Massive Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill

[Admiral Valdemar]

How do we get oil?

[Temujin]

And the disaster continues!

BP reverts to deep dispersants, preps new cap
Chemicals sprayed mile below; smaller containment chamber in works
NBC News and news services
updated 2:39 p.m. ET, Mon., May 10, 2010

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO - BP on Monday resumed injecting dispersants into the gusher a mile below the Gulf of Mexico, as it weighed its next steps. Ideas include "top hats" and "junk shots" to try to contain the spewing crude.

BP PLC spokesman Mark Proegler said the company received Environmental Protection Agency approval and began pumping dispersant on the site starting at 4:30 a.m. Monday. The company plans to continue spraying and taking tests.

Sprayed by a remote-controlled submarine, the dispersants had never been tried at such depths before this spill and officials have been worried about the effect on the environment.

Officials with BP have been encouraged by earlier underwater spraying, saying it prevents some of the oil from reaching the surface.

Engineers at BP were also wrestling with a shopping list of ways to plug the well or siphon off the spewing crude, including a five-foot-tall containment box, dubbed a top hat, and injecting debris including shredded rubber into the well as a stopper, called a junk shot.

"The issue is how to keep some of the water out," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told NBC's "TODAY" show on Monday. The top hat, he said, "is a much smaller dome" than the failed chamber attempted over the weekend.

"And in addition it has the ability to inject methanol into the top of it, which should prevent the hydrates from forming," Suttles said, referring to the icelike crystals that formed on the larger chamber, blocking the oil from being siphoned up.

Asked if BP was operating without a playbook in looking for options, Suttles said that "there's a lot of techniques available to us. The challenge with all of them is, as you said, they haven't been done in 5,000 feet of water."

The top hat strategy, BP CEO Tony Hayward told reporters later Monday, should be ready for deployment by Thursday.

On Monday, BP said that the spill has cost it $350 million so far, suggesting the final bill could be much higher than many analysts predicted. In a statement, the firm said the sum referred to the cost of spill response, containment efforts, relief well drilling, payments to the Gulf Coast States to speed up their response plans, some compensation claims and federal costs.

The company's shares was lower again on Monday. The stock has lost 16 percent since the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire with the loss of 11 lives, wiping around $30 billion off BP's market value.

Big problem for BP

The cold, pitch-black depth of the seafloor is a formidable problem. That's where icy slush formed inside a a four-story container and foiled plans to funnel the oil to a surface tanker, which had been the best hope for containing the leak quickly while a drill rig spends up to three months boring a new well to shut down the old one permanently.

The engineers appear to be "trying anything people can think of" to stop the leak, said Ed Overton, a LSU professor of environmental studies.

On land, helicopters were dropping sandbags in Louisiana to guard against thick blobs of crude that began washing up on beaches as the well spills at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf.

On Sunday, in a waterfront yard in Port Fourchon, La., a tractor-trailer dumped a load of sand, which workers planned to pack into 5-cubic-yard bags. Once the bags are ready, the Army National Guard will airlift them on Monday to five spots along a four-mile stretch of coastline between Port Fourchon and the Jefferson Parish line, said Lafourche Parish compliance officer Robert Passman.

"We want to block it off to where the oil doesn't get into the marsh areas," said Passman. "What they're trying to do is just prevent. I know it's still east of here but they're just trying to do a little prevention."

Among plans under consideration for the gusher, BP is looking at cutting the riser pipe, which extends from the well, undersea and using larger piping to bring the gushing oil to a drill ship on the surface, a tactic considered difficult and less desirable because it will increase the flow of oil.

A junk shot would be followed by cement to seal the leak and the technique is something company officials said they might try next week. The smaller container, or top hat, could be tried first, around the middle of this week.

An estimated 3.5 million gallons of oil have spilled since an explosion on April 20 on the drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. At that pace, the spill would surpass the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster by next month.

