'Not for public': the oil spill may be getting much worse

[norton ash]

The moral equivalent of war. (Carter, 1977.)

This is the moral equivalent of war. If America and the world doesn't fight this one, and by so doing become aware of who we are as a species-in-the-cosmos, we lose, and we get the Vonnegut epitaph.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

[82_28]

You're right wintler. For the first time like, ever, I don't have any clear call on the future or any kind of potential outcomes -- other than gargantuan disaster of course. Not that I have ever been right about shit either, mind you! But I just can't wrap my mind around this whatsoever. I can't even see what kind of trajectory this will take -- you know like, oh I betcha xxxxx is going to happen next as in just a general topic of conversation.

We have stories of NK torpedoes out there.

We have stories of extreme incompetence and corner cutting by the big three contractors.

We have floating theories of what was the nature of the visit of these BP honchos on the rig.

We have floating theories in the mystical realm that this is Earth striking back.

We have teapartiers.

We have an Obama.

We have a bail out thing and Goldman supposedly profiting from this.

We have BP covering their asses probably in even more and more arcane ways.

Wars and rumors of war all over the place.

It just goes on and on. I cannot tell whatsoever what is connected to what. It's simply too big and deep -- both figuratively and literally. It seems, in a sane world the government would have jumped on this right away. Like everyone else, I am working on a theory using sources that I basically trust, old, new and yet to come.

Anyhoo. . .

[82_28]

New, giant sea oil plume seen in Gulf

NEW ORLEANS — Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama.

The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

The thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters), and is more than 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) wide, said David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school.

Hollander said the team detected the thickest amount of hydrocarbons, likely from the oil spewing from the blown out well, at about 1,300 feet (nearly 400 meters) in the same spot on two separate days this week.

The discovery was important, he said, because it confirmed that the substance found in the water was not naturally occurring and that the plume was at its highest concentration in deeper waters. The researchers will use further testing to determine whether the hydrocarbons they found are the result of dispersants or the emulsification of oil as it traveled away from the well.

The first such plume detected by scientists stretched from the well southwest toward the open sea, but this new undersea oil cloud is headed miles inland into shallower waters where many fish and other species reproduce.

The researchers say they are worried these undersea plumes may be the result of the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil a mile undersea at the site of the leak.

Hollander said the oil they detected has dissolved into the water, and is no longer visible, leading to fears from researchers that the toxicity from the oil and dispersants could pose a big danger to fish larvae and creatures that filter the waters for food.

"There are two elements to it," Hollander said. "The plume reaching waters on the continental shelf could have a toxic effect on fish larvae, and we also may see a long term response as it cascades up the food web."

Dispersants contain surfactants, which are similar to dishwashing soap.

A Louisiana State University researcher who has studied their effects on marine life said that by breaking oil into small particles, surfactants make it easier for fish and other animals to soak up the oil's toxic chemicals. That can impair the animals' immune systems and cause reproductive problems.

"The oil's not at the surface, so it doesn't look so bad, but you have a situation where it's more available to fish," said Kevin Kleinow, a professor in LSU's school of veterinary medicine.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... gD9FVDIK03

[NeonLX]

Looking out the window, I can see that it's one of those rare, brilliantly gorgeous days--perfect blue sky, cheerfully bright sun, comfortably low dewpoint temperature--an absolutely bang-on perfect day to take a hike out into the woods, listen to the birdies sing and get stupefyingly drunk on a bottle or two of Mad Dog.

Probably won't get the chance to do that kinda thing much longer.

{SIGH}

[82_28]

Legally, this announcement by BP seems to show that the writing is on the wall. I just bet the gov and Navy have to take over now. And contrary to most out there, I do sense a deep contrition, confusion, fear, exasperation, existential dread in CEO, Tony Hayward's eyes and mannerisms.

BP calls Gulf oil leak 'environmental catastrophe'

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/28/gulf.o ... tml?hpt=T1

That has to mean something when a company calls it's own disaster and ecological CATASTROPHE. What's the next word up from "catastrophe" that means something even worse than a catastrophe?

[Luposapien]

I haven't felt much like posting lately. Haven't had the time to put my thoughts together in a meaningful way, and really don't know where to start, but I feel like I gotta start saying something or I'm gonna go crazy. Tragic and enraging, and just so utterly predictable and unnecessary. About the only thing I can think of to put the smallest silver lining on this shitstorm is the way it's putting into stark relief how utterly corrupt, shortsighted, and generally fucked up this whole consumerist, corporatist fantasy-land we live in really is. Then again, maybe that's just my wishful thinking coming through. I've been hoping that this is going to be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back, but who knows. Hell, the camel's probably long since dead, smothered under a haystack so huge that the camel might just as well be a needle.

