Epic Oil Spill...FUCK!

[3113]

The Latest!

BP is changing movies. They're now going for science fiction....

An operation using undersea robots to cut off the fractured pipe and seal it with a cap was launched on Tuesday...Mr Suttles said: "If everything goes well, within the next 24 hours we could have this contained." But, striking a note of caution, he stressed that success was not guaranteed and urged people to "remember this is being done in 5,000 feet of water, and very small issues take a long time to fix".

Full story here

Wonder which Transformer they'll use

 

[trysail]

The recent decisions by... [ the ] administration to extend the moratorium on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) by six months, to recapitulate on activities in the Arctic, to cancel the upcoming lease sale originally scheduled for August 2010, and to lengthen the shallow water permitting process beyond 30 days will collectively take their toll on offshore operators and drillers.


Rigs currently contracted in GOM include 41 jackups and 34 deepwater units. From an employment perspective, the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC) estimates that the GOM offshore industry employs approximately 75,000. Activities levels for both employment and wells drilled offshore may be trimmed as operators react to the economic dynamics imposed...


MMS records indicate that 58 pending plans for the months of May through July 2010 were filed prior to the moratorium's extension. Using these statistics would imply that as many as 20 current drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico would likely to dry on the vine even if moratorium is lifted in six months as proposed.


Of the 34 rigs that are currently contracted for the GOM's deeper waters, nine are drillships and 25 are semisubmersibles. Half of the total are controlled by Shell, Anadarko, ENI, Chevron, and BP. The moratorium extension for new drilling leaves these operators in quite a pickle considering that the average rates are $445k/day. Obviously, the nine drillships would be the easiest to move out of the region if work is sought elsewhere in the mean time. All seven operators with contracted drillships have international drilling activities that could lend themselves to mitigating the impact of the moratorium. Only two of the operators with contracts, Taylor and Walter Oil & Gas, do not have international operations that could provide some buffer. Additionally, Cobalt International Energy is subletting a rig from Anadarko which we doubt would get moved internationally.

http://www.rigzone.com/images/news/analysis_moratorium_graph_3.jpg​

*****​

... Combining 100-150 rig hands with another 200-250 individuals providing ancillary support; you are looking at between 300-400 jobs lost per rig. From an oil demand standpoint, nearly one-third of U.S. consumption comes from Gulf of Mexico production. While the moratorium applies to exploration efforts, clearly both jobs and future production are put in jeopardy by the decision to suspend deepwater drilling and extend the permitting process for shallow water operations. Time will tell if the enhanced safety and security measures that are under construction mitigate the immeasurable costs they impose. The most salient quote we have heard recently on the matter was by Amy Myers Jaffe, a research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute, to the Christian Science Monitor. "What the president's announcement has accentuated for the industry in a very concrete way, is that the industry is only as safe as the practice standards of the weakest link."

http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=93915

 

[trysail]

By: Harrison Schmitt

Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico, as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.

President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!


The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft, illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled, in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.


“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.


Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant.


Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.


Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.


A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War, in which America raced to demonstrate to the world the superiority of freedom over the Communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire analogy ceases.


The NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.


The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?


President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the Administration could not make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use previously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill.


In addition, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to protect the state’s shores and wildlife habitats, by building offshore sand barriers – as unnecessary as having to make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?


The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude oil, natural gas and brine, contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.


Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and did not have a deep-water, robotically emplaced crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.


Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?


Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production prospects has driven American exploration away from more easily discoverable and producible resources – and into the much more dangerous and technically challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare, in spite of the geological, engineering and weather-related difficulties that explorers and producers face as a consequence of these misguided restrictions.


Long-term, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial action. Remember that the fuel oil which blackened the world’s beaches as a result of World War II ship destruction disappeared after only a few years, and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation’s most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.


If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities, and only domestic production can solve it in the next 50 years.


The 2010 elections thus become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back into the Federal Government.

 

[Huckleman2000]

By: Harrison Schmitt

Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico, as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.

So, a Corporate Shill.

 

[trysail]

So, a Corporate Shill.

I have never seen you offer an opinion about any topic that betrayed even a slight hint of familiarity or knowledge. Did you finish elementary school? High school? College? Have you ever been employed? Virtually everything you have ever posted around here suggests that you are essentially clueless about virtually everything. You give every indication of a strong belief in Santa Claus and perpetual motion machines.

By: Harrison Schmitt

Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico, as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.

President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!


The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft, illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled, in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.


“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.


Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant.


Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.


Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.


A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War, in which America raced to demonstrate to the world the superiority of freedom over the Communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire analogy ceases.


The NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.


The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?


President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the Administration could not make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use previously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill.


In addition, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to protect the state’s shores and wildlife habitats, by building offshore sand barriers – as unnecessary as having to make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?


The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude oil, natural gas and brine, contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.


Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and did not have a deep-water, robotically emplaced crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.


Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?


Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production prospects has driven American exploration away from more easily discoverable and producible resources – and into the much more dangerous and technically challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare, in spite of the geological, engineering and weather-related difficulties that explorers and producers face as a consequence of these misguided restrictions.


Long-term, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial action. Remember that the fuel oil which blackened the world’s beaches as a result of World War II ship destruction disappeared after only a few years, and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation’s most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.


If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities, and only domestic production can solve it in the next 50 years.


The 2010 elections thus become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back into the Federal Government.

 

[trysail]

UnScientific American
By William Tucker

Scientific American used to be a great magazine but like any publishing venture headquartered in New York, it has gradually drifted into liberal never-never-land.

Over the years the magazine has run several lead stories encouraging complete nuclear disarmament. At one point it had O.J. Simpson's attorney explaining why DNA technology would never be accurate. Now it's become a shameless, uncritical cheerleader for a world run on renewable energy.

This month's cover story ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030 ), "A Plan for a Sustainable Future: How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030," is a prime example. Authors Mark Z. Jacobsen and Mark A. Delucchi are respectively, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and a research scientist at UC Davis -- which makes you wonder what's going on in academia these days. The article is so full of half-truths, absurd omissions and blue-sky fantasy that it is hard to know where to begin.

The authors premise is this: In order to free ourselves from fossil fuels and nuclear power, the authors postulate, all we need to do over the next 20 years is build the following:

• 490,000 tidal turbines of 1 megawatt apiece (<1 percent of which are now in place).

• 5,350 geothermal plants of 100 MW (< 2 percent in place).

• 900 hydroelectric dams of 1300 MW (70 percent in place),

• 3,800,000 windmills of 5 MW (1 percent in place).

• 720,000 wave converters (ocean turbines driven by waves rather than the tide), 0.75 MW (< 1 percent in place).

• 1,700,000,000 rooftop solar voltaic systems, 0.003 MW (< 1 percent in place).

• 49,000 solar thermal plants (mirror arrays that heat a fluid), 300 MW (< 1 percent in place).

• 40,000 photovoltaic power plants (sunlight directly into electricity), 300 MW (<1 percent in place).​

That would make a nice stimulus package, wouldn't it? Let's hope Congress doesn't take this too seriously. Offhand, I would say that if we undertook one-tenth of these tasks over the next twenty years we would be very ambitious. Even then, the authors have had to do a lot of fudging. For example:

• 900 hydroelectric dams, 1300 MW, 70 percent in place. There are only 94 dams in the whole world that produce more than 1300 MW, eleven of them in the United States. Even Glen Canyon (1296 MW) does not quite qualify. Around the world there are few dam sites left untamed. Even building 70 more dams of this size – let alone 800 -- is unlikely.

• 3,800,000 windmills, 5 MW, <1 percent in place. The largest windmills now designed generate 3 MW. These are "the length of a football field," as President Obama recently mentioned. A windmill generating 5 MW would probably be the length two football fields and stand 80 stories high. Imagine the landscape covered with 3 million these

• 1.7 billion solar rooftop systems. With only 6 billion people in the world, there may not be enough rooftops to house all these. We'll have to put up some more buildings just to accommodate them.

• 89,000 solar thermal and voltaic plants, 300 MW apiece. It takes about 15 square miles to generate 1000 MW with either system. There is little room for improvement, since the limits are set by the sun's energy. That amounts 450,000 square miles, about the size of Texas and California combined. Solar mirrors and panels must be washed once a week or they collect too much dust and lose their efficiency. That's a lot of water.

Oh well, this isn't really a serious exercise, is it? The authors are just doing some creative thinking so the U.S. delegation at Copenhagen in December can have something to wave in front of the cameras. The lead editorial praises the authors' "hard-headed pragmatism," saying they show "step by step… that more than enough sustainable energy exists [and] the needed technologies are available now."