Above the oil leak, waves of dark brown and black sludge crashed into the support ship Joe Griffin. The fumes there were so intense that a crew member and an AP photographer on board had to wear respirators while on deck.

Philip Johnson, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said cutting the riser pipe and slipping a larger pipe over the cut end could conceivably divert the flow of oil to the surface.

"That's a very tempting option," he said. "The risk is when you cut the pipe, the flow is going to increase. ... That's a scary option, but there's still a reasonable chance they could pull this off."

Johnson was less optimistic that a smaller containment box would be less susceptible to being clogged by icelike crystals.

"My suspicion is that it's likely to freeze up anyway," he said. "But I think they should be trying everything they can."

New sense of urgency

There was a renewed sense of urgency as dime- to golfball-sized balls of tar washed up Saturday on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than the thin, rainbow sheens that have arrived sporadically in the Louisiana marshes. Until Saturday none of the thick sludge — those indelible images from the Valdez and other spills — had reached shore.

The containment box plan, never before tried at such depths, had been designed to siphon up to 85 percent of the leaking oil to a tanker at the surface. It had taken about two weeks to build it and three days to cart it 50 miles out and slowly lower it to the well.

Icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.

The blowout aboard the rig, which was being leased by BP, was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

Lane Zirlott, 32, a commercial fisherman from Irvington, Ala., said he's not frustrated about BP failing so far to cap the leak because he understands how difficult the job is.

"When they said they were going to put this little cap over this thing, I laughed and said there's no way," he said. "I said there's no way they're going to do that. And then sure enough, it didn't happen."

The Associated Press contributed to this report

They really don't have a clue on how to solve this; its all just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks at this point.

[Temujin]

Hopefully though, maybe they'll end up serving as an example to the rest of the industry; but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Despite clout, BP awaits tough questioning
Political connections unlikely to aid lobbying powerhouse during probe
The Associated Press
updated 1:40 p.m. ET, Mon., May 10, 2010

WASHINGTON - With millions of dollars invested in campaign donations and an all-star lobbying team, BP executives could give an advanced class in how to build influence in Washington. But with millions of gallons of leaking oil bearing down on Gulf Coast beaches and bayous, they could also teach how to lose it.

Even pro-oil Republicans — whose 2008 vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, made "Drill, Baby Drill!" a party rallying cry — are demanding answers. At least for the moment, it appears that whatever clout BP has accrued, the oil company is unlikely to get delicate handling from lawmakers investigating the oil rig disaster when oversight hearings begin this week on Capitol Hill.

"I'm sure it's not helpful," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., asked what impact the spill would have on BP's political influence. "This is a disaster of major proportions, and we need to get to the bottom of what happened."

BP-related campaign and lobbying spending makes the political outlays of Toyota, another major foreign-based company under investigation by Congress for its failings on safety issues, look feeble by comparison.

British-based BP, No. 4 on Fortune magazine's list of the world's largest companies, spent $16 million last year lobbying Congress and the federal government, and $3.5 million in the first three months of this year. That was before its rig disaster led at least a half-dozen congressional committees to start investigating. Japanese automaker Toyota, No. 10 in the Fortune ranking, spent $5 million lobbying last year and $880,000 in the first quarter this year.

BP employees donated at least $160,000 to congressional candidates and their parties so far this election cycle. When campaign donations from BP's lobbying corps of roughly three-dozen people and their firms' political action committees, or PACs, are added to BP employees' total, the political giving since January 2009 tops $1 million, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. The firms lobby for multiple clients, not just BP.

President Barack Obama's campaign was the top recipient of BP employees' money in the 2008 election: $71,000.

Asked about the donations, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said Obama "didn't accept a dime from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists."

"He raised $750 million from nearly 4 million Americans," LaBolt said. "And since he became president, he rolled back tax breaks and giveaways for the oil and gas industry, spearheaded a G-20 agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and made the largest investment in clean energy in American history."

