While this isn’t our normal fare here at WUWT, I found it interesting and relevant, since WUWT covered the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling spill story early on here, with several follow ups. This story is a result of that spill. – Anthony
Guest post by WUWT moderator Mike Lorrey
US Department of Interior Inspector General Kendall is now investigating claims by seven members of the National Academy of Engineers that Interior falsified statements by them in order to support the Obama Administrations arguments for a moratorium on offshore oil drilling in the wake of the BP oil spill.
As you may recall, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was asked by President Obama for recommendations on new drilling safety recommendations. On May 27th, Obama announced a six month moratorium on offshore drilling based on Salazar’s report, the top recommendation of which was a moratorium on drilling.
The Department of the Interior later said it didn’t intend to imply that the experts had supported the moratorium. Oh dear, that must make it all better. After all, good intentions helped the hockey team get away with their climategate related actions.
Fortunately, the courts aren’t having any of this sort of argument. The engineers complaints are also a central part of the federal lawsuit against the moratorium, which to date, has gone badly for the Obama administration.
A Justice Department attorney, Brian Collins, argued in the case before Judge Martin Feldman that the government was justified in acting because the potential environmental and economic harm that would come from the risk of a second rig disaster would far outweigh the costs of the moratorium. Collins said a better question (versus the 10,000 oil drilling jobs at stake) is the tens of thousands of people whose livelihoods are harmed by the ongoing oil leak.
Feldman frequently interrupted attorneys Montero and Collins with questions about the “probity” of the record on which the Interior Department’s decision was based, the basis of the six-month time frame, and why steps aren’t taken to shut down other industries if there’s a horrible accident.
Indeed. By this sort of logic, the hockey team’s claims of catastrophic global warming justifies shutting down the entire global coal and oil industries no matter what the economic impact.
Now, claims of economic harm from the ongoing oil leak are difficult to assess. Primarily because those most impacted by the spill, for instance, shrimp fishermen and beach/vacation industry employees, are largely being employed by BP on a full time basis to clean up the oil mess, from skimming oil on the water to cleaning up tarballs on beaches. One would be hard pressed to say whether these people are working harder or not than they would have in an otherwise depressed economy, where family budgets for vacations and shrimp food products may be otherwise limited. Given the type of work, one might say they are earning more per hour doing this cleanup work than they would be doing their normal labor.
It is, however, far easier to assess damages when entire industries are shut down with no alternative employment during the interim. While the moratorium has been lifted by court order, the Obama administration continues to enforce it and is fighting it on appeal. Uncertainty due to this fight is creating a de facto moratorium as companies are loathe to risk capital drilling when they don’t know if they may be shut down from day to day in the political tug of war.
Similarly, uncertainty over cap and trade legislation has created similar uncertainty in the wider economy for businesses of all types, making them loathe to spend capital on business expansion, productivity improvements, and hiring, when they do not know from day to day whether they will need that capital to pay for carbon credits or other emissions mitigation efforts.
Now that Senator Reid has taken cap and trade off the schedule for the remainder of the term, we may see that business, in a sigh of relief, will open their purse strings to helping finally to capitalize a true economic recovery, not the fake recovery of earlier this year in the teachers and police union industries, as well as in the temporary census worker industry. They may hold off on this until after the elections deliver a significant loss of control in Congress, particularly if it leads to the removal of Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker with the GOP regaining a majority in the House.
Either way, on the Interior Department investigation, I suspect we will see a whitewash similar to recent climategate related inquiries.
Gail Combs,
The links you provided seem somewhat contradictory. Habeas Corpus has been upheld by the SCOTUS, but a lower Appeals Court had a different opinion, so the issue is in limbo for now.
That issue will be decided eventually. What is almost as disturbing is the UN’s typical Big Government position against the free market. From the link:
The UN is flat wrong. Zero tariffs benefit the citizens of the countries that eliminate tariffs, which are nothing but a protection racket for a special interest group at the direct expense of everyone else. Tariffs should be permanently and completely abolished.
In 1987 Harley-Davidson petitioned the ITC for termination of the tariff on imported motorcycles, and their sales skyrocketed. Harley’s management realized that when a company is coddled by protective tariffs, they become fat and lazy. They are no longer hungry. That hurts consumers, so clearly tariffs are against the public interest.
Now we have the ultimate special interest tariff laid on the American taxpayer: Obama’s takeover of Chrysler and General Motors. By an arbitrary decree Mr Obama replaced the CEO, and several members of the Board of Directors. These companies are being kept afloat with billions of taxpayer dollars which, despite the propaganda issuing from the NY Times and the Administration, will never be repaid. Never. When the inevitable extinction or downsizing through bankruptcy finally occurs, repayment of those $billions will be the first thing to be repudiated.
In the past we have seen the extinction of car companies like Nash, American Motors, Hudson, Fisher and many others. They went out of business because they could not adequately compete with more innovative, less expensive, higher quality competitors. That is Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” which benefits consumers. Its antithesis is government ownership and control of the means of production — and that never benefits the general public. It only benefits the government; the ultimate self-serving special interest.
It is clear that Oxfam [–> UN] is 100% in favor of tariffs, and is fiercely opposed to the consumer-friendly free market, which has kept prices so cheap in the U.S. That opposition is not surprising, coming from the bloated, protected and completely unaccountable UN kleptocrats who are living high off US taxpayers — while working directly against our best interests.
The arguments about the casing design may be true but the remaining fact is that the well has been sealed at the top and is holding pressure under current conditions.
The fact is the BOP failed to prevent the explosion and fire at the platform even though it is SOP and all other drilling companies say that their process is the same as the one BP used. The BOP failed and allowed a large bubble of high pressure methane to get through to the platform.
