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'SHR' on The BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo Well Blowout,
and what we are facing in the Gulf.
(from GLP netcast 12 June, 2010)
Click
here for the MP3 audio recording
Click
here for the original written presentation
MODERATOR
(M): Good evening everyone and thanks for coming. SHR will be here in
approximately three minutes. In the meantime I’m going to brief
you on tonight’s event.
On May 23rd, SHR discussed the
oil spill here in GLP voice chat, detailing the disaster and
consolidating the news reports, data, and stats for all of us.
Tonight you will be discussing the most recent news releases
concerning the BP oil spill disaster and what we can expect herein.
SHR: How’re you guys doing? Do I sound okay and
everything? Too high, too low, whatever?
M: No, you’re
perfect.
SHR: If anybody wants to know my background, well, I
own a manufacturing company. I don’t have an engineering
degree. I started one, I just never finished it. I guess it just kind
of wasn’t my thing. But I’ve been in everything from a
machinist, to a tool maker, to a die maker, to a die designer, to a
mechanical designer for probably about 30 years right now.
I’ve
worked with a lot of engineers. They’re okay, for what
engineers do. To me, they’re more about stress calculations and
things like that, while mechanical designers actually design the
things that we use in real life, more so than most engineers do. I
find that some engineers make good designers, not the majority of
them.
Like I said, their mechanical engineering is better for
doing load analysis and things like that while, like I said, a
designer is actually gonna be probably a better engineer than most
engineers are. The things you see around you, we design.
I’m
not really worried about the stress points on a light-switch cover or
something like that. So probably 90% of the materials that you see
around you are basically created by mechanical designers first before
the actual tool makers go out there and make the tools to run them on
the machines... it’s actually machined metal... to make them.
So all these things that you’re seeing in the world,
these giant assemblies and things like that, are, you know, the
engineering is done on them, the tool designers design them, the tool
makers make any tools that are required to make them. The machinists
may make them, and I’ve done all of that. So that’s my
background as far as mechanics goes.
M: All right, guys, it’s
10 o’clock. Thanks for coming. Tonight we’re calling it
GLP Raw Feed. This is SHR’s, the BP Deepwater Horizon Well
Blowout, Part Two. The floor’s yours, SHR.
SHR: All
right. Well thanks. Mind the bird. If you didn’t just hear the
bird in the background going “Whaaat?” you may hear her
from time to time, but that’s my African gray parrot who likes
to chime in.
So I’m glad to see a lot of people here.
I’m glad to see a lot of people interested in this because it’s
important subject matter, in my opinion. That’s why I wrote two
mega-threads about it.
I can usually ramble on. I ramble on
when I talk. That’s the type of person that I am. I’m the
same way when I post and I usually make big informational threads
when I feel that something is important.
I feel this is
important. This is an event, catastrophe, crisis, disaster, whatever
you want to call it. All of those terms apply. It could really have
global connotations and very much so, very dire consequences for the
United States, so I think it’s an important subject for us all
to be interested in.
You people from other countries, it’s
good to watch how events unfold and how things are handled or not
handled because you may be faced with a crisis like this in your
future, too. You know, if we were a little bit wiser here in the
States we maybe would have looked to some of the things that other
countries have done, some of the capabilities of other countries, but
we haven’t really done that.
Like I said, I really
don’t want to get into a lot of the political reasons in my
thread this time as to what was going on as far as the remediation of
the oil spill, which is very important, but I just want to try to
stick with the mechanics of what was going on at the time with the
well.
So if you guys want, I can do a little bit of synopsis
on my thread, or we can just go right into questions. You know, I
came here to talk with you guys and I don’t know what anybody’s
going to ask me, there is no preliminary anything done, so I really
just leave it up to you guys. Do you want me to give you a little
short synopsis of what my thread was? Or do you just want to go right
into deep questions and ask?
M:
Could you please do a synopsis on your thread? That would be great,
especially for the video.
SHR: It’s no problem. It was a long thread. I tried to
make it uncomplicated as possible but I tried to cover a lot of
material.
Basically what the thread said was this, is that we
not only have the leak that you see – or you used to be able to
see on top of the Blowout Preventer (BOP), that large mechanical
apparatus that seals off the well or was supposed to seal off the
well, but basically is the only piece of metal that we see left –
we not only have a leak there but we have a leak in the well tubing
going down 13,000-some-odd feet underneath the seafloor itself.
That’s a very bad thing. That’s pretty much the
worst case scenario thing to have happen because it means the more
they try to close off the well from the top, the more it will leak on
that long segmented assembly of tubing going down to the oil
formation.
It’s just like a hose, you know. If you have
a leak in a hose and you have a nozzle on the end, one of those
typical gun-type nozzles that you squeeze it water shoots out, if you
have a leak in your hose and you have the nozzle on, you may not even
see a leak; there might just be a little bit of a drip or something.
When you turn the nozzle off, restrict the flow, all the pressure
that’s in the hose now only has that one other place to leak
out, so your leak will get a whole lot worse. Open the nozzle again,
it’ll get a whole lot less worse.
We’re basically
faced with the same type of situation in this well and it’s
becoming more and more apparent, more and more obvious. We’re
starting to see little trickles of information, you know, the BP
officials saying “unnamed sources,” “BP sources who
wish to remain anonymous” blah-blah-blah, basically starting to
kind of float some trial balloons as to the well bore is compromised.
This is a really bad thing as far as controlling this well
goes. It’s a leak that’s completely inaccessible to us.
We have no way to get to it so there’s no way to stop it.
If
it was only the Blowout Preventer on top of the well that was leaking
and we had a nice sealed piece of tubing coming up from the oil
formation under high pressure up to the seafloor, basically the point
of entry, which is basically now the top of that big piece of
machinery... but if we had a nice big... that long series of tubing,
and we had a nice closed system there, all we’d basically have
to do is basically fabricate a sort of valve or use the BOP, which is
just a giant series of valves itself, to seal off the well itself and
it would be sealed and the well would be dead and we wouldn’t
have an oil leak anymore.
However, that is no longer the
case. They can no longer restrict the flow up there because the more
they restrict the flow above the seabed, the more it will leak out
from underneath. And as I said, it’s inaccessible.
That
type of leak does a lot of damage to the well system. It will begin
to erode the cementing process. The cementing process holds this
giant long piece of tubing to the earth, to the strata around it, and
it needs to be held in place by that. That’s what gives it a
lot of its support.
You can’t just take a
13,000-foot-long piece of pipe and stick it into something 13,000
feet away and leave it kind of hanging in the air and expect it to be
able to support anything. It wouldn’t even be able to support
its own weight; the bottom would crush, the joints, the connections
and everything would fail and it would begin to come apart.
So
this is the problem, really, that we face, and it’s a big
problem.
In my first thread I said that we really need to
pray this “top kill” works. It was our best chance at
killing it. That’s a tried and true methodology of killing
out-of-control wells. I can go into that a little bit later, how that
works, if you guys are interested in it. But basically they pump in a
heavy fluid. It creates a hydrostatic head, which is... to make it
easier, it’s a giant liquid cork that weighs a lot; the well
can no longer push it up. Once that’s established, you can
basically disconnect the BOP, walk away, they’ll turn off the
pumps, there’ll be nothing coming out because the well can’t
push it up anymore.
