Drill, Baby, Drill!

There is a widely circulated new analysis of the Gulf spill that was posted on The Oil Drum recently, which claims that the true extent of the catastrophe is much greater than either BP and the government are, even now, letting on.

The post lays out a fairly convincing argument that the problems within the well go far beyond what we can see on the deep sea video-in other words, that the oil spewing from the wellhead is not the whole story.

The poster, who identifies himself as an expert in domestic energy business, claims that everything that we know about the leak points to a catastrophic sub-seafloor failure of the well pipe, and that it is now leaking at around 1000 feet below the seafloor. This leak will grow worse and worse, until it results in an unrestricted flow of oil from the reservoir below. And to make matters worse, if the relief well that is currently being drilled doesn’t reach the well pipe before it disintegrates, it will be useless and we will be out of options to stop it. And at this point, we could be looking at releases of 150,000 barrels per day.

At this point, the entire capacity of the underlying Macondo prospect will flow unrestricted into the Gulf of Mexico.

Does this sound scary? It should. The Macondo reserve holds an estimated 50 million barrels of crude oil. This is 2.1 billion gallons of crude. To put that in perspective, this is 200 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. It is an unimaginable figure, and would cause an environmental disaster of unimaginable proportions.

The post claims that it is probably too late to prevent this from happening. I don’t know if that is true or not. I hope it’s not. But so far, everything that BP and the government has told us has been either a lie, or frighteningly wrong. There is absolutely no reason to believe anything they say regarding what’s actually happening down there. And so we have to assume that there is a good chance that the doomsday scenario will happen-that the entire 50 million barrel reserve is going to end up in the Gulf and eventually spread to all four corners of the earth.

What is BP doing about this possibility? Nothing. The spill response plan that BP was required by law to have ready at all times was useless, a generalized plan written by a contractor that had references to saving walruses and proved to be completely inadequate for the current spill, and will be even more so if this entire well does, in fact, fail.

We are told that they are drilling a relief well, and have been told that this is guaranteed to work. But now, unsurprisingly, we are learning that there is a good chance that it will not work, even if the well does not fail. What then?

I think that there is one other thing that we could do which would mitigate the disaster. It would be expensive, and that’s probably why I haven’t heard BP make a peep about it. In fact, I haven’t heard this suggestion anywhere, but I’m going to make it anyways: It’s time to start drilling multiple wells into this reserve. By this I don’t mean a relief well, because these won’t work in case of complete failure. I mean separate wells.

If this gusher cannot be stopped, we can either get the oil out in a relatively safe manner, or it can get itself out. Every barrel that we can get out through a well is a barrel that won’t be escaping into the sea. We don’t need one well, or two, but as many as we can possibly drill, in as short a time as possible. And we should start drilling them now, because they will take a long time to complete.

BP, of course, doesn’t want to contemplate this. Deep sea wells are extremely expensive to drill. Multiple wells make no economic sense in normal times, because there is a fixed amount of oil in a reserve, and there is no hurry in getting it out.

But these are not normal times. Every single day tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of barrels of poison are escaping from that reserve. We are in a huge fucking hurry.

Will this be expensive? Of course. We may drill these wells almost to completion only to find that the original well has not deteriorated further, and we may decide at that point that we only risk making the problem worse by tapping the reserve with the same well technology that just recently failed so spectacularly.

But if this well fails completely, then we are going to need these wells. It won’t matter if they fail, anyway. And it will be far to late to drill them at that point.

BP will scream bloody murder, of course. But if they refuse, the United States government should nationalize them, and make them drill. There is plenty of precedent for doing this in the face of threats to the national security, and there can be no doubt that this is exactly such a threat.

Empty promises from BP to pay for the cleanup instead are unacceptable. There is a great likelihood that BP doesn’t have enough money to pay for the damage already done, and that’s assuming that you can even put a price on what’s happened. And I don’t believe that you can.

It’s past time for us to assume the worst. We can no longer trust BP when they say they have a plan, or when the government says it’s on top of things.We can no longer allow BP to base its response to this disaster on its own financial interests. It’s time to act.

The Terrible True Cost Of Oil (That BP Doesn't Want You To See)

Notes from the BP hearing:

"(BP President Lamar) McKay, did, however, issue a plea for forbearance from Congressional and executive branch officials, saying: “America’s economy, security and standard of living today significantly depend upon domestic oil and gas production. Reducing our energy production, absent a concurrent reduction in consumption, would shift additional jobs and dollars offshore and place millions of additional barrels per day into tanker ships that must traverse the world’s oceans.”

