Oh the Irony

[EyeKhan]

Twenty Billion Dollars

[Ominous Gamer]

[EyeKhan]

Holy shit, is that Admiral Adama!?!?

[Ominous Gamer]

BP doing its doublespeak thing

[GGT]

All dividends suspended for the remainder of the year.....

[Being]

I wonder if anyone is keeping an eye on BP's assets to make sure they don't secretly sell off enough of them to qualify for bankruptcy? I'm talking about mineral rights and drilling contracts etc; the big money stuff.

[Wraith]

BP doing its doublespeak thing

Roughly the same clause is in my employment contract.

[littlelolligagged]

Roughly the same clause is in my employment contract.

Yes, well...

[Nessus]

Also, it's doublethink, and Newspeak

[EyeKhan]

All dividends suspended for the remainder of the year.....

Apparently there's a bunch of retirees and pension funds that depend on these dividends, in part, for their fixed income in GB. They're kinda fucked right about now.

[EyeKhan]

Sorry for the Double Post, but I think this deserves its own spot. Because. It's new and innovative. And cool.

Oh I've got big balls
I've got big balls
And they're such big balls
Dirty big balls
And he's got big balls
And she's got big balls
But we've got the biggest balls of them all

One Ballsy Proposal to Stop the Leak

Willard Wattenburg, an electrical engineer and nuclear physicist from Greenville, California, made a name for himself by directing the capping of the more than 500 hundred burning oil wells in Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991. His scientific connections helped put his idea on the desk of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. The reasoning behind Wattenburg's proposal is seductively simple. If the steel balls are big enough in diameter, their weight will pull them downward even through the upward-rushing torrent of oil and gas. So they'll settle into the well at some deep level and begin to clog it. Two hundred tons of the things should slow the gusher enough that it can then be stopped with a more conventional injection of mud, says Wattenburg, a research scientist at the Research Foundation of California State University, Chico, and a consultant to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The big question is how large must the balls be to fall through the flow of oil and gas, To find out, Wattenburg suggests using a connection from the surface to the so-called blow-out preventer (BOP) on top of the well to pump in steel balls with a range of diameters up to about 3.8 centimeters (1.5 inches). Then engineers can simply observe which ones come flying back out of the top of the broken pipe at the top of the BOP, where oil is currently flowing from the well. If the larger balls don't come out, they must be sinking the well, Wattenburg explains. And if all the balls come out, well, no harm done. "I would claim that you have an all-win, no-lose experiment for little expense," says Wattenburg, who estimates the cost at $100,000.

Wattenburg's track record suggests that his idea should not be dismissed out of hand. In 1991, scientists estimated that it would take 5 years to extinguish and cap more than 500 oil wells that the Iraqi army had left burning in Kuwait when it fled before the U.S-led invasion. Wattenburg oversaw efforts that got the job done in 7 months. In 1994, he invented a temporary bridge made from railroad flatbed cars that was used a year later to repair a section of an interstate highway in California that floods had destroyed. As a Livermore scientist in the 1960s, Wattenburg developed a means to monitor the size of underground nuclear explosions from afar.

Wattenburg, who also hosts a radio talk show and is not afraid to recount his own accomplishments, is well connected. He forwarded his idea to a friend who on 2 June sent it directly to Chu. Chu e-mailed back to say DOE had considered such a scheme but that there were complications. Wattenberg says he would like to know what the complications are. "All I'm looking for is proof that it won't work."

When it comes to possible complications, petroleum engineers can name a few major ones. For example, oil and gas are not rushing up the well's central pipe, or "production casing," which has a diameter of 25 centimeters. Rather, they're flowing through the space between that pipe and the larger outer casing, which has a diameter of 38 centimeters. Balls fed in through the BOP can take either route, notes Julius Langlinais, a petroleum engineer retired from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. So given the chance, they'll take the path of least resistance and go down the central pipe where there isn't any flow, he says. "They would not fall where it's going to make any difference," Langlinais predicts.

Simply pumping the balls into the well would also be difficult, Langlinais says, because those heavy enough to fall through the gushing oil would also be heavy enough to fall out of any slurry used to pump them. Finally, Langlinais says that balls that fall all the way down the well won't plug it because the well can hold an essentially limitless number of them.

Wattenburg dismisses all these points. Balls that go all the way down the center of the well would eventually get blown into the outer region where they'd work their magic, he says. And, he says, Langlinais simply doesn't understand what different types of pumps can do. "I think I can give you evidence that these [objections] are just not relevant," Wattenburg says.