In a reflection of the Obama administration's and BP's mutual interest in developing fuel alternatives to gasoline, Obama named Steven Koonin, BP's former chief scientist, the Energy Department's undersecretary for science.

The other top recipients of BP employee 2008 election-giving both sit on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, one of the panels investigating the spill. Obama's GOP presidential rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, received $37,000. And $16,000 went to a senator whose state is on the receiving end of much of the spilled oil, Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The oil and gas industry is a big employer in Louisiana. Landrieu supports offshore drilling and has repeatedly said rig fires are rare, a point she made at a committee hearing last November when Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., displayed a photo of a summer blaze on a rig off Australia's coast.

"The fact is, these things happen," Landrieu said at the time, estimating there are about 20,000 such rigs. "So, 19,999 were not on fire."

Landrieu doesn't believe BP-related campaign cash is any reason to step away from the committee's investigation, nor does she see any reason to give the money back, spokesman Aaron Saunders said, adding that she has called for a full investigation of the BP spill.

"I think her record speaks for itself," Saunders said. Landrieu met last week with BP Group chief executive Tony Hayward.

The percentage of BP employee-giving that goes to Democrats has inched up since they took control of Congress and the White House. It has gone from 30 percent Democrat and 70 percent Republican a decade ago to a split of about 40 percent Democrat/60 percent Republican in the last election and so far this election cycle.

All of BP's political spending, particularly on lobbyists, has given the oil company one thing it desperately needs — access to members of Congress to tell the story of the rig spill and response its way, and sophisticated navigators of Washington to help do it.

One Gulf senator and offshore drilling supporter, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has met at least twice with BP officials since the spill, once in his office in Washington and once in Mobile, Ala. Despite BP's problems, Sessions believes they are still listened to in Washington.

"For the most part, we have similar interests at this point. The American people, the national interest, and BP's interest in shutting off this well," Sessions said. "We don't have any differences on that part of the question."

BP is working with the Brunswick Group, an international communications and crisis management firm, to craft its public response to the spill.

Su-Lin Nichols, a Brunswick director, said Hayward was in Washington last Monday and Tuesday and Hayward "is in regular contact with officials in Washington to ensure close cooperation" on the spill response. Brunswick has teams in Washington, on the Gulf Coast and in London, where Brunswick and BP have corporate offices.

Brunswick's Washington office employs political and congressional veterans including Hilary Rosen, a former Democratic congressional aide and former head of the Recording Industry Association of America; Anthony Coley and David Sutphen, former aides to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.; and Michele Davis, a former Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush and GOP congressional aide.

BP's Washington lobbyists include well-connected people from both major parties, some of them visitors to the White House.

Lobbyist Tony Podesta is a prolific Democratic fundraiser and brother to John Podesta, who headed Obama's transition team. Tony Podesta appears at least seven times in visitor logs released by the Obama White House. Six of Podesta's visits were on behalf of clients, but he and his firm said none was BP-related. The other visit was to Vice President Joe Biden's residence for a dinner in honor of the Greek Orthodox Church patriarch.

The White House confirmed that BP lobbyists have been to the White House complex, but said only two visits were BP-related: Two of the oil company's in-house lobbyists, Karen St. John and Michael Brien, attended 2009 meetings on EPA standards, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB accepts all requests for meetings during the review of such regulations and discloses the meetings.

BP declined to talk about its lobbying efforts or comment on White House visits.

Other BP lobbyists from lobbying firms include Jim Turner, a former House Democrat from Texas now with the Arnold & Porter firm; Ken Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff under President Reagan whose lobbying firm employs several former top Democratic and Republican congressional aides; Michelle Laxalt, a Republican with ties to GOP lawmakers; and Michael Berman, president of the Duberstein firm and a former Democratic Senate aide and party adviser.

