Unconfirmed report on status of Gulf of Mexico oil infrastructure

[jpak]

Take with a grain of salt....but it looks bad....

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/8/31/83553/8973

There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures.

<snip>

In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production...


Loss of the MARS platform alone cost us 95,000 barrels a day for a year or maybe more.

YEARS, people. I know what this means - hope everyone else gets it too...

<more>

[phantom power]

1. I don't get this. Katrina isn't the first cat-5 storm in the Gulf.

I thought those rigs weathered storms like this regularly. WTF?

[jpak]

3. Camille was the last Cat 5 in the Gulf of Mexico (1969)

Most of those rigs are post-Camille.

[phantom power]

6. I was thinking Ivan, but it was Cat-3 in the Gulf.

[jpak]

11. You're right - it was a Cat 5 in the Caribbean.

The last NOAA radio report I heard before I evacuated had it at 162 mph sustained.

....and all the computer models had it headed my way....

[Massacure]

17. Don't forget that the sustained winds hit 182 miles per hour at one point.

[phantom power]

18. They clocked it at 182?? The highest I heard was 175.

[Massacure]

23. They took measurements every two hours.

They measured a 175, then a 182, then another 175. So it couldn't have lasted longer than two hours.

[Tace]

2. The Implications Are Too Profound For Most To Grasp

[benburch]

5. Mad Max, Tace. Mad Max. nt

[AValdoux]

4. So I guess we know who's...

... getting a bailout, remember the airline industries after 9/11. How about "we fix it we own it"?


AValdoux

[MnFats]

7. So is crude oil now pouring into the Gulf?

that seems to be the implication....writer mentions capping all those wells...
the implications of THAT are staggering

[phantom power]

8. You'd think that would show up on satellite.

[MnFats]

9. even if it's very heavy dense crude?

I know petroleum products float, but some heavy crude is heavier than water, isn't it? I may be wrong.

[phantom power]

10. To my knowledge, it all floats, but I'm no expert.

[benburch]

13. There are valves that are supposed to stop that.

Perhaps they actually worked.

[NNadir]

12. Gee, I hate to look on the bright side, but...

...the world's biggest problem is NOT keeping the gas tanks on the Hummers filled.

The world's biggest problem is global climate change, of which this hurricane is almost definitely a symptom.

Shortages of oil will raise prices and, necessarily...reduce consumption, thereby slowing the real impending tragedy.

The American people have been committing murder for oil. They have been destroying the atmosphere and their nation's future for it.

We all regret the loss of a beautiful and historic city; we all weep for the lives lost; but speaking only for myself, I am not at all unhappy for the loss of oil.

[jpak]

14. Yeah, all those twits in the Northeast should freeze to death in the dark

this winter.

Decrease the surplus population, etc...

[NNadir]

19. I live in the Northeast. We have nuclear power. We'll be fine

In fact 50% of the power here is nuclear power. If oil becomes very expensive we can always switch to cheap electricity.

We can also dress warmly and we can easily conserve. This may escape self-absorbed little boys with trust funds, but when energy is in short supply people are careful with it. Given the crisis of global climate change, learning how to conserve is a good thing.

Now, most of the energy infrastructure that has survived Katrina in Louisiana are, in fact, the three nuclear reactors there. There's no fucking natural gas; there's no oil, and I very much doubt that millions of tons of coal are going to happily be flowing down the restored infrastructure of Louisiana any time soon. A nuclear power plant, on the other hand, can run for years without refueling at all. That's just another huge advantage of nuclear power among the many others I frequently point out, including safety, reliability, and cost - they require very little infrastructure to operate. It is much easier to transport 100 metric tons of fuel every two years than it is to transport thousands of metric tons every damn day.

It should be a no-brainer, but apparently if you have no brains, you can't really get it.

And of course, there are no fucking magical solar cells saving the day in ravaged south, because - hello? - the solution to the energy crisis really isn't magical religious chanting.

I would think that the official Greenpeace line would have no problem with the depletion of a fossil fuel. They always spout (dishonest) bullshit about giving a shit about global climate change, don't they? Of course, they really don't - as I also point out when I express my contempt for their tiny minds. An event such as this, of course, exposes them about as baldly as it exposes their boy Bush (who relied so heavily on their nuclear mysticism to justify the war now being carried on by - hello? - the national guard in - hello - fucking Iraq?).

So what's next from Greenpeace, a thread on why we need the Iraq oilfields?