What is truly remarkable is that the authors' inventory of knowledge seems to include nothing about nuclear power, the one technology that can truly provide "green energy." To begin with, they barely make any distinction between nuclear and fossil fuels, lumping together as the old way of doing things:

Most recently, a 2009 Stanford University study ranked energy systems according to their impacts on global warming, pollution, water supply, land use, wildlife and other concerns. The very best options were wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and hydroelectric power -- all of which are driven by wind, water or sunlight (referred to as WWS). [This statement is incorrect. Geothermal energy is driven by the radioactive heat of the earth due to the breakdown of uranium and thorium. That's why I called my book "Terrestrial Energy."] Nuclear power, coal with carbon capture, and ethanol were all poorer options, as were oil and natural gas.… Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered. Carbon capture and sequestration technology can reduce carbon dioxide emission from coal-fired power plants but will increase air pollutants and will extend all the other deleterious effects of coal mining, transport and processing, because more coal must be burned to power the capture and storage steps. Similarly, we consider only technologies that do not present significant waste disposal or terrorism risks.​

Where the authors get the notion that nuclear will emit 25 times as much carbon as wind is anybody's guess. A reactor contains about 500,000 cubic yards of concrete and 120 million pounds of steel. Yet a single 45-story windmill stands on a base of 500 cubic yards of concrete and contains as much metal as 120 automobiles. Since you need 2000 of these to equal one nuclear reactor (a very generous estimate), that adds up to twice as much concrete and steel.

Then there's the business of uranium enrichment. Environmentalists love to argue that nuclear is actually more carbon-intensive because uranium enrichment requires such huge amount of electricity. This is true in one respect. The country's only operating uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky requires 2,000 MW of electricity -- supplied by two full-fledged coal plants. But the plant employs World War II gas-diffusion technology. The United States Enrichment Corporation's new laser enrichment plant in Ohio would consume only 5 percent as much electricity- except that the Obama Administration has mysteriously rejected its application for a $2 billion loan guarantee and work has been temporarily suspended. In any case, uranium enrichment produces carbon emissions only if the electricity is supplied by coal. If enrichment were powered by nuclear power, carbon emissions would be zero.

Then there's the business of "transporting uranium fuel." It's hard to tell what the authors are talking about here. A nuclear reactor requires a new shipment of fuel rods once every 18 months. They are delivered by about six tractor trailers. There is probably more energy expended in hauling a single giant windmill to a remote farm location than is spent in refueling an entire 1000-MW reactor.

Where the authors lose all contact with reality, however, is in talking about "reliability." Here is what they have to say:

WWS [wind, water, solar] technologies generally suffer less downtime than traditional sources. The average U.S. coal plant is offline 12.5 percent of the year for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Modern wind turbines have a down time of less than 2 percent on land and less than 5 percent at sea. Photovoltaic systems are also at less than 2 percent. Moreover, when an individual wind, solar or save device is down, only a small fraction of production is affected; when a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant goes offline, a large chunk of generation is lost.​

Here are the facts. Every form of electrical generation is rated by what is called its "capacity factor," meaning the percentage of time, on average, it is up and running. Plants go on- or off-line for many reasons – maintenance, refueling, high costs, or simple unavailability. Coal plants are generally shut down once every two weeks to perform routine maintenance and "give the boiler a rest." Natural gas is often taken off-line because the fuel is so expensive. Hydroelectric dams shut down because of fish migrations or seasonal variations in reservoir capacity.

The generally accepted capacity factors for the various forms of generation are as follows:

• Nuclear -- >90 percent

• Coal -- ~80 percent

• Geothermal -- 75 percent

• Natural gas -- 50 percent

• Hydroelectricity -- 45 percent

• Wind -- 30 percent

• Solar -- 20 percent

In order to fabricate their argument, the authors have:

1. Considered only maintenance shut-downs and not general availability, and

2. Completely ignored the capacity factor of nuclear.

Windmills may only offline for maintenance 2 percent of the time but the wind only blows about 30 percent of the time. Solar power is available even less. Neither is "dispatchable," as the electrical engineers say, and therefore require constant back-up from other sources. Storage techniques may eventually solve this problem but the storage facilities will take up as much room as the generators themselves.

What Jacobson and Delucchi have managed to leave entirely out of the picture is the concept of energy density. Nuclear power's overwhelming advantage is its tremendous energy yield per pounds of resource employed. A pound of uranium contains 2000 times as much energy as a pound of coal. In real life, this translates into a 110-car coal train arriving every 30 hours versus six tractor trailers arriving once every 18 months.

Yet while nuclear has a tremendous advantage over the fossil fuels, so the fossil fuels have about 20 times the density of wind, water and solar. That is we adopted fossil fuels in the first place. We no longer use the wind to power grist mills or waterwheels to run factories because it takes too much effort to gather too little energy. What renewable enthusiasts are asking us to do is move backwards in history.

