All these years? Poetic license. It’s been two years since the disastrous explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Eleven rig workers were killed in a valiant but failed attempt to control BP’s Macondo well located 50 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River in Gulf waters 5,000 feet deep. The ensuing blowout seemed to last an eternity. The finger pointing and legal action | Read More »
In 2011, Gulf of Mexico oil production will under-perform the government’s pre-Macondo forecasts by 355,000 barrels per day — almost 130 million barrels for the year. In 2012, the shortfall rises to 550,000 barrels per day — 200 million barrels. That’s fully one-third of the Gulf’s oil producing capability, and over 10% of total domestic oil production. These are staggering numbers. Alaska, our #1 oil | Read More »
As many of you know, your humble correspondent is a veteran of 32 years of service in the oil and gas industry, currently serving as the operations manager for a small Gulf of Mexico exploration and production company. This week, the President’s Oil Spill Commission published its 380-page report on the BP blowout and spill on the Deepwater Horizon. I won’t pretend to have read | Read More »
John Kerry in the Huffington Post (9/21) goes off on a “Climate is Not Weather” riff, and then says something quite revealing: It’s next to impossible to attribute any single natural disaster or weather event entirely to climate change. But the pattern of recent events provides insights into the challenges we will face in a warming world. We may not know if flooding in Pakistan | Read More »
Scientists have discovered a hitherto-unknown oil-chomping microbes in the cold, briny depths of the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find free oil out in the Gulf, either on the surface or in a subsurface plume, a little more than a month after the flow from the Macondo well was controlled. If you’re a bacteria, the BP spill was | Read More »
A group for researchers from the Georgia Sea Grant grabbed headlines yesterday by challenging NOAA’s claim that 75% of the BP oil is accounted for – that it has been captured, burned, evaporated, degraded, dissipated or munched by microbes. The study by the Georgia group claims that 80% still lurks somewhere in the environment. Who’s right? First off, the numbers aren’t comparable because the Georgia | Read More »
Remember back when BP severed the riser, so they could install the cap, the one that finally controlled the spill? Here is a photo taken by an ROV just after the severing was completed. The photo shows the outer shell of the riser, at one time a 21-inch cylinder, collapsed like a Coke can by the severing tool. Inside the collapsed riser are what appear | Read More »
As oil stopped flowing in the Gulf, we’ve seen a flurry of “Where Did The Oil Go?” stories from the USA Today, Tom Friedman at the New York Times, and others. A new TIME Magazine article begrudgingly admits that “obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh” may have been right when he asserted that the BP oil spill was something less than “the worst environmental disaster America has | Read More »
According to a new Bloomberg poll, American public opinion on the BP oil spill reflects common sense and a rejection of the Obama Administration’s legalistic overreaction. While public objections to a drilling ban echo the views of Republican leaders such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the sentiment is strong regardless of political leaning: 85 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of independents and 65 percent | Read More »
Environmentalists and the Obama Administration consider all offshore wells to be equally risky, but it’s important to recognize the relative risk of grossly dissimilar types of wells. Congress is considering a proposal to remove liability limits for all offshore well operators. That provision would effectively limit offshore operations to those companies big enough to self-insure: BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, maybe ConocoPhillips, and the foreign national | Read More »
For context in understanding the oil spill, and to help answer the question “How could it possibly be this bad?”, I recommend a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The BP spill is a textbook example of what Taleb calls a Black Swan Event. The event is a surprise (to the observer). The event has a major | Read More »
The New Orleans Superdome is pretty big. According to an article this week in the Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), the amount of oil spilled from the BP Macondo well so far would fill up one-seventh (1/7th) of the volume of the Superdome. Here’s a view of the Superdome from the air, at a scale of 1:2,500. Note the bar for scale. (First four images from | Read More »
I’m no apologist for Big Oil. As a resident of South Louisiana, I’ve seen the mess that was left behind when they left for greener pastures. The simmering animosity between the “majors” and us “independents” goes back generations. They also have enough dough to carry their own water; they don’t need the help of a small fish blogger like me. That being said, the press | Read More »
Colleague and occasional RS diarist Steve Maley testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on Thursday. The topic of the hearing was “The Deepwater Horizon Incident: Are the Minerals Management Service Regulations Doing the Job?” Full video of the hearing (over four hours) is available here. It featured testimony from the acting head of the MMS and the Interior Department’s Inspector General | Read More »
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