Now that we have breaches in the system,
we can no longer do anything like that and especially from the top
down. So this is a really, really bad situation that we have –
ruptures and compromised sections of casing in the well itself.
And the well itself is a complicated system all on its own,
you know. It’s a series of sleeves that get cemented in. Then
there’s a production casing that goes on that and that gets
cemented to those other sleeves and it’s a big complicated
process to get it into the ground, especially 13,000 feet below the
seabed. And it needs to have that cement to make it strong, you know,
to make it work. That’s where a lot of that structural
integrity comes from, that cement.
It also forms a barrier to
keep the gas out. Gas is very problematic in wells because the gas
will seep in and as the gas rises it expands rapidly, and as it
expands it makes a lot more pressure.
Just to give you an
example, say a liter of liquid methane, which is natural gas. Natural
gas is 98% methane, so when they say “gas” it is methane
as far as the well’s concerned. When you have a liter of
methane on the ocean floor and you bring it up to sea level, it
expands 165 times its original volume; it’s because gas is very
compressible, unlike liquid.
If you take a gallon of water on
the ocean floor and you put it under a billion pounds of pressure, it
doesn’t matter, you’re still going to have a gallon of
volume of liquid because liquids don’t compress, fluids
don’t... Well, some fluids can be gas, so I shouldn’t say
that. But liquids don’t compress. Water doesn’t compress.
Gas can compress a lot. When you get a little CO2
canister, there’s a lot of cubic feet of gas in there.
So
a lot of things in the well are very problematic. The gas in the well
has a very huge expansion factor, so one of the problems with a
ruptured well casing is that it’s going to allow some of the
gases to enter the well. Some of those gases are going to come from
the methane hydrate layer that’s around the well. So they don’t
want these gases entering the well because they create a lot of
problems. That’s what causes wells to blow out.
A
ruptured casing is a very, very big problem for this well. Like I
said, it’s inaccessible. There’s nothing we can do to get
at it to try to seal it.
There’s a lot of problems with
just the system itself beginning to wear because what they need to do
is not put pressure on the ruptures below, which can create a lot of
problems – undermining the seabed, compromising the cement bond
to the strata – which will weaken the entire system and
eventually cause the gigantic piece of machinery (the BOP) to
collapse on itself, which is the horrible end.
They don’t
want to have any unnecessary or undue or basically a little as
possible amount of pressure on those down-hole leaks. So what they
needed to do and what they have done, which is contrary to our logic
because we want to see the well stop, is they opened it up and they
let it flow more.
They tried to create better oil-catching
processes, you know, that’s what this new cap was; they’re
going to connect this other ship up to it and try to suck out more.
But as I said in my thread, in the new one (and this was
supposed to be a short synopsis of it but it probably has as many
words as the thread) – there will be no more stopping the well
at the well-head. That’s gone. So we can forget about anybody
who has any good ideas about a valve, or doing balloon angioplasty on
it, or sawing it off and putting a piece of steel in there, or
shooting epoxy into it and letting it harden, or anything like that.
That’s done; it won’t be happening because the more we do
that, the more it destroys the lower portion of the well and the
lower portion of the well can do more damage to the well itself than
just allowing it to flow out, even though it has the potential to do
more damage to the Gulf.
As I said, they hope to stay ahead
of that with better oil-catching processes, but that’s the
point that we’re at. That’s all we can do. We can allow
it to flow more to relieve the pressure on the down-hole leaks and
hope to catch it better.
It’s a really sorry state of
affairs that we’re in. We’re not in a good position on
this well. As a matter of fact we have very bad [unclear]. So that’s
what they did and it’s where we’re at. A lot of people
didn’t understand why but I hoped to explain why.
And
as more and more oil flows faster through the gigantic BOP, all the
erosion, all the wear caused by abrasives in the flow, cavitation,
and things like that, but just basically it’s a mixture of
stuff firing through this enormous BOP that will wear it out. It
polishes it away. It goes pretty slowly; it abrades it very slowly.
But you know, nobody has any real numbers on how it’s reacting
to it, how much it’s doing.
We saw on the riser kink,
within the short time of a week there was a whole new wear-hole in it
and everything else had gotten bigger, so it was growing pretty fast.
Those same actions are happening right now inside the gigantic BOP as
well as some happening at wherever those ruptures are down below.
If they’re blown out, if there isn’t enough
volume of flow to create a Venturi Effect – and a Venturi
Effect is like, it’s almost like a Bernoulli’s Principle,
where you blow across the top of a straw ... you know, everybody did
this... you blow across the top of a straw in a glop of water and it
sucks the water up the straw. Even though you’re only blowing
across it, you create a suction with low pressure.
A Venturi
Effect is kind of the same thing, so as the oil rushes by, if they
had enough back pressure it would be a leak. If there’s not
enough back pressure and you let it flow by, and it flows by very
rapidly, it will actually suck IN stuff from the outside. And if that
stuff is loose earth, sand, chunks of cement, whatever, it’s
getting sucked INTO the well and blown up through the BOP and being
even more abrasive and tearing even more of it apart as it goes.
And the longer this goes on, the more damage it does. The
damage is relentless. It’s constant. While they’re
releasing oil out there, damage is being done and we’re barely
even halfway into it now and we have a long way to go and we’ve
lost a lot of the system already. Some of the decisions to lose some
of that system have been through BP’s, you know, probably best
guidance on what to do.
We’ve seen the system get worn
out. We’re beginning to see it [the BOP] literally tilt and
lean over now. All the cement around the wellhead is completely gone.
It’s completely eroded away. You can see almost a little crater
and see all the well connectors exposed now, and the gigantic massive
BOP is beginning to tilt and it’s over a five degree angle.
It’s not designed to tilt.
The
more that that gets eroded away and the more a little gas or little
oil pops up and around it and loosens that seabed around it, the more
likely it is to tip over. And the more it leans, the more side-load
it puts on that pipe. And eventually, when it gets to a point of,
say, it will be almost four times the amount it leans now, but if
it’s leaning 5 degrees now, once it gets to 20, it will just
begin to slowly stop not-leaning, more and more.
So you may
see it lean, say, another 5 degrees over the course of next week.
That would be 10 degrees.
Once it gets to 10 degrees, it
won’t take another week for it to go to 15 degrees. It will
only take three days.
And once it gets to 15, it won’t
take another three days to go another 5. It’ll take more like
one day.
And then once it gets to 20, it’ll just start
going like a degree an hour.
And once it reaches 30 it won’t
stop, it’ll literally just fall over, just like cutting a tree
down. When you cut a very straight tree down, they start, you know,
falling kind of slowly. You can look at it and it’s almost
majestic, you know. It just begins rather slowly and once it gets to
about, you know, 30, 45 degrees, it starts [unclear], it starts going
fast and it doesn’t stop.