Just whip out all those billions of solar cells Green peace boys. Shit, if we put 8,000 of them together at the tiny cost of 70 or 80 thousand, and if the sun is shining, and we have a few tons of batteries at another 70 or 80 thousand a piece, we can really demonstrate exactly how much we care about the poor at the society of Society of Trust Fund Twits with Bad Livers.

I'll say it again and again. Anti-environmental anti-nuclear shitheads are fossil fuel apologists. They talk endlessly about magic but when the fossil fuels are gone they have zero, as in NADA, as in ZIP, as IN NOTHING to give. No one Cries harder about the loss of fossil fuels than a Greenpeace Twit. No one. Maybe they'll be less diesel fuel to burn on the twit boats while they follow shipments of safe nuclear fuel around, but who gives a flying fuck about these self promoting energy ignoramuses. They don't give a fuck about global climate change and they are part of the problem and don't have a fucking remote smidgen of a modicum of a fragment of a clue about the solution.

[jpak]

20. People in the NE don't use electricity to heat their homes

because it's far far more expensive than oil or gas.

Do hypocrite Larouchian pro-nuclear twits heat their homes with "cheap " nuclear electricity?

nope - they heat with natural gas.

case closed

[phantom power]

21. In the near future, electricity may become cheaper.

Of course, that doesn't help the millions of people who have oil/gas furnaces, and maybe can't afford to replace them.

Which is one of those catch-22s guys like Kunstler cite as evidence that we're all fucked. Looks like we're going to find out if he was right, a bit sooner than I expected.

[NNadir]

24. Oh really?

Many people have electric heat pumps, many have radiators, and many (me in fact) have electric space heaters. I have a gas heater, and a fire place with a heat circulator. There I also burn wood from downed trees on my property.

Oil and gas used to be cheap, but when its expensive, we go electric. Because I am an environmentalist, and because I know about global climate change and my state's large reliance on nuclear plants, I use electric power equipment in my yard, from chain saws, to weed whackers to hedge trimmers. We pump our water with electricity.

We will also conserve.

We will do fine without the International Nincompoop Squad for Relying on Fossil Fuels and Panicking without Them.

One possible explication for the complete ignorance of the greenpeace hollow heads of how we do things here, is probably connected with their irrational and hysterical fear of radiation. We have lots of uranium in our soil, radium, and radon gas in our well insulated closed buildings. (I'm having mine checked right now.) This sort of thing sort of minimizes the risk that I will ever end up with a completely paranoid idiot living next door.

We do use solar passive heating and cooling.

Our house is designed with deciduous trees on the south face next to a large window that gives us a nice view of a creek. It provides solar warming in the winter and is shaded by maple leaves in winter.

We plant trees aggressively. We have eight or ten large pines, many fruit trees grown from seeds, elm, sycamore, 3 or 4 black walnuts and my pride and joy, an American Chestnut. We also have cherries, peach and nectarines, all grown from seed pits.

How house is comfortable and we seldom have high unmanageable fuel bills

[jpak]

26. Larouchian twits that spend >$3500 "cash outlays" a year

to heat their spacious upscale greenhouse-gas-emitting homes better start conserving a little more.

Natural gas prices will skyrocket this winter - and there WILL be shortages.

But that's OK with me. The less natural gas these twits burn this winter, the better it is for collapsing atmosphere...

:sarcasm:

[NNadir]

29. My last electric bill: Supply: 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.

And that's retail.

Now let's look at the website of the magical solar power promoters from solar buzz.

(Distribution costs were about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.)

$21.12 kw-hour and rising.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/

Like I said, the program of the International Society of Spoiled Brat Rich Twits Whose Energy Program Suggests That They Must Be High On Something is great for, well, rich spoiled brats who must be high on something.

I'm what's called a liberal. This means that I am sober and realistic. This means that I place the interests of humanity over my private paranoias. This means I want a future for the human race, one with dignity and hope. This means that I believe that poor people actually have rights, irrespective of the petty fears and obsessions of twits. This also means that I don't spend my days blitzed out my mind and babbling semi-coherently about Lyndon LaRouche and wiping imaginary radioactivity off my skin. Instead I merely study and point out what works.

Increasingly, I am aligned with the mainstream of the US.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Energy_Nuclear%20Power_August%2016.htm

In fact 52% of my fellow democrats agree with me.

Recently we had a thread started with a gushing - if pixilated - post here about the huge sucess of solar industry in New Jersey. The thread was started by someone who is clearly having hallucinations of a most disturbing kind. Now we have a thread about terror at the end of oil, a fear I don't share because I am educated about energy.