Even more significant, the world of Jacobson and Delucchi would be the most colossal human intrusion into the natural world the history of the planet. It would dwarf any previous effort of civilization. We would live in a forest of 80-story windmills interrupted by rolling prairies of solar collectors. Every inch of coastline would be girdled with tidal generators while every square mile of ocean was dotted with wind and wave collectors. There would be no place on the planet not dedicated to gathering energy.

Could we do it? Sure, we probably could, although not on the time scale Jacobsen and Delucchi propose. Would we want to do it? You can answer that question yourself.


http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/28/unscientific-american/print

 

[DeeZire]

I have never seen you offer an opinion about any topic that betrayed even a slight hint of familiarity or knowledge.

The same could be said about you, Trysail. You constantly C&P, without comment, sometimes C&P'ing contradictory information. It is as if the throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach is your preferred ideology. In other words, you have no ideology other than to rail against anything that inhibits corporate profits at the expense of protecting the environment. But I will grant you this, you have definitely contributed more colorful charts and graphs to the AH than any other poster in LIT history.

 

[trysail]

A predictable response.




Anadarko May Shift Spending Elsewhere on U.S. Rig Ban
By Edward Klump

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the Texas oil company that owns a stake in BP Plc’s leaking Gulf of Mexico well, said it may shift spending on capital projects to other regions after the U.S. extended a ban on deep-water drilling.

Capital spending this year will still total between $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, as forecast before the April 20 rig explosion that triggered the oil spill, Anadarko said today in a statement. The company said it will consider reallocating money that would have been spent in the Gulf this year to other projects around the world, including U.S. onshore developments.

“We want to assure our stakeholders that we expect to meet our 2010 production targets and have already taken a number of actions to protect the value of our portfolio during the moratorium in the Gulf,” Anadarko Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett said in the statement.

Anadarko halted all Gulf drilling under a moratorium that President Barack Obama ordered in the wake of the oil spill and extended by six months last week. The ban precludes issuance of new deep-water drilling permits, and companies were ordered to stop work on 33 wells that the government previously approved...

*****​

Full article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aiNUVZQUeDmw

 

[Huckleman2000]

A predictable response.

At this point, you're treating this as bad news?

 

[trysail]

At this point, you're treating this as bad news?

You don't do math, do you?


...and— god knows— you know nothing about economics.

 

[trysail]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=an_jMkuLBE68

 

[trysail]

...The fleeing Iraqi troops didn’t just burn oil; they also opened valves sending some 8 million barrels [ 336,000,000 gallons or at least 10x MC 252 to-date ] of crude into the Persian Gulf, making that incident the biggest oil spill in history (so far). While sharp drops in shrimp populations were seen shortly afterward, international studies found that the oil had not done long-term damage to corals or fish stocks in that gulf...

-Andrew C. Revkin
N.Y. Times
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/what-if-the-oil-just-kept-flowing/
3 June, 2010

 

[Xelebes]

You don't do math, do you?


...and— god knows— you know nothing about economics.

And sadly, neither do you.

 

[trysail]

...The fleeing Iraqi troops didn’t just burn oil; they also opened valves sending some 8 million barrels [ 336,000,000 gallons or at least 10x MC 252 to-date ] of crude into the Persian Gulf, making that incident the biggest oil spill in history (so far). While sharp drops in shrimp populations were seen shortly afterward, international studies found that the oil had not done long-term damage to corals or fish stocks in that gulf...

-Andrew C. Revkin
N.Y. Times
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/what-if-the-oil-just-kept-flowing/
3 June, 2010

 

[trysail]

Exxon $600 Million Algae Investment Makes Khosla See Pipe Dream

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=an_jMkuLBE68

 

[trysail]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...mmentKey:767851ef-2971-40e5-a6f5-5c930cefdb7e

 

[trysail]

U Thant once observed:
"It is no longer resources that determine prices. It is prices that determine resources."

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I've been looking at video of the dead and dying wildlife at Louisiana, and I think its time we hang the Slimey Limey CEO of BP from an oil platform. What a fucking mess.

 

[trysail]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a.tF.Pp1iZIM

Jindal Challenges Obama Drill Ban, Cites Loss of 20,000 Jobs
By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose state is bearing the brunt of the environmental damage from BP Plc’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, challenged President Barack Obama’s decision to suspend deepwater drilling for six months.

The moratorium may cost the state as many as 20,000 jobs in the next 12 months to 18 months during “one of the most challenging economic periods in decades,” Jindal said in a letter to Obama released today. Two thirds of the rigs subject to a ban are in Louisiana’s coastal waters, the governor said.