We’ll see the same
thing happen eventually. How long it’ll take? I don’t
know. It’s almost anybody’s guess.
If something
opens up, if that pressure that’s leaking out from underneath
happens to find a nice little channel, it’ll go real fast
because all the oil and gas will start to release itself through that
path of least resistance that’s there. And once you see a
little squirt that doesn’t go away, the next day it’ll be
a pretty big squirt. The day after that, it’ll be gushing. And
you will just see it go over more and more. Even if they support it,
eventually once all that cementing that supports the well from the
outside is eroded away, it’ll just collapse. I mean, it’s
inevitable. The only question is, like I said, how long will it take
and can we outrun it to try to kill it?
Q:
There’s a question from MonkeyMind... What is your take on the
VOCs being airborne and how far will they go?
SHR: The volatile organic compounds being airborne? It’s
probably not too bad in comparison to the overall level of toxicity
of all the oil that comes out of there.
Crude oil has a lot
of toxic things in it – xylene, benzene, toluene, all these
things that are basically solids. They’re all products of the
crude oil and they’re all present and a lot of them are toxic,
among some other things.
One of the things that we have to
our benefit is that Louisiana light sweet crude oil, LLS, is not very
high in sulfur. Sulfur is really a bad element to have out there
because not only does it smell, it’s just highly reactive and
it starts to form some really nasty compounds with crude oil. So we
don’t have that, so it could be worse as far as that goes.
This brand of crude oil, which you know, crude oil is
different from all over the world – you have Texas light sweet
crude; this is Louisiana light sweet crude. You have... I forget what
some of the other ones, Grant crude oil, but they all have different
make-ups and they all have different names.
So this one is
not as bad, as far as actually being, you know, a toxic element
released into the Gulf or into any seaway or ocean or anything like
that, any body of water. But it is not very good for a lot of things.
Number
one, it doesn’t burn well so they can’t really burn it
off very well; that’s why you see the fire booms had a lot of
problems. And it tends to kind of gook up and form almost like a
chocolate mousse because it emulsifies better than a lot of other
oils do.
You take, say, a real heavy, like a 90-weight crude
oil or something like that and you put a drop on a pool of water, you
would be amazed at how big a slick just even one drop... and you’ll
see that kind of oily rainbow sheen very readily because that type of
crude oil slicks up very easily.
This type doesn’t
really do that that much. It emulsifies better than a lot of other
crude oils. Why exactly, I haven’t really looked into, but I’m
sure it’s part of its chemical make-up. So you’re going
to see a lot of these thick, gooey, chocolate-looking oil slicks.
So while that’s not necessarily a bad thing when it’s
out in the open ocean, if we can do it, once that reaches shore and
starts to interact with wildlife, especially all the sea birds and
not so much the fish because they can be under it, but anything that
comes up to the surface is just basically, you know, coated in like
molasses and peanut butter mixed together.
So as far as the
volatile organic compounds in it, there could be worse. Some other
crude oils are worse.
As far as them being airborne, it’s
not as bad as it could possibly be. It’s a lot badder to be in
it than you will have it, say, hundreds of miles away, let’s
put it that way. It’s not making toxic gas clouds at this
point.
But however, I caution anybody, and I’ll say
this about anything, and I work with chemicals a lot, it’s that
if you can smell it, it’s killing you. Okay? Some things are
going to kill you more than others, you know. People that put
hairspray or whatever, you smell perfume, it’s smelling. If you
can smell it, it’s killing you. Things like perfume, hairspray,
stuff like that that’s normally fairly smelly, is maybe only
killing you a couple of seconds of your life, while something like a
cyanide-based gas, you know, if you smell that, it’s going to
kill hours, days, years, of your life.
But, it is bad, but it
could be worse.
Q:
Monkeymind also asks what’s your take on the dispersants that
they’ve been using and the toxicity of them? And then there was
another question about your take on that hurricane.
SHR: I think all use of dispersants should never have been
allowed, especially in an open water spill like this. They do nothing
but make things worse. Things look better for whoever the spillor is,
but they are not better for the spillees, which we are.
I
don’t think that any dispersants should be used, regardless of
their toxicity level. I don’t care if we put Johnson’s
Baby Shampoo into the well and inject that at a low level, it’s
not something that we need to be doing.
[Removing the oil is]
the only real remediation for oil that’s effective up to the
high 90 percentage you want to get this. After that, then yeah, the
microbiological remediation techniques... I don’t really want
to call them dispersants because they’re kind of not... they’re
better when you’re in a closed and tighter system.
If
you have some stuff that’s in marshes, you know, that’s
sensitive to actual physical contact, the bioremediation stuff is
good for that. It can get in there and it can basically eat the oil
up in places you don’t want to go, you know, where you don’t
want to be stomping on baby heron nests or things like that. Or
possibly where there’s alligators and snakes and things that
will kill people. So it’s good for when it’s in there.
But this could be a relatively small percentage, like I said, in the
single-digit percentile.
So the 90-something percentile
that’s out in the open ocean, you don’t
want to use dispersants on it because it just spreads out the
problem.
The microbes are already present in the Gulf in high
quantity. As a matter of fact, right now they’re feasting the
oil buffet. They’re going berserk. They’re beginning to
create hypoxic zones already which are zones where the water is
depleted of oxygen and when there’s no oxygen in the water, no
fish can live. They die. So we already have dead zones in the Gulf.
In the mouth of the Mississippi, especially, there’s a
huge dead zone that happens every summer after the runoff from all
the agriculture comes down the Mississippi River and spreads out into
the Gulf. All the fertilizers and phosphates and the different
chemicals that are present in the Mississippi River, after they’re
applied for the spring planting, they come down the river, and the
bacteria goes berserk eating them. And the bacteria also use up
oxygen and they create what’s called hypoxic... Like I said,
where the oxygen is depleted from the water, nothing can live in
there.
The
fish usually run away. When they start to feel they can’t
breathe, they move out to sea. That’s going to happen this
year. This year when they run away and they move out to sea, they’ll
hit basically a never-ending depleted oxygen zone and they won’t
make it. They’ll die. So we’re going to have a lot of
sealife kills of fish and things that are gill-breathers.
So
the use of dispersants is, to me, like I said, I’m completely
against it. I don’t think we should be using anything. I think
that’s for much later on down the line if there is any oil left
in the marshes once the vast majority of it is gone, sucked out,
taken out of the water... because that’s the only real true way
to combat oil.
Oil is not supposed to be in water, so once
you have oil in water you have to take the oil out
of the water. That’s the only real way to do it that works. If
you dissolve it, you just have dissolved oil in that much more water.
And oil is bad enough in the parts per million that are present there
now, it’s already toxic, so we don’t need to spread it
out into a more toxic area just so that it looks nicer.
So
that’s my take on dispersants. I don’t think dispersants
should be used at all.
And the other question? I don’t
remember because I talked for too long.
Q:
...asks what is the diameter in the well carrier pipe and the
diameter near the BOP? And j calley wants to know what your take is
on the relief wells, if the relief wells are going to work?
SHR: I remember the first question was if the relief wells
were going to work.