As detestable as BP is, McKay is right about this. We absolutely must reduce our consumption of oil. And the reasons for this go far beyond those which McKay listed. Our out-of-control use of oil is the reason we are currently engaged in two wars, which are killing hundreds of thousands and costing the United States trillions. It is the reason we suffer from air pollution that kills thousands each year, and sickens many more. It is one of the reasons we are facing global climate change.

And today, it is the reason that a huge part of the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico is dying, that thousands of fisherman and shrimpers have lost their livelihoods, and that millions more who rely on a clean ocean will pay a fearsome price.

But what McKay didn't say is that one of the main reasons Americans do not reduce their consumption is because he and the rest of his industry do everything in their power to keep Americans hooked on oil. And the way that they do that is by using Congress to hide the true costs of oil consumption.

When we buy gas at the pump, we pay only the cost of producing and delivering that gas, plus a little extra in taxes to maintain roads. The people who use gas don't directly pay the costs of trillion dollar wars, or pollution, or climate change, or of the devastation in the Gulf.

But those costs are real. The true cost of a gallon of gasoline is probably somewhere around $15. We all know there is no such thing as a free lunch. So who pays?

You do.

You pay in taxes to support imperialistic wars needed to secure large supplies of oil for our addicted population.

You pay every time you take a breath of polluted air.

You pay every time a landfill overflows with petroleum based plastics.

You pay every when production catastrophes result in a virtual destruction of large parts of our country.

And you pay for this even while the oil companies make hundreds of billions of dollars, while passing off the hidden costs to you.

We must reduce our use of oil. But we will never be able to do this as long as the oil industry pays off Congress to require us to pay the hidden costs of oil. These hidden costs make our alternatives to oil seem more expensive, even though they are not. And until we are able to see the true cost of our oil use, we will not kick the habit.

Maybe the silver lining in this disaster is that people will finally begin to see just how terrible is the price we pay.

Excusing Obama

BP, Deepwater, Obama, Salazar

Debcoop at Open Left has a new post up trying to make sure everyone knows that Republicans are to blame for the oil spill, and not Obama.

The NY Times thinks that President Obama has not responded aggressively enough to this spill. Let's be clear:

No way is this oil spill Barack Obama's fault.

Seriously? As Paul Rosenberg points out (also in a post on Open Left!), Obama appointed an Interior Secretary (Ken Salazar) with deep ties to the oil industry. Salazar was confirmed in January of 2009. The BP permit for the Deep Horizon well was approved 3 months later in April, with zero meaningful oversight.

Since then, 26 additional well permits have been handed out in exactly the same way, by the exact same Interior Secretary. As Rosenberg says, these permits were simply rubber stamped, and the oil companies were allowed to simply assert that there would be no environmental impact. (Read Rosenberg's post if you want to get a good idea of what the Interior Department does to make sure disasters like the BP catastrophe don't happen.)

Now, you may argue that we can't expect the president to know all of the intricacies of deep sea drilling, and that it is true. But you simply cannot excuse him for appointing an Interior Secretary with the record that Ken Salazar has.  

And in case you think he just didn't know any better, just last month Obama approved a massive expansion of offshore drilling, which would have been done using the exact same regulatory process, by the exact same department-a process that could best be described as simply signing whatever drilling applications the oil corporations filled out, and then going back to sleep.

This is not some case of Obama making the passive and innocent mistake of not realizing that the Secretary of the Interior was in charge of regulating activity that could (and did) result in a massive environmental catastrophe. No, this is worse. Obama actively planned to allow a huge expansion of this activity, and he either did not bother to look into the risks of such activity, or did look into it and saw nothing or didn't care. And we know this because his administration has continued to issue rubber stamp permits, just like the one that BP got, even after the BP explosion!

None of these explanations are acceptable, nor the actions excusable. They are precisely the kind of thing that we would be (rightly) excoriating Bush/Cheney for, and yet here is DebCoop, on Open Left of all places, excusing this behavior.

This is exactly the kind of sycophantic drivel one would expect to find on the pages of the White House web site or some Democratic Party hack's blog, and yet it is making it's way onto the pages of OpenLeft.com.

The fault lies with the ideology and mores of the Republican party and its theory of government.

Which are, it is becoming painfully obvious, no different from the ideology and mores of President Obama.

Their solution to this country's energy's future is to drill anywhere and everywhere.

This might be more relevant to your case if Obama had not- just last month!- approved a plan to pretty much just drill anywhere and everywhere.

