Titans of Industry category archive

Even if the cap holds, it isn’t over.

One water sample blew up when tested for the spawn of Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well.

Story here.

Via the Booman.

The world’s mine oyster, which I shall ope with my swo–oops:

Surveys of coastal oyster grounds have discovered extensive deaths of the shellfish, further threatening an industry already in free-fall because of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The deaths are blamed on the opening of release valves on the Mississippi River in an attempt to use fresh water to flush oil out to sea. Giant diversion structures at Caernarvon and Davis Pond have been running since April 25 on the orders of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and local officials with the consent of the Army Corps of Engineers.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting on a gas blowout in the Marcellus shale foundation:

John Hanger, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), sharply rebuked EOG Resources Inc. for failing to maintain control of the Clearfield County well, which erupted June 3 and spewed natural gas and toxic wastewater for 16 hours before it could be capped.

Hanger said that EOG had employed only one mechanism to keep the high-pressure gas well under control and that that measure had failed at the hands of employees who were not certified in well-control techniques.

He also said EOG, which is based in Houston, wasted valuable hours by failing to promptly notify officials about the blowout.

Rather than calling DEP’s 24-hour emergency line, the driller left three phone messages at night with a DEP employee who was on vacation. Then, the Texans twice tried calling the county sheriff, who in Pennsylvania is not responsible for emergency response. Finally, three hours after the blowout, EOG called 911.

Of course, if there were no government regulation, the blowout would never have happened. Read the whole story for other things that would never have happened: spills, blowouts, polluted water, and so on.

Also, pigs, wings.

Dean Baker in the Guardian. The whole thing is worth the five minutes it takes to read:

While BP has taken some heat over its spill in the Gulf, it is remarkable how limited the anger actually is. Many defenders of the company have made the obvious point: it was an accident. BP did not intend to have a massive spill that killed 11 people, devastated the Gulf ecosystem and threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers.

Of course this is true, but it is also true that a drunk driver who runs into a school bus did not intend to be involved in a fatal collision. As a society, we have no problem holding the drunk driver responsible for a predictable outcome of their recklessness. Driving while drunk dramatically increases the risk of an accident. This is why it is punished severely. A person who is responsible for a fatal accident while driving drunk can expect to face many years in jail. Even someone who drives drunk without being in an accident often faces jail time because of the risk they imposed on others.

It would be a stretch to refer to Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well as an “innocent mistake,” given the corners they cut, the chances they took, and the false paperwork they filed.

Also, stuff that can’t be called an accident.

No accountability for the no account.

Facing South takes a look at Buccaneer Petroleum’s policy of glastnost.

Check it out.

Buccaneer Petroleum invades Lake Ponchartrain, seeks revenge for Battle of New Orleans:

John Lopez, director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation’s coastal stainability program, spotted the first tar balls in the Rigolets Pass on Sunday. By Monday, the blobs of oil had washed ashore as far west as Treasure Isle in Slidell.

Alex Beam in the Boston Globe pens a note to Buccaneer Petroleum. A nugget:

The next best thing to caring is advertising that you care.

Thank heavens no one remembers that you were once the British Persian Oil Company, a colonial oligopoly probably more responsible for the ongoing bloodbath in Central Asia than any other business or government in history. But why dwell on the negative, especially now?

Your critics temporarily hold the upper hand — the “little people,’’ the media sermonizers, the pusillanimous politicians who were hectoring you for handouts just a few months ago. This, too, shall pass. Like Americans everywhere, they need their overpowered cars, their grandiose, climate-controlled McMansions, and their scalding hot showers every day. A year from now, they’ll be begging you to drill more, deeper, farther from shore.

Windmills? How charming. Good for grinding flour, less useful for powering the most wasteful economy in the history of mankind.

Gallows humor keeps us from tears.

BBC:

Detailed simulations of the Gulf of Mexico oil leak show that crude is likely to start spreading into the Atlantic Ocean soon.

Once oil becomes caught in the Gulf of Mexico’s fast moving Loop Current, it could be carried thousands of miles, around Florida, up the Atlantic coast of the US, and then out into the open ocean.

An animation by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) suggests that concentrations of oil in the water south of Florida will start to become detectable around 70 to 90 days after a leak starts. The Deepwater Horizon rig sank on the 22nd April.

