BP Oil Leak May Last Until Christmas in Worst Case Scenario

BP Oil Leak May Last Until Christmas in Worst Case Scenario

www.businessweek.com

June 2 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc’s failure since April to plug a Gulf of Mexico oil leak have prompted forecasts the crude may continue gushing into December in what President Barack Obama has called the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts.

“The worst-case scenario is Christmas time,” Dan Pickering, the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pick

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
rawstory.com
dailypaul.com

Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Gulf spill: is the methane a bigger problem than the oil?

Physics professor Michio Kaku has some bad news. Oil could continue to gush from the leaking BP deepwater well for years

patrickhenrypress.info...

[edit on 2-6-2010 by apacheman]

I never had much faith in BP's attempts to fix this. The relief wells are another thing that's never been tried at this depth, and it's become glaringly obvious that BP was working literally out of its depth.

The technology simply doesn't exist to safely work these depths. In all the time since the Ixtoc blowout, not one advance has been made in how to deal with them. Everything they've tried is exactly the same as what was done then, with nearly exactly the same results.

Christmas will be just another buy-more-time bs horizon after the relief wells fail.

Wanna bet?

And still nothing about the bigger component of the spill:

the methane.

www.businessweek.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University.

So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results, said Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

www.businessweek.com...

That's using the current conservative estimates of the flowrate. If the flow rate is on the order of of the 70,000-84,000 bbls/day as some estimate, that total could easily be three times that amount, and still they aren't including the methane.

reply to post by apacheman


We can only hope that December is the worst case scenario. The fact that they (BP) was responsible for the botched initial cleanup in the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, does not lend much assurance to me that they will do any better with this one.

www.cbsnews.com...

[edit on 2-6-2010 by manta78]

JEsus good lord!!! until christmas? man...who did BP amocco employee, grown ups with the mentality of 9 year olds? god do i feel for the states and residents in the gulf down thier im speechless...all this technology, cell phones, satellites, launching nuclear weapons at eachother with near preicse tartgeting....and they cannot plug a well hole*
I, and others here on ATS had some crude but descent ideas on how to plug this hole. Think maybe BP amocco or the government would at leat listen too our oil well plugging proposals?

By christmas, the oil, if thiers that much coming up from the well, prob will have gotten into the gulf stream via the jet stream, the currents, and end up near iceland/northwestern europe, right on thier shores

This is terrible. It feels like the world is being destroyed and no ones doing anything. Anyone in charge of this who would call them self an intellectual should be ashamed.

[edit on 2-6-2010 by psilocybernaught]

And now we have:

"Saw Gets Stuck In Riser Pipe"

www.wkrg.com...

This is a major mess! The Goverment say's it needs BP to do it because the gov doe's not have the people who can????? BS!!! The gov can get the bigest and best in the world if they want, What the hell is the problem? There is a bigger issue here! BP Bigger than the US goverment? Doe's BP really talk with the US goverment? who is in charge? Makes you wonder, I think BP want's what is in the oil reserve so that is why they are drilling the other 2 drill holes, what untill the leak has stopped, BP will be no were to be found and we will be stuck with the mess, pollution, death, what next? the gulf will be poisend for years to come.
ET Please help!

This is just so sad, I really feel for the fisherman and all who are affected id the gulf

Seems like we all have the same metality here. MY snd thought was, thier goes the fishing industry as we know it.... toxins in crude will posion fish, much like the Valdeez spill. 18 years later, a documentary i saw recetly came out in 2007 about the coasts of alaska to date* thier still finding fish tainted or in fact, contaminated with toxins..their technically unsafe to eat, unless you dont mind becoming cancer infected latert in life.
it was all due lack of maintenance, jsut as the alaskan oil line. when it was built, and they had government interest and funds, it was well kept. after years, the government started cutting back its funding, its maintenance* as a result, leaks to date, sprout up time to time.
big business, government and the oil industry all they care about is money. the could care less if we get sick from what theyve made* another reason not to endorse bio technolgy* they literally get away with muder* all in the name of capitalism

they had better not have the balls, to rasie the cost of fuel either* for many many years. Its going up again, as it does every summer. I thinkwe shuold be exempt form paying higher fuel costs, because bp amocco and exxon havea terrible maintenance schedule and record. they made the mess why should we pay for it?

A Dutch company's idea to end the leak in a few days:

A. Find a suitable ship or pontoon of considerable size with (an) open compartment(s), flatten its top and turn it upside down before sinking it.