I know this is more a side note to this whole disaster, but the situation with the Greenpeace folks getting arrested for their anti arctic drilling protest mentioned upthread made me fucking sick with rage. You wanna fine them for trespassing and vandalism, fine. But this...

A spokeswoman for the Lafourche Parish sheriff’s Office, Sgt. Lesley Hill Peters, suggested that the protesters could also face terrorism-related charges. The New Orleans Joint Terrorism Task Force “is looking into the matter,” she said.

Are you fucking kidding me? Of course, I know the unfortunate answer to that question. Gotta make sure to slip that in there. Make sure us useless eaters don't start getting too big for our britches. Even outside of the current context of the "leak" in the gulf, this seems to me to be patently outrageous, but considering the fact that not a single BP exec or corrupt government official has yet to be charged with anything whatsoever over this criminal catastrophe, it just boggles the mind. If it wasn't clear before, we've obviously entered into full-tilt Bizzarro-World insanity.

In case you didn't know, this is now what a terrorism looks like:

[ninakat]

.

ANOTHER vast oil plume, in addition to the 22-mile one.

La. scientist locates another vast oil plume in the gulf

By David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 2010; 1:09 PM

A day after scientists reported finding a huge "plume" of oil extending miles east of the leaking BP well, on Friday a Louisiana scientist said his crew had located another vast plume of oily globs, miles in the opposite direction.

James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, said his crew on Wednesday found a plume of oil in a section of the gulf 75 miles west of the source of the leak.

Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball. Unlike the plume found east of the leak -- in which the oil was so dissolved that contaminated water appeared clear -- Cowan said the oil at this site was so thick that it covered the lights on the submarine.

"It almost looks like big wet snowflakes, but they're brown and black and oily," Cowan said. The submarine returned to the surface entirely black, he said.

Cowan said that the submarine traveled about 400 feet down, close to the sea floor, and found oil all the way down. Trying to find the edges of the plume, he said the submarine traveled miles from side to side.

"We really never found either end of it," he said. He said he did not know how wide the plume actually was, or how far it stretched away to the west.

Cowan's finding underscores concerns about oil moving under the surface, perhaps because of dispersant chemicals that have broken it up into smaller globules. BP officials have played down the possibility of undersea oil plumes.

This discovery seems to confirm the fears of some scientists that -- because of the depth of the leak and the heavy use of chemical "dispersants" -- this spill was behaving differently than others. Instead of floating on top of the water, it may be moving beneath it.

That would be troubling because it could mean the oil would slip past coastal defenses such as "containment booms" designed to stop it on the surface. Already, scientists and officials in Louisiana have reported finding thick oil washing ashore despite the presence of floating booms.

It would also be a problem for hidden ecosystems deep under the gulf. There, scientists say, the oil could be absorbed by tiny animals and enter a food chain that builds to large, beloved sport-fish like red snapper. It might also glom on to deep-water coral formations, and cover the small animals that make up each piece of coral.

"You're almost like a deer in the headlights when you're watching this. You don't know what to say," Cowan said. He said the oil's threat to undersea ecosystems "is really starting to scare us."

In the discovery described Thursday, scientists aboard a University of South Florida research vessel found an area of dissolved oil east of the leak that is about six miles wide, and extends from the surface down to a depth of about 3,200 feet, said Professor David Hollander.

Hollander said that he believed the plume might have stretched more than 20 miles from the site of a leak on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank April 22. It has not yet reached Florida.

The plume is clear, with the oil entirely dissolved.

"Here is a situation where, unless you're looking at the chemical fingerprints, [the oil] is absolutely not visible," Hollander said. "It's not some Italian vinaigrette or anything like that. It's absolutely, perfectly clear."

But, Hollander said, even this clear-looking water could contain enough oil to be toxic to small animals at the base of the gulf food chain. He said he was also worried that the oil contains traces of "dispersants," soaplike chemicals sprayed into the oil to break it up.

"You don't want to put soap into a fish tank," Hollander said.