Tragically the platform sank killing 11 working stiffs . When it sank it broke the riser pipe above the BOP and that allowed oil and gas to escape from the well into the ocean.
From out here in Africa the xenophobic attacks on BP from the White House on down seemed completely out of proportion. Furthermore the unrestrained attack on “Big Business” by the White House seemed to be socialist political opportunism following the earlier nationalization of banks and auto manufacturers.
The characterization of BP as “Greedy and uncaring” is very shallow. All companies are made up of individuals who generally are trying to do their jobs in the best possible way after all these people chose their careers and I am certain they take great pride in their abilities. That goes all the way to the top and doubly so in high risk hi-tech operations where skill levels are high and well paid. Nobody wants to get it wrong, especially not deliberately .
These type of accidents happen from time to time. Aircraft crash, chemical plants gas towns, dams burst, ships sink and these events always lead to improvements in design and use as will be the case with this failure and as no doubt happened after the Brazilian offshore well failed.
I have worked in engineering all my adult life ( I am now 62 ) and failures happen without involving malevolence and/or greed. Some happen because of human inadequacies or because of as yet unrevealed modes of failure but to ascribe this to some BP “suit” choosing profit over safety and so over-riding strong technical advice is stretching credibility.
On the other hand I can see a group of “pols” sitting around deciding to “never let a good crisis go to waste” and using this as theater . The MSM love a tale like this because it just runs and runs in a form like sport only running over months. Choose your team and follow the action every day. The media coverage of the actual spill that we have seen out here doesn’t show much more than some dead pelicans and a couple of stretches of black beach and today the question seems to be “where has the oil gone?”.
The BOP failed , that’s the real problem because they are used on every underwater well in the world no matter who drills it. To me considering the immense engineering task , and the financial call paid entirely by BP, was done very fast and very effectively. The relief well was always going to be the absolute cure and that kill starts on August 2nd, ahead of projections and done totally without drama while the world watches.
The BOP failed.
“Keith Battye says:
July 27, 2010 at 9:59 am
…………………………… The BOP failed.”
I may be misunderstanding but are you implying that because there is an ultimate fallback, the BOP, then actions can be taken under legitimately the SOP that may result in need to use the BOP, with an assumption that the BOP will work. In this particular case had the BOP been suitably tested?
son of mulder says:
July 27, 2010 at 10:53 am
Sorry I may not have been clear.
What I am saying is that the well and casing are holding up even though the wellhead has been closed by an alternative to the BOP which indicates to me that the methods used to drill and line the well seem to be up to the task. The problem as I see it is that the BOP was overwhelmed by something coming up the well resulting in the sinking of the platform, the death of 11 men and the resultant outpouring of oil and gas into the Gulf.
I have not read the testing procedure for the BOP, nor if it was followed .
The inability of the BOP to control the situation is the uppermost question in my mind and the BOP is used everywhere there is an underwater well. It is supposed to be the final backup in the chain and it didn’t work. That seems to be unrelated to anything else.
Perhaps it’s just a “hope and pray” thing in which case something better needs to be evolved. That’s what I am saying.
David: July 26, 2010 at 3:06 pm
They ground planes in some cases whilst investigating the cause of an accident. I don’t see why they cant do it for oil drilling.
They only ground aircraft during a preliminary accident investigation when the investigators suspect a systemic malfunction as the cause. In this case, the cause is known — it was human error, in the form of willful and knowing violations of established operating and safety procedures.
Keith Battye says:
July 27, 2010 at 11:10 am
son of mulder says:
July 27, 2010 at 10:53 am
Sorry I may not have been clear.
What I am saying is that the well and casing are holding up even though the wellhead has been closed by an alternative to the BOP which indicates to me that the methods used to drill and line the well seem to be up to the task. The problem as I see it is that the BOP was overwhelmed by something coming up the well resulting in the sinking of the platform, the death of 11 men and the resultant outpouring of oil and gas into the Gulf.`
Yes, the BOP failed, but in drilling operations, you really never want to depend on the BOP. you want to have control of the well with the combination of casing strings and fluid in the hole.
So the latest cap`s ability to contain the pressure indicates that the wellhead and outside string(s) of casing are competent. The fact that there was a blowout indicates that the last casing string and cement job failed somehow. If BP just ran a fifth of the centralizers that were recommended by Halliburton, and didn`t lock down the last casing string securely, or bring it high enough into the pre-existing casing, a high-pressure zone could force a way up into the well, causing the blowout. Thankfully, the previously cemented strings of casing have held.
Returning to the original post about the misrepresentation of engineering reports by the Interior Secretariat, it seems that the Administration is determined to enact a moratorium, no matter what. The safety recommendations in the report including more BOP redundancy and inspections before deployment should be enough to prevent a similar disaster. To require every deepwater drilling operation to comply as soon as it was safe to install them would have been enough.
That a disaster occurs tends to concentrate the mind and make others super safety conscious is a normal thing.
It seems that the Secretary of the Interior thinks deepwater drilling is something that is inherently unsafe, while this is the first serious blowout in quite some time.
Flask: July 27, 2010 at 2:58 pm
It seems that the Secretary of the Interior thinks deepwater drilling is something that is inherently unsafe, while this is the first serious blowout in quite some time.
He’s just advancing the agenda, and the agenda is “No more drilling in the US — anywhere.”
If you want to see a greenie turn bright red, ask him how that fits in with “Reducing our dependence on *foreign* oil.”
The only thing more variable than the weather is politics.
PS: And politics has ‘climate’ too;-)