BP has many other Washington connections:

• - At least four lawmakers on committees investigating the spill reported family stock holdings in BP or two other companies involved in the rig disaster: Halliburton and Transocean, according to their most recent financial disclosure reports, filed last year.
  - Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., disclosed family stock holdings of up to $15,000 in BP and $65,000 to $150,000 in Transocean. Asked whether he would recuse himself from the investigation in light of that, press secretary Whitney Smith called the question "preposterous."
  - "Senator Kerry has been the Senate's best environmental champion for more than 25 years," Smith said. Kerry plans to unveil an energy and climate change bill on Wednesday.
  - A spokesman for Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., who has reported $16,000 to $65,000 in BP holdings, also brushed off questions about recusal.
  - "Fred has forcefully taken on BP in the past for polluting the Great Lakes region and is already is on record with strong comments that that it will be BP and not taxpayers who will be on the hook for the cost of the cleanup," spokesman Sean Bonyun said.
  - Spokespeople for two other members of investigating committees who reported holdings had no immediate comment. The most recent financial disclosures, filed last year, showed Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., with $15,000 to $50,000 in BP stock and Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., with $23,385 in BP stock and $13,202 in Transocean assets, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review.
  - BP has had several Washington insiders on a company advisory council, including former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who served on Obama's transition team on health care and was his original pick for health and human services secretary; former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman; former New Jersey governor and former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman; former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta; and former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo.
  - The company counts current and former employees on at least three federal advisory panels: NASA's Aerospace Advisory Panel, the National Petroleum Council, and the Energy Department's Unconventional Resources Technology Advisory Committee.
  - BP is a major federal government contractor and grant recipient. It has reaped at least $8.6 billion in federal contracts and millions of dollars in grants since budget year 2000, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan OMB Watch's FedSpending.org.
  - BP gave at least $50,000 to the Democratic Governors Association in 2009-10, figures compiled by the CQ Money Line campaign-finance tracking service show.
  - The company gave $10,000 to $25,000 to former President Bill Clinton's foundation, his donor list shows.
  - Tea party favorite and potential 2012 presidential candidate Sarah Palin's husband Todd has been an oil production operator for BP Alaska.
  - BP says it is spending $500 million over 10 years and working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others to support the Energy Biosciences Institute's development of biofuels.

Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management consultant in Washington not working with BP, said BP would lose clout in Washington, but only temporarily.

"When you're in the middle of these kind of things it seems like the end of the world, but good companies with good solid resources usually do recover," Dezenhall said.

Still, said Dezenhall: "They have to accept that nothing they do in the short term will be received well."

Even before the disaster, BP's activities put it at odds with government objectives on at least one issue: The U.S. goal of starving the Iranian government of the money it needs to develop nuclear weapons. BP has interests in and is the operator of two oilfields and a pipeline outside Iran in which the National Iranian Oil Co. and an affiliated entity have interests, BP disclosed in its 2009 annual report, adding that it complies with U.S. trade sanctions on Iran.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Its funny, in this thread an argument over corporate lobbying has diverged. I think this is a pretty good example of why it is a bad thing.

[Erik von Nein]

Oh, dispersants, where instead of being a disaster on the surface and on shores, it's instead a disaster for bottom-dwelling marine life! Well, guess it's gotta go somewhere.

[MKSheppard]

It's not like bottomdwellers at 12,500 feet are worth a damn.

[Temujin]

Oh, dispersants, where instead of being a disaster on the surface and on shores, it's instead a disaster for bottom-dwelling marine life! Well, guess it's gotta go somewhere.

In this case, it may be both considering the amount they're dumping and the relatively limited effect its having on the spill.

It's not like bottomdwellers at 12,500 feet are worth a damn.

The problem is they don't know just how bad this shit actually is, especially considering the unprecedented amounts its being used in. You have the potential of doing enough damage that you fuck up the whole food chain of the region; which is bad, m'kay.

[Erik von Nein]

It's not like bottomdwellers at 12,500 feet are worth a damn.

Yeah, whatever.

Hey, one flippant, irrelevant comment begets another. I'd explain the importance of their (and, you know, coral reef) existence, but you frankly don't care.

