tagged w/ Environmental Catastrophe
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Obama setback in deepwater drilling case
Appeals court won't reinstate six-month ban while it weighs merits
msnbc.com news services
updated 2 hours 52 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration lost an attempt Thursday to keep a temporary moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in place while it appeals a court ruling against the six-month ban.
The administration had asked the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, to stay a lower-court ruling until a full hearing on the moratorium was heard. But the appeals court found that the Interior Department failed to show the federal government would suffer "irreparable injury."
In the lower court ruling last month, a federal judge, also in New Orleans, lifted the moratorium after Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. argued it was arbitrary because it was a blanket ban on all new drilling in depths below 500 feet.
The Obama administration appealed, saying the suspension was needed to give time to investigate the cause of the BP blowout and ensure other drilling rigs operate safely.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration said the ban would reduce crude output by an average of 82,000 barrels a day, more than previously estimated.
The appeals court set arguments on the government's appeal seeking to reinstate the original moratorium order for the week of Aug. 30.
Also Thursday, the head of BP's Gulf Coast restoration unit, Bob Dudley, told NBC and the Wall Street Journal in separate interviews that it could be possible to stop the well before the mid-August date that had been widely discussed.
"In a perfect world with no interruptions, it is possible to be ready to stop the well between July 20 and July 27," Dudley told the Wall Street Journal.
A BP spokeswoman later clarified his comments, saying that "the expectation is that it will be August" before a relief well will be ready to stop the blowout, and that Dudley was providing "the very, very best scenario if everything went absolutely superbly according to plan."
National Incident Commander Thad Allen said Thursday that the relief well is expected intercept and penetrate the Deepwater Horizon well pipe about 18,000 feet below sea level within seven to 10 days.
But he said they won't know how long it will take to stop the oil until they get there. The gushing well has several rings, and oil could be coming up through multiple rings.
The plan is to pump heavy mud and then cement into the well to overcome the upward pressure of the huge oil reservoir below.
If the oil is coming through the outer ring of the well, then they will have to pump in mud and cement to stop that layer first. Then they would have to drill through the hardened cement and repeat the process in each ring until they reach the center pipe and do it again.
That scenario would push into the middle of August, which is the timeline the company and government officials have held to for weeks.
"If you have to exhaust all means for the ways that hydrocarbons are coming up the pipe, then that puts you into middle August," Allen said.
If the oil is only coming up the center pipe, then it's possible to stop the leak sooner.
The relief well is currently the best hope for stanching the oil leak sparked by the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 workers and began an environmental catastrophe for the region.
Shaving even days off the mid-August timeline would stop millions of gallons of oil from escaping into the Gulf. The broken well has spewed between 86 and 169 million gallons of oil, according to federal estimates. That's enough oil to fill about 3.4 million standard bathtubs.
A new collection vessel that should more than double BP's oil-capture capacity to 53,000 barrels a day from around 25,000 is projected to take three more days to hook up, as rough seas hamper efforts to finish the job.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Obama setback in deepwater drilling case
Appeals court won't reinstate six-month... more
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GULF SHORES, Ala. (AP) - Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water off Florida beaches, like forest animals fleeing a fire. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deepinto marshes, never to be seen again.
Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange phenomena.
Fish and other wildlife seem to be fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast in a trend that some researchers see as a potentially troubling sign.
The animals' presence close to shore means their usual habitat is badly polluted, and the crowding could result in mass die-offs as fish run out of oxygen. Also, the animals could easily be devoured by predators.
"A parallel would be: Why are the wildlife running to the edge of a forest on fire? There will be a lot of fish, sharks, turtles trying to get out of this water they detect is not suitable," said Larry Crowder, a Duke University marine biologist.
The nearly two-month-old spill has created an environmental catastrophe unparalleled in U.S. history as tens of millions of gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Scientists are seeing some unusual things as they try to understand the effects on thousands of species of marine life.
Day by day, scientists in boats tally up dead birds, sea turtles and other animals, but the toll is surprisingly small given the size of the disaster. The latest figures show that 783 birds, 353 turtles and 41 mammals have died - numbers that pale in comparison to what happened after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989, when 250,000 birds and 2,800 otters are believed to have died.
Researchers say there are several reasons for the relatively small death toll: The vast nature of the spill means scientists are able to locate only a small fraction of the dead animals. Many will never be found after sinking to the bottom of the sea or being scavenged by other marine life. And large numbers of birds are meeting their deaths deep in the Louisiana marshes where they seek refuge from the onslaughtof oil.
"That is their understanding of how to protect themselves," said Doug Zimmer, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
http://www.kgun9.com/Global/story.asp?S=12660941GULF SHORES, Ala. (AP) - Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow... more
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" 'Kill, don't clean' " oiled birds
No, that's not the opinion of a heartless bird-hater, or BP CEO Tony Hayward letting fly another tactless gaffe. It's the actual recommendation of one oil spill expert and animal biologist who says that once birds are thoroughly oiled, the best course of action is to put them out of their misery. Even if all the crude is scrubbed from their feathers, she says, oiled birds are all but certain to die a long, painful death."
