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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (77433)	6/5/2010 12:10:27 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

The Demise of BP? Posted by Robert Rapier on June 5, 2010 - 8:25am 4 It was about six weeks ago that the man I work for walked into my office and asked what was happening in the world of energy. “This oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico”, I told him, “is going to be a monumental disaster.” He hadn’t heard about it yet, but my views on it at the time were 1). They weren’t going to have an easy time getting the leak stopped; 2). It would drastically shift the debate on offshore drilling. I published an essay on the spill shortly after it happened in which I predicted that this would be a death blow for deepwater drilling in the U.S. Only time will tell on that one, but it has clearly changed the debate drastically. No longer can drilling proponents point to decades of safe operation. No more can they reassure people that something like this can’t happen. And in that case, what are the chances that new areas off the coasts of Virginia, Florida, or California are going to be opened up to drilling? Slim to none. The latest news per the Wall Street Journal is that “the Obama administration announced a six-month moratorium on all offshore drilling and canceled exploration lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Virginia coast.” (That moratorium is on deepwater projects; a temporary ban on shallow-water projects has expired. Update 06/03/09: The moratorium has been extended to include all new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico according to a Minerals Management Service, e-mail obtained by the AP). And frankly, as someone who has argued that the U.S. needs to invest in more offshore drilling lest we face oil shortages and increasing dependence on other countries for our energy, I can’t make that argument in light of this sort of disaster. We may need drilling, but we also need our coastlines. If the choice is to deal with oil shortages or risk a disaster off the coast of Florida, I am going to vote to live with shortages. I know that when the shortages occur, we will probably try to drill anywhere and everywhere out of desperation. I believe I understand what the consequences of shortages may look like – hence my support for expanded drilling. But this disaster has convinced me that we have exceeded the depths at which we can safely drill and extract oil. There will always be human error, and there will always be companies willing to take shortcuts. When the consequences are potentially severe, you have to play it safe. But that’s a digression from the title of this article. When the BP disaster in Texas City occurred in 2005 – killing 15 people and doing a great deal of damage – it was a serious blow to the company’s image. They had carefully crafted the image of a company – now rebranded Beyond Petroleum from British Petroleum – that was moving away from oil. They deeply cared about the environment and were moving the company in a new, greener direction. Then the explosion happened and the world was focused on BP the oil company. While it wasn’t a death blow for the company, their carefully crafted image vanished in the eyes of many people. For many, they were simply an oil company trying to convince people they were something beyond that. With the latest disaster – which many have already categorized as the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history – BP’s image has likely taken a death blow. Sure, ExxonMobil survived the Valdez disaster, but it was a stain on their corporate image that will last forever. But unlike BP, ExxonMobil never pretended to be anything other than an oil company. Still, ExxonMobil since then has been viewed by many as the epitome of the greedy, dirty oil company. The situation that has constantly come to my mind is the Bhopal disaster and the subsequent fallout. For those who are unfamiliar, in 1984 an accident at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India wrought terrible destruction on the population there. The official immediate death toll was 2,259, but it has been estimated that ultimately more than 15,000 people died as a result of the incident. As a result of this tragedy, Union Carbide’s reputation was destroyed. They would forever be viewed by many as a company with lax safety standards who put profits ahead of lives. They continued to function as an independent company for a number of years as the inevitable lawsuits played out, but this former component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was ultimately swallowed up by the Dow Chemical Company. It is hard for me to envision a different fate for BP. While the nature of these incidents is certainly different (I don’t mean to imply that the oil spill is comparable to thousands of people dead in India), BP will now forever be viewed as the worst kind of corporate polluter. That is simply reality. Many people will make it a point to never buy BP products again. Investors who bought into the rebranding – and hung around after Texas City – may have had their fill. There can be no rebranding in the aftermath of this. BP’s stock has been pummeled in the aftermath of the disaster, and now a criminal probe has been launched. The witch hunt is on, and it promises to keep BP in the hot seat for a very long time. We will be bombarded with anti-BP news for years to come. In any case, the name BP will not disappear overnight. BP’s refineries, oil rigs, and chemical plants will continue to operate. Union Carbide’s lawsuits took years to work their way through the courts before Dow bought them out. I think the same will hold true for BP. And although BP has long been a source of pride with many Brits, I can only wonder now if in the future we will refer to them as “BP, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil.” theoildrum.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (77433)	6/5/2010 1:22:33 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

