Matt Simmons tells a 'real ugly story' (must read, about BP & Spill)

[Maine-ah]

http://knox.villagesoup.com/news/story/matt-simmons-tells-a-real-ugly-story/338589

Corporate inaction and incompetence helped thrust the Macondo blowout into an environmental disaster, and energy investment banker Matthew Simmons will be the first one to say so; in fact, he was among the first to say so, and by his own words, took a roasting for it.

The Simmons commentary on the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the resulting oil spill is based on his years of familiarity with the oil industry and its systems — the business he started, Simmons and Company International, has been integral to American oil enterprise since the 1970s, and Simmons was at one time an adviser on the industry to President George W. Bush.

He is succinct about what happened: BP pushed its drilling offshore in pursuit of claiming success for shareholders — "to get to the bottom, announce proven results, and get out of the hole." But despite great advances in oil extraction technology over the past decades, the capability to safely extract oil in deep water does not yet exist.

"It proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we've taken technology far beyond where we have a fire truck," he said on a hot July afternoon, in his Rockport boathouse overlooking the cobalt blue of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine, far away from the dark blight in the Gulf ofMexico, yet all part of the same Atlantic Ocean.

[northernlights]

1. sorry, but I'm not buying it

He's an investment banker with an MBA, not a geologist or a physicist. BP is not trying to cap the end of the riser. They cut most of the riser off. They're capping at the wellhead. What is his evidence that there is a lake of oil leaking 6 miles away? I've read claims of leaks 10 and 20 miles away too -- where is the evidence? Is there video in those areas? The orange that's washing up is either an emulsion of oil and water or of oil and water and Corexit.