“Why don’t those 3 million people buy the park and run it how they wish?”
WE DID
Well, the Congress certainly has the power to regulate things like this so if you can pass the regulations, you’ll have your counterweight.
Haven’t been able to find any polls on what Americans think in terms of oil company regulation though.
One man=one vote=communism
I heard an interview with an oil rig engineering survivor and he said, what had happened was that so much gas pressure built up, it was not predictable. An act of god in legal terms. This was one of those 1 in a billion chances it would happen. And it did.
Regulations are punishment for crimes that haven’t been committed. Forcing people by gunpoint to perform actions. That is a fact. The gun may be far away, and hidden, but it is there. Hidden behind fines.
Source, please.
sigh okay They were using a nitrogen foam cement after drilling had completed. The production casing was run in the hole, and cement slurry is pumped down the pipe and up through the annulus (space between production casing and hole). All the fluids in the hole are incompressible, so you can shut off the annulus at the surface and apply pressure to the fluids. You apply pressure to cement, and you squeeze all the water out of it, causing it to harden very quickly.
During the cementation job, its possible that gas from the formation overcame the hydrostatic pressure and entered into the annulus. Gas bubbles are very low in density, and since the annulus is held at constant volume, the gas bubble cannot expand. This means that the pressure inside the gas bubble stays at formation pressure.
At the surface, you see formation pressure minus hydrostatic pressure. But if a gas bubble at formation pressure hits the surface, the surface doesn’t have the help of hydrostatic pressure.
The seals on the casing/seafloor were good to about 8500 PSI. The formation pressure is somewhere around 10 thousand PSI. But you have to remember that there’s a hydrostatic head of water (5000ft) above the seal, so that still helps you.
Just before the blowout, they were circulating seawater out of the ocean riser. Its possible that this created a vacuum above the casing seals, removing the sea water pressure above them. Combined with the formation pressure from a gas bubble, this would break 8500PSI and cause a blowout.
This is all speculation. We don’t know what happened yet. But this is possibly, and probably, what happened.
“was not predictable”
are you saying that because you’ve researched it?;
NEW ORLEANS (CN) - A federal class action claims Transocean defrauded investors by concealing its history of failed blowout preventers, misrepresenting a string of failures as “anomalies,” to inflate its share price.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/05/14/27286.htm
A House energy panel investigation has found that the blowout preventer that failed to stop a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a “useless” test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn’t strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/AR2010051202190.html
Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.
As he describes it, the test involves a chart that shows whether the device will hold a certain amount of pressure for five minutes on each valve. (The test involves increasing the pressure from 250 pounds per square-inch (psi) to 5,000 psi.) “Sometimes, they would put their finger on the chart and slide it ahead – so that it only recorded the pressure for 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes,” he tells HuffPost…
…
Hamel, who is on the board of the Project on Government Oversight and formerly worked as an oil trader, has a long history with BP – the company was forced to pay more than $1 billion in safety-related improvements to the 800-mile Alaska pipeline as a results of investigations prompted by Hamel.
Alyeska Pipeline, he company, which operated the pipeline on behalf of BP, responded by hiring a private security firm, Wackenhut, to conduct surveillance on Hamel in the 1990s.
“They tapped my phone at my home in Alexandria, Virginia, had keys to my house – I discovered that they went into my house twice,” he says. And he claims that they sent a group to follow him up in Alaska, including a woman dressed provocatively who tried to get him into a hotel room with her.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/bp-whistleblower-claimed_n_573839.html
SOUNDS LIKE A CRIMINAL CORPORATE CULTURE, AS PER USUAL. ALSO, CHECK OUT THESE AMAZING PICTURES OF WHAT COULD BECOME THE WORST MAN-MADE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER EVER:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/disaster_unfolds_slowly_in_the.html
Benjamin: “SOUNDS LIKE A CRIMINAL CORPORATE CULTURE, AS PER USUAL.”
Really? Are you telling us that in corporatist economy, politically-connected international corporations are corrupt? Thanks for letting us know that A = A.
Cue Benjamin telling us that BP operates in an anarcho-capitalist economy.
I demand proof that the individual named Benjamin is under constant supervision to ISO standard 546. Benjamin is a potentially dangerous individual (as are all individuals!) and as such I must be reassured that a government agency fully staffed and well equipped is engaged in 24 hour surveillance and will act to intervene at the least indication that Benjamin will fall short of performing in the most socially beneficial way. How can we have sat idly by with unregulated Benjamins on our doorstep for so long !!!
Until I am satisfied in this regard it will not do to have a serious conversation of current events with an unregulated Benjamin that is a danger to himself and others.
eagerly awaiting the paperwork
nir
http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article.asp?id=1790422&spid=32364
Don’t scoff at the source, it’s caller who claimed to be an engineer on the rig when it happened. He does not deny faulty equipment could have been a problem. Because he has no way of knowing one way or another. But he does say that they experienced gas pressure that they did not anticipate.
Daniel Muffinburg wrote the following post at Sun, May 9 2010 1:03 PM:
Source, please.
Quote
Wibee, I wasn’t replying to you. I was replying to Benjamin.
And serial killers can stop killing. Its just not a particularly practical thing to say.
This is the kind of zero sum thinking that is typical among statists. Free association is not a Roman Colloseum, whereby foolish gladiators participate in a last-man-standing free for all. On the market, when a company goes out of business, it does not bleed to death and rot. Its capital and workers are allocated to other industries so that they can be used productively. It is a healthy endeavor.
We’ve been over this. Its a failure of water-socialism. But its typical you would ignore this.
Actually economic fascism is a system whereby governments patronize the means of production, rather than through outright appropriation. See here.
Oh, and speculating on the causes/remedies to this whole thing? Its embarrassing. You all aren’t engineers. You all can’t even properly interpret what engineers say, and most practising engineers with 10-20 years of experience aren’t competent anymore. They’ve gotten used to doing their daily thing and that’s all they know how to do.
They would fail a momentum balance / inflow performance relation in ten seconds.
Sorry for triple post, but how is this thread still continuing?
Benjamin: BP is getting away with polluting the water!
Us: BP should be held fully liable for repairations and cleanup costs. This is what the free market requires.
/thread
benjamin thank you for insight on corporatism not the free market
Cue Benjamin telling us that BP operates in an anarcho-capitalist economy.
Damn straight they do! They’re an international corporation operating a rig in international waters. How much more anarcho can you get? Maybe if they had black flags with dollar signs on them?
(on edit: I suppose if there were no laws requiring they clean anything up, that would be even more “anarcho-capitalist.” You do realize the only reason they’re paying to help clean up is because it’s required by LAW, right?)
If they don’t pay full reperations and cleanup costs, it not anarcho capitalist.
Look, I’m not an anarcho-capitalist or anything, but it’s ridiculous to assert they haven’t proposed private legal systems. I’m not a fan of them but still.
If they don’t pay full reperations and cleanup costs, it not anarcho capitalist.
You’re talking ethics; if you’d like to talk economics, then you have to discuss what incentive would actually encourage a corporation to address its negative externalities, like an oil spill.
Seriously, why would BP pay one dime in damages to a shrimp boat captain if they weren’t required to by law? Anything they pay out which they don’t have to is against the interests of their share-holders and their performance bonuses.
And why would a CEO care at all about giving the OK for shoddy equipment which may fail in 10 years if he plans to retire in 9, unless its possibly criminally prosecutable?
I mean you’re right, if the law didn’t require them to, they would have no reason to pay.