The diameter of the well? If you guys
want, I can post an entire well schematic that’s really
complicated. But the diameter of the pipe that you see on top of the
BOP that the oil was coming out of, that’s now capped, it’s
a 21-inch OD, outside diameter, and it’s an 18-1/2 or 18-3/4
ID, inside diameter. So it’s a big pipe.
Those bolts
that you’re looking at that are on top of the BOP right by the
sawed-off area are about 4-inch-width bolts. So, you know, that’s
a bolt with a 4-inch head on it. That means you need a socket, you
know, if you had a ratchet, you’d need a socket that’s
about the size of a one-pound coffee can to go over that. It’s
hard to see the scale on things because everything is so big down
there.
But if you want I can post a really good well
schematic. If you guys want I’ll post a link to it and that’ll
show you all the different diameters and lengths of pipe and
everything on the well. So I’ll post that while I’m
talking about the next thing.
Q:
... wants to also know about a tsunami being caused by the seabed
collapsing. They want to know how plausible that might be, if there
is actually a danger of the seafloor collapsing?
SHR: Okay, let me get to the relief wells first, the chances
of the relief wells working.
First of all, people have to
stop thinking of them as relief
wells because they’re not going to relieve
anything. This is what they’re called, that is the terminology
for it, but they’re not meant to go down there...
A lot
of people seem to be thinking that they’re going to go down
there and they’re going to pump oil out of those wells and
they’re going to make the pressure go down on the Macondo well,
on the blown-out well, and they’re going to basically use those
wells to relieve pressure from the well that is leaking now. And then
they’re going to somehow turn off the well, do whatever it is
they’re gonna to stop the top.
That’s not what’s
going to happen. That’s not what those wells are made for and
that’s not what those wells are going to do.
What those
wells are made for is they’re made to go down and they’re
made to intersect the well that’s leaking now. Once they
intersect it and basically bore into the pipe that is the well that’s
down near the oil formation, they will be used to pump in the
kill-mud, the same sort of thing that we saw in the mud-kill, “top
kill” effort that failed, which I talked about. They’ll
use the same type of mud, to pump that in and form a hydrostatic head
and kill this well, only from the bottom up.
They have a much
greater chance of doing it from the bottom up, let’s put it
that way. The way it is right now, I would probably put the chance of
that at 50/50. A lot of people out there from some of the
professional oil and gas people sites that I’ve read around,
they don’t even think it’s 50/50, so I’ve just kind
of formulated my own odds of it working at 50/50.
It’s
not very good but it’s also not very bad. It’s as good as
it is bad, you know, that’s what 50/50 means. We have as much
chance of it failing as we do of it working, so it’s not very
great. I think it’s probably the best chance that we’ve
had since the beginning to actually kill the well.
Some of
the problems that we’re gonna face are just going to be getting
there. At 13,000 feet below the seabed, the well that seems so big to
us on top, it’s only a 9-inch-diameter tube that they have to
hit underground with a mile of water above it, from 18,000 feet away,
basically with remotely-guided drilling heads.
It’s
easier to just drill a well and hit an oil formation because the oil
formations are big. They basically know where they are. They drill
straight down. Now they’re facing the challenge of coming down
near that well, turning the directional drilling head and basically
seeking along... They have, I heard, some magnetic, but they
certainly have sonic detection equipment ahead of the drill that
they’ll periodically stop and listen for. And of course it has
GPS. They send all these electronic gizmos down there to let them
know exactly where they’re at and hopefully they will get it
through the image, or to the image anyway, you know, and know the
depth, and hit that 9-inch-diameter pipe from over 3 miles away under
all that pressure by remote control.
So you guys can kind of
see the technological challenge that they’re up against to just
even get there. And then after they get there, they have to be able
to pump all this mud down fast enough, but not too fast enough
because they don’t want to explode the well bore and pop it
like a long thin balloon, which could happen if they go too fast. And
they want to basically pump in this heavy dense fluid and kill the
well from below. So that’s what the relief wells are all about.
Like I said, I personally give it about a 50/50 chance of
being able to work and I think it’s probably the best shot that
we have going at it. So that’s what that’s all about.
Q:
... why can’t they work harder at the recovery? And also
someone has asked what’s your take on nuking the well?
Well, the one about, somebody said about collapsing
the seafloor.
Collapsing the seafloor is not out of the realm of possibility. As a
matter of fact there is a lot of really terrible scenarios,
conclusions to this, that are possible.
They’re, you
know, the probability of them? The odds are against it. But the odds
against them happening three months ago might have been a
hundred-million-to-one. You know, you have a better chance of winning
the lottery, the lotto, the big lotto in five different states all on
the same day, billions-to-one.
The odds of all these
alternate nightmare situations just got a whole lot better since this
happened. They may still be high, but they were not even something to
be concerned about three months ago. They’ve entered the realms
of possible now to the point where we probably should be concerned
about them, to a degree. I don’t think we should spend a lot of
time on the ultimate worst case. We’d have to have a cascading
chain fall into place for all these horrible situations to happen.
But the possibility of something like a seafloor collapse, a
subsidence of the formation underneath because of the depletion of
oil and gas and the pressure that holds it up, just became a whole
lot more real. It’s not as far-fetched, really, as it was just
a few months ago.
Like I said, I think the odds of those
things happening right now are extremely high. They are extremely
much, much lower than they were prior to this happening, while I’m
not going to be one of these people that go around and say: Yeah,
if it goes for another month we’re going to have a seafloor
collapse and a massive tsunami.
I’m not that guy because I still think the odds of it are very
high.
But like I said, the odds of it actually happening just
got a whole lot better and those cataclysmic events are not
impossible. They are very possible. And like I said, it’s just
a matter of probability.
I don’t think that we’re
going to see that unless I see something like a massive upsurge in
the pressure coming out of the well. I think that it’ll
probably be fairly confined to this formation, and this could be a
very big formation. We’re talking this one little formation
under Macondo Well #252 could possibly go on for years.
If
all the strata underneath and the webwork that maybe interconnects,
maybe doesn’t... they don’t really know because we can’t
see down that far very well... if it starts kind of fracturing and
collapsing into walls of other formations and we see a huge upturn in
pressure, it’s basically like the fragile and delicate walls
are breaking down and we’re into bigger and bigger formations.
The longer it goes on, those things definitely become a very real
possibility. But right now, I don’t think that it’s a
threat in the near future.
Q:
SHR, the other day somebody posted a couple of images that were
underground volcanoes. I’m going to expand on sam-I-am’s
question... how accurate and how truthful do you think BP is in
showing us these images? BP’s been showing us live cams of the
BOP down below. Now, a member had a thread (I believe I have it saved
to my favorites) where they have images of underground volcanoes
where they were saying that the steam that comes out is white, and
they said a lot of the images that BP was showing us was the white
steam coming out. In other words, what I’m asking is how
accurate and how truthful do you think the images and the cam shots
that BP has been showing us is true... truth?
SHR: I think they’re real. I think they’re live.
