.

But this isn't the "Potential Worst Case Scenario". The actual worst case scenario is this:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/...

"Two additional release points were found today. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

In scientific circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.3 million gallons a day.

But now we know that it is probably 26,000 barrels of oil per day. Typical oil well gushers are from 40,000 to 60,000 barrels per day. This well has a potential leak capacity of greater than 100,000 barrels per day.

or 4.6 million gallons of oil per day.

or an exxon valdez spill every 2.75 days.

If it takes 90 days to stop the spill we are looking at a potential spill size greater than the worst oil spill in world history, when Saddam Hussein destroyed the loading facilities in Kuwait during Gulf War I.

apologies for Faux news, but this clip is currently the best report to date on the subject, though they are still quoting the 5,000 barrels per day mis-estimation.

-------------------
update:
first time on the rec list - Correction: This is not the deepest oil well ever drilled, that well is the tiber well, operated by the same Deepwater Horizon company. This well was started at over 5,000 foot sea depth and was to be drilled to a depth of 18,000 feet.

The well was planned to be drilled to 18,000ft, and was to be plugged and abandoned for later completion as a subsea producer. for a total well depth of 23,000 feet.

This well is located at Mississippi Canyon block 252, offshore
-------------------

comment: If you want blame, blame the bush administration. Those oil-men allowed BP to self-regulate while performing an experimental drilling operation that had the potential to produce a catastrophic failure and environmental disaster that could only be compared with a nuclear power plant disaster.

This is a function of the fraud imposed by deregulation of industries in America. in Brazil or Norway, adequate and necessary safety devices would be in place to have prevented this . . .abomination.

Tags: oilpocalypse, oil spill gulf, worst case scenario, skytruth, noaa, disaster of epic proportions, Janet Napolitano, eKos, Deepwater Horizon, recommended (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

Permalink | 411 comments

[JCMach1]

14. I saw a report: they had TO BUILD THE CONTAINMENT DOMES

Why didn't BP and other companies have some of these in-place to use for contingency purposes?

[zenprole]

15. Not with a whimper, but a bang.

And I thought the mafia sinking highly toxic and/or nuclear waste in the Mediterranean and off Somalia was the most frightening ecological crime ever to happen.

This deregulated corporate disaster could become a singular calamity - all the ingredients are there. I'd just like to have all the facts, which are most definitely being hidden, before taking stock of the situation: scale graphics of the site, damage analysis and spill rate, and the array of solutions on offer.

When such efforts at problem-solving become a bad joke, then everyone can start drafting h. sapiens' obituary.

[ladjf]

17. BP has done enough damage. They should be taken out of the

process. Whatever experts there are on the subject of deep water wells should be brought in to try to work out a safe solution to this blowout. The pipes right at the well head MUST be preserved.

[northernlights]

20. exactly. regardless of the fact that they have created this calamity

it is OUR ocean, OUR coastline, OUR earth that stand to be destroyed.

They should be shoved aside and everybody else focussed on fixing this. They can be shut down, cleaned out and jail for the criminals involved later. Right now humanity and life itself that is potentially at stake.

[ladjf]

25. I noticed in the news this morning that the lead BP exec is claiming

the accident was not BP's fault but rather the company that was running the rig. He also claimed that the valve was the best available. That was not true.

[flyarm]

19. No system to shut this oil off but our government wants to go to Mars!

Can't shut down a well 5,000 ft under the gulf..but we are told our government wants to go to fucking Mars!

Weeks and Weeks ..months and months..is what we are hearing in Fla..with Oil being spilled every second..too big to fail..don'tcha know..these rigs are safe..even Obama said that..while selling us out onn drilling thatt he promised he wouldn't do..yes he promised that in his campaigning here in Fla..don't say he didn't ..I have provided the link to the video..

contracts given to fucking crooks ..and no one ever held accountable...no one..if you are the big cheese fucking Americans..you are assured of never being held accountable!!

wow I am ashamed to be American more and more each day!