Animated map at the link.

Mudflats has more wild well pictures, even while reminding us that BP is going all out to prevent news coverage. Buccaneer Petroleum knows that out of sight is out of mind with much of the American public.

The U. S. Department of the Interior has fined BP over five million dollars for underpaying an Indian Tribe its royalty payments.

It’s unclear whether this resulted from incompetence or intent. With BP it can be difficult to tell. (BP blames a computer problem).

More BP foolishness here.

The St. Petersburg Times photoblogs the desecration of Pensacola.

Via True Blue Texan.

MarketWatch compares the effects Katrina and Buccaneer Petroleum. Katrina comes off looking pretty good. As you watch it, remember that MarketWatch is part of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. The focus on dollars, rather than on nature or any sort of holistic take on things, is simply how they see the world. In the Wall Street World, dollars are the wholistic take.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Fresh Air interviewed Henry Fortune, a science reporter for the New York Times. Here’s part of the description of the interview:

Science reporter Henry Fountain has been covering the environmental disaster for The New York Times. In an interview with Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, Fountain explains how deep-water drilling works thousands of feet below sea level and what may have gone wrong on the Deepwater Horizon.

More than anything else I have read or heard, this interview got into the nuts-and-bolts of what actually goes on on drilling platforms, how they work, and their day-to-day operations. Follow the link to listen or to read highlights from the transcript.

My title is a little misleading. Comparing the investigation of Deepwater Horizon with the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger, Mr. Fortune suspects that it will be at least six months before there is a sound theory of what actually happened and a couple of years before preventive action is possible.

From an update on BP’s wild well at Facing South:

BP has tried to stop the oil assault with boom, the now-infamous tubes of absorbent material laid along the coast.

But the boom has proved no match for the steady stream of spilled oil flowing to the shore. In the Barataria Bay where Facing South explored, much of the boom had fallen apart or drifted away.

Even where the has flimsy boom has survived the battering of ocean waves and weather, ocean surges easily push the oil over the small protective barriers — allowing oil to drench coastal land, and trapping it there to cause further damage.

Also, what Brendan said.

Via Seeing the Forest.

Addendum:

Skepticism.

Michael Klare, writing in the Asia Times, points out that one of the contributors to BP’s wild well was searching for oil in more difficult–they say “extreme”–locations. He goes so far as to call it an “inevitable result,” which I find rather a stretch.

It was certainly an inevitable result when drilling in an extreme location is compounded by cutting corners on safety, failing to install back-up equipment, and ignoring warnings.

When recklessness mates with incompetence, inevitability is the offspring.

To illustrate his points, the writer posits four hypothetical locations for the next failure; they are not science fiction, though they read like it. Follow the link for the very detailed explanation:

Aside: Field had a post about the situation in Nigeria a couple of days ago.

How to apologize to BP.

Via Seeing the Forest.

Mudflats has a report from Professor Rick Steiner, a marine conservation biologist who has been advising on dealing with BP’s wild well.

Read it. If nothing else, you will find it refreshing to hear from someone who is qualified to pundificate on this.

Michael Tomasky reports, in the Guardian, that Exxon still hasn’t finished paying off claims from the Exxon Valdez. A nugget:

. . . O’Neill says that his clients are still awaiting their late installments, 21 years on.

Do you really want that to happen to the people of the gulf? The Republican Party functionally does. They wouldn’t say it that way, . . . .

Addendum:

Jay Bookman in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

But the evidence is strong that overall, Barton’s sentiment permeates the conservative movement, from pundits to politicians. That deference to corporate power is the default position. Even in a catastrophe, this is where their first loyalty lies. The instinct that in this case has driven conservatives to defend BP is the same instinct that has driven Shelby and others to defend Wall Street and the banks in the economic collapse.

In fact, the parallels between the Gulf tragedy and Wall Street’s meltdown are manifold. The conditions that created one disaster created the other as well. In both cases, government regulators were declawed and seduced, greed-driven executives were freed to take big risks, industry hubris created a false sense of confidence and a disaster that we were assured could never happen did indeed happen.</blockquote>

June 21, 2010 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Titans of Industry | Bookmark this post