You’re going to see a few things, you know, where there’s
camera gain and contrast and some difference in colors. I’ve
seen some people say: Oh
it’s different now. It’s a different cap, it’s
yellow. No, it’s white on this cam, it’s yellow on this
cam.
Some of that is going to be contrast and camera gain where things
appear a little bit differently.
But I think they’re
pretty accurate and I think that these are probably some of the most
watched feeds, so I don’t think we’re going to see a
whole lot of shenanigans going on. If they didn’t want to show
us, they just would have said No. They wouldn’t have done it.
You know, the government could have cried and pissed and moaned all
they wanted to and they would have just said No. But they got ’em
to show ’em to us, so I think what we’re seeing is real.
I don’t think this is a hoax. There’s a lot of
people like, you know, you’ve got Matt Simmons: Oh
the BOP’s gone, it’s connected to the rig, it’s
five miles away. You know, we’re not seeing it coming out of
there. The only reason you’re seeing the BOP is because it’s
leaking out of the rig. It’s going in reverse.
You know, obviously that isn’t true anymore since they clipped
the riser off and the BOP magically kept leaking and the other end of
the riser plume stopped leaking because it wasn’t connected to
the well anymore. So you’re going to hear a lot of crazy stuff
like that out there.
I think the images that we’re
seeing are real. I think most of what we got as far as information
goes is real. What they’re doing is just pretty much the
classic manipulation of information, is that they’re not going
to come out and basically tell you lies and stone falsehoods, is that
they’re going to withhold
a lot of information. They’re going to let a lot of people jump
to conclusions and they’re not going to go out of their way,
you know, to stop that.
If somebody wants to come up with a
crazy theory about something, they kind of just let people run with
it because it ends up discrediting anybody that’s asking any
real questions. You know, if I come out and I’m with a group of
five people and I say: You
know, it looks like this, this, this, and this, and you know we have
a lot of reports on this... what is it saying?
They just go: Well,
we can neither confirm nor deny.
And then the next person comes out and says: Well,
you know, I heard that it was an alien gamma ray that sunk the well
because there was a big hole in the helipad and we think it’s
HAARP technology and this whole thing is a show and it’s not
happening.
And they just go: Well,
we will neither confirm nor deny.
And the next thing you know, people are watching a whole a
press conference and your lucid question about whether there’s
a compromise of the well integrity down-hole in the casing string,
you get lumped in with the guy with the laser beam and Galactic
Federation attacking the well or a North Korean submarine attack and
everything like that.
So, it’s just classic
manipulation of information. You have to be careful of everything you
hear and the sources from it. We’re not nearly getting enough
information. A lot is being withheld from us, but the little bit that
we do see is real.
If you notice, you’re not seeing
ROVs. You’re not seeing too many feeds from them when they’re
out poking around and looking at some stuff. It would be nice to have
raw unlimited footage archives to just go through and be able to
download 24/7 of all 12 of those ROV cams and try to get an idea of
what’s really going on down there, but we don’t. We get a
lot of them turned off from time to time, some of them of staring at
the same thing from time to time... for most of the time.
So
that’s the way that they manipulate information rather than
just creating stone falsehoods and just lying to us because they
mostly get caught. So they don’t want to get caught in a lie
but they can withhold information all day long and all anybody will
say is: You’re
withholding information.
And then they can just say: Well,
we’re busy. We don’t have time to tell you everything.
And you don’t understand it anyway, sheeple.
Q:
All right, I want to expand on one area here, with the information
we’re not being told. What’s concerning me is we’re
going to revisit 9/11 with the EPA. Now, you’ve seen the past
couple of days there’s threads on the board especially with
Lindsey Williams. They threw my thread up on the pin where Lindsey
was saying we’re not being told how toxic the air is down
there. Where do you think they’re going to go with this? Do you
really think that this air is toxic? I mean, you live down there.
That should be a big concern for everyone along the Gulf if they’re
withholding this information, if that air is toxic.
SHR: Well, like I said before to somebody, I don’t
think that there is a massive amount of airborne toxicity. I just
don’t think it’s there in the oil, from what I can see,
from what little I can find.
It’s getting harder and
harder to dig up information on it. I’m glad I did some a while
ago and saved it. It’s hard to get back to it because it just
seems, like I said, they’re scrubbing more and more of it.
You know, we’ve seen it happen on the website. You
know, we got three or four DMCA notices, like, where we RARELY do. I
think we’ve gotten a couple. Some of them were just retarded...
David Icke calling up and saying... You know, not calling up, but
some firm sent a letter saying: We
want you to remove this disparaging article.
And we basically went: Fuck
you
and said, you know, we
were promoting you here for free a lot, dude.
So we’ve killed all positive articles and left the false
negative articles and changed his name into David Dick, you know. If
he wants to be that way, he can be that way.
But, you know,
we just got like four DMCA notices from some big players, you know.
Reuters
News Service.
Another one was Times
Online...
or Guardian,
No... Guardian;
I’m sorry; and some others, you know. And these are all
British-owned and, you know. They’re either British-owned or
they’re heavily British-tied companies. So, you know, BP is
circling the wagons.
And if you start to notice, if you’re
searching for information on this it’s just getting harder and
harder to find. You can search BP BOP and right away in images across
the top of the screen all you have is linked to BP’s homepage,
while you used to be able to get images of different blowout
preventers and links to articles and the images that were in them.
Now it’s just “B-BOP, music from the ’50s”,
you know, and BP, you know... “My name is Brian Potain and my
friends call me BP”, and a bunch of crap.
They’ve
definitely manipulated a lot of the search engine results and things
like that. And like I said, not a lot, but they can manipulate the
information easily enough.
A lot of the things that Lindsey
Williams has said in the past I agree with. I kind of find him
credible to some degree. Some things you have to kind of take on
faith because he has a lot of (quote/ unquote) “insider”
information. So you have to kind of take some things on faith but he
makes a lot of sense. He has some credibility, to me, more so than
Matt Simmons, who I won’t go into too much, but I don’t
find him very credible at all.
And it is possible. When
you’re down there in close proximity to it, there’s no
doubt that it’s creating a toxic environment, that there is
toxicity in the air. Like I said before, I always tell people: If you
can smell it, it’s killing you.
As far as how deadly
that is, it’s really hard to say because all these things are
long term, you know. They’ve never had an environment with 10
miles of beach that’s infiltrated with a raw spill that’s
cooked in the sun and reacted with salt water for 30, 40, 50 days,
whatever is, of this Louisiana light sweet crude. They can guess at
it, but this is the first time they’re really seeing it.
And
I was at ground zero too, just a few weeks after 9/11 happened. There
was a lot of people walking around without respirators on, you know.
I was one of them and I never suffered any adverse effects from it or
anything like that, but I know some people who did. You know, they
were there for a long time and they were like some days it was just
horrible, the smell was horrible, the wind was blowing that way or it
was cooking in the sun or it was a warmer day or it was humid and the
smell was horrible. They did end up having some adverse effects from
it, and I’m sure that we’re going to see some to a degree
here too.