Obama declared the moratorium to give a presidential commission time to investigate the April explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 workers and unleashed as many as 19,000 barrels of oil a day. A longer interruption could crimp U.S. oil-and-natural gas production, raising energy prices and costing jobs, lawmakers have said.

“The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more,” Jindal said in a statement.

The moratorium will shut 33 deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, including 22 near Louisiana, costing as many as 6,000 jobs in the next three weeks and 20,000 by the end of next year, Jindal said. At least 100 miles (161 kilometers) of coast has been fouled by oil and the fishing industry has “huge economic losses,” he said.

Idled Platforms

Each platform that is idled puts 1,400 jobs at risk, according to the National Ocean Industries Association, a Washington-based group that represents drillers and companies that support oil production. Lost wages could reach $10 million a month for each rig.

In addition to the ban on deepwater drilling, Obama delayed planned exploration in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska and canceled a plan to search for oil and gas off the Virginia coast. New drilling in the Gulf in less than 500 feet of water can proceed.

“Shutting down the outer continental shelf, all that’s going to do is raise energy prices and cost American jobs,” U.S. Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, said in an interview. “The right course is to continue the permitting process and become more diligent in the inspection and enforcement of existing wells.”

Obama has promised unemployment aid and cleanup jobs to workers affected by the spill, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail. Among the rigs idled by the moratorium are four that BP has a role in operating.

Economic Costs Considered

“We must ensure that the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is never repeated,” LaBolt said. “Economic impacts were certainly taken into account -- the moratorium is surgical and shallow water drilling, in which the risks are better known, is continuing under stricter safety rules.

One third of U.S.-produced oil and gas comes from the Gulf, and 80 percent of Gulf oil is extracted from deepwater wells, according to the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. The suspension will hurt rig owners, supply boats, welders, divers, caterers and other supporting contractors.

About 80,000 barrels of new daily production, or 4 percent of deepwater Gulf output, will be delayed until after 2011 because of the ban, according to a May 28 report by Edinburgh- based Wood Mackenzie Consultants Ltd. The total may be as high as 130,000 barrels a day, according to Kevin Book, a managing director at ClearView Energy Partners LLC, a Washington-based policy analysis firm.

Imported Oil

The U.S. would spend $10 billion to buy imported oil through the end of 2011 to replace lost Gulf production, Book said in an e-mail.

Oil producers including BP and Exxon Mobil Corp. don’t know when work in deep waters can resume, said Jack Gerard, chief executive officer of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil industry. In the meantime, companies probably will ship their rigs to the coasts of Brazil and China or to the North Sea in Europe to avoid sitting idle in the Gulf, he said.

Contracts were cancelled on three drilling rigs Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the Texas company that owns a stake in BP’s leaking well, had leased in the Gulf using a clause triggered when events occur beyond the company’s control, Gerard said. The cancellations let Anadarko stop paying rent on rigs it will no longer be able to use.

“It’s unlikely they’ll sit around that long waiting in the Gulf of Mexico,” Gerard said in an interview. “If some of those drilling operations are moved to other parts of the world, it will be difficult to get them back to this part of the world any time soon.”

U.S. Costs

The moratorium will cost the government as much as $150 million in lost royalty payments as production of oil and gas stops, Gerard said.

The administration is “pausing” deepwater drilling “to ensure this type of disaster doesn’t happen again,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters last week.

Obama created the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling by executive order and on May 22 named as co-chairmen Bob Graham, former Democratic governor of Florida, and Republican William Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency director. The panel aims to issue a report, with recommendations on steps to avert future offshore drilling disasters, by the end of the year.

 

[TxRad]

I've been looking at video of the dead and dying wildlife at Louisiana, and I think its time we hang the Slimey Limey CEO of BP from an oil platform. What a fucking mess.

Yeah, uh huh, that will solve the problem alright.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Its time to send the Limeys a message.

 

[trysail]

An explanation of the LMRP [ Lower Marine Riser Package ] approach, a second collection method using a subsea manifold and the two relief wells. The first relief well spudded on 2 May and was below 12,000' ( as of 31 May ). The second spudded 12 May and was below 8,000' ( again, as of 31 May ).

http://bp.concerts.com/gom/kentwellstechupdatelong053110.htm

 

[Liar]

Just a "fun" little visualizer.

http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

 

[Zeb_Carter]

http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/#loc=W...&x=-76.91551619062501&y=39.19800973459337&z=7

Right where it belongs!

 

[Songcatcher]

Goldman Sachs Dumps 44% of it's BP Stock Weeks before Oil Rig Disaster!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw_8HsU1in4