B. Make a hole in the bottom and weld a horizontal pipe on it.

C. Make a shut-off at the pipe that can be controlled from the surface.

D. Connect a hose to the shut-off with a total length of about 1700 m, which is sufficient to reach the tanker on the surface.

E. Connect the end of the pipe to the oil-tanker.

F. Dump the upside down ship or pontoon over the leaking oil wells.

www.zerohedge.com...

Seems to me to suffer mainly from the lack of any ability to control where the ship lands when you sink it.

Perhaps if anchors with pulleys were sunk in the seafloor first, a large containment vessel could be pulled down precisely where you need it.

Ha. It'll all be over by christmas!

where have we heard that one before?

Pretty sure I could fix it by December.

They really don't want to fix it yet do they? I think the elite want the stock to drop as low as possible before they buy up all remaining shares of the world's 5th most profitable company for pennies on the dollar. BP raked in 21.16 billion dollars last year. If and when war in Iran strikes guess who and which company will benefit the most?

Physics professor Michio Kaku has some bad news. Oil could continue to gush from the leaking BP deepwater well for years.

After six methods for stopping the leak failed, BP is now trying a seventh method: "cut and cap." Underwater robots are attempting to cut the pipe connected to the blowout preventer. BP wants a diamond wire cutter to leave a smooth surface on the pipe cut. Depending on how well the cut is made, either a "top hat" or "top cap" will be lowered from the surface which will transport the spewing oil to a drilling ship.

The "cut and cap" method has several drawbacks. A perfect seal is thought to be almost impossible and some amount of oil will continue to leak into the Gulf. And the cap will have to be completely removed during inclement weather. Hurricane season started June 1 and it's expected to be the worst year since 2005.

If this seventh attempt fails, the next option will be to wait on one of two relief wells to intercept and block the original well. This is considered the best hope for permanently stopping the flow. Those wells won't be in place until August at the soonest. Some predict that it could take until Christmas.

But Kaku thinks that even those predictions could be too optimistic.

"You would have to win the lottery to get on the first try an exact, an exact meeting at the bottom of the well in order to pump cement to shut it off," Kaku told NBC's Matt Lauer Wednesday.

If the attempt fails, the drill will be reversed, the hole will be filled with cement and they will try again.

"You have to do this over and over again until you get it just right. It takes many tries. So August is optimistic," said Kaku.

"So this could be spewing oil for months. Could it last for a year?" asked Lauer.

"It could last for years, plural. Okay? If everything fails and all these different kinds of relief wells don't work, it could be spewing stuff into the Gulf until we have dead zones, entire dead zones in the Gulf. For years," Kaku explained.

patrickhenrypress.info...







Stupid pinda-lick-o-ye!

edit to add:



[edit on 2-6-2010 by apacheman]

That is sad news if it turns out to be the case.

I never thought i'd say a quote from a Steven Segal film would be fitting in a thread here on ATS, but after hearing this tonight from one of his older movies, i felt it fitted just fine here...



He would have done well in the premonition section.

CX.

I just know that Michio Kaku is going to be correct about this. BP have cried wolf too many times now since this all started, so when they set a deadline you better believe it won't happen.

When the Gulf ends up with massive dead zones and oil is on the shores of other nations, I hope the furore is epic enough to put a halt to our reliance on fossil fuels once and for all, or we will will inevitably end up with more of the same spills like this one.

:shk:

Worst case scenario? Really?

December might mean we were lucky. This could go one for a year or more!!!

Read, people. Read.

The REAL worse case scenario is beyond imagining...

reply to post by CX


Good analogy.
Thanks for posting that trailer.

So they say erosion of the pipe is a factor because of the debris coming up with such force and volume.
How much of the well will be left by November?
If the casing fails before they manage to tap the relief well/s will they even be able to stop the flow?
So much high pressure methane is going to complicate any concrete mix pumped in enormously and lack of a well casing may make a seal impossible.
Finally with a media brown out cutting information no more has been said about possible cracks in the sea floor which may have opened due to this event.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
No new info on an situation but since the gulf is a sieve slowly leaking oil the possibility the blow out fractured the casing and is bleeding into surrounding strata is not out of question.
I believe we are being lied to about the true nature of the event ,the unprecedented media manipulation should be a clue the truth is more than they want known and it must be bad to go to these lengths.
N.