It's amusing to watch the Internet experts explain how they can solve the BP Deepwater Horizon crisis. It's even more amusing to watch the critics who have absolutely no understanding of what's involved. "Golf balls? They plan to plug the well with golf balls? Stupid people!"Lots of smart people working for BP are trying their best, and they are on the line 24/7 with thousands of engineers around the globe, including their competitors. Heads will roll, as they should. Meanwhile, ignore the paranoid gibberish and the rants about how the Feds could do better. They can't. The Feds can't spot a housing bubble even though it's staring at them in the face, they hire banking regulators who spend their working days watching pron, and give us incompetent bureaucracies like the TSA.
Let the experts at BP and other companies do their work. Keep the Feds doing what they do best: grandstanding off on the side.
10 comments:
I agree Lou. They were talking about human hair at one time. WTF? How in the heck can that work and who's head were they going to get it from? I still can't understand the tires either. Imbeciles.
If the idiots claim they know how or have ideas to stop the well from gushing, where the heck are they? They need to come forward with their ideas or else STFU!
I am the world's foremost expert on conspiracy theories, and this is another plot to drive up the price of gasoline!!
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:casey:
Well, on the plus side, BP really hit into a corker of a oil find. So, they have that going for them, which is nice.
I'm not an expert, but how come the EPA doen't ease up on small diesels for cars, like used in Europe? I'm told it would cut in half oil imports, over time.
You have one group of real experts forcing car weight up with safety stuff. Another government/tax paid experts reduces fuel mileage with air pollution crap, and another arm of the Fedgov pushes small cars for mileage for oil conservation. The the fed gov does cash for clunkers, destroying usable cars, to make factories in Japan burn more fuel, to destroy used car parts for modest earning working class and poor and then the Fedgov proposes more taxes or debts for mass/gov/union/hack mass transit.
Each and every organ of Fedgov staffed by experts. All in by 9, out by 3, with breaks,at a snails pace until retirement at age 50 with full benefits.
Shall I talk about housing? Banking? The US Army rolling into Baghdad and asking the State Department if they brought the post Baghdad plans?
Yeah, BP is taking it in the neck, but I'm glad we live in the era of questioning the notion of 'expertness'.
Just a note on your theme of non-experts( excluding Harvard Law graduates, the all knowing, peace be upon them ).
"President Obama's recently announced six-month moratorium on drilling operations could lead to the loss of 40,000 U.S. jobs by the end of the summer, according to Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.
The first wave of job losses is expected in less than two weeks when all deepwater offshore drilling officially comes to a halt.
The 8,250 people who work on these rigs—approximately two rotating crews of 125 workers for each of the 33 idle rigs—will be the first to lose their jobs. "( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704875604575280983140254458.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories )
I would imagine shutting down, and letting rust, decay, then starting up these rigs would entail more risk of fire, oil leaks, etc.
So here we have a guy who supposedly is trying to get the economy started, and off oil dependency, shutting down an economy, increasing risk, and increasing imported oil.
Brilliant!
The bottom line is that BP as well as any other energy companies which engage in ocean drilling have no business drilling at those depths if they dont have a PROVEN EFFECTIVE plan in place to seal a well when this type of scenario happens. Anyone who has done any sort of engineering in any discipline knows that an important part of your job is anticipating worst case scenarios. If you dont have an answer for the worst case scenario then you have no business getting started in the enterprise. This isnt a nascent industry. There is no excuse for what has been going on here. And an effective plan doesn't include drilling a relief well months after a catastrophic failure.
The bottom line is that BP as well as any other energy companies which engage in ocean drilling have no business drilling at those depths if they dont have a PROVEN EFFECTIVE plan in place to seal a well when this type of scenario happens.
I agree. Heads should roll. Meanwhile, companies like BP are the only ones with the required expertise cap the well.
Paul, you are right. In their rush to punish, DC is going to force thousands of people onto the unemployment rolls.
The impact on the people of LA seems sometimes incidental to the news outlets...each move the Gov takes seems at odds with their future....the admin's tie to the enviromental left has delayed and disrupted the local people from defending their coastal regions...this is intentional destruction vs BP's unintended destruction.
We don't have small diesel engines because California's Air Resources Board (CARB) hates diesel engines.
They still hold that NOx emissions, which are hard to control from diesel or any other lean-burn cycle, are responsible for more smog.
But ground-level smog is VOC, not NOx limited, and you get far more VOCs from a gasoline engine than a diesel engine.
Any diesel engine sold here requires expensive after-treatment systems to convert NOx to nitrogen.
Given that, car companies have found they can make more money selling diesel engines in Europe (which doesn't have crazy NOx regs) instead of here in the U.S.
It will be more than a decade before Europe has as strict NOx regs as the U.S.
So, except for VW (not very reliable) or luxury brands such as BMW/Mercedes, we are stuck with the much more expensive (than a modern diesel) gasoline-electric hybrids.
Amen brother! Several knuckleheads (including some idiot over at NRO) seem to think that using a nuke to seal the well is the plan to end all plans. Stupid effing idiots!
Just because the Soviets did it on a half-dozen land well blowouts up in Siberia as a PR stunt does not make it a viable, safe, or even practical method. And subsea is not the same as land. Water I might remind everyone is NOT compressible. and subsea shock waves have another name, they are called tsunamis.
I have sourced drilling mud for onshore wells, and the weird variety of stuff that is included in mud astonished me. Stuff like walnut shells and hair. So when they started talking about golfballs and shredded rubber tires, I was not at all surprised.
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