Day 56 Links

This town will never cease to surprise me: On Friday, I met a middle-aged local who, after chatting for a while, informed me that I am too socio-politically conservative for my age. My cheeks hurt so much because I’ve been smiling like a fool since. The world has hope yet, people.

Which we need when people like Bruce Bullock of the Maguire Energy Institute says to Offshore Engineer magazine

“I don’t think there’s anybody who will argue that a pause in new permitting is not a prudent thing to do. I think the question is going to be: what level of risk, as a society, are we ultimately willing to take? Airplanes crash, but we still fly. Cars crash, but we still drive.”

A wrong question, one that shows no acknowledgement of an ongoing disaster event and its far-reaching repercussions. Someone want to tell Mr. Bullock that the analogy is more along the lines of the equivalent of multiple airlines crashing into multiple cars for the last 56 days?

True futurists need to meditate on and research the questions posed by Gail over at The Oil Drum instead:

• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?
• Can technology solve all our problems?
• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?
• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here

Back to the present and the latest issue of well casing compromised downhole and the fear that this puts gushing oil in communication with the seafloor other than just at the wellhead. We knew back in May, right around the time of Top Kill and before the LMRP plan (ah, those were the days), that an anonymous BP official revealed that BP had “discovered things that were broken in the sub-surface,” and  that “mud was making it out to the side, into the formation.” At what depth is this crack? How big is it? How porous and faulted is the seafloor in this area?

Regardless of how many of these questions are answered, we’re going to have to wait until August for the 12-day-late relief well to PLEASE JESUS not blow out as well, make contact with and occupy that specific (x,y,z) location in the reservoir horizon and capture ALL of the flow. During hurricane season.

Unless BP suffers a stroke of genius soon. They are trying.