Perhaps most important is Wattenburg's claim that his experiment cannot make matters any worse. That's not necessarily so, says Martin Chenevert, a petroleum engineer at the University of Texas, Austin. "Once you get these steel balls in there, you'll never get them out," he says. And that could greatly complicate future efforts to drive cement into the surrounding earth to help seal the well, he says.

I say do it. DO IT.

[Nessus]

For example, oil and gas are not rushing up the well's central pipe, or "production casing," which has a diameter of 25 centimeters. Rather, they're flowing through the space between that pipe and the larger outer casing, which has a diameter of 38 centimeters. Balls fed in through the BOP can take either route, notes Julius Langlinais, a petroleum engineer retired from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. So given the chance, they'll take the path of least resistance and go down the central pipe where there isn't any flow, he says. "They would not fall where it's going to make any difference," Langlinais predicts.

That reads like a major pitfall. Also, who says the balls will drop straight down against the current? While the heavier ones might hit bottom at some point, the on-coming stream could deflect them so that they'll miss the hole entirely. And so forth.

[EyeKhan]

That reads like a major pitfall. Also, who says the balls will drop straight down against the current? While the heavier ones might hit bottom at some point, the on-coming stream could deflect them so that they'll miss the hole entirely. And so forth.

RE sentence 1, agreed. But they should do it anyway. RE sentence 2 and 3, I don't understand what you're talking about.

[Nessus]

They should do it because it sounds cool?

[EyeKhan]

They should do it because it sounds cool?

In part, yes. That's a good enough reason to do a hell of a lot of stuff.

[Wraith]

In part, yes. That's a good enough reason to do a hell of a lot of stuff.

[GGT]

Hey! I hear bp has ordered 30 of Kevin Costner's centrifuge sucker-separator machines!

[Being]

Hey! I hear bp has ordered 30 of Kevin Costner's centrifuge sucker-separator machines!

Exxon Valdez every 5 days since April 20th.

That's about 10 Exxon Valdezes so far.

What's happening with BP's carbon footprint? Watsefully burning all that oil at sea? Where's cap-and-trade when it'd actually be good for something? Where's Kevin Costner centrifuges? If BP had to pay a tax on all the CO2 they're putting in the atmosphere because of the spill, I bet they'd have no problem with buying a few thousand of those from Costner.

Also, don't hurricanes follow the warmest path through the Gulf?

[EyeKhan]

Hey! I hear bp has ordered 30 of Kevin Costner's centrifuge sucker-separator machines!

Are u joking or serious?

[Nessus]

Are u joking or serious?

Ban with prejudice

[GGT]

Are u joking or serious?

I r serious cat. It's in the news. 32 machines to be exact.

[Hazir]

I am a bit surprised how BP is giving in to pressure that's backed up with threat to introduce legislation that could have no constitutional basis. What does Obama think he is? Some 21st century robber baron?

[Loki]

Ditto. The Economist aptly compared him to Putin. He seems to think the law shouldn't apply to him if anyone dares to make him look bad.

[Hazir]

Ditto. The Economist aptly compared him to Putin. He seems to think the law shouldn't apply to him if anyone dares to make him look bad.

I have a backlog of unread economists but I'm happy to hear they came to a similar conclusion.

[GGT]

It was a voluntary agreement. bp might have done the escrow account anyway, as a PR move.

[Loki]

http://www.economist.com/node/163772...ry_id=16377269

It was a voluntary agreement. bp might have done the escrow account anyway, as a PR move.

Voluntary? Are you serious?

[Hazir]

It was a voluntary agreement. bp might have done the escrow account anyway, as a PR move.

You must be joking, there was nothing voluntary about this. They are being forced to put the existence of the company in question, and with that the pensions of millions of Brits and Americans, where their actual liability was limited - legally - to a mere $75 million. There is no way they would have made such a step if they hadn't been pressured with some legal terrorism from the side of the US government.

[GGT]

Political pressure, yes. If bp thought it had legal grounds to stand on, it would have. That article is written with a slant, in effect....you might as well say the gummint also "forced" bp to give those multi-million dollar wetland funds and conservation grants to affected states.

[Loki]

Yeah, and when someone gets called to Putin's office after veiled (and not so veiled) public threats and then changes their stance on a major issue, it's all done voluntarily.

[Hazir]

Yeah right, with the President attacking a 'foreign' company the way he did and Congress backing him up with calls for illegal legislation. That really put BP in a position to defend itself against robber baron Obama.

This was about as voluntary as voluntary got for that guy who chose to be executed by a firing squad the other day.