You know, at ground zero, the people were in it,
they were on it, they were standing on it. We walked around in it
right there. Anybody that’s involved with the spill mitigation
that is right there, that has the oil coming up on the beach, that
sees oil everywhere, that smells it, should be wearing a respirator
because all these compounds, you know, they’re just not good
for you. But it’s just general self preservation, safety, kind
of tips at that point.
You know, I wouldn’t walk up to
a chemical spill. That’s what this is. It’s a chemical
spill. It’s an organic chemical, but most nasty chemicals are.
So this is a chemical spill. And I wouldn’t walk up and start
trying to basically gather up or mitigate in any way a chemical spill
without some sort of protective gear. It’s just simple common
sense.
Yes, it is dangerous, but I don’t think it’s
making a death cloud that’s going over states and you can’t
smell it and you don’t know it, that kind of thing.
Q:
... They put 12,000 barrels of mud down there; it disappeared...
[unclear]
SHR: Well, not all of it disappeared, you know, vanished,
without them knowing. A lot of it did come out the blowout preventer.
I found out a little more information afterward and I could give you
guys a little bit better timeline. It’s really difficult, like
I said, it’s getting hard to get information. I got this from
the Department of Energy. You don’t want to go there anyway
because it’s one of those places that all us paranoids hate
going to.
But they tried 17 kill shots into this thing. They
weren’t telling anybody about that. They did it over a course
of three days. I could get you the actual totals of everything, but
it totaled to about 50,000 barrels of mud. The first day they did
like, say 20-some-odd-thousand with no kill shot.
The second
day they did like 10-some-odd-thousand barrels of mud with 16 kill
shots over the course of a few hours. That’s all the junk
shots, you know, the golf balls, the shredded tires, ropes with knots
in them, all that crap. They fired shit into that well 16 times over
the course of a few hours.
Then on the third day they tried
one more junk shot and basically pumped in, tried to pump in, the
remaining balance of the mud, up to about 50,000 or so barrels that
they pumped into it.
You know, they say 30,000 but like I
said, they had a ship there with 50 and it ran out and they had to go
get a second ship. So if they had a ship with 50 and it ran out and
they had to go get a second ship and they’re only telling you
30, how much do you think they really pumped in there? Probably
double that, probably more like 60.
And not all of it, like I
said, just vanished. Some of it went out the top of the well. But a
lot of it went down and they couldn’t account for it and it
wasn’t getting any better, they weren’t establishing
their head, so they know that it had to be leaking out.
I’m
sure they also know about what depth the first problem that they
encountered is. They know if it’s at 500 feet or they know if
it’s at 1000 feet or if it’s at 1500, 2000 feet, etc.,
etc, so that’s the kind of stuff that they’re not telling
us. We’ve heard that it may be about 1000 feet down. That’s
probably, you know, a general good enough idea to think of as a rough
estimate for right about now, about 1000 feet down. So not all of it
vanished, so they know where some of it went, but they also know that
some of it leaked.
But you can’t really judge when it’s
going to happen with the limited amount of information that we have
access to, you can just take a guess. Like I said, it’s leaning
now.
That’s
something that we should all keep an eye on. Whenever we can get a
view of the BOP and especially down around the base, compare it to
old photos. You know, we have hours of video that show the tilt;
other people have a lot of video that shows the amount of tilt. So
anytime that we can see that again and we can look at it and see that
if in the first week it gained 2 degrees, here’s another one
that we got a chance to see and it gained 5 degrees in a week. If in
a week then we see 10 degrees, it’s going to happen very
fast... we may have a matter of weeks left.
In my guess, you
know, just me taking a look at it and trying to guess your best
without knowing everything... and like I said I wish I knew a whole
lot more because I would be able to calculate it a lot better... I
think it’s going to be fairly close.
I think some of
the relief well operations are seriously going to stress out the
system and, you know, I hope it’s in as good a shape as it can
possibly be by the time we get to take the chance to put that shot in
because it’s going to be coming out... All the oil and
everything is going to be gushing out a whole lot harder when they
take those pumps, intersect that well, connect those giant pumps up
to it, and they are going to increase the pressure on that well. It’s
the only way they can do it.
If they go in with the same
pressure it’s just going to flow out, they’re just going
to have muddy oil coming out. So they WILL increase the pressure on
that well when they go to do that and that’s two months,
minimum, from now. Things are going to be beat up even worse than
they are now, you know, so... I think it may be close. I’ll
know more, you know, in a couple of weeks from now I may be able to
give a better estimate of the time.
But we’re really
just starting to see a lot of this stuff. We’ve started to see
the BOP tilting over only a week ago and we’re just being able
to look from, say, a week, not even, ago and just over the matter of
a couple of days I can’t really give you a good estimate. But I
might try to take a guess at it within a couple of weeks after I see
a little bit more.
Q:
... what about a hurricane? Or maybe many hurricanes over the season
while there’s oil in the Gulf? Are the people in the Gulf
states moving out?
SHR: Well, if a hurricane does come, the first thing that
will happen is the ships will pack and leave. That means there won’t
be any upcap or unit out there sucking away. There won’t be
anything connected to the well if they use that direct Connixit
system sucking the well, because the ships will leave. So that will
immediately stop all the mitigating practices happening now.
So
they go away. So we have the oil well doing the best it can do,
pretty much open at that point, open as far as it is now without all
our leak mitigation technology on it. So that immediately stops, all
the ships go away.
Number Two that is bad is that the ocean
currents of course get stirred up. You know, you have lot bigger
waves, things move in the surge that’s created by the hurricane
and the hurricanes create a lot of current even down below.
Five-thousand feet below surface the current will increase. You’re
not talking, you know, 20-foot waves on the bottom like you would on
the surface, but the current will increase.
And any current
down there is pushing on that, mechanically pushing on that BOP,
trying to sway it side to side. And it’s weak and it’s
bending and the pipe holding it is undermined, so it’s not as
strong as it used to be, you know. It has no good purchase on the
ground up on top anymore to help it. So that’s a bad situation
if you get a lot of current.
Then you have a rather large
portion of the Gulf with oil floating on the surface of it that the
hurricane will suck up and drop as rain wherever it goes. So it will
rain, you know, contaminated water, oily water, to some degree.
How
much
it can pick up? Who can really say? The hurricane does pick up a
lot through mechanical means, not only through evaporation but
through spray. You know, the oil’s not going to evaporate into
the hurricane, but the hurricane will pick up some oil because it
splashes around the water, there’s oil on that water, it’s
going to splash that around, so it will suck up an amount of oil. And
I don’t think anybody really knows because it’s never
happened before. You know, we’ve never had a hurricane of
whatever category buzz across a giant oil slick and try to pick it
up.
The last thing that a hurricane will do which is also bad
is that the storm surge, which is kind of the big bubble of water
that happens because a hurricane is a low pressure system... a big
bubble of water is going to shove an assload of oil inland and onto
the beaches.
So a hurricane does a lot of bad things. I don’t
know whoever came out and said... oh, I think it was the president
who said: Oh,
a hurricane actually wouldn’t be too bad because it would help
to spray oil around, spread it out and get rid of it fast.
