Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico could force oil recovery ships to seek a safe harbor for as much as two weeks starting early July. since the upward estimate for oil flow from the BP site is 60,000 barrels a day, wouldn’t that mean an unimpeded volcano of petroleum spewing for the subsequent two weeks? And, worst of all, BP might be forced to cease drilling the relief wells during that period, too. The relief wells are the most likely way out of the catastrophe, though hitting the right spot at that depth is no easy task. I have a sinking feeling that the August date estimated for finishing work on the relief well may get pushed back during hurricane season.
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Yes, by all means, let the oil industry, which is making massive money off both sides here, define the ‘best’ way of dealing with this situation. I’m sure they’ll be happy to do this for months more, if not years (just as the military industrial complex is happy to define the options in our various wars of conquest and our hyper-aggressive foreign policies, and the Insurance wing of the FIRE sector is happy to continue to health solutions, just as Wall Street Megabanks are quite happy to continue to define financial options for america and the world…).
Of course that makes sense in the world of an alternapundit shilling for the corporatist Democrats, where one painstakingly helps to build a beautiful world of no expectations from the obnoxious People, a world in which we all know that ‘serious people’ line up to receive the blessing of the lastest rationalizations handed out with talking points, now that ‘the adults are in charge’, and anyone real can be safely marginalized as a ‘wingnut tea partier’ or a ‘ nasty lefty’…
Just a thought, that I hope is more in-tune with reality:
Maybe BP really just does not care about pesky pelicans and tree-hugging obstructionists. Had the situation not be pressed, would they not have just saved zillions of $ by starting the relief wells and not going through all these futile gyrations of top-hatting etc??
Lets review somethings obvious and already forgotten. Through just a 5 sec snippet of film, using standard engineering tools, profs at Purdue and Berkeley quickly KNEW, with huge confidence, that the leak was 30-60 whatever gallons a day. No argument or question, except for the proportion of oil to gas. With more footage and access to samples BP must CERTAINLY have known the same thing, along with proportion of methane.
Entonces, this whole exercise was one of keeping the Little People satisfied that “something” was being done, when nothing effective COULD be done, and they have simply been pursing their economic self-interest by manipulatin the PR. Sure, they are now recovering a fraction of the leak, but I suspect it is at lost given the total expense these efforts have entailed, and because of the PR problem they had no other choice. Relocation of these rigs from the North Sea is incredibly expensive, but unitl it was forced on them, they could at least avoid that daily expense for a few weeks since they had “no idea the spill was larger than whatever”. Keep in mind, the astronomic cost of operating this offshore equipement (the reason drilling equipment everywhere is leased). Saving money will, I am confident, be shown the cause of the spill, and their subsequent actions.
As a business entity whose alligiences and values are ONLY to the bottom line, BP cannot care less, and will do everything it can (legally and in a PR sense) to not spend money on anything other than the relief wells, which may have been the only solution as they always knew.