Black Gold, Texas Tea

I received the green light yesterday from the Audubon Society in Baton Rouge to head on down and lend a hand. Today will be spent packing and preparing. I also think it's important to explain a few things about drilling and the recent catastrophe, because so far the media has not done a bang up job. So allow me to vent for a minute.

I don't think the American public has any idea how often oil spills happen, or how risky offshore drilling is. The talking heads blab about this spill only in comparison to the Exxon Valdez, as if they were the only two major spills we've had in the past three decades. What they ignore is that this is the fifth oil spill in and around New Orleans in the last 10 years. There are major oil spills every year around the globe. In fact last November an Australian rig exploded under oddly similar circumstances. A fractured pipe 8000 feet down burst sending millions of gallons spewing out. The fact that two, nearly new oil rigs have recently blown pipes, killing people and causing environmental catastrophe begs the question, why is this happening?

We have now learned that methane gas leaked up the pipe and exploded when ignited on the rig leading to the loss of human life and the ensuing spill. How the methane got into the pipe is still unknown. But, as the experts say, poor cementing and/or a broken pipe can leave enough room for gas to surge up the area between the cement and the pipe. And a tiny bubble of methane underground becomes an expanding, flammable cannon ball as pressure decreases on the way up to the surface.

Cementing typically provides a secure casing to the walls of oil wells (Oh, btw Haliburton was the cement contractor) and should have prevented, not possibly caused this. The gas also made it’s way past a string of safety measures that failed including the all important “blowout preventer” on the ocean floor. And the last resort “shear ram” (a set of steel blades intended to slash through a pipe at the top of a well and close off the flow of crude) failed, just like 50% of them do under testing

So that’s the explosion as we know it now. Oil is shooting out like a volcano from the ocean floor because multiple safety measures failed. There was one safety measure missing however, an “acoustic switch”. An acoustic switch is like a remote control for your tv. You can sit across the room (or sit on a boat near the rig) and push the off button. This in turn sends acoustic pulses to the blowout preventer causing it shut things off. Other countries require acoustic switches, but not the US. So BP didn’t have to pay the 500K for one. Instead they’ll be paying tens of billions for the clean up. This tragedy is really a microcosm of our sad dependency on oil, where greed and the failure to think about the future has come back to haunt us.

Jed Clampett would be so pissed right now.