This is a catastrophy of epic proportions!

and the blame is spread out in both parties ..that all get their damn pockets Greased! At our planets and our expense!

and do not tell me it is not both parties ..I will call ..bullshit..look at the dates in this first article!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Obama Dropped Offshore Tax on Big Oil:
Mon May-03-10 12:32 AM
Obama’s Drill To Nowhere

"....Here’s why Obama’s political move to open up our coasts to more drilling is wrong.
1. Opening up offshore areas to drilling hurts efforts at a climate deal – not helps. On March 23, ten coastal state Senators wrote a letter to the ad hoc Senate climate crew of Kerry-Lieberman-Graham warning that they “cannot support legislation that will . . . put our coasts at greater peril”. They note the environmental concerns that offshore drilling presents, but also highlight the unfair proposal of allowing coastal states to keep a sizable portion of the royalties rather than share that revenue with all states and taxpayers. The letter was signed by Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson (Fla.), Robert Menendez (NJ), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Barbara Mikulski (Md), Ben Cardin (Md), Frank Lautenberg (NJ), Ted Kaufman (Del), Ron Wyden (Ore), Jeff Merkley (Ore) and Jack Reed (RI).

snip

......Opening up “access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030“. The Energy Information Administration estimates that if the ban on drilling remains in place, that “the average U.S. price of motor gasoline price is 3 cents per gallon higher” than if we open these areas to drilling. That’s because the US isn’t Saudi Arabia: we sit on only 1.6% of the world’s oil reserves, while the Saudis have 20%. Dumping our little pond of oil into the giant sea of global reserves can’t make a significant dent on our imports or impact prices


......taxpayers on existing drilling leases is unfair. Now, we’ve written extensively about this over the years. Because of a bureaucratic oversight by the Department of Interior during the implementation of the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act of 1995, oil companies that secured leases in 1998 and 1999 were exempted from royalties, regardless of the prevailing market price of oil. Recent lawsuits have exposed more leases going back to 1996 to this same loophole. This stands in stark contrast to other, similar leases, which require the payment of royalties if the price of oil exceeds a certain threshold. The day the bill was signed in November 1995, West Texas Intermediate oil was trading at $18.28/barrel. With oil now trading at roughly $80/barrel, these companies have been and will be extracting very valuable energy from public land without paying any royalties to American taxpayers. The GAO estimates the loss to the US Treasury of more than $50 billion over the life of these royalty-free leases – a huge subsidy for Big Oil. And investigations have found serious problems in the management of the entire royalty program.

As recently as August 25, 2009 - when President Obama submitted his Mid-Session Review budget to Congress – he recognized this fleecing of the taxpayer by Big Oil and proposed a “Levy tax on certain offshore oil and gas production” as a back-door way to capture some revenue from these no-royalty leases, raising $6 billion over a decade.........But in Obama’s budget submitted in February, the Administration has now dropped this offshore tax on Big Oil (you can see the itemization of repealed oil & gas tax breaks on page 30 of 88 at the above link, with the new levy tax now gone)......Obama puts a lot at risk with this offshore drilling plan and gets little reward. What a disappointment.

http://publiccitizenenergy.org/2010/04/01/obamas-drill-... /




xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Spill, Baby, Spill
By Michael Isikoff, Ian Yarett and Matthew Philips | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010

BP has been trying hard to burnish its public image in recent years after being hit with a pair of environmental disasters, including a fatal refinery explosion in Texas and a pipeline leak in Alaska. One major step was to announce, in 2007, that it had hired a high-powered advisory board that included former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and Leon Panetta, who were each paid $120,000 a year. (Panetta left when he became President Obama's CIA director.) Two years ago the oil giant's chief executive, Robert Malone, flew board members out to the Gulf of Mexico on a helicopter to demonstrate the safeguards surrounding BP's advanced drilling technology. "We got a sense they were really committed to ensuring they got it right," Whitman told NEWSWEEK.