Is Government The Problem?

Have you heard about the big oil leak off of the coast of Louisiana? The one that is threatening to destroy what's left of the wetlands that are the only barrier between a major American city and the ocean? The same wetlands that oil companies have been destroying for years by building pipelines and canals through?

Well, it turns out that the oil companies were warned repeatedly about the possibility that precisely what happened would, well, happen.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.

The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and collecting royalties from it, never took steps to address the issue comprehensively, relying instead on industry assurances that it was on top of the problem, a review of documents shows.

Anyone who paid any attention to the Bush administration's attitude towards regulation during the last decade would hardly be surprised. That attitude could be summed up as: "There will be no regulation."

In the intervening years, numerous blowout preventers and their control systems have failed, though none as catastrophically as those on the well the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was preparing when it blew up on April 20, leaving tens of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico

Agency records show that from 2001 to 2007, there were 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations, leading to 41 deaths, 302 injuries and 356 oil spills. Yet the federal agency continues to allow the industry largely to police itself, saying that the best technical experts work for industry, not for the government.

This is how adversarial relationships work, you see.

When the government charges you with a crime, if you hire a lawyer who is smarter than the prosecutor, the government just lets your defense lawyer write the prosecution's case.

In tournament chess, the player with the most experience gets to make his opponent's move as well as his own.

Hell, I don't understand why bank robbers aren't allowed to write the laws on bank robbery, since they arguably know more about the subject than anyone.

(Actually, the banks do write the laws governing banking, and that's pretty much the same thing.)

The free-market fraudsters, of course, want you to believe that regulation by government is bad because they'll just fuck it up. And they'll use this case as evidence, because in this case, they did fuck it up.

But what they won't tell you is that they fucked it up because the free-market fraudsters told them to.

They ran the government almost singlehandedly for eight years. Their goal was to let corporate interests do whatever the hell they wanted to, and to hand them money for doing nothing whenever possible. And they succeeded.

Are you an investment bank that wants to gamble in an unregulated derivatives market with a notional value equal to 40 times the size of the entire US economy? Go right ahead, and we'll bail you out with taxpayer money when you implode.

Are you an international drug company that feels like marketing dangerous pharmaceuticals to people who don't need them? We'll slap you on the wrist and send you back out to kill again.

Are you a defense contractor who's tired of having someone in the government making sure you're not ripping off the Pentagon? We'll just tell those in charge of watching to close their eyes.

Are you an oil company that doesn't want to spend a few more bucks on safety equipment to prevent catastrophic environmental disasters that will affect millions of average Americans? We'll just tell the inspectors to defer to your best judgement, as though you actually have the welfare of the American people in mind when you despoil their land.

Over and over again, you will hear that government is incompetent and can't do anything right.

But here's the thing. People don't suddenly get stupid when they work for the government. The government invented the atomic bomb. It predicts the weather. It built the interstate highway system. It put a man on the fucking moon 40 years ago, using a computer that probably had less power than your $30 mp3 player. It sure as hell can figure out when BP is blowing smoke up its ass, if its told to do so!

And that's the thing. It has been told not to figure that out, over and over again. Regulators have been told not to regulate derivatives, so they did not. Regulators were told not to pay attention to the billions and billions of dollars of Iraqi reconstruction funds that were handed out to Halliburton on pallets of cash for work that was never done, so they did not. The Department of the Interior was told not to argue with BP about whether they were doing enough to prevent this kind of disaster, so it did not.

And now we have one more disaster on our hands; one more in a long line of disasters that could have been prevented by government, but were not because the free-market fraudsters and their paid-for politicians made sure that government would not be allowed to interfere in the making of money, unless they were just going to be handing more of it out.

The sad thing is that this has been a long time coming. It's not just the Bush administration; it started with Reagan's bullshit line that government was the problem, and continued through Bush I and Clinton, and then was accelerated in a frenzied looting of the American public during the eight long years of Bush II. And Obama doesn't seem to even know where to begin to fix it, and I have no idea if he even wants to.

But after a 30-year long evisceration of government's ability to govern, there really isn't much left there institutionally. The free-marketers would have you believe that government is bigger than ever, but it's not. It spends more than ever, but instead of using that money to actually do things, it just hands it over to corporations and tells them to do whatever they want with it.

It's going to be a big challenge to get the regulatory arm of government rebuilt. It will take time, and it will take money. Rich people who run oil companies will have to pay more in taxes. But it must be done, and the sooner we start on it, the better.