So, yeah. Whatever.

[MKSheppard]

I'd explain the importance of their (and, you know, coral reef) existence, but you frankly don't care.

Coral reefs occur in shallow water, along with the majority of marine life, due to you know, there being enough oxygen to support large amounts of life.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'd explain the importance of their (and, you know, coral reef) existence, but you frankly don't care.

Coral reefs occur in shallow water, along with the majority of marine life, due to you know, there being enough oxygen to support large amounts of life.

Deep water is used by a lot of commercially important organisms during different stages of their life cycle, as well as by organisms that commercially important organisms eat. Plus those compounds (bear in mind, we do not know what is in them because the composition is a trade secret) may get bound up in suspended sediments and taken up by organisms, or get moved out of deep water by currents. Mmmmm bioaccumulation.

In other words shep: Fuck off.

[Erik von Nein]

I'd explain the importance of their (and, you know, coral reef) existence, but you frankly don't care.

Coral reefs occur in shallow water, along with the majority of marine life, due to you know, there being enough oxygen to support large amounts of life.

Because deep-water corals, oxygen bands, and nutrient cycling don't exist.

[FSTargetDrone]

They all blame each other:

Oil spill testimony to Congress: Not our fault

By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 32 mins ago

WASHINGTON – BP PLC told Congress Tuesday its massive Gulf oil spill was caused by the failure of a key safety device made by another company.

In turn, that company said BP was in charge, and that a third company that poured concrete to plug the exploratory well didn't do it right. The third company, which was plugging the well in anticipation of future production, says it was only following BP's plan.

The blame game shot into the open Tuesday as the Senate began a hearing into the oil spill that has been contaminating water in the Gulf of Mexico for three weeks and threatens sensitive marshes and marine life from Louisiana to Florida.

Executives of the three companies, testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, acknowledged investigators have yet to pinpoint definitively the cause of the well explosion April 20 or why the oil was not contained, but they spent little time before trying to shift responsibility for the environmental crisis to each other.

In opening the hearing, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the committee's chairman, said the failures that led to explosion and spill need to be closely examined so new safety measures can be imposed.

"I don't believe it is enough to label this catastrophic failure an unpredictable and unforeseeable occurrence," said Bingaman, D-N.M.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the panel's ranking Republican, said the future of domestic oil development in this country rests with finding out what went wrong, correcting the failures and shortcomings and assuring the public offshore drilling can be conducted safely.

Murkowski and several other senators made clear they didn't like the finger pointing.

"I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together," she told the executives, who were sitting shoulder to shoulder at the witness table, "because this incident will have impact on developing of our energy policy for this country."

"I hear one message — don't blame me," said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. "Shifting the blame game doesn't get us very far."

The hearing, with a second one planned by another Senate committee later in the day, marked the first public questioning by members of Congress of executives of BP, which owned the exploratory well and was overall operator; Swiss-based Transocean Ltd., which owned the drilling rig and key well safety equipment, and Halliburton Inc., which worked on sealing the well for future oil production.

BP PLC focused on a critical safety device, the 450-ton blowout protector, that was supposed to shut off oil flow on the ocean floor in the event of a well blowout but "failed to operate."

"That was to be the fail-safe in case of an accident," Lamar McKay, chairman of BP America, pointedly noting that it did not own the rig and that "responsibility for the safety of drilling operations" belonged to Transocean.

Of the 126 people on the Deepwater Horizon rig when it was engulfed in flames, only seven were BP employees, he said.

But Transocean CEO Steven Newman emphasized BP's role.

"Offshore oil and gas production projects begin and end with the operator, in this case BP," said Newman. His said it was BP that prepared the drilling plan and BP that gave the go-ahead to fill the well pipe with sea water before a final cement cap was installed, reducing the downward pressure.

The executives said this was a practice that was being used frequently and that BP got approval from the federal Minerals Management Service.

