In before top-kill declared a failure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I

Bill Gates' TED 2010 talk about his investments in a new nuclear technology. Talk is 30 minutes, but the nuclear stuff starts right at 14 minutes. More detail about it around 19 minutes.

The new reactor is trying to be designed to burn spent uranium among other things.

I saw somewhere that yes they are doing that after I posted. Wasn't sure.

There are two relief wells being drilled. Apparently, unforeseen delays, occasionally very lengthy (month or better?), are pretty commonplace in the realm of underwater drilling. The redundant well is supposed to lower the probability of an extended delay. I read a persuasive article making the case for four wells instead of two, but I did not bookmark.

Bill Gates TED talk guy.....your pony very slow. Post #496 ftw.

Repeating a claim made earlier...

Oil Guru Matthew Simmons: It Could Be 24 Years Before The Deepwater Gusher Ends

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/matth...#ixzz0p7nM1jY9

granted, the pressure will decrease as time moves forward and the field depletes, but... "120,000 barrels" per day?

and the follow-up interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGAoU1H2gM

lindsey williams on the oil crisis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlMS1h3KYrE

in his opinion, there may be no way to stop the oil spill because the pressure is too big... and it may never run out. matt simmons is a big peak oil guy... but if you believe that oil is created out of the center of the earth and gets pushed out... than it may never really stop gushing and will pollute the world's oceans.

williams also explains that the fact that there is this much oil, this deep down, proves that oil is not a fissile fuel created by decaying organic matter... because there is no way that decaying organic matter could get that deep. oil is in fact created from chemical reactions in the center of the earth and the pressure pushes it up towards the surface where we find it in oil fields just beneath the ground. but what BP and the Russians have shown is that if you drill down deep enough, there is massive amounts of oil.

i've heard that some credible people are estimating that it's around 70,000 + barrels per day... maybe in excess of 100,000 per day.

lindsey williams said that the danger of bombing is that it makes the hole bigger and make the mess worse.

Obama assembles the best oil drilling crew to fix the disaster

I prefer to believe that Elvis is alive. Far more plausible.

Turns out it wasn't a meteor...

'Top kill' stops gulf oil leak for now, official says

Reporting from Houma, La. — Engineers have at least temporarily stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government's top oil-spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.

The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting. The top kill effort is not complete, officials caution.

Once engineers had reduced the well pressure to zero, they were to begin pumping cement into the hole to entomb the well. .....

This story has not been confirmed by BP.

Zerohedge

Interesting, gracias.

BP seeks oil-tested judge on lawsuits - Miami Herald

Lindsey Williams doesn't know what he's talking about, and still hasn't cited his one (1) source for his Gull Island claim.

Thomas Gold's "The Deep Hot Biosphere "(Abiotic) theory of oil has been thoroughly peer reviewed and crushed.

Either way, whether it's biotic or abiotic, that isn't really the point. The point is, 1) well then where is it? and 2) how quickly will our company bankrupt itself trying to get to it?

NYT: Setback delays 'top kill' effort to seal leak.

This horrible spill wouldn't be happening in the gulf of AMERICA! Arizona knows what I'm talking 'bout!! #fistpound #bpcares

A friend of mine reminded me of this yesterday:

BP's Gulf battle echoes monster '79 Mexico oil spill

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - BP Plc's race to cap its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is eerily similar to a 1979 accident off the coast of Mexico that caused the world's worst oil spill.

In both cases natural gas flowed unnoticed into the well being drilled, causing an explosion. In both cases a critical piece of fail-safe equipment -- the blowout preventer -- failed. And in both cases the operators struggled to quickly staunch the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

.....

But while Mexico's Ixtoc well was only 150 feet below the sea surface, Macondo lies at the crushing depth of 5,000 feet,

....

Experts have warned that the well may not be capped until relief wells are completed two months from now,

.....

But it would still not surpass the extent of the disaster caused by the Ixtoc spill, which belched crude oil for 297 days, dumping nearly 3 million barrels (126 million gallons/477 million liters) of oil into the southern Gulf of Mexico,

.....

And the experience of Mexico's state oil company Pemex shows that relief wells are no silver bullet.

Ixtoc, off the coast of the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche, continued to leak oil more than three months after Pemex completed its first relief well.

.....

Pemex never revealed the exact cause of the accident and as recently as 2007, Jan Erik Vinnem, an offshore risk management specialist at Norway's University of Stavanger, wrote that the lessons learned from the disaster were "unknown."

Pemex pumped cement and salt water into Ixtoc for months before finally bringing the runaway well under control and sealing it with cement plugs.
Pemex's scramble to come up with other solutions while the relief wells were being drilled will sound familiar to those who have followed BP's efforts to stop the oil gushing out of its ruptured well.

Divers tried to manually operate the blowout preventer but this effort was unsuccessful and over the next several months Pemex tried a variety of solutions,

.........

The robots used by BP have been unable to get the blowout preventer to work and BP abandoned an attempt to cap its well with a steel structure after natural gas hydrates accumulated within the structure.

Executives even mulled shooting golf balls, pieces of tires and other debris into the well to try and stop the flow.

The company now plans to attempt a "top kill" procedure

...

BP says the spill has already cost it $760 million

....

Pemex spent over $100 million on the capping and cleanup operations, but dodged most compensation claims by asserting sovereign immunity against U.S. courts.


Almost 9 friggen months in 1979 for the Pemex spill and that was in 150 ft of water.

somewhat mitigating that is 30 years of societal development

I'm hopeful that this will not be 9 months

Yes, good point. Don't know how much deep water (5000 ') will complicate things.

Me too, probably will be way short of that. Reports seem to be cautiously optimistic about "Top Kill."

BP lobbying Canadian government to have relief well safety precaution removed.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN...pe=marketsNews

Matt Simmons is claiming there is another, bigger leak 5-6 miles away from the leak being shown on the underwater cameras:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/...er-theres.html

Wow. Assuming this dude is right, there's no real way to know outside of BP and/or the government telling us...short of what, a private expedition a mile down to check it out?

the thing that is annoying to me in so many of these articles is the after the fact zomg pressure! was applied stories. it is pretty well known that these are some of the most stressful jobs that there are and that the pressure is intense. it goes with the territory. this is pretty much true of any job engineering and construction related as they generally all fall behind schedule and require working way longer and harder towards the end of the project and this is probably even more so true here given the nature of drilling. It doesn't necessarily mean anything nefarious happened.

I interviewed with Schlumberger about doing just this a number of years ago and there was no hiding of that fact. The job is 2-3 weeks on and 2-3 weeks off and pretty much 16+ hours a day when on. I would have taken the job if i had not just gotten married and had a child on the way. There was a "factor" that they used in determining your salary. That factor was a function of location and safety records. In the Persian Gulf for instance some of the factors were 2+. So my $55k starting salary (in 1995) would be multiplied by that factor.

We'll get James Cameron on it posthaste.

that was linked in post 555...

unfortunately, to some people here, Matt Simmons is "just an energy investment analyst"