And a big nod to Rachel Maddow for her report on TRMS/March-24
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Robert L. Cavnar, Founder, DailyHurricane.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-cavnar/tests-on-bp-well-blowout_b_840025.htmlYesterday, the Department of Interior released Det Norske Veritas' (DNV) report on the forensic testing that it conducted on the blowout preventer (BOP) that failed to shut in BP's blown out Macondo well almost a year ago.
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DNV was addressing a recommendation to the industry that it study the causes and results of "elastic buckling" of the drill pipe within the Macondo BOP that pushed it to the side of the wellbore, preventing the blind shear ram, or the ram that is supposed to cut the pipe and seal the well, from doing so. During the time of the blowout, the forces within the well were so strong that it lifted the drill pipe, causing it to buckle and push over to the side of the BOP bore, positioning it outside of the shearing faces of the rams.
The long-delayed DNV report is very thorough and highly technical. I've been wading through it for several hours and will write about some of their more detailed conclusions in a later post, but I wanted to make this one key point right now: The US government is currently issuing permits to drill knowing full well that operators are using blowout preventers that are insufficiently designed to shut in blown out deepwater wells. I have been talking about this fatal flaw for months now. The industry and Gulf Coast politicians have been applying unrelenting political pressure on the government to let deepwater drillers go back to work, and it has rationalized its capitulation saying that the industry has demonstrated its ability to contain deepwater blowouts with new equipment designed to do that. That's not really true, of course, since this new equipment is untested in real life conditions. Add this to the now well documented flawed BOP design, and we have another potential catastrophe on our hands.
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Per TRMS: the first permit went to a Noble Energy, a contractor to BP. BP is a 46% partner in a joint venture to "explore".
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/