That’s just absolutely a retarded notion and just shows
how completely inexperienced he is. He’s probably listening to
some academics who #1) have never been through a hurricane, #2) only
know oil from cooking and #3) should probably just stay in the
classroom and shut up.
Q:
SHR, Freethinker had a question before, he says he’s got no
mic, wanted me to ask you. I’d like to know how BP knows their
casing blowout is 1000 feet down-well. This is a critical dimension.
Do you know if this 1000 feet is legit or just another datapoint
flung from the BP disinfo machine?
SHR: First of all, I want to thank Freethinker for all his
input on the threads about the oil well. He’s a really
knowledgeable guy. Really thank his input and his expertise and his
professional outlook on all these things that we’re facing.
He’s been a good guy to have around; I like to bounce stuff off
him every now and then. He’s a poster to watch, to listen to.
He’s a smart guy; he knows about this shit.
To answer
that question, as far as I know, 1000 feet down? I’m only
getting it from that one Wall
street Journal
article and there’s only about three pretty sketchy articles
out there.
So I’m not saying that I know for sure it’s
1000 feet down, but you know, that’s the only reference to
depth that I’ve heard and I’ve pretty much stated that,
that they know they have a leak down-hole, or I’m assuming that
they do... all things point to that, you know, as I outlined in my
thread. All the evidence points that way and I think it’s an
inescapable conclusion.
But where it exactly is? That’s
one of the few references to depth. It may be the ONLY reference to
depth that’s out there.
Now I’d like to ask him a
question. He can answer through text. (I’m sorry, I’ve
only been looking out the corner of my eye because I’ve got
about eight screens around me.) But why is 1000 feet down a critical
depth? Let’s see if we can get an answer from him as we go.
What
was one of the other questions that I was asked, oh, about the
(quote/ unquote) “nuclear” option, the Russian option?
Nuking the well?
In my opinion this would be an incredibly bad thing to do,
and especially an atomic explosion. The way to shape... you don’t
need an atomic explosion. Any explosion down that deep really
wouldn’t have much of a chance of using a (quote/ unquote)
“shaped” charge to move things very directionally because
we would have to move a lot of earth to do it, so we’d
basically have to use raw explosive force.
We can’t
really do shaped charges, which are usually more – by their
nature by the physics that make them work – usually a smaller
force where we can cut steel beams or cut concrete pilings and things
like that. We can’t really do that when we need to move a
gigantic amount of earth unless we can set up 100 small shaped
charges and we don’t have to opportunity to do that here. We
would have to use pretty much one or two really big bombs.
The
issue with an atomic bomb is that an atomic bomb, of course, has a
lot of energy. We can generate megatons of TNT, kilotons easily, with
an atomic explosion. The problem with an atomic explosion is that it
creates a lot of heat. So basically what we’re going to do, if
we drill the hole and put an atomic bomb down in it, is we would make
a big circular bubble of pressure and heat. And while it may stop the
well for a little while, basically what we’re left with is a
big empty glassified sphere of the many thousands of feet below the
seabed that we dissolved to do this.
This is really bad
because eventually the earth, the pressures of the rock, will crush
it and break it and it’s a big open cavity. And even in this
oil deposit it’s not an open cavity. We don’t have that
many open cavities. It’s kind of more like a sponge rather than
a balloon full of oil. Even though it’s under pressure, it
still kind of has a lot of weblike intricacies running through it.
So it we put a nuclear bomb down a hole, which, number one,
is logistically very difficult to do, we don’t really have a
nuclear bomb that’s designed to operate 10,000 feet below sea
level at 5,000 PSI of positive pressure acting on it. Most of our
bombs are designed to explode much closer to the surface, in fact on
the surface and above the surface.
So we would have to make
an atomic bomb that was capable of withstanding those forces which
can crush our military submarines long before they ever reach the
level that these little ROVs, the cute little ROVs that we’re
seeing on the videos feeds, are playing around at. Our mighty, you
know, missile submarines would be crushed like bugs long before they
reach that.
So, number one, we would have to create an atomic
device, probably a hydrogen bomb most likely, that could withstand
those forces of pressure. Then it would have to be small enough to
get into a hole that we could drill. We can’t drill a hole big
enough... or we could but it would be a logistical nightmare. We
can’t make a real big hole, one big enough for, you know, like
a Nagasaki bomb or a Hiroshima bomb, so we have to get one that’s
compact enough to go down there.
And like I said, we’d
basically create a big glassified sphere. If you watched the Japanese
scientist whose name always escapes me but you see him around. He’s
a pretty smart guy and he’s pretty credible. There’s some
YouTube videos of him. He says basically the same exact thing.
I
go a little step further. I’ve said that if we create a
gigantic glassified sphere under the seabed, it could break from the
pressure of the oil well that it is trying to seal from underneath.
And if it does that, it basically becomes a big accumulator of extra
energy, so we create something closer to the surface with more
pressure in it that’s more willing to pop and which could very
well happen, so there’s a whole lot of downsides to doing it
with an atomic bomb.
I know the Russians did it and they did
it out in a vast wasteland out on the tundra where nobody lives. The
Russians are notorious for not really giving a fuck about their
people. If they have to kill a few thousand of them with radiation or
mutate them for generations to come, that’s just tough crap and
you live with it. Or if they have to dislocate an entire population,
well they just do that; it’s not a big deal. They just pick
them up and then move them over to another place in the tundra and
say “you have to live here now and anybody that bitches will
just get shot.” So it’s not really that big a deal for
them.
And like I said, they did that out in the middle of
basically a vast wasteland where the well was burning for something
like four years before that and nobody really cared. They just wanted
to get the gas that was around it because it was a big gas deposit
and they figured they were wasting it. So it was more of a monetary
thing for them.
It’s not in the middle of the Gulf of
Mexico, which is a highly populated area and also has, you know, a
huge aquatic-based industry all around it that that high population
density relies on to live.
So it’s just two completely
different circumstances, two different countries, two different
attitudes towards handling it and I just really don’t think it
would work for us and I think it’s a really incredibly bad
idea. I’d give it less chance of actually being able to stop
the well. I would probably give that maybe a 20% chance of working
and an 80% chance of doing damage and making it worse than things
that we could come up with long prior to ever getting that far.
Q:
Then
why do you think the Obama administration sent nuclear
scientists down there within weeks? I mean, doesn’t it seem
like BP and the Obama administration knew within a couple weeks that
they had something on our hands that the world had never seen and no
answers for it? And even now they have no answers for it. They’re
doing a dog and pony show to try to convince the world they’re
going to fix it. This thing could be the worst catastrophe that the
world’s ever seen. It could actually kill the Gulf of Mexico.
SHR: They sent those guys down there to look into it, I’m
sure, to suggest it because it has been done before; it was a known
thing. As far as I know I remember reading something a week ago, I
forget what department it was from, but it was absolutely 100% off
the table and won’t be happening.
That doesn’t
mean that they didn’t look into it. I know they sent the head
of Sandia down there. They sent that old Oppenheimer-like guy who was
the father of the hydrogen bomb...
