where do you see the culpability for all this playing out? Are they going to try and get the deepest pockets (BP), the most demagogued (Halliburton), or Transocean, or all 3? Fair disclosure, I own stock in RIG.

HF

.

…demonstrating:

1. How foolish it is to have such extreme limitations on drilling nearer to shore where, in case of accident, it’s relatively easy to contain the damage;

2. How feckless and knee-jerk demagogic this administration is; and

3. How obsessively focused on the so-called green economy, which is killing us and our way of life.

How about some of you adding additional examples of the “benefits” to this man-made opportunity.

are in international waters, so how can the U.S. dictate what they do?
The decision is totally insane, but in keeping with this administration doing most everything backwards!

Very Apollonian of him.

that said he is in the industry, and that he was getting ready to go into a meeting to start discussing major lay offs.

So, all of the foreign owned rigs can keep drilling away, while us suckers shut down, and drive gas up probably to $5 a gallon real soon. If another rig, whoever owns it, has an accident isn’t it going to spill into the same Gulf waters?

I’d be willing to bet that they won’t be back up and running for a very long time, probably until we replace the Marxist regime in Washington.

What would happen if a rig owner refused to shut down? Would it be another Elian Gonzales raid to remove the rig workers, and shut it down themselves?

nt

The Chinese gotta be laughing thinking stupid Americans just leaving more for us!

Vlad’s engineering and, technical comments from the “upstream” are marvellous, hope we all appreciate them. As to the “downstream” impacts, I saw some questions in these threads last week, what will happen to gasoline prices this summer because of the Deepwater Horizon blow out? Until yesterday the answer would have been, “probably no or not a whole lot of increase; or, if retail prices at the pump do go up in July, it would be not due only to this but other factors as well.” Unfortunately Obama and his people, who don’t have a clue (by his own admission) about the US and worldwide energy industry, its technology and infrastructure, have this picture in their mind, that the US part of the industry is really just one, fat, rich Republican guy sitting in a secret room behind drawn curtains ,with a gasoline price dial he just turns up and up whenever he wants even** more!!** money (don’t forget imagining the sinister laugh and cigar puffing that goes along with this). And if you need more oil, you just turn on the switch at one of those “oil well-thingies” and it gushes out on command. Nothing could be further from the truth of course. The industry particularly in the Gulf region & Southwest is comprised of tens of thousands of American men & women engineers, scientists, geologists, lawyers, accountants, traders, pipeliners, construction supervisors, gang pushers, roustabouts, etc., etc., very dedicated people who are keeping this huge nationwide and worldwide infrastructure functioning, from exploration and drilling at well head (or platform and seabed pipe), to pipeline, to refinery, to distribution to the pump, to your car. . As long as that entire infrastructure is not critically damaged, which in this case it is not, the oil will keep flowing through it, the system will work towards a correction for this one, grievous platform loss (men have lost their lives here, remember), & gasoline should still generally make it to your corner service station & into your tanks for about $3/gallon (more or less) this summer. (A force five direct hurricane strike in the Gulf is of course another matter entirely!) But – with the sweeping moratorium and government action announcements yesterday, which were figured to be coming, and the sense now of how Obama is going to go about this all – retail gasoline price prediction becomes much more uncertain.You see, the commodities traders see future supply diminishing because of the gov’t action/ moratorium, and the futures/contracts prices start up on their own. At the same time the business development types/ economic planners at even the biggest international oil companies, get cautious in their projections, and the managers translate that into project cutbacks and layoff good employees (in my part of the country those are not just statistics, those are friends and neighbors .) This is really the worst time to impose sweeping gov’t action that impacts or threatens future supply. But that is what Obama appears to be doing, thinking he is “helping.” All other factors being equal, this latest means we could very easily have to deal with gasoline price increases this summer tracing back to the federal action. And remember: “oil is in everything.” Medicine, computers, airlines, military, on and on & including gasoline of course. A n increase in price per barrel of oil however it happens is like a tax all through the economy. So Mr President if you are going to take government action affecting this vital industry for regulatory or safety’s sake, you have to go in with a surgeon’s scalpel, not a spiked, 5- ft shillelagh. And not shut down entire zones or classes of exploration/ production (e.g. Shell in the Chukchi Sea, Alaska), while your inside-the- beltway based bureaucrat/inspectors try to find the Gulf on their Michelin Acapulco/Mexican Riviera maps (“ooh can we go clubbing?”) To conclude with another medical analogy, when the patient is sick, don’t, like some 17th century doctor, bleed her by applying leeches, it only makes things worse. In summary, the industry and the market can handle the Deepwater Horizon disaster ,but not so much or so well this coming, big federal intervention and punitive taxation (oh yes it’s also being prepared ) which doesn’t have to be done, after all . History shows Carter’s windfall profits tax was exactly the wrong thing @ the wrong time, it retarded exploration and cut supply, for years afterwards. But what can we expect from national leaders who do not understand or choose to ignore: a) basic Econ 101 supply and demand; b) how many hundreds of thousands of ,Americans directly or indirectly owe their livelihood to this industry; and c) the core position of energy in this nation’s economy and national security.

Creates a crisis to exploit
or
hurts America

The O is there doing what his handlers help him to do best…

Exploit the crisis or hurt America… in this case it’s a two’fer for the O…

Impeachment cannot come soon enough.

Memo to Dems – wanna keep your cushy house seats? Start the impeachment of the O before the Summer is out… when gas prices skyrocket and unemployment swells and this asshat has the audacity to blame big oil for him having to shut down all these operations and blames Bush (again and again) for everything under the sun YOU will pay for it at the elections… come to think of it, impeachment may even not be enough to save your jobs thanks to the health care power grab. But if you impeach and remove you can at least take him into the ranks of the former government salaried asshats and severely annoy mr.perfect there…