'Top kill' method 'slows BP oil leak' in Gulf of Mexico | Hacker News Reader

'Top kill' method 'slows BP oil leak' in Gulf of Mexico

news.bbc.co.uk

32 pointspierrefar34 comments

So, BP wouldn't allow anyone other than them to inspect the leak and give an estimate of the flow rate, the 5,000 number is "unreliable", but they know for sure that it is less than before. I hope it's true but mark me down as skeptical.

The actual headline says "slows", not "stops". (Has it changed?)

(yes)

edit: no seriously it said stop at first, and the bbc ninja edited it

Yes it has. When I submitted it, I just removed the "BBC News" prefix in the title and nothing else.

The short slideshow at the bottom of the article is one of the better concise explanations I've seen of the process.

If this story in WSJ is proves accurate, BP has a lot of culpability.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870471700457526...

There's some other unsubstantiated stories that Schlumberger pulled their guys off the rig just before it blew up:

http://adropofrain.net/2010/05/rumor-schlumberger-exits-deep...

Yeah, I haven't seen reports of this from any major news outlets. I'm not sure how much I'd trust that source.

I'm sure this is a sensitive topic among ALL of BP's contractors. Nobody is going to be verifying any of this until Congress in investigating.

Let us hope it is a responsible investigatory body, say the FBI, not Congress that does the investigating. Politicizing this can be another way of burying it.

That's interesting. I worked for Schlumberger for a couple of years. They are a good company in their core business of oil services (their software division is horrible, but that's another story). They particularly emphasize safety. I have no idea whether the story you linked to is true, but if the chief SLB person on site made a decision that his people were at risk, it would be consistent with the company's culture to get them out of there at their own expense.

I've been looking, but there has to be a list of who was on the platform (survivors and deceased) when it exploded.

EDIT: There are links that confirm SLB folk were off the rig, but SLB isn't saying it was any kind of emergency evacuation at this point. It was a "scheduled flight".

Anyone know why this wasn't tried earlier? Lower estimated chance of success than other previous strategies? Would have precluded other options if it failed? Some other kind of complication?

I'm not an expert. I'm just passing along what I hear Prof. Bea of UC Berkeley saying (and that makes intuitive sense to me).

One of the big risks of the top-kill procedure is a kind of "you push in here, it pops out there" problem. There's a big pipe down into the ground, right? It's constructed in segments. We have limited amounts of information about what condition it's in.

There is risk that they throw mud down, that does indeed slow or stop the current flows, but the flows find a new path busting through the pipes or the joints between segments - and the net result is a flow just as bad or worse as before the top kill but even harder to fix.

That they've only so far "slowed" the flow doesn't give me much encouragement yet. Both plots ("it works" and "it fails and makes things worse") start that way.

Here's a link to Adm. Allen's talk with NPR referenced in the article. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/05/there_are_indica...

queue Fox News to say that Obama should have insisted that this be done 4 weeks ago.

Which if he had would have meant instantly calling him a socialist for interfering with a corporation's business.

I must admit, I don't understand this. What do US presidents, or for what it's worth, US governments, know about how to stop oil spills 5000 feet below the surface of the sea?

What reason is there to assume that BP is not trying the best it can to stop the spill, and to them being the best experts on the subject?

Also, hasn't the government called in a panel of independent experts already?

It's simple. When things are going well, everybody spends all their time calling government the problem, cutting funding, shredding regulations and defanging any government enforcement agencies.

Then when things go bad, everyone's pissed that the government isn't omnipotent.

"Then when things go bad, everyone's pissed that the government isn't omnipotent."

That, my friend, is a true statement.

For bonus points, it's usually the same people who were loudest about shredding regulations and disempowering government in the first place.

Related examples include the NIMBY a-holes who lobby against cell phone towers in their town while having a family plan, and of course people who insist on tax cuts while demanding better services.

> It's simple.

You're forgetting that Obama and the Dems campaigned on "we're far more competent than Bush and the Repubs. If you elect us, sea levels will fall, [etc]."

It's sort of like the "huge financial firms aren't giving money to Obama, that money comes from their executives" argument. While true, you never hear it about money going to Repubs.

Yeah, and the Republicans campaigned on "all you need to know about energy is drill baby drill".

So do you think the government should have done more to prevent this? Or that this isn't a big deal and that the private sector is handling it fine?

Big Oil gives to the Democrats. I wonder why? I read somewhere that Obama has been the biggest recipient of Big Oil monies as a politician in the last 25 years. Again, I wonder why?

All big lobbies give to both parties.

Obama has quite loudly proclaimed that he wants to take our economy off of oil dependence and onto renewables. He says this multiple times every week. If Big Oil has bought and paid for him, they've done a horrible job of it.

FYI: "I wonder why?" is terrible form. Make a statement and defend it with facts. You're not even arguing anything, just trying to insinuate things that are quite clearly contradicted by the man's repeated public statements.

> Obama has quite loudly proclaimed that he wants to take our economy off of oil dependence and onto renewables. He says this multiple times every week.

He says similar things about "big finance" but his actions are different.

I'm frustrated too although we did have attempts at financial reform and at cap and trade in the House and Senate. I don't think Obama's the principle person holding them up -- and yes, they're flawed proposals. But he's trying to do something.

Just curious, do you see oil dependence as a problem too?

I think "oil dependence" is a hard problem to solve because it is hugely political on both sides of the aisle. Dependence on anything is generally bad. However, a "viable" alternative has to be found as well, which I am sure is hugely political as well.

Sorry about the "I wonder" above...was just being snarky.

> Just curious, do you see oil dependence as a problem too?

Which "oil dependence" problem? The US dependence on imported oil or the developed world's dependence on oil?

I don't see imported oil as a huge problem. It's actually a much bigger problem for other countries.

The US is still a huge oil producing country - it just uses more than it produces. It gets the vast majority of its imports from Canada and Mexico, with a significant fraction from South America. If the Middle East went south, the US could survive by blocking exports from this hemisphere.

As to the world's dependence, I don't see it as a huge problem either. It's also a choice - we could have more nuclear power.

> So do you think the government should have done more to prevent this? Or that this isn't a big deal and that the private sector is handling it fine?

mu.

I don't think that the govt could have done more to prevent this without causing other, more significant problems.

It is a big deal. I think that the private sector is doing a better job of fixing the leak than govt would have.

I note that govt had reasonable plans for dealing with the effects of leaks yet didn't bother. (For example, burning, which should have been started on day 1 and would have helped significantly, was pre-cleared in the 1990s for exactly that reason. Note that it never happened in any meaningful way.) It's unclear why I should blame the private sector for that.

Well, fair enough. It does actually sound like most people involved are doing their best job, except for the safety inspectors who let the thing get built that way in the first place.

I like this quote because it is true as well. It is easy to point to finger.

"But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We're in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they'll probably get the big California earthquake. And they'll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well."

> It does actually sound like most people involved are doing their best job, except for the safety inspectors who let the thing get built that way in the first place.

Not at all. The cleanup and reaction people failed horribly, and most of them were in govt.

Citation needed.

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