"The first thing to say is I'm sorry," Tony Hayward said when asked what he would tell people in Louisiana, where heavy oil has already reached parts of the state's southeastern marshes.
"We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."
Bloomberg, March 5, 2010:
BP Plc Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward received a 41 percent pay increase last year, after the company produced more oil and gas than Exxon Mobil Corp. for the first time.
Hayward was paid 4.01 million pounds ($6 million) in cash and shares compared with 2.85 million pounds in 2008, the London-based company said in its annual report published today. The figures don’t include his pension fund, which is worth about 2.7 million pounds.
Associated Press, May 31, 2010:
"I was just sitting here thinking our way of life is over. It's the end, the apocalypse," said fisherman Tom Young of Plaquemines Parish on the coast.
Alabama Local News, June 23, 2010:
FORT MORGAN, Ala. -- An Orange Beach, Ala., charter boat captain shot and killed himself this morning just before his vessel was scheduled to set out to take part in oil cleanup and protection efforts, investigators said.
William Allen "Rookie" Kruse, 55, was found dead on the flying bridge of his boat, The Rookie, at the dock at Fort Morgan Marina just before 7 a.m., Baldwin County Deputy Coroner Rod Steade said.
"He had just let his deckhands off the boat and sent them to get something," Steade said. "He was going to meet them at the fuel dock. They heard a pop and when the boat didn't come around, they went back and found him."
Tim Dickinson, "The Spill, The Scandal and the President", Rolling Stone, June 8, 2010:
[A]fter the president's press conference, Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its "best estimate" acknowledged. That same day, the president's Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher's output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group's minimum estimate. The upper range was not included in their report because scientists analyzing the flow were unable to reach a consensus on how bad it could be. "The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."
The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days. "That's what the plume team's numbers show too," Crone says. A source privy to internal discussions at one of the world's top oil companies confirms that the industry privately agrees with such estimates. "The industry definitely believes the higher-end values," the source says. "That's accurate – if not more than that." The reason, he adds, is that BP appears to have unleashed one of the 10 most productive wells in the Gulf. "BP screwed up a really big, big find," the source says. "And if they can't cap this, it's not going to blow itself out anytime soon."
[This article is a must-read.]
The Wall Street Journal, Washington Wire, June 21, 2010:
How do you toughen a regulatory agency under fire for laxness and coziness with the industry it regulates? If you’re Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, you rename it.
The Mineral Management Service is no more. As of today, the agency in charge of overseeing offshore oil exploration–and the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig–will be known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. That’s the Bureau of Ocean Energy, or BOE, for short.
The New York Times, June 16, 2010:
[Credit where credit is due.]
The $20 billion fund announced on Wednesday will be administered by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the lawyer and mediator who ran the fund for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and has emerged as a troubleshooter on issues like executive compensation and resolving claims for asbestos and Agent Orange victims.
While acknowledging that oil is likely to continue spewing from the well for perhaps months to come, Mr. Obama was able to throw something of a lifeline to desperate coastal residents worried about meeting payrolls, mortgages and shrimp boat payments.
Under the famous portrait of a charging Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, administration and company officials haggled over last details in an extraordinary White House meeting that went more than four hours, double the time scheduled, and was punctuated by breaks as each side huddled separately. Finally, participants said, Mr. Obama sealed the deal in a private, 25-minute session with BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg.
CBS News, June 14, 2010:
BP hoped to drill the well in 51 days for $96 million. But things ran way behind schedule and over budget, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.
Leasing the Deepwater Horizon cost BP a million dollars every two days. The day of the explosion, the rig was already 43 days late for its next job.
Investigators say that may be why BP took so many risks. Like choosing a cheaper well casing over a safer option that would have cost $7 to $10 million more.
One BP colleague emailed another: "This has been [a] nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."
The New York Times, June 20, 2010:
The chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee released an internal BP document on Sunday showing that the company’s own analysis of damage to the well bore resulted in a worst-case estimate of 100,000 barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico each day. The chairman, Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, said the document provided a sharp contrast to BP’s initial claim that the leak was just 1,000 barrels a day. Mr. Markey said that when the document was made available to Congress, BP said that the leak was about 5,000 barrels a day and that the worst case was 60,000 barrels. “Considering what is now known about BP’s problems with this well prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, including cementing issues, leaks in the blowout preventer and gas kicks,” Mr. Markey said in a statement, “BP should have been more honest about the dangerous condition of the well bore.”
NPR, May 14, 2010:
The volume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig may be at least 10 times higher than previously estimated, NPR has learned.
The U.S. Coast Guard has estimated that oil was gushing from a broken pipe on the Gulf floor at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.
But sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday by the oil company BP shows that the true figure is closer to 70,000 barrels a day, NPR's Richard Harris reports.
That means the oil spilling into the Gulf has already far exceeded the equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
The analysis was conducted by Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry. Harris tells Michele Norris that the method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. That means the flow could range between 56,000 barrels a day and 84,000 barrels a day.
Another analysis by Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 20,000 barrels a day and 100,000 barrels a day.
Even the most conservative of those estimates is much higher than what the Coast Guard has so far said.
"Alexander Higgins Blog", June 11, 2010:
There has been speculation about the Blow Out Preventer leaning, which is why BP robots have been driving around with “inclometers”.
Today that is confirmed as I have recorded video footage of BP taking “bullseye” readings.
CNN, May 30, 2010:
The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
Houston Chronicle, June 21, 2010:
Money-saving measures BP took while designing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have dogged efforts to bring the massive oil spill under control.
Documents released by congressional investigators show that modifications to the well design BP made last year included a reduction in the thickness of a section of the casing — steel piping in the wellbore
The modification included a slight reduction in the specified thickness for the wall of a 16-inch-diameter section of pipe toward the bottom of the well, according to a May 14, 2009, document.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, commander of the response to the blowout and oil spill, has confirmed reports that concern about the strength of the casing led officials to stop efforts last month to plug the well from the top by injecting drilling mud and cement in a procedure called a top kill.
Another proposed spill control method, placing a blowout preventer on top of the one that failed in the original April 20 blowout, also was abandoned over concerns about well integrity. A blowout preventer is a system of shears and valves installed as a last line of defense against loss of well control.
[...]
Marvin Odum, president of Houston-based Shell Oil, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell, told the Houston Chronicle last week that the integrity of the well casing is a major concern. Odum and others from the industry regularly sit in on high-level meetings with BP and government officials about the spill.
If the well casing burst it could send oil and gas streaming through the strata to appear elsewhere on the sea floor, or create a crater underneath the wellhead - a device placed at the top of the well where the casing meets the seafloor - that would destabilize it and the blowout preventer.
The steel casing used in oil wells is strong, said Gene Beck, petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, but pressures deep in a well are powerful enough to split strong steel pipe or "crush it like a beer can."
[...]
[T]he longer the well flows uncontrolled the more likely it is that the well casing could be damaged or the blowout preventer damaged further. Sand and other debris that flows through the pipes at high velocity can wear through metal over time, said [Director of geoscience programs at the University of Houston Donald] Van Nieuwenhuise.
Mother Jones, quoting an anonymous comment at The Oil Drum, June 16, 2010:
"It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo."
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