What do you think is best?
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/less-1-percent-oil-soaked-birds-survive.php" 'Kill, don't clean' " oiled birds
No, that's not the... more
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Could we choose an other gas station to fill our tanks?
Where do we go?
Exxon?
Shell?
They are all EVIL!
They are all destroying our world and we are part of the problem and always will be.
Deliberately or not we are all accomplices until we do something about it.
The core spirit of the Organic Legion's movement is to eradicate a problem, boycotting the source.
Why wasting our time and effort to get a ban on plastic bags or stopping the next offshore/onshore oil drilling that will cause more environmental catastrophes when we could stop this altogether?
Stop oil dependency and the oil monopoly now.
Alternative, safe technologies exist and work effectively, enough to power every vehicle and every home in America and all over the world.
Stop this EVIL now, they run the economy and our lives.
They are contaminating our soil, our water and the future of our children and generations to come.
We are the people, we are the almighty, we can change things.
Let's unite and rise as one to stop this poison that is here to stay and this cruel greed.
Do we really want to wait until everything turns to "black" to realize what's happening?
WE hold a power, the power to change things once and for all.
Nobody can't take that away from us!
Sign the petition below:
http://environment.change.org/petitions/view/no_more_drill_baby_drill
Thank you for taking action by stopping the oil industry and its monopoly on our economy, environment and our lives.
Spread the word, change the WORLD!
From OrganicLegion.org:
http://organiclegion.org/pt/How-do-we-boycott-BP/blog.htmCould we choose an other gas station to fill our tanks?
Where do we go?
Exxon?... more
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We, the people have had enough of environmental destruction. The gulf oil spill is the tipping point of your greed, of your corporatism that only welcomes short term financial gain and puts profit over people.
We've had enough of killing marine life with unknown repercussions on our Nature, we've had enough of contamination of our fresh water supplies, we've had enough of oil spills that only endanger our health, the well being of our Mother Earth and the future of our children.
We want you, as our government, as a body of representation of the people of the United States to invest billions into alternative and sustainable energy. We ask you to approve a budget that makes environmental, safe and renewable energy sources like solar and biofuel from organically grown hemp, a reality NOW, enough to power America and eliminate oil dependency once and for all. No more delaying.
No more oil monopoly, no more oil!
No more waiting, technologies and safe alternatives like the ones mentioned above do exist and do work effectively. We want every vehicle and every home to be powered by these energy sources and we want that to be mandatory!
NO MORE "Drill, Baby, Drill!", no more deaths, no more killing.
Thank you.
Sign this petition and let your voice be heard, take a powerful action in less than thirty seconds:
http://environment.change.org/petitions/view/no_more_drill_baby_drillWe, the people have had enough of environmental destruction. The gulf oil spill is the... more
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Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. BP will try another strategy.
May 29, 2010
BP Prepares to Take New Tack on Leak After ‘Top Kill’ Fails
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.
“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.
The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.
BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP.
President Obama, who is spending the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, issued a statement Saturday evening on the decision to abandon the top kill.
“While we initially received optimistic reports about the procedure, it is now clear that it has not worked,” Mr. Obama said.
He said that Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard had “directed BP to launch a new procedure whereby the riser pipe will be cut and a containment structure fitted over the leak.”
“This approach is not without risk and has never been attempted before at this depth,” Mr. Obama said. “That is why it was not activated until other methods had been exhausted.”
The president continued, “We will continue to pursue any and all responsible means of stopping this leak until the completion of the two relief wells currently being drilled.”
For BP, the besieged British company, the failure could mean billions of dollars of additional liabilities, as the spill potentially worsens in the weeks and months ahead.
“I am disappointed that this operation did not work,” Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to make this situation right.”
A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.
“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.
“The engineers are disappointed, and management is upset,” said the technician. “Nothing is good, nothing is good.”
The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Since then, it has dumped an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons into the gulf.
After the announcement Saturday, the disappointment was palpable along the Louisiana shoreline, where the oil has increasingly washed up in sticky, rusty globs.
Michel Claudet, the president of Terrebonne Parish, 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said that when he heard the news, he felt “sorrow, despair and like this ordeal will never finish. If you go around the parish, it is all our folks talk about.”
Mr. Claudet said that he was trying to remain hopeful, but that it was increasingly difficult. “As every item fails,” he said, “I am less and less optimistic.”
In New Orleans, Margaret Shockey, 67, a retired teacher, said, “One thing’s for sure, this is the last city that deserved this.”
Last week, BP described the top kill — which was an effort to pump heavy mud into the well to counter the flow of oil — as its best hope for stopping the spill. During the course of the operation, BP officials had often expressed optimism that it would work.
But on Saturday, Mr. Suttles said the operation had pumped 30,000 barrels of mud into the well and yet failed to stop it from flowing.