Newman said there is "no reason to believe" its blowout protector didn't work and that it might have been clogged by debris shooting up the well.

The explosion, believed likely to have originated from upward surging methane gas within the well, came three days after the drilling process was essentially completed, said Newman, pointing a figure at yet a third company, Halliburton Inc., which as a subcontractor was encasing the well pipe in cement before plugging it.

But Halliburton executive Tim Probert said they followed a process dictated by BP's drilling plan and the company's work was done "in accordance with the requirements" set out by BP and followed accepted industry practices.

BP and Transocean are conducting separate investigations into what went wrong.

Meanwhile, on the Gulf coast, crews replenished supplies, including fuel and water, preparing for the long haul in their struggle to stop the flow of oil. A supply boat, the Joe Griffin, that brought a 100-ton containment box to the site that ultimately didn't work, pumped roughly 100,000 gallons of fuel into the tanks of a vessel that is drilling the relief well. It's expected to take up to three months to complete such a well.

Daily activity sheets for the vessels in the containment area reviewed by The Associated Press were light on substantive plans for several of the boats surrounding the main leak on Tuesday. Several were standing by for further instructions.

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Frederic J. Frommer in Washington, and Harry R. Weber from the site of the oil leak on the Gulf of Mexico, contributed to this report.

[FSTargetDrone]

Some initial findings:

What went wrong at oil rig? A lot, probers find

By H. JOSEF HEBERT and FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Associated Press Writers H. Josef Hebert And Frederic J. Frommer, Associated Press Writers

1 hr 29 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Bad wiring and a leak in what's supposed to be a "blowout preventer." Sealing problems that may have allowed a methane eruption. Even a dead battery, of all things.

New disclosures Wednesday revealed a complex cascade of deep-sea equipment failures and procedural problems in the oil rig explosion and massive spill that is still fouling the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and threatening industries and wildlife near the coast and on shore.

The public also got its first look on Wednesday of oil gushing from the broken pipe that rests nearly a mile under water as BP PLC, the well's operator, released a video taken by a remotely controlled camera. Oil flowing from a break in the yellowish pipe becomes lighter in color as it mixes with natural gas. Over the past 21 days more than 4 million gallons of oil have been released.

A litany of worrisome events and findings that were at play on the night of the well explosion and pipe rupture was described in internal corporate documents, marked confidential but provided to a House committee by BP and by the manufacturer of the safety device. Lawmakers released them at a House hearing.

A senior BP executive, Lamar McKay, cautioned, "It's inappropriate to draw any conclusions before all the facts are known." But the documents established the firmest evidence to date of the sequence of catastrophic events that led to the explosion and worsening spill, a series of failures more reminiscent of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger than the wreck of the Exxon Valdez.

Like the 1986 Challenger disaster, the investigation into the Gulf spill may well show that complex and seemingly failproof technical systems went wrong because of overlooked problems that interacted with each other in unexpected ways. In the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, a captain simply ran his ship onto a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, spilling nearly 11 million gallons of oil.

The April 20 BP rig explosion 40 miles off the Louisiana coast killed 11 people. Oil continuing to flow into Gulf waters threatens sensitive ecological marshes and wetlands and the region's fishing industry.

Congressional investigators revealed Wednesday that a key safety system, known as the blowout preventer, used in BP's oil-drilling rig in the Gulf had a hydraulic leak and a failed battery that probably prevented it from working as designed.

They said that BP documents and others also indicated conflicting pipe pressure tests should have warned those on the rig that poor pipe integrity may have been allowing explosive methane gas to leak into the well.

"Significant pressure discrepancies were observed in at least two of these tests, which were conducted just hours before the explosion," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., at a House hearing on the rig fire and oil leak, citing documents his committee had received from BP.

Asked about the tests, Steven Newman, president of Transocean, which owned the drilling rig, and Lamar McKay, president of BP America told the committee the pressure readings were worrisome.

