BP Oil Spill – A Disaster Most Foul

In a devastating nexus of technical incompetence and greed lies BP, without the slightest clue in the world as to how to stop the 200,000 gallons of oil being spewed per day from the wreckage of the oil rig explosion.

Their “fail-safe” mechanism to shut off the well did not work, and complicating any meaningful efforts is the fact that this oil is being spewed from a depth of about a mile. Never mind that BP has no experience in handling this type of problem at these depths. They were simply confidant that this could not happen, and that was all the assurance they needed to give to operate at these depths.

Now, BP has been imploring the U.S. Government, scientists, and oil well experts to weigh in with any help that might make a difference.

This will be the largest natural disaster in history related to drilling. The real question is, “How long will it remain the worst disaster?”. How quickly will it be superseded by something far worse, a bigger disaster that our notable petroleum engineers failed to foresee in their best-case scenario style of planning and risk management?

From the LA Times:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico presents BP Exploration and Production with a problem of unprecedented severity — a limitless gush in very deep waters — forcing the London-based company to grasp for fixes that have never been tried before.

The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn’t really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

“Everything about it is unprecedented,” said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don’t know when it’s going to stop.”

Accidents have occurred before in which oil has gushed from damaged wells, he said. But he knew of none in water so deep.

And “everything is bigger and more difficult the deeper you go,” said Andy Bowen, a research specialist who works with undersea robotics at the Woods Hole center. “Fighting gravity is tough. It increases loads. You need bigger winches, bigger cables, bigger ships.”

An analogy, he said, is the difference between construction work on the ground versus at the top of a mile-high skyscraper.

To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.

BP’s oil containment problem is unprecedented – latimes.com.

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