The University of South Florida vessel, the Weatherbird II, used sonar and other devices to sample the water below it. Other scientists have said they have little of the equipment necessary to find oil under the water, leading to debates about whether the underwater plumes were even there.

This week, Mike Utsler, who helps oversee the spill response off the entire Louisiana coast as BP Houma incident commander, said he's focused only on taking oil off the surface. "We don't know there's oil underwater," he said.

William Hogarth, dean of the USF College of Marine Science, said university researchers have sent samples to federal officials for analysis, but it's clear the oil is new because Stanford scientists had sampled the same area a year ago and found no evidence of oil. The Weatherbird II will conduct another tour next week, he said, with different researchers aboard.

"This is not natural seep," he said, adding that scientists will have to study the region for several years in order to properly gauge its impact. "We're talking about probably a three-to-five-year monitoring program to see what happens to food chain."

[82_28]

A comment gleaned, from Washingtonsblog:

From what I have read various places, some common ideas have been:
1) Big bang at the well head – sometimes a nuke
2) Drop a bazillion tons of stuff on it
3) Drill a hole next to the drill pipe and explode the well shut

Sane responses have pointed out that Gulf floor is soft sediments for hundreds or more feet down. If the pipe isn’t tightly sealed by this process, the oil will be leaking into this sediment and start coming up all over the place.

On the nuke idea, with oil already working to kill much of the life in the Gulf, I guess adding radioactivity into the water won’t be that much worse.

If the top kill fails (sounds like it probably will fail) the next idea I have heard is to cut off the broken riser pipe and attempt to clamp onto it and pipe the flow to the surface.

It is sounding more and more like the only workable solution is the new wells being drilled to stop the flow very deep. That will take many weeks.

It is one more very depressing occurrence in our messed up world.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/ ... -sink.html

[Peregrine]

This week, Mike Utsler, who helps oversee the spill response off the entire Louisiana coast as BP Houma incident commander, said he's focused only on taking oil off the surface. "We don't know there's oil underwater," he said.

Well of course you don't know there's oil under water. Not like that toxic shit you're spraying on it is causing it to sink so you can deliberately hide how bad the disaster is, eh? Out of site out of mind, as they say. Asshole.

[82_28]

Obama is about to go on here in a sec I guess. See if he finally has something remotely forceful to say.

I'm thinking we're just gonna have to write this disaster off and adapt from there. I don't think there's any stopping this shit at all. From what I am also gleaning from comments at the oil drum, is that all options to stem this are risky.

[Jeff]

JP Councilman questions sudden appearance of cleanup workers

by Scott Satchfield / Eyewitness News wwltv.com

Jefferson Parish officials say they believe an unexpected show of force cleaning up beaches on the parish’s Gulf Coast was staged for President Obama’s visit.

Those officials said they received many calls to their office from eyewitnesses who said the workers showed up in several buses around 7:30 a.m. The buses were loaded with workers – a show of force the officials said hadn’t been seen to this point in cleanup efforts.

The callers told the Grand Isle mayor’s office that the workers who showed up were given t-shirts and began cleaning oil as the president flew over.

Those same eyewitnesses claimed that before Obama had even gotten back on board Air Force One to leave New Orleans, the workers were gone.

The JP officials said they have been pleading for more workers to help in cleanup and to prevent oil from coming ashore. They said they have seen far too few workers.

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts said he thinks the show of force Friday was staged to impress Obama.

“This in no way compares to what we’ve seen over the past few weeks, particularly last weekend when we were inundated with oil,” he said. “It’s just a total shame that they would stoop to that level to try and lead people to believe that they have that many assets on the ground, because that’s just not true.”

Roberts said people tried to question the workers as to who brought them there but said the workers did not answer, concluding him to believe they were schooled in how to respond.

BP’s Doug Suttles, in a late afternoon press briefing, said the influx of workers is part of the plan and that the very hot conditions cause them to leave after short stints of work.

He denied they were sent for a photo opportunity.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/gulf-oil-spil ... 49564.html

[Pele'sDaughter]

BP’s Doug Suttles, in a late afternoon press briefing, said the influx of workers is part of the plan and that the very hot conditions cause them to leave after short stints of work.

Do liars ever think about what they're saying? Or do they just not know their own ignorance.

[82_28]

My fucking goodness. What a fiasco in every which way.

