Do You Really Think BP is Trying to Save the Gulf Environment? Or that the Oil volcano is only 5000

[Joanne98]

For OpEdNews: Rob Kall - Writer

Now we know that BP made a decision to leave out a key step, inserting a "top cap" a column of mud, which would have blocked up the well, temporarily about 1000 feet below the sea floor, before the well-head was cemented. Haliburton, doing the wellhead cementing, proceeded to do as BP's people instructed, knowing they were not doing things the proper way. Shortly after Haliburton did it's cement job on the wellhead, just hours later, a big burst of gas pulsed through the "riser"-- the piping that takes the crude oil, sand, gas, mud mix to the surface-- and, when it hit the low pressure surface, flowed down hill-- it's heavier than air-- until it hit something that ignited it, causing the massive fire and explosion on the rig.

We know that BP worked with Dick Cheney to have the requirement for the half million dollar cost acoustic coupler safety backup removed from regulations. We know that MMI-- the federal regulatory agency responsible for regulating gulf oil well digging and the coal mines where so many miners were recently killed, where dozens of violations had been un-addressed-- failed to properly check into the drilling plans for the Gulf BP-Congress Catastrophe that resulted after Transocean's Deepwater Horizon was deep sixed by the explosion and fire. We know that Ken Salazar, Obama's appointee didn't clean up the rats nest of Bush-appointed Oil industry insiders at MMI.

The first failed effort to stop the out of control oil well failed because of bad planning and design. The engineers, who had a riser pipe that was heated so the mix coming out of the well wouldn't freeze did not also use some kind of heating system that would prevent the cone from freezing. If the cone had worked, they would have been able to pump some of the oil coming out of the well from the cone. Whether, if the idea had been successful, it would have worked to contain ALL the crude oil mix is a totally different question. We don't know that it might have seeped out of the wellhead faster than they could pump it.

We do know that before the explosion, the well was, without the aid of a pump, just from internal subterranean pressures, pumping 8,000 barrels a day. If you take a water hose 100 feet long and pump water 100 feet high, it takes a lot more pumping power than if you pump it 5 feet high. The amount of pressure at the sea floor, 5,000 feet down had to be at least ten or twenty, maybe 100 times greater than the 8,000 barrels a day.

The 5,000 barrels a day CNN and other news organization are using as the flow rate is the lowest of the low estimates. Others say it could be 25,000 barrels or over a million gallons a day. I say that it could be even greater. But the riser pipe from which crude oil is leaking at two points is kinked at the bottom, so that may be cutting the flow a bit. And supposedly, the failed shut-off valve is 80% closed. Still, we don't k now.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Do-You-Really-Think-BP-is-by-Rob-Kall-100512-728.html

[glinda]

1. Incentive is to kill all ocean creatures so to drill wherever and whenever. They don't care.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. What is a "pressure ... maybe 100 times greater than the 8,000 barrels a day" supposed to be?

It's a meaningless phrase. You can't compare a pressure to a flow rate, and putting numbers like "ten or twenty, maybe 100 times greater" in the comparison just shows you are making up figures about a subject you don't know about.

[bemildred]

3. It is already perfectly clear that BP does not care a fig about the Gulf environment.

They do not want to be blamed or held accountable for the damage they do, but that's it.