That thread, like all PV schemes, was full of wishful thinking and not even remotely connected with reality. Here is the energy breakdown, after 40 years of PV hype and misrepresentation, for New Jersey:

http://www.eere.energy.gov/states/state_specific_statistics.cfm/state=NJ

Lets, see, solar PV, oh yeah, if you put your glasses on you can see it, 0.1 "megawatt," where we have bought into the traditional bullshit hype that solar capacity can be stated in terms of its performance on the brightest sunny day at noon. Even accepting this delusionary claim about capacity, a claim that is only believable if you're high on something, we see that this is 4 one hundred thousandths of the capacity of the Salem Creek nuclear station, which by itself produces 25% of New Jersey's electrical demand.

So much for seeing things that are not there.

Textbook for arguing when one's brain is so fried as to have a very tenuous grasp of reality.

[Throckmorton]

30. I have triple redundant and diverse heating in my house

Oil, Wood, and Electric

Hope you enjoy your $10.00 a gallon gasoline this winter, and your $15 a gallon milk.

But then again I'm just a Larouchian pro-nuclear twit. By the way, both of my reactors are at 100% power today. At least until we run out of fossil fuel. Oh, thats right, I use evil uranium to make power, my bad. Maybe We can shut down, sympathy pains for the dinosaur burners and all.

So, how did the solar panels far in 150 mile per hour winds?
Windmills doing just fine too.

Waterford 3 is in mode 4 because there is no place to send the power, the local grid voltage is too high for them to tie back in. It came through the storm just fine.

[NNadir]

31. Hey, wait a minute! You can't be Lyndon LaRouche ! I'm Lyndon Larouche.

:-)

You can be Dick Cheney if you want, but Larouche is all mine baby!

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

And don't even try to deny that the rain falling on the containment dome at Waterford 3 is a much worse environmental disaster than the oil floating down the Mississippi River. You know if the rain falls for 1,346,269 years continuously, the dome will be eroded away - and you know what that means. That means that there may be one or two atoms of that awful Cesium-137 still in the reactor, and they will kill everyone in Louisiana.

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[jpak]

32. LOL!!!!!!

Finally a post!

:hi:

Wind farms are not suitable for the Gulf Coast (wind regimes unfavorable).

PV farms can be located inland away from intense hurricane winds.

Most PV trackers and roof-top fixtures are rated to withstand 120-130 mph winds (note: most homes and buildings cannot withstand sustained winds >130 mph) - so no, they can't take 150 mph winds.

But those LA nukes did not withstand 150 mph winds - they experienced much lower windspeeds during Katrina and they are absolutely useless today.

Hope I like what????

All the nuclear power plants on Earth aren't going fix the current gas crisis.

I live within walking distance from work and a shopping center. $15 a gallon gas won't affect me (except for food shortages resulting from gas shortages).

I use <200 kwh of grid electricity a month - and PV electricity and solar hot water every day.

I built my PV/hot H2O systems for post-hurricane survival - they do not require gas and do not emit carbon monoxide. I can get along indefinitely without electricity.

and I drink soy milk.

and know quite well that YOU aren't a Larouchian twit.

...but that cannot be said for OTHERS here...

...but then again, it's OK for them to engage in lies and name calling - some people call it "eloquence"...

:rofl:

With regard to Katrina...

There are a number of companies that make trailer-mounted PV generators 1-10 kw in size. They don't require fuel and can operate continously, independantly and indefinitely.

Other companies manufacture PV-powered communication support equipment - that again does not require fuel to operate.

Still other companies make PV-powered water purifiers and traffic control equipment (lots of post-hurricane traffic nightmares due to traffic lights out).

If FEMA had these things available they would make a real contribution to post-Katrina recovery (unlike the useless nukes in LA).

http://www.nrel.gov/surviving_disaster/documents/26490.html

http://www.kyocerasolar.com/products/indproducts.html

www.rweschottsolar.com/us/download.aspx?fileid=127

http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/freshstart/articles/enrgsyst.htm

http://www.aqua-sun-intl.com/

etc...

[skids]

22. What utter bullshit.

If NE tried to heat via our electric grid we would fry it.

Moreover, the NE electricity feed is about 60% fossile.

http://www.iso-ne.com/nwsiss/grid_mkts/enrgy_srcs/index.html

The efficiency of a modern oil or gas furnace in changing fossile fuel to heat is high (approaching 90%.)

From a carbon-loading perspective, the total system efficiency of a space heater plugged into a wall socket would have to be greater than it is. Even today many fossil plants extract only about a third of the coal's energy, then we must subtract transmission and distribution overhead.

