BP finally stops oil spewing from Gulf gusher | Hacker News Reader

BP finally stops oil spewing from Gulf gusher

news.yahoo.com

67 pointsssclafani54 comments

Third paragraph:

> "Finally!" said Renee Brown, a school guidance counselor visiting Pensacola Beach, Fla., from London, Ky. "Honestly, I'm surprised that they haven't been able to do something sooner, though."

Seems like an odd choice for the first quote in the article. Shouldn't they have chosen someone obviously qualified to comment?

Most people think it's just a long pipe going down there, and you can put your thumb in it.

Most people think they should have this "cap" on stand-by on every drilling rig out there.

and considering the massive risk to other people's property, I'm not sure that's unreasonable. Obviously, they'd need to cost it out, but I mean, they appear to take some pretty massive risks with other people's property.

I guess if the reparations from BP are fair, the right thing should happen (e.g. they should keep those domes on hand if that is cheaper than paying out the reparations every 10 years or however often this sort of thing seems to happen.)

Surely most people would think they should actually make shutoff valves that actually work. Though clearly a lot more needs to be invested in disaster prevention.

They do, in theory. The Blow-Out-Preventer, basically an automatic cap, it installed in-line on every well currently being drilled.

Yes, it failed but there is no guarantee that "this cap" will succeed in the case of another BOP failure.

I still think the industry should put together a consortium that develops and builds such equipment and keeps it ready to go in the event of deep-water well failures like this. Seems like a lot of trial and error and onsite improvisation and engineering were done after the disaster. If it had been done ahead of time, then we may well have gotten to this point perhaps weeks sooner. A lot of oil might not have been spilled.

It better be federally mandated. Lord knows the industry won't do it on their own. Case in point: BP oil disaster.

That blow out preventer was federally mandated. As was the dead backup battery.

The thing about mandates is they are easy to write. It's the enforcement that has the problem. If you look at every airplane crash, exclude pilot error and rare weather events, you will find the remainder were due to lax maintenance. Federally mandated lax maintenance.

Maybe we need to clue in the insurers? If I were writing insurance for a blowout, I'd want a petroleum company to be in the consortium I described. Hell, I'd help run it! I'd make damn sure they were doing rigorous research and engineering. (And hardware testing!)

If a private company had built such a cap and kept it on standby, they could have probably sold it to BP for over $20 billion.

I'm a liberal, but I really don't like reading or watching liberal biased news constantly. It's as uninteresting and un-though-provoking as watching conservative shows all day.

That said, Rachel Maddow compared this gulf oil spill to the gulf oil spill of 1979 by using news clips from then, and the sad part is, the new technology we used for this spill is the exact same technology they used back then. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

"Most people" don't think about it at all. Disclosure - long BP

Qualified opinions are boring and don't sell newspapers, better to ask the 'man in the street'. As a bonus, if that man in the street spews extremist ideas, you can do the 'both sides of the debate' trick.

Airborne Dietary Supplement - Made by an Elementary School Teacher!

Shouldn't someone more obviously qualified make it?

This is not entirely true. The seal in place is considered temporary until a pressure test can be completed. This is expected to be completed within the next 48 hours. If that test is not successful, then this seal comes straight off and the leak resumes.

More information about the test from Bloomberg: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-15/bp-halts-gulf-of...

Not exactly. The new tight-fitting cap is there to stay, but they may re-open the valves which are presently preventing oil from escaping if the well is determined to be insufficiently sound. In that case, the new cap will still allow them to collect all the oil, preventing any from leaking. That may take a week or so until they can get more collection ships, though.

My bad; I had misread the other story. Thanks for the correction..

Well, obviously it sucks that it took so long, and so much damage has been done, but nonetheless... this is great news, if true. Let's just hope that this new cap holds up until the relief wells are finished and things are truly under control.

Wonder how long the cleanup process will take? Can something of this magnitude even ever be completely cleaned up?

I was under the distinct impression that this was only a test to gather data, and even if things go well, the cap is coming back off in 48 hours or less.

If everything goes well, they (Adm. Allen) announced they would be leaving the cap in place. Only if things go wrong will they reopen the seals. Even if they need to reopen it, the plan is to capture the oil into ships using pipes connected to this new cap.

