Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill as long as i still get to be in charge. and i do need assistants, so i'll just round up the tf'ers to help. great name for it. i vote that tony hayward is the first one in line for an "oil change".
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill I'd vote for oilboarding AND an oil enema for Tony Baby. :thumb:
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill Looks folks, there is a reason government inefficiency is a redundancy. Call me a racist if you like because of who our president is, call me a no count f'g Repulican because the Democrats currently control both houses of Congess but our government has failed miserably here. At a minimum the MMS permits to build berms to prevent the oil from reaching our coast should have been approved as soon as submitted. Whatever adverse impact on the environment they could have created pales in comparison to what is going to happen now that the oil has reached the marsh. Lots of people are complaining in response to the above argument that the government didn't create this situation. (What the hell is the government for then if not to react to an outside crisis? Hello, the UINTED STATES OF AMERICA seamed to react pretty good in WWII, a war it didn't create) However, that is true of most catatrophies that impact our countery, unfortunately, our president has not provided leadership. He has no experience as an executive (government, private sector or otherwise) and it is very apparent during this crisis. All of his sound bits about "kicking @ss" etc. don't mean shyt to us here is Louisiana. He's clueless about what to do here. If this was going to happen (and God forbid that it ever did given the loss of lives here, people who lost their lives not trying to evacuate but to control the situation}, it should have happened in Louisiana waters where our state would be in more control of what is happening. Please excuse the rant here friends, but I'm tired of people in our government not doing there jobs while I have to wake up EVERY morning and do mine!
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill i just read testimony from a high up at transocean. actually read the printed out form, so sorry no links to websites. to give an idea about how serious transocean is about safety: although their safety record is highly respected, they themselves were not satisfied with their safety scores in 2009, so no executives got safety bonuses that year. repeat, big wigs didn't get their fat checks at the end of the year. These guys don't phuck around in this department. was written back in early may (may 11 if i remember right). until a complete investigation happens, this is the best we got. complete investigation can't even begin until leak is stopped and things down there can be examined. guy does a great job of describing how each phase of drilling works. what's done and why. really helpful for someone like me who has never been on a rig. anyway, to get to the point. this thing should have never happened. the well had already been cemented, and they were in the process of replacing the mud with sea water, which is standard procedure at this point in a well. he also said that any talk of blaming the BOP makes no sense at all. they were at a stage where the BOP was gonna be removed within a couple of days. whatever failed, happened somewhere below the BOP. we're talking about really thick layers of cement and mud, or possibly the casing around the drill pipe failed catastrophically. edit: everything below this is my personal opinion and guesses did bp cut corners? probably were those corners cut to save money? probably was safety put in question by cutting these corners? possibly did cutting these corners cause this explosion and leak? at the time of this report at least, highly unlikely. was BP and others involved completely unprepared for this? yep. but here's why: this has never happened before, and there is almost no way anyone could have foreseen this happening.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill edit: this post is also my guesses, and did not appear in the report listed in above post. now for some more depressing news. knowing that either the cement, mud, or possibly casing failed, people need to be prepared for the possibility of the relief wells not working and this leak being around LONG term. if the casing failed somewhere above where the relief well is going to puncture, there may not be enough room to fill the well with enough cement and mud to hold down the pressure long enough to plug the well. this thing is not acting like a normal well so far, so there really isn't any reason to think that conventional method for anything else is going to automatically work. this well hasn't slowed down its flow (actually may be speeding up), it hasn't even begun to collapse upon itself, etc. etc. casing and cement failed, 8 layers of failsafe on the BOP (which was tested 2 days before the explosion) failed. get comfortable folks we might be here a while.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill Thank you for the report. No disrespect, but I am waiting on the testimony from low level men on the rig. Those that are not worried about covering anyone's rear end and bottom line. At this point in the game I dont trust executives who are trying to save their company.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill well, i apologize for making it sound that way. a lot of what I wrote was my interpretation of what he said. this thing was several legal pages long, and I summarized and simplified it. the picture he paints is not a pretty one, so I don't think he was covering anyone's rear end. it was written before the spill got out of hand, so all the stuff about the magnitude of the spill is my words, not his. basically, all this report was, was a complete explanation of how the drilling process works. brief detailed descriptions of each step, and why things are done they way they are. the gist of it is that at the stage they were, the BOP was pretty much no longer necessary. they were at a point where the hole was cemented, and the mud was being replaced. nothing is supposed to even reach the BOP at that stage. what failed below still remains to be seen. lots of questions remain. was it a bad cement job? was the next step performed before cement was ready? was the casing faulty? improperly used? some of these may have been answered in the month that has passed since this report was written. I don't know if they have or haven't. It basically eliminates mechanical failure (i.e. the BOP) as a culprit.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill There was an MMS / Coast Guard hearing in Kenner, Wed - Sat, May 26 - May 29, second phase of hearings. First phase was on MMS oversight (lacking), second phase was on what happened leading up to the blast. Key guy is this Hafle guy, engineer from BP. BP engineer defends drilling project design Questions will center on the size of the casing and the hole. This design was changed in the last week of the project, it originally was a 5" casing, not 7, leaving much more room for the cement. A new type of cement was used, nitrogen infused, that had not been used at that water depth before. I'd say its not looking good for BP. There will be a third hearing in July, then study, then findings. We should find out what really was the problem, eventually. Video of 1.5 hours of Mark Hafle testimony before the panel: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293776-1 Good discussion around 28 - 33 minutes in, Mr. McCarroll and Hafle. There is also cspan video of all the others who testified. There is a LOT OF STUFF at the cspan link just above, depends how much time you want to put into this, but there is a lot of actual testimony from folks in responsible positions on the rig and in the offices. It's obvious the coast guard should not have a seat at the table, they don't know anything about drilling a well. Maybe if there is a hearing on the clean up...
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill The BOP is the ultimate "oh sh*t" plan, and will be a big issue going forward. If it works, this wouldn't even be mentioned on the news, just another well control issue that happens on a near daily basis out there.
