As most of you are aware, the first two thirds of the President's speech to the Nation was long on generalities, and short on specifics of what the U.S. Government, in concert with BP, was going to do to stop the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. There was lots of mambo mojo about punishing BP and going Medieval on BP's executives, as well as some BOOOOOSH Bashing.
Because there has never been a leak this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology. That's why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge -- a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's Secretary of Energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.
As a result of these efforts, we've directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology. And in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well. This is until the company finishes drilling a relief well later in the summer that's expected to stop the leak completely.
But that's not quite what's going on. If one reads from one of the professional blogs, The Oil Drum (no friends of Palin, by the way) what is actually going on is a race against time. Erosion caused by the high pressure movement of hydrocarbon product, sand and silt up the shaft and through the Blowout Preventer system is creating instability up and down the entire shaft system. BP knows this, apparently, as does the Administration. Money section:
Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.
A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons.
There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the "system" including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil "Product" rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it's way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?...no one really knows....However now?...there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.
This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer's immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?...we are beginning to the results of the well's total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.
The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn't hold up anything and isn't meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head "spud" stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn't do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn't put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100' tall pipe "in the air" and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over...unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well's piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over...and it is now showing signs of doing just that....falling over.
One of the things you did not see from Obama is an actual plan from him, and BP, to actually STOP the leak, pending the digging and execution of the two relief wells. The poster at the Oil Drum is indicating that we may run out of time and that the pressure of the oil from the chamber below ground may tip over the BOP before the relief wells kill the leaky well.
In that eventuality, we may have no choice but to seal the well using a tactical nuclear warhead. Matt Simmons, deep ocean oil expert on Youtube, lays it all out.
Matthew Simmons, founder of the Ocean Energy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Lori Rothman about BP Plc’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and his view that the use of a “small-bore nuclear device” is now the “only option” to stop the flow of oil.
The Nation, and indeed the Caribbean community, simply cannot tolerate a massive amount of oil leaking into the Gulf for the next thirty years. The President simply hasn't made up his mind what to do yet. That is something that came across last night, in spades, to the American people. There's no hand at the tiller.
In the last third of the speech, Obama rolled out Cap and Trade again, in the hopes that public outrage over the BP and its malfeasance would have the public clamor for higher gas prices at the pump, but I suspect that that's a misreading of the public mood. Palin's response was brutal, and to the point.
I kind of have a big beef with you too though, Bill, if you don't acknowledge that President Obama is wrong on his call for a need for energy policy. Certainly we need that, but he is wrong not to acknowledge that we still need on a three-legged stool the conventional sources of energy to be drilled here. Otherwise, Bill, we are going to be dropped to our knees and bowing to the Saudis and Venezuela and places like Russia that will keep producing oil and petroleum products, and we will have to ask them to produce for us because we will still be dependent upon these sources of energy.
In addition though, too, shifting more towards the renewables which, of course, we need. And the other leg of that stool is conservation. President Obama, it scares me, it saddens me that the CEO of our nation does not understand that inherent link between the conventional sources of energy that we're dependent upon and our security, our prosperity, our freedom.
Palin is a realist. But she also understands that Obama operates within the political environment of the Left Wing of the Democratic Party, and that Obama's aims run counter to the long term best interests of this country. Most of the Green Energy scams being pushed by Obama, so far, have proven to be of little investment value, else they would have attracted investment dollars from capital markets. But Obama and the Left are pushing this nonsense because of their belief in Green Energy, and partly as a payoff to George Soros and his people, who have huge longs in Petrobras and other overseas petroleum interests.
Their interests rise in value if US production declines.
What Palin gets is that with Obama, all one has to do is follow the money. The country is getting this, too, despite the smoke and mirrors that went into electing him, I think that the voters are catching on to the fact that they elected a phony and a con man. I also believe, as I suspect does Palin, that it's all beginning to unravel.
A lot of the liberal anger with Obama's speech that people saw last night was a reflection of the fact that the Left is beginning to know the meaning of fear.