Edit: I can't remember the source for this; I believe I heard it on the Diane Rehm show yesterday. If I can find the source I'll update.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/15/gulf.oil.disaster/index.htm...

"BP cautioned that the oil cutoff, while welcomed, won't go beyond the 48 hours."

Yeah, you're right... it did go on to say that 'valves' will be opened and oil would be siphoned off. I didn't realize there were going to be pipes either. :)

"Can something of this magnitude even ever be completely cleaned up?" Likely no. Certainly improvements can and will be made, but there will be irreversible damage, at least on a human timescale.

Crude oil is a natural substance. It leaks out of the earth all over the place. This is obviously an extreme case, but I think that with time, the environment will absorb this and return to some sort of normalcy.

On a long enough timescale, most things can be handled by the environment. That timescale may extend past the human timescale in many instances, which is generally viewed as unacceptable.

There is never going to be a return to normalcy for this area. It has already been under relentless pressure from human activities, to the point where we have a dead zone the size of Rhode Island floating around near this area already due to criminally irresponsible over-use of agricultural chemicals. Way too much pollution has already been coming out of Houston and New Orleans for a long time. BP wasn't satisfied dumping millions of gallons of oil into the water, they also felt it was necessary to dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of unnecessarily toxic dispersant chemicals into the water, mainly for cosmetic PR purposes. Louisiana's marshes are already in serious physical decline from the change in water flow and silt buildup caused by hydrologic engineering in the area.

As far as something being natural, that has little to do with it's ability to destroy ecosystems. Sure, many synthetic chemicals are worse, but don't we have plenty of examples of very harmful natural phenomena? Radiation is natural, for instance. Perhaps you'd like to absorb a couple thousand rems, and see if the naturalness makes a difference in your return to normalcy. Or drink a big glass of oil, why not! It's natural! Several thousand dolphins, sea turtles, jellyfish, fish, sting rays, eels and octopi surely gave that a try recently.

You are ranting and I honestly don't understand your need to compare an oil spill to a specific tragedy of radiation poisoning or an individual dying from exposure to oil. Oil spills are dangerous and hurt the environment greatly in the short term, but we are talking about a small region of the entire ocean that (while beautiful) doesn't sustain the large portion of the world's ocean.

Saying "never" and "always" is just a way to push propaganda unless it can be proven otherwise.

Ever so sorry, when someone says something insensitive, insulting and incorrect I guess a proper response could be characterized as a 'rant' as the amount of information you need to convey to give them half a clue is a lot.

The radiation example is related to the statement about oil being 'natural'. Again, radiation and cyanide are natural, but it's all a matter of concentration. Oil has overwhelmed this area and is killing massive amounts of sea life, regardless of it's fabulous property of 'naturalness'. So, while an x-ray might not hurt you, sticking your face into a bucket of plutonium might. A drop of oil may not kill you. YOUR ENTIRE BODY BEING COVERED IN OIL UNTIL YOU SUFFOCATE WHILE ALSO BEING POISONED BY HYDROCARBONS IS DIFFERENT. Do you agree?

By 'Never' I mean 'maybe sometime in the future, outside of a human time scale and definitely when none of us are alive'. The changes to the ecology of this area are irreversible.

It's not propaganda, the lying people on the other side of the issue who try to insist everything is OK because they have $$$$$ at stake are the ones feeding you propaganda. Thoughtful, intellectual honest men like Rush Limbaugh were the first to insist that this man-made disaster is a 'natural phenomenon'. It's absolutely ridiculous. To believe and repeat that ACTUAL propaganda, one must be uninformed and easily manipulated, or have something to gain from misleading people.

To me, killing one frog by accident with my lawnmower is upsetting. These people are killing millions of animals, then dumping more chemicals in the ocean for PR purposes. They WILL be killing people through their actions, if you're concerned at all about that. Of course, this is on top of a scene of fishing industry whose main plan is to go around dredging with heavy chains ont he ocean floor, or dragging 500 meter nets, keeping what they want, killing the rest and throwing it back. It's not even 'collateral damage', to these people, ocean life is as worthless as shit. Sorry, some of us disagree.

Bananas are radioactive, and yet they are harmless and delicious. The fact that you can eat some radioactive things does not make it a good idea to eat other radioactive things, like Plutonium.