[82_28]

Out in the Gulf BP are going through the preparations for the next stage in the attempt to top kill the deep water well that has been leaking oil and gas for more than a month. The kill attempt has now been underway for a couple of days, and so this is initially a recap on what I believe has happened to date, and what they are currently planning on doing. I will include in this explanation the two attempts that BP have made so far, and what I expect that they will do next.

To help with the explanation I am going to use some very simple models, which oversimplify the situation, but hopefully help in explaining it. To start with I am going to break the overall system down into a very simple diagram.

Simple approximation of the situation

Basically BP are sending mud through a series of feed lines, which I have simplified for the explanation into one feed pipe that I have called the choke line (grey). It has an internal diameter, at most, of 3 inches. (I say at most because most fittings on these lines have smaller diameters). It feeds into the top of the well, which I have colored brass, and which is the pipe (casing) that feeds from the seabed down to where the oil is emerging from the rock, some 13,000 ft further down.


The casing and choke line sit underneath the Blowout preventer (which is the large assembly at the top of the rig). I have colored this bronze, and simplified the shape, for this explanation, to represent a pipe that has been partially closed by the action of the BOP.

Now, here is the problem. BP want to feed mud through the choke line at such a pressure and flow that it will push the oil and gas flowing up out of the well back down the well. To do that they have to create enough resistance to the flow that the combination of the mud flow and the oil can’t all escape out through the hole in the BOP.

They can do this since, as you increase the flow through a hole (or nozzle) it has to move faster to get through the space in a given time. It takes a driving pressure to get the fluid moving at that speed, and for a given driving pressure the fluid will only move at a certain speed, and so only a fixed volume of fluid can go through the hole.

Thus if BP pump more fluid into the well than this volume, for that given pressure (which is higher than the pressure that the oil was flowing at) then all the flow out of the well will change to mud, and the excess mud that is not flowing out of the hole will be at enough pressure over the oil (and gas) in the well that it pushes it back down the well and back into the rock.

Now that was the first step. The idea was that once the column of mud filled the well, down to where the rock reservoir lies, that the weight of the mud would exert a pressure on the oil in the rock, that was higher than the fluid pressure, and the flow would stop.

The first time they did this, the density of the mud (weight of a cubic foot) was not high enough for the full column to balance the pressure in the rock, and the leakage of mud out of the hole in the top of the BOP was higher than BP had thought, so they were losing too much mud to the Gulf.

So they moved to step two. The first part of this is to try and reduce the size of the hole in the BOP. And for this they used a variety of what everyone is calling a junk shot. It actually isn’t. Given the problem that I am about to outline, they have an ally that folks normally don’t have. As Secretary Chu has pointed out there is the full intellectual strength of the Federal Labs behind this attempt, so where one would normally just chop up tires and similar materials, there is a fascinating mathematical problem in designing plug pieces of the right shape that will fit the constraints, and which will accelerate the blocking of the flow path. So I suspect that some of the shapes that will appear in the flow, will have been specificially designed for the problem.

Not being familiar with their answer I’m going to stick with the spheres and triangles of the more traditional, shall we say old fashioned, way of addressing the problem.

It is one of these problems where the bounding conditions can make life rather difficult. Let me redraw the problem with a different orientation. What we have to do is to block (the term that is being used is bridge) the passage through the BOP. This will stabilize the flow, and will allow the cement plug time to set up. (We’ll talk about cements another time).

So here is the slit: through the BOP – it is going to be a more complex shape, but this allow some explanation of the problems.

Simplified picture of the slot to be sealed

Now to block the slot we have to have some pieces of material (although they are quite large for simplicity I am going to call them all particles) that are big enough to wedge in the slot, but small enough to get through the feed lines to that point.

Now here’s the first catch, we don’t want them to be hard enough that we will damage the passages, nor soft enough that they will bend distort and compress and squeeze through the hole. Rubber turns out to fit the bill, and though there are other materials that could be better, in this initial explanation that’s what I am going to use.

The easy thing to do is to use some spheres, not easy to get, though golf balls are an example. Unfortunately they are a bit too big. The reason is that the feed line through the choke has a maximum inner tube size of probably 2.75 inches. A golf ball is about 1.6 inches, which is more than half this, so that two balls together could block the feed line – a definite no-no. (And don’t say it can’t happen, I’ve seen it with smaller particle ratios than this).