In response to the widening disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, government officials have approved a plan to intercept the oil by building a 45-mile sand berm. There are many stupid things being said in this mess but this ranks right up near the top. I hope BP pulls the plug on this one by refusing to pay for it. I don't know squat about oil drilling but I do know something about construction......you don't build anything without months of design preparation esp. if you are building in the ocean which is subject to all kinds of currents and storms. Jindal is a hot head with national ambitions who needs to take a chill pill. But scientists fear the project is a costly boondoggle that will inflict further environmental damage and do little to keep oil off the coast. I'll drink to that one. Oil continues to gush from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, with the U.S. Geological Survey estimating that as many as 28 million gallons of oil have been released into the Gulf, compared to 11 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez spill. I wish they would stick to either barrels or gallons instead going back and forth.....it makes me confusing.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (77433)	6/5/2010 1:25:23 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Does this sound like backpedaling. I hope not. “The vents remain open,” Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, who is in charge of the federal response to the oil spill, said in a briefing Saturday morning. Admiral Allen said that while engineers had so far been able to bring 6,000 barrels of oil to the surface, they had been hesitant to close the vents. If they do so, they fear, water will rush in and form the kind of icy hydrates that doomed a previous attempt to cap the leak. “When we put the cap down, there were four vents on the cap that allow oil to escape that’s not going up through the pipe,” he said. “What you want is you want to keep oil in the containment cap and not let water in, because when water gets in you form hydrates.” The admiral had initially said that engineers hoped to begin closing the vents on Friday. But on Saturday he said they had not because of fears that the pressure inside the cap would become so great that oil would blast through the imperfect seal. With the oil staining beaches and killing wildlife across the gulf, and tar balls beginning to surface on the shores of the Florida Panhandle, President Obama said in his weekly Saturday radio address, “We are prepared for the worst, even as we hope that BP’s efforts bring better news than we’ve received before.” BP and government officials have said it will take at least until Sunday to fully deploy the containment device and make a definitive assessment of the amount of oil it can collect. BP executives have said that as much as 90 percent of the escaping oil may be contained by the cap if all goes well. A ship on the surface is capable of collecting 15,000 barrels a day, Admiral Allen said. The cap is a temporary measure. The well cannot be cemented shut until two relief wells are drilled, by August at the earliest. Technicians, employing submarine robots, worked through the night to begin closing the vents. So far the cap has been able to bear the pressure and there is no sign of hydrates forming. That is viewed by experts as a positive sign because hydrates clogged a similar containment device a month ago and prevented it from capturing the oil effectively. In his speech, Mr. Obama said the federal government had “mobilized on every front” to contain and clean up the oil spill, and called attention to the plight of some of the shrimpers and oystermen he met while visiting the Louisiana coast on Friday. “These folks work hard,” the president said in the address, which he recorded Friday evening during a visit to Grand Isle, La. “They meet their responsibilities. But now because of a manmade catastrophe — one that’s not their fault and that’s beyond their control — their lives have been thrown into turmoil. It’s brutally unfair. It’s wrong. “ Mr. Obama promised that he would “stand with the people of the Gulf Coast until they are made whole.” He reeled off a ream of statistics to show the scale of the response so far. He said that more than 20,000 people are at work protecting the coastlines, and that he had authorized the deployment of 17,500 National Guard troops to help in the response. He said that 1,900 boats were in the gulf working on the cleanup, and that more than 4.3 million feet of boom had been deployed to try to keep oil from reaching the coastline. BP is already preparing to install over the next several weeks a couple of backup systems in the containment effort. The company has several more caps on hand with different engineering designs in case the device it is trying now fails. By the end of the month, it will replace the newly installed capping device with one called an “overshot tool,” which is heavier and is more tightly sealed. The tool would not only direct the escaping oil from the runaway well to a containment ship, but also be outfitted with a containment drum, so that oil collection would not be completely interrupted if a hurricane forces the ship to leave the area. The company is also building a free-standing riser pipe that would siphon oil through the manifold that was built during the failed top kill operation. The pipe would be connected to the surface ship with tubing that could be detached and reconnected rapidly in the event of a hurricane. “That will reduce the time to hook up and disconnect from probably 10 days with the current system to perhaps 48 hours,” Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said on Friday. Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and Michael Cooper from New Orleans. nytimes.com