My body can handle a handful of virus cells when delivered by vaccine, but in large quantities, they overwhelm my immune system.

A dam holds back a river, but not a flood.

Small leaks of oil over time are tolerable to the ecosystem, whereas giant gushers overwhelm it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Within a year or two you will have to search hard (i.e. dig) to find evidence there was ever a leak.

This is not the first time oil has leaked. It's biodegradable, the damage is totally reversible. Just look at the history from the ixtoc oil leak (about the same size as this one). There was pretty much no long term damage at all.

At the bottom of the sea the oil will probably last for a while, but it'll be buried very soon. Everywhere else it'll be gone quickly.

Read this if you don't believe me: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/07/19...

ixtoc was not "about the same size" as this one.

Ixtoc was: 3 million barrels over 2,800 km^2.

Deepwater Horizon is (so far): ~8.7 million barrels (100,000 barrels * 87 days) over 6,500-24,000 km^2.

It's nearly an order of magnitude more significant than the Ixtoc spill. And we're not even sure it's capped, yet.

(according to wikipedia, anyway)

If anything that means this ones is much less severe - it's more diluted.

And 3 times larger is not an order of magnitude.

Remember: the more diluted, the faster it will be gone. As long as they have oxygen, bacteria will eat it. By diluting it more, there is much more oxygen available.

I don't know about calling it great news...it's just not more bad news.

Except there are probably dozens of little leaks all over the pipes from the failure event. That's what they kept arguing why the couldn't just close the top, it would make all the little leaks into big leaks.

So basically they've just shut off the one that was getting the most attention.

Geez the amount of wildlife they have killed - no-one will go to prison and it's practically the crime of the century.

> Geez the amount of wildlife they have killed - no-one will go to prison and it's practically the crime of the century.

The Iraq invasion by USA happened in this very century.

Very good point. I can't believe I've fallen for the lack of that in the news cycle.

Going to war is like a different, almost underground part of society now.

It's just hard to sustain public interest when it isn't getting particularly worse, isn't getting particularly better, isn't going away, and we are not in imminent danger. If we felt threatened and outraged like we did in past wars, people would be hanging on every word out of the news.

So did 9/11, for that matter, which probably outranks the BP thing in many people's minds.

One week after the moratorium on offshore oil drilling has been rejected. Coincidence?

I've heard the theory that with the relief well approach, BP would have been able to continue getting the oil. With the threat of the moratorium, the relief well would have been the only way to continue getting the oil.

Maybe it is too much paranoia, but ever since I heard that theory, I can't completely shake the feeling that there might have been something to it.

probably too much paranoia.

Let's look at the positive parts of this:

1. All oil companies are going to upgrade their safety standards

2. A lot of new knowledge on how to seal oil leaks has been brought into the world. This knowledge will have various applications, and if a bigger leak happens again, then there will be more preparation

Anyone notice the BP or whoever spokespeople deliberately referring to it as "Hydrocarbon release" rather than "Oil volcano" or "oil spill" now? "uncontrolled hydrocarbon emission" and things like that..... that MUST be a deliberate PR move.

The terminology is more correct, even if it sounds more weasel-y. If they said "oil spill" then someone would be complaining about them being inaccurate and ignoring all the other hydrocarbons that come out of the well, like natural gas.

US was lucky that it was such a big spill.

~ 15.000 barrels per year spill in nigeria since 50 years. won't fix. (half of what deepwater spilled per day).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig...

I find it all rather sad. BP has committed an appalling act of negligence however the parties operating the rig and the company that provided the Blow Out Preventer (Trans Ocean and Halliburton) still seem to be avoiding the worst of the flack. They are culpable too, yet the administration chooses to ignore it. This has been a marvellous political tool for them.

Wonder if Dow Chemical has fixed the issues in Bhopal yet?

i'd like a 2nd opinion from a 3rd party, just to be sure.

Yeah really. Does this get us to the original PR assessment of 1000 bpd?

yep ideally from another large firm with oil experience. such as Halliburton or Exxon. ;)

Phew. Now I can go buy BP gas again.

great news if the oil leak is finally stopped, however, i will really miss the quips from @bpglobalpr

Well, it's not as if the disaster is over.

Not before time.

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