The maximum size that you can get through the line should be about a third of the minimum diameter – say 0.9 inches, stretch a point and make it a maximum ball size of an inch. So we fill the mud with miniature golf balls, pump enough of them down that they end up going through the BOP and wait for the effect. Let me show you, using pearl spheres, how the problem evolves:

Spheres in slot

See all the open space around the spheres, and how much of the slot remains open. We really haven’t made much of a blockage in the slot area of contact, and we have made it hard to push other materials into the slot area itself. However the smallest open area now may be at the maximum diameter of the spheres, which is further back, where the feed pipe is larger. Putting more spheres of the same size down won’t improve the situation much, because they still leave room, around the spheres, for fluid to flow.

There are two ways to go, once the initial building blocks for the bridge have been established. The first might be to use triangular pieces of rubber (as we saw protruding from the crack in the riser. These can fit closer together and fill more of the slot and flow passage.

Ideal case of three rubber strips blocking flow

Here the strips have aligned in the right way and have been driven into the slot, reducing the flow path. But note, as with the spheres that the gaps that are left are now too small for more strips of that size to feed into the slot and do more blocking.

So in either case what has to happen is that there should be a second pass, where smaller particles are used . These couldn’t be used before, because they would push through the slot, but now the slot size is smaller, and so these can start to fill in the gaps. Let me illustrate with the spheres:

Filling the gaps with a smaller second set of spheres.

So now the gaps that remain are even smaller, and so in a third shot, with even smaller gaps the feed particles have to be even smaller.

It can take a number of different slugs of material going through the choke line (and being pushed into the BOP instead of falling down the well, before the slot is sufficiently “bridged” that there isn’t much flow out of the BOP.

So expect that there will be a number of these shots, after each of which mud will be pumped in to see how much progress in filling the holes they have made. Bear again in mind that there is this restriction on how big a piece they can feed in, and just hope that all the gaps in the BOP are small enough that big enough particles can be fed into the lines to block it.

Now, as I said, they are probably using more sophisticated shapes from the National Labs, that will allow the number of shots to be reduced, but the relative sequence still has to be followed, as they build the bridge. Let's see how it goes, and be patient, each shot takes time to set up.

And at the same time, given that they have to balance the weight of the column of mud against the rock pressure, they are using the interval to change the mud weight increasing it each time, to seek that balance. (They don't want it higher than it has to be or it could hydraulically fracture the rock and lose the mud into the crack).

(Oh and if some of you remember the class in school where the teacher filled a jar with big pebbles and asked you if it was full, you said yes, then he/she poured in smaller pebbles, now is it full? Then came sand - now is it full? And then the jar was filled with water - its the same basic idea).

Images, diagrams and the all important comments @ theoildrum

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6522

[2012 Countdown]

The story about the staged cleanup is true. Witnesses/ residents who called into the radio station also busted them and they took photos!
The story is the came on rented JP busses, were allegidly paid $12.00/hr for the day.
Link to televised broadcast/video that shows the psyop/sharade:
http://www.wwltv.com/news/JP-Officials- ... 49564.html


JP Councilman questions sudden appearance of cleanup workers
by Scott Satchfield / Eyewitness News
wwltv.com
Posted on May 28, 2010 at 5:28 PM
Updated today at 5:45 PM

Jefferson Parish officials say they believe an unexpected show of force cleaning up beaches on the parish’s Gulf Coast was staged for President Obama’s visit.
Those officials said they received many calls to their office from eyewitnesses who said the workers showed up in several buses around 7:30 a.m. The buses were loaded with workers – a show of force the officials said hadn’t been seen to this point in cleanup efforts.
The callers told the Grand Isle mayor’s office that the workers who showed up were given t-shirts and began cleaning oil as the president flew over.
Those same eyewitnesses claimed that before Obama had even gotten back on board Air Force One to leave New Orleans, the workers were gone.
The JP officials said they have been pleading for more workers to help in cleanup and to prevent oil from coming ashore. They said they have seen far too few workers.
Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts said he thinks the show of force Friday was staged to impress Obama.
“This in no way compares to what we’ve seen over the past few weeks, particularly last weekend when we were inundated with oil,” he said. “It’s just a total shame that they would stoop to that level to try and lead people to believe that they have that many assets on the ground, because that’s just not true.”
Roberts said people tried to question the workers as to who brought them there but said the workers did not answer, concluding him to believe they were schooled in how to respond.
BP’s Doug Suttles, in a late afternoon press briefing, said the influx of workers is part of the plan and that the very hot conditions cause them to leave after short stints of work.
He denied they were sent for a photo opportunity.