Sunday, June 06, 2010

Oily pelicans

Watching videos of oil soaked pelicans I'm staring to get annoyed
with the response from both BP and the government. I realize the federal
government can do little now except clench jaws and shake fists, but
they could have allowed more berms to be build to protect the wetlands,
brought more booms in, etc. But that is the response I expect from the feds,
too slow, ponderous etc, and anyone that bets their lives or livelyhoods on
the federal repsonse is a fool. (doesn't matter which gang is in charge)

The thing that is pissing me off today is an article on the oil drum, which
always has interesting articles and commentary and has been following this
disaster in real-time. BP apparently had an incident back in 2003 where
the riser parted and the only thing seperating the well they were drilling and
a massive spill was the Blow-Out Preventers worked. They apparently didn't
learn anything from that and design and build any additional machinery
in case of a similar incident and a massive spill. So they learned nothing from
a very near miss.

In the end it will be a series of failures that caused this accident, bad planning
bad luck and finally the single point of failure, those "pinchers" failed and there
was no backup plan. The result will be we'll end up with the obamafication of the
bp portion of the deepwater production portfolo to pay for this disaster, to the
detriment of both the offshore oil industry in the US, and 3 or 4 years down the
line when we really need that production to prevent $200 oil prices the production
won't be there because it's being shut down and delayed by stopping the permitting
process now.


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