Now BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, finds itself blamed for what could prove to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. And only weeks after Obama announced an ambitious plan to open up more U.S. offshore waters to oil drilling, shunting aside environmental concerns from his own Democratic Party, his administration is facing a comeuppance from hell. "There was a lot of wishful thinking, I guess," says Villy Kourafalou, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "The new technologies were said to be so wonderful that we'd never have an oil spill again." Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who had sought to block the expanded drilling, says the oil and gas industry was pushing this idea hard. "They said, 'We'll never have a repeat of Santa Barbara,'?" referring to the 1969 rig explosion off the California coast. Both the Bush and Obama administrations "were buying the line that the technology was fine," Pallone adds.

BP pressed hard to make that point in D.C. Its PR efforts included payments of $16 million last year to a battery of Washington lobbyists, among them the firm of Tony Podesta, the brother of former Obama transition chief John Podesta. Last fall, after the U.S. Interior Department proposed tighter federal regulation of oil companies' environmental programs, David Rainey, BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration, told Congress that the proposal was unnecessary. "I think we need to remember," he said, that offshore drilling "has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment."

Read the full article at:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/237298


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

BP Is Criticized Over Oil Spill, but U.S. Missed Chances to Act

snip

......The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP, which was leasing the drilling rig that exploded in flames on April 20 and sank two days later. Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead.

The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was “a spill of national significance,” and then set up a second command center in Mobile. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.

The delay meant that the Homeland Security Department waited until late this week to formally request a more robust response from the Department of Defense, with Ms. Napolitano acknowledging even as late as Thursday afternoon that she did not know if the Defense Department even had equipment that might be helpful.

By Friday afternoon, she said, the Defense Department had agreed to send two large military transport planes to spray chemicals that can disperse the oil while it is still in the Gulf.

Officials initially seemed to underestimate the threat of a leak, just as BP did last year when it told the government such an event was highly unlikely. Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry, the chief Coast Guard official in charge of the response, said on April 22, after the rig sank, that the oil that was on the surface appeared to be merely residual oil from the fire, though she said it was unclear what was going on underwater. The day after, officials said that it appeared the well’s blowout preventer had kicked in and that there did not seem to be any oil leaking from the well, though they cautioned it was not a guarantee.
BP officials, even after the oil leak was confirmed by using remote-controlled robots, expressed confidence that the leak was slow enough, and steps taken out in the Gulf of Mexico aggressive enough, that the oil would never reach the coast.
(The NOAA document on a potentially far larger leak, first obtained by The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala., was described by an agency spokesman as simply a possibility raised by a staff member, not an official prediction.)

Some oil industry critics questioned whether the federal government is too reliant on oil companies to manage the response to major spills, leaving the government unable to evaluate if the response is robust enough.

“Here you have the company that is responsible for the accident leading the response to the crisis,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “There is a problem here, and the consequence is clear.”

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01gulf.html?ref=sc...



"But in Obama’s budget submitted in February, the Administration has now dropped this offshore tax on Big Oil (you can see the itemization of repealed oil & gas tax breaks on page 30 of 88 at the above link, with the new levy tax now gone)......Obama puts a lot at risk with this offshore drilling plan and gets little reward."

But perhaps hmmm campaign money?????????




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Obama: “Oil Rigs Today Generally Don’t Cause Spills”

Obama Repeats Katrina Oil Spill Myth To Defend Offshore Drilling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm8gLmuTvJ4&feature=play ...


By: David Dayen Thursday April 29, 2010 1:42 pm

snip:

What a difference 18 days makes. Here was Barack Obama, on April 2, before the BP oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming that oil rigs are safe to justify his position on offshore drilling:

I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

Not only does this quote look ridiculous in hindsight, it wasn’t true at the time, as Brad Johnson points out:

Obama’s claim that oil rigs did not cause any spills during Hurricane Katrina is simply false, as the Wonk Room reported in June, 2008, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other conservatives made the same false claim:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.”

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/04/29/obama-oil-rigs-t ... ’t-cause-spills/


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YouTube - Barack Obama on Offshore Oil Drilling ( to Florida voters while asking for their votes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8fkbEuCQss&NR=1

[inna]

26. Wow, this post totally deserves and needs its own thread!

[FarCenter]

23. How about a really big C-clamp to pinch the pipe closed?