They indicated "that there was something happening in the well bore that shouldn't be happening," said Newman. McKay said the issue "is critical in the investigation" into the cause of the accident.

The well explosion unleashed a massive oil spill that after three weeks remains uncontained.

But Waxman said important elements of what went wrong were beginning to surface.

While "we have far more questions than answers," it appears clear that there were problems with the blowout preventers before the accident and confusion almost right up to the time of the explosion over the success of a process in which cement is injected into the well to temporarily close it in anticipation of future production.

In other developments Wednesday:

• The White House asked Congress to raise the limits on BP's liability to cover damage from the spill beyond the $75 million cap now in law. It also wants oil companies to pay more into a federal oil spill cleanup fund.

BP president Lamar McKay said the company will pay any legitimate claim of damages beyond cleanup costs despite the federal cap.

• On the Gulf Coast, a new containment box — a cylinder called a "top hat" — was placed on the sea floor near the well leak. Engineers hope to work out ways to avoid the problem that scuttled an earlier effort with a much bigger box before they move the cylinder over the end of the 5,000-foot-long pipe from the well.

• The Minerals Management Service told a government panel of investigators in Kenner, La., that inspections of deepwater drilling rigs has turned up only "a couple of minor issues."

The House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing into the spill was the third this week at which executives of BP and two other companies were questioned by lawmakers.

The committee produced one document from BP that provided the most detailed information to date on what led up to and may have caused the explosion and spill at the Deepwater Horizon rig, floating in mile-deep waters 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, and why equipment designed to stop a spill failed to do the job.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., said there were at least "four significant problems with the blowout preventer" — or BOP — including evidence that it had a significant hydraulic leak and a dead battery that was supposed to activate a so-called "deadman" trigger.

In Kenner, La., where a separate hearing is being held as part of a U.S. Coast Guard and Interior Department investigation, Michael Saucier of the Minerals Management Service testified the government isn't required to inspect the BOPs as they are built and when installed. Operators are required to test the devices every two weeks, and Saucier said the MMS monitors those tests. He said the agency relies on drillers to ensure the device is working properly.

A 2001 report by Transocean, which bought the BOP from Cameron, indicated there can be as many as 260 failure possibilities in the equipment, which is supposed to be the final safeguard against a well blowout by clamping down and sealing a gushing oil well, said Stupak, chairman of the panel's investigation's subcommittee.

"How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" asked Stupak.

Stupak said when an underwater remote vehicle tried to activate the blowout protector's devices designed to ram through the pipe and seal it, a loss of hydraulic pressure was discovered in the device's emergency power component.

When dye was injected "it showed a large leak coming from a loose fitting," said Stupak, citing BP documents. He said officials at Cameron, the company that made the preventer, had told the committee the leak was not believed to have been caused by the blowout because other fittings in the system were tight.

Stupak also questioned why the BOP had been modified.

Newman, the Transocean executive told the committee that, indeed, the BOP had been modified in 2005 at the request of BP and with approval of the Minerals Management Service.

Stupak said the committee had been told that one of the BOP's ram drivers had been changed so it could be used for routine testing and was no longer designed to activate in an emergency. He said after the spill BP "spent a day trying to use this ... useless test ram" which no longer was configured for emergency use.

Executives of the companies involved have sought to shift blame on one another at Senate and House hearings this week on the spill.

BP has cited the failure of the blowout preventer owned by Transocean, which in turn has raised questions about the cementing process conducted by Halliburton, a BP subcontractor.

At Senate hearings Tuesday and again before the House panel, Timothy Probert, an executive of Halliburton, said that its work had been completed except for the installation of a final cement cap and that it was done according to the BP drilling plan.

___

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Robert, La., and Michael Kunzelman in Kenner, La., contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS to gallons, not barrels, in figures for Gulf and Exxon Valdez spills.)

There is a video embedded in the story at the link showing the oil flowing out of the well, but here is another one I can embed here:

[Erik von Nein]

Meanwhile BP's still claiming it's not their fault. We'll see. Apparently most of what could go wrong with their safety systems did. Neat.