Admiral Landry called the failure “very disappointing.”
The new strategy is to smoothly cut the riser from which the oil is leaking and then place a cap over it. Pipes attached to the cap would take the oil to a storage boat on the surface.
Though a first effort at a containment dome failed, Mr. Suttles said BP had learned from that experience and now believed that this cap, which is custom fitted to the riser, would be more successful.
He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
He would not give odds for the operation’s success, but said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would work.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Suttles said preparations for such an alternative plan were already under way, just in case. “That equipment is on stage and ready to go,” he said. Equipment is being deployed on land and on the seabed, he said.
If the new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the wellhead and has not functioned.
But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill was the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but was still at least a month away.
“It’s like a bad movie that just won’t end,” said Billy Altman, 45, a mechanic in New Orleans. “You know, you think they finally killed the bad guy, and then he comes back to life. It’s crazy.”
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and Leslie Kaufman from New Orleans. Robbie Brown contributed from New Orleans, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil... more
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BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company's chief operating officer said Saturday.
The oil giant has tried for days to stop the the largest oil spill in U.S. history by pumping heavy, mudlike drilling fluid into a ruptured oil well, a method known as "top kill."
The next option is to place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option should it become necessary, he said.
"We've been prepping that all along in case we need to move to that option," he said. "People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don't know."
And if "lower marine riser package" were to fail, he said, BP engineers would try placing a second blowout preventer on top of the first, which failed to cut of the oil flow after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
Meanwhile, teams in Louisiana were working Saturday on a clean-up project aimed at protecting coastal marshes while BP continues its efforts to stop oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser has said that machines would suck oil out of marshes Saturday after crews determined where to deploy them.
Video: Fishermen woes
Video: BP CEO pledge: 'Stop the damn leak'
Explainer: Stopping the leak RELATED TOPICS
Gulf Coast Oil Spill
BP plc
Louisiana
Deepwater Horizon
"We will begin to clean up some of those areas that fell by the wayside for the last couple weeks," he said.
Oil giant BP's focus has been trying to put a stop to what officials say is the largest oil spill in U.S. history, with as many as 19,000 barrels of crude gushing into the ocean daily.
By Sunday morning the company could know whether the "top kill" procedure -- pumping heavy drilling mud into the breached oil well at high pressure -- is working, said Robert Dudley, BP's managing director.
"It's like an arm-wrestling match of two equally strong forces," he said.
Government scientists on Thursday said as many as 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil were spewing into the ocean every day, making this disaster perhaps twice the size of the Exxon Valdez incident.
Previously, BP officials and government scientists had said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude were flowing out daily.
"This is clearly an environmental catastrophe," BP CEO Tony Hayward said Friday. "There's no two ways about it."
Under intense political pressure to take control of the situation, President Obama toured the region on Friday.
"We want to stop the leak, we want to contain and clean up the oil and we want to help the people in this region return to their lives and livelihoods as soon as possible," the president told reporters.
About 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico exclusive economic zone has been put off limits, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and fishermen are worried the gushing oil will take a more serious toll than Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.
"Katrina was nothing but rain, water and wind. This is poison. It's gas," oysterman Arthur Etienne said.
Obama said Friday that federal officials were prepared to authorize moving forward with "a portion of" an idea proposed by local officials, who want the Army Corps of Engineers to build a "sand boom" offshore to keep the water from getting into the fragile marshlands.
That did not satisfy Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has advocated immediate construction of the booms. Noting in a written statement that 107 miles of the state's coast have been oiled, he said, "We continue to ask federal officials to approve our entire sand-boom plan from the northern Chandeleurs to the Isle Dernieres chain."
Obama said he has directed federal officials to triple the manpower in places where oil has hit shore or appears within a day of doing so.BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in... more
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I just started this petition, if there is one thing we can do now is RAISING OUR VOICES!
Please go ahead and sign this, it will only take you thirty seconds and will be incredibly powerful:
http://environment.change.org/petitions/view/no_more_drill_baby_drill
Targeting: The President of the United States, The U.S. Senate and The U.S. House
Started by: Organic Legion
Enough is enough!
We, the people have had enough of environmental destruction. The gulf oil spill is the tipping point of your greed, of your corporatism that only welcomes short term financial gain and puts profit over people.
We've had enough of killing marine life with unknown repercussions on our Nature, we've had enough of contamination of our fresh water supplies, we've had enough of oil spills that only endanger our health, the well being of our Mother Earth and the future of our children.
We want you, as our government, as a body of representation of the people of the United States to invest billions into alternative, true environmental and sustainable energy. No more delaying.
NO MORE "Drill, Baby, Drill!", no more deaths, no more killing.
Please sign and take action in a powerful way now:
http://environment.change.org/petitions/view/no_more_drill_baby_drill
Join the Organic Movement:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/I just started this petition, if there is one thing we can do now is RAISING OUR... more
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