* WWLTV.com | BP says tube taking out one-fifth of oil leaking from well blowout

BP PLC chief operating officer Doug Suttles said Monday … that a mile-long tube was funneling a little more than 1,000 barrels — 42,000 gallons — of crude a day from a blown well into a tanker ship. The company and the U.S. Coast Guard have estimated about 5,000 barrels — 210,000 gallons — have been spewing out each day.

Let’s say the tube is evacuating more like one-tenth of the oil. Allowing scientists access to the gusher at the sea floor to measure it “is not relevant to the response effort,” according to BP, so I guess it doesn’t matter if one-fifth, one-tenth or one-twentieth is being taken out, right?

Getting the relief tube in right the first time a problem is not a mistake, but an opportunity in “learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

* Scientific American | How Long Will the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Last?

“If the [oil] mousse gets into the marshes, it can last a real long time … Once there’s no oxygen, it doesn’t break down fast at all; it’s a long-term toxic reservoir.”

The toxic compounds in oil vary, but largely fall in the group known to chemists as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), such as napthalenes, benzene, toluene and xylenes. All are known human carcinogens with other health effects for humans, animals and plants. “These hydrocarbons are particularly relevant if inhaled or ingested,” says environmental toxicologist Ronald Kendall of Texas Tech University. “In the bodies of organisms such as mammals or birds, these aromatic hydrocarbons can be transformed into even more toxic products, which can affect DNA.” In other words, the effects of the oil spill will linger in the genetics of Gulf coast animals long after the spill is gone, resulting in mutations that could lead to problems ranging from reduced fertility to cancer.

* More on the science of chemical dispersants: “while we may worry about BP’s dishwashing venture in the Gulf, the bigger experiment is our own.”

* NPR | Gulf Spill May Far Exceed Official Estimates

Bottom line: Flow rate from the major riser leak is at least 4 times larger than the Conventional 5000-Barrel-Per-Day Wisdom.

* SCPR | Investigators Find Slew Of Problems At Oil Rig

I’d like to know who is helping the House investigative subcommittee understand all the oil industry lingo and methodology.

* New York Times | U.S. Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits

As I said to a commenter regarding yesterday’s post, pro-regulation doesn’t necessarily mean pro-new-regulation. It implies getting governing bodies to do their jobs, i.e. forcing them to force the industry to follow existing regulations.

* National Geographic | Gulf Oil Leaks Could Gush for Years

…  such recovery operations have never been done before in the extreme deep-sea environment around the wellhead, noted Matthew Simmons, retired chair of the energy-industry investment banking firm Simmons & Company International.

For instance, at the depth of the gushing wellhead “5,000 feet (about 1,500 meters)” containment technologies have to withstand pressures of up to 40,000 pounds per square inch (about 28,100 kilograms per square meter), he said.

Also, slant drilling – a technique used to relieve pressure near the leak – is difficult at these depths, because the relief well has to tap into the original pipe, a tiny target at about 7 inches (18 centimeters) wide, Simmons noted.

“We don’t have any idea how to stop this,” Simmons said of the Gulf leak. Some of the proposed strategies – such as temporarily plugging the leaking pipe with a jet of golf balls and other material – are a “joke,” he added.

“We really are in unprecedented waters.”

I hold out hope that the new well will reach its target. What I’m not too hopeful about is anything else working in the meantime. Other than Kevin Costner’s plan. Does this technology involve aquatic human mutants by any chance?

Just don’t. They carry coconuts around.

Coolest video I’ve seen in ages (audio is unnecessary).

Octopus is made of PURE WIN. This is seafloor footage we need more of.

Yes, it’s been 22 days since the Oilpocalypse began. Count on me to mark off calendar days so you don’t have to.

NASA satellite (MODIS) image of the flow at the surface – May 9th

CBC News | BP turns to new options in oil cleanup – First the Macondome, now the Top Hat. “The smaller dome is able to inject methanol, an alcohol used as antifreeze, into its top to prevent the same type of crystals, or hydrates, from forming … the company hopes to have the smaller dome in place by the end of the week.”

Back close to the shore, the slick spreads west.

NOLA.com | Gas surge shut well a couple of weeks before Gulf oil spill – “[UC Berkeley engineering professor, Robert] Bea believes the narrative he is creating raises serious questions about the risk assessments used by BP and the Minerals Management Service.”

Speaking of the MMS, it could be split, giving the rig inspection arm more autonomy.

For every disaster, there’s always the disaster on top of the disaster: The New Orleans Lens reports that BP oil cleanup jobs are not the stimulus Vietnamese, who constitute half of the fisherpeople hurt by the spill, hoped for.

Guess they can always go work for the oil industry, while their families reside on polluted land. Southeastern Louisiana ranked #1 in Mike Mandel’s recent calculation of metro areas with the biggest real per-capita income gains between 2000 and 2008.

The top ten cities, measured by growth in per capita income, had an average college graduate rate of 17.7%. The bottom ten cities had a college graduate rate of 31.8% … my personal view is that the lack of rewards for educationwhich show up in the individual income statistics as wellis correlated to the lack of commercially-successful breakthrough innovations, which would immediate sop up all the excess college graduates.

To put it another way, innovative industries tend to locate where they can get a lot of college graduates. That means high education areas attract new companies, boosting growth.

But without innovation,  the whole economic development dynamic changes. You can’t attract growing innovative companies because they are few and far between. For their part,  companies are more likely to view cost as a main consideration in deciding where to locate.  Goodbye San Jose and Austin, hello China and India.