Oh, and the use of dispersants is pretty much one huge experiment into what they can do and what their effects will be, since there's not much info on their use. Awesome.

[FSTargetDrone]

The above is basically the same video clip seen in the Yahoo story I posted earlier.

[Steven Snyder]

I am at work so I can't post a link yet...but NPR is reporting that independant analysis of the video released by BP puts the estimate at around 70,000 barrels per day.

[jcow79]

NPR

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.
At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.
The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.
Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.
"There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said.
But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low.
"We're talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said.
At least two other calculations support him.
Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he'd like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.
Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper.
Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark.
"I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he said.
Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect."
Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters.
"It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said.
BP disputed these figures.
"We've said all along that there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately," said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman.
Instead, BP prefers to rely on measurements of oil on the sea surface made by the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are also contentious. Salvin also says these analyses should not assume that the oil is spewing from the 21-inch pipe, called a riser, shown in the video.
"The drill pipe, from which the oil is rising, is actually a 9-inch pipe that rests within the riser," Slavin said.
But Wereley says that fact doesn't skew his calculation. And though scientists say they hope BP will eventually release more video and information so they can refine their estimates, what they have now is good enough.
"It's possible to get a pretty decent number by looking at the video," Wereley said.
This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.

[jcow79]

This was being described on their broadcast as an Exxon Valdez every 4 days.


**Edit
According to Wikipediathe Valdez spilled a minimum of 10.8 million gallons. So that doesn't quite add up. Still a horrible horrible disaster.

[Uraniun235]

What would/will happen if nothing was/is able to stem the flow and it just gushed until there was nothing left in the well?

[jcow79]

This was being described on their broadcast as an Exxon Valdez every 4 days.


**Edit
According to Wikipediathe Valdez spilled a minimum of 10.8 million gallons. So that doesn't quite add up. Still a horrible horrible disaster.

Err....I was thinking barrells=gallons. My mistake. That's actually pretty close.

[Crossroads Inc.]

What would/will happen if nothing was/is able to stem the flow and it just gushed until there was nothing left in the well?

That for me is the absolute most horrific of the "Worst Case Scenarios" and something I find myself thinking about often. Weeks turn into Months.. and months, and then a year.. and it keeps spilling... This is something that could spread throughout the whole ocean eventually.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There are over 100 million barrels in that field. It will just pump it all out until equilibrium pressure is met. If all of that were to get pumped out, we'd be cleaning tarballs off beaches in the Costa Del Sol.

[ShadowDragon8685]

You know, something just hit me...

This mother-humper is alternating between oil and methane... Just how much methane are we talking here? Even if the lion's share is oil, what kind of impact will all that methane have on global warming?

This could be a catastrofuck on two levels, couldn't it? Crap.

[CaptainChewbacca]

You know, something just hit me...

This mother-humper is alternating between oil and methane... Just how much methane are we talking here? Even if the lion's share is oil, what kind of impact will all that methane have on global warming?

This could be a catastrofuck on two levels, couldn't it? Crap.

There's not enough natural gas in there to do what you're thinking unless we just NEVER stop the flow. It takes alot of methane to affect the environment.

[Korgeta]

BP will suffer a lot fincinally out of this but are there any signs that Obama will push through greater drilling restrictions or a review of drilling practises?

[eion]

There are over 100 million barrels in that field. It will just pump it all out until equilibrium pressure is met. If all of that were to get pumped out, we'd be cleaning tarballs off beaches in the Costa Del Sol.

Is it primarily a pressure differential or a density differential that is driving the oil discharge? If it's pressure, you're right, it'll should itself when the pressure equalizes. If it's the difference in density between the sea-water and oil then it could go on until most of the oil is removed from the field.

If I have a beaker of water, and I puncture a balloon holding oil sitting at the bottom, won't the balloon empty and the oil rise to the surface regardless of any pressure difference?