Oceans
How Did It Happen?
An article in today’s Washington Post has some useful background on oil-well blowouts: Blowouts are infrequent, because well holes are blocked by piping and pumped-in materials like synthetic mud, cement and even sea water. The pipes are plugged with cement, so fluid and gas can’t typically push up inside the pipes. Instead, a typical blowout …
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CONTINUE READINGAnother Lesson from the BP Disaster: The Need for Better Risk Assessment
Apparently, the lease grant to BP was exempted from environmental review, according to the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin: The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 …
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CONTINUE READINGHow bad? More than bad enough
Earlier today, Dan asked “How bad is the spill?” He quoted a New York Times story which suggested that concerns about the spill were overblown. Not so fast. Probably the only thing we can say with confidence right now is that it’s still too early to tell exactly how much environmental or economic damage the …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Bad is the Spill?
These comparisons may be a little misleading — a bit like saying that we shouldn’t worry about 9/11 because a a hundred times more people died in the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
CONTINUE READINGWill the BP Oil Spill Change Public Policy?
The oil spill catastrophe now engulfing the Gulf Coast brings home in incredibly vivid detail the ways in which human activity can damage the earth. This is in stark contrast to climate change, for example, where the changes caused by accumulating greenhouse gas emissions are hard to see and where actions today will only affect the …
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CONTINUE READINGDeepwater Horizon and the Dark Side of the Stevens Legacy
If John Paul Stevens was the architect of modern environmental law, the Deepwater Horizon disaster shows the effects of one of his worst building projects.
CONTINUE READINGA Brief History of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout
2001. Manufacture of the BOP (Blowout Preventer), a huge block of steel and valves that that holds the well pipe.The BOP has the ability to slice through the pipe and seal the well. The BOP used by the Deepwater Horizon remains with the rig for the next nine years. April 19, 2010. Halliburton completes pumping …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Odds of Failure
First, “human error” is a cop-out when you’re dealing with major technology. . . . Second, it’s probably true that this was a very unlikely way for any particular oil rig to go wrong, but that doesn’t mean much because there are a lot of rigs out there in the Gulf.
CONTINUE READINGMoby Slick
Knowing that the area of the Gulf of Mexico covered by the BP oil slick is important habitat for sperm whales, I’d been wondering about effects of the oil spill on those whales and on marine mammals generally. Sperm whales were long hunted (Moby Dick is the most famous specimen) and are listed as endangered …
CONTINUE READINGGulf oil spill update
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig rig explosion was bound to put some pressure on the Obama administration to renounce the plan it announced just three weeks earlier to open new areas to offshore drilling. Today, the President ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to report on how to reduce the risk of oil spills from offshore …
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