So, while it may be better for the environment to plug in a hybrid car, because small gas IC engines are not very efficient at all, heating your house in New England with electricity is worse.

Oh, and by the way, running a space heater off a PV panel would be the ultimate idiocy, considering that solar thermal panels are four times more efficient per unit area and half to a quarter of the cost -- even less if you are skilled enough to construct your own. Not to mention you don't really even need panels for the daytime portion of the heat, just a lot of properly shaded south facing windows and a light-absorbing interior.

If I rather than my landlord actually owned the house I lived in, I could easily renovate it to use only a quarter of the oil it does now before winter using solar (thermal) power. Noone's going to be building a nuke plant in that amount of time.

[NNadir]

25. Um, did you ever hear of snow?

It makes solar panels thermal panels useless. Sometimes it sits there for months on a roof. The efficiency of a solar panel is fucking ZERO, as in ZIP, as in NADA when its covered with snow.

So much for even more solar bullshit.

I live in New Jersey. Most of my neighbors have electric space heaters. Many of us have oil heaters (and underground tanks are a major source of water pollution here.) Some of us have natural gas; I know I do.

We will face somewhat higher electrical rates because we used (in 2003) 25.9% natural gas, 17% coal, 2.7% oil, and well, 51.9% NUCLEAR to produce our electricity. Fucking solar is lumped under the 2.9% "other" heading, probably with incinerating New York's garbage. The "other" probably includes hydroelectric imported from Canada.

http://www.nei.org/documents/States_NJ.pdf

We probably have some of the cleanest electricity in the United States, mostly because we rely heavily on nuclear. In fact, if they wanted to build a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, I'd probably leap for joy, because I am interested in my environment and my children's lungs.

By the way, we have a huge wind resource here on our shore. Many of my NIMBY neighbors oppose windmills here, but I don't. I am on record supporting them. I would be happy to replace our withered coal sector with wind, but not our outstanding nuclear capacity.

The fact that solar capacity loading around here is at best 12% probably reflects that it is next to useless in New Jersey all winter long. We hear bullshit and misleading hype about "huge" kilowatt scale plants here, but they do almost zero to produce actual energy when viewed on a realistic scale. For a few hours a day in the summer, they run a few air conditioners which is great, but which will have almost zero effect on our long term energy needs.

I am really tired of solar advocates lecturing me on what solar "can do."

If it's so fucking great, why isn't it done then? You have all this great press...

For the record, I have a huge South facing window in my house, effectively a passive solar heater. It helps on rare bright sunny days, but if my heat went out, I would still freeze, especially during the long night when, surprise, surprise, it is colder.

(Now I'm going to hear endless bullshit about some expensive thermal reservoir - skip it - most New Jersyans could better afford $5.00/gallon oil.)

Oh and I, and my neighbors, use solar biomass heating as well - most of us have fireplaces. When people crank up the use of these things, you can hardly breathe when you go outside. They are, however romantic. The recycling fan on mine heats the house fairly well, though not without cost to my kids and my own lungs.

[jpak]

27. There are hundreds of off-grid solar homes in Maine

They do just fine in the winter.

http://www.solarhouse.com/index2.html

BTW

It's the nuclear-powered-twits that will freeze-to-death-in-the-dark in NJ....

:sarcasm:

[NNadir]

28. 100's? How fucking pathetic with all the solar hype.

It's nice to know that there are several hundred rich people in Maine who can play stupid toys from "Home Power Magazine."

If I am correct, greenpeace twits represent solar PV cells as a solution to the Greenhouse effect. They have lots of hype, lots of positive press, 40 years of in fact, and still every solar house (inhabited by rich people) deserves a fucking web site?

If solar power were more than a play thing for rich spoiled trust fund brats, there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such homes.

But solar power doesn't really work without extreme measures.

Telling. Very telling.

Just like the dry drunk Bush, Greenpeace twits, dry or active, give a shit only about rich people.

[phantom power]

15. Except that it's EXTRA hard to combat climate change while..

mired in an economic depression. As you've pointed out in previous posts, we may find that we're unable to afford the cost of migrating to a post-fossil economy.

[phantom power]

16. I find myself thinking about whitewater boating.

There's a special feeling you get, when your kayak is poised above a class-V rapid, and it passes the point of no return. That point where you know that, right side up or upside down, in the boat or out, you're taking the ride all the way to the bottom.

Then, there's that other feeling you get in exactly the same situation, except you've just hit a rock at the very top, and now you're committed to running that rapid backwards.

I have that second feeling all the time, now.