Sent Chu down there, who’s
been the most absolutely useless... the most awesome Nobel Prize
winner. I think if I hear “The Department of Energy Secretary,
Stephen Chu, and he has a Nobel Prize,” you know, I’m
just going to puke, you know, because he has a Nobel Prize in laser
cooling of integrated circuit manufacturing that has absolutely
nothing to do with oil. I also read a story somewhere that he wasn’t
even aware that oil was in the Department of Energy’s
portfolio, that like they were even in charge of anything to do with
oil. “I thought it was like... you know... Minerals Management,
I thought that was like their baby.” He didn’t even know
he was in charge of it or anything.
He’s a really smart
guy. I’m sure Steven Hawking is a really smart guy but I don’t
think I’d want Steven Hawking in control of a wild blown-out
oil well, no matter how smart he is. I really want a guy with like
30, 40 years’ experience in controlling wild blown-out oil
wells is probably my best choice... unless the guy is brain-damaged
and half-retarded, which somebody would be... in charge of handling
complex animal-like oil wells. So I’d rather have the guys with
experience than the guys who are just really smart guys. I’m
sure that there are some philosophers out there that are really smart
guys that would be absolutely freaking useless in a situation like
this. I don’t care how big their brains are, they have no
experience in it and they would be worthless.
So they sent
these guys down there and another one was the head of the US
Geological Survey, whatever her name was. I don’t think it was
Marsha McNutt, but it was one of these people, another academic,
another administrator, went down there. And I think they just
basically had a conference but then they came back.
And like
I said, from what I heard it’s completely off the table. I
don’t think it will ever happen. I don’t think it ever
should
happen. And I think if it does happen it will most likely make things
worse. It’ll probably still either blow... the well will either
blow out again if it does stop it at all, even briefly, or it will
just tear it open and the well will begin leaking worse and we’ll
have irradiated oil coming into the Gulf at that time because as we
all know atomic weapons create a lot of radioactive isotopes when
they go off.
So there’s very little chance of any
upside and a very... as a matter of fact it’s not only a
chance, it’s a given... that there will be a lot of downside to
it. So like I said, as far as I know it’s off the table. I
don’t think it should happen and I don’t think it ever
will happen.
Q:
Freethinker... he has a response for you, just a moment. Okay he says
it’s critical because the mud stacked up from the bottom will
not kill the well if the rupture is low enough downwell that the
formation pressure is more than the weight of the mud between the
formation and the rupture.
SHR: Right. I understand that. Right. They wouldn’t
have enough room to create a large enough hydrostatic head heavy
enough, you know, that the well would kill, the well couldn’t
push up any more.
I think 1000 feet, though, I think they
still have enough left – we’re probably looking at 12,000
feet of well. I don’t know if we ever tried to calculate how
much, you know, weight we could generate over a certain amount of
feet. That might be something that we want to look into doing.
One of the other problems is, too, we know that they had some
problems down where they made the bottom plug. The bottom plug to the
well...
You know, when you guys were thinking that they’re
plugging the well, they’re getting ready to leave; when they
were doing all their preparation and they displaced the riser with
seawater, they were only a day away from packing up and leaving and
this well would have been sealed off and the drilling crew of
Deepwater Horizon would have left and the production crew would have
come on, you know, maybe six months from now or something like that.
We may almost be... I mean, I hate to say it, it wasn’t
lucky for the Deepwater Horizon, but we may be luckier that it blew
out now and didn’t blow out, you know, two days after they left
because then we would have the hole in the ground. We would just have
nothing. We would just have a raw hole in the ground gushing out oil.
We wouldn’t have a sunk, you know, drilling rig, and we
wouldn’t have 11 dead oil guys, but we may have a better
situation as far as the actual leak is concerned that the BOP is
still on there, because they would have disconnected that and taken
it away; that’s what they do.
So anyway, when they were
plugging this well in the course of getting ready to leave, they put
what is called the bottom plug in, and that’s what they did the
positive/ negative pressure tests on and everything like that. It’s
a concrete plug that gets cemented into the well. But that plug is
not near the surface. As a matter of fact, that plug is 12,900 feet,
I believe it was... I have the actual numbers somewhere... but just
say 12,000 feet below the surface.
That is where they were
having the problems with their casing and we know that that plug had
to have failed and was blown out. So that’s all 12,000 feet
below the surface creating problems, who knows where, above that.
Now there’s still a long piece of drill string in
there. Nobody seems to know exactly how long it is. Maybe it’s
10,000 feet long, maybe it’s 12,000 feet long; maybe it’s
5000 feet long. Nobody’s telling us. So that cement plug may
have come loose and literally shot up, hit the top of that drill
string, careened along casings along the way. I mean there’s a
lot of avenues to do a lot of damage very deep in a well and down
below too.
But I understand, you know, what he’s saying
is that if we don’t have enough length of the well, especially
down below because we can’t make a cap on it, you know, with
this mud kill, it will just leak out. It won’t cap it. It won’t
be able to cap it. Either the gas will cap it on the top, but the gas
will still come out from underneath if there’s not enough
length from the bottom up to make a cap.
Say a cap... I keep
saying cap...
say a plug,
a mud kill, a hydrostatic head required to kill this well was 10,000
feet long. If there’s only 8 in feet of usable well, you can’t
make it; you can’t make a 10,000-foot-long plug in an
8,000-foot-long tube. There’s not enough room. And what we
would do at the point, I really just don’t know.
Q:
...I just wanted to thank SHR for his expertise in this area. I was
wondering, in light of the poll on the GLP webpage about this being
an extinction level event, what his idea is about that? And it sounds
like we have really no good options at all to stop this leak and 30
to 40 years of leaking into the oceans is going to spread it in
currents around the world, so it doesn’t look good. It’s
making everything sound pretty hopeless. What are your thoughts on
that?
SHR: I think we have one fairly good chance left to kill it.
I think the relief wells are a pretty good chance to do that.
Even
if
what I said comes true – the whole upper mechanical unit
fails and we have a maximum-level gusher going into the Gulf of
Mexico for however many days post that would happen till the lineup
with the kill wells actually kills the well – it may be a
month; it may be two months; it may be three months.
So we
need to now to be preparing for the worst, because the worst is a
definite possibility that the odds are increasing of happening every
single day. Every minute, every second of every single day, the odds
of that entire unit just reaching some sort of catastrophic level
failure go up. It’s being eaten out and it cannot last forever.
It’s impossible. So eventually it will happen and how long it
takes for that to happen is going to depend on a lot of
circumstances; and there’s a lot of things that can happen.
I’m sure that they or I could invent a scenario where
the thing comes apart tomorrow. I’m sure that we can also
invent the longer-term scenario where it’ll be just like you
see it today for six months. Neither are likely to happen. It’s
probably going to be somewhere in between but it’s a big amount
of room in between.
So we need to prepare for the worst, you
know, and we’re talking a quadrupling, quintupling in size of
the output of oil. We’re talking about seeing the amount of oil
that we have out now already wreaking all this havoc in the Gulf,
happening every week, you know. We have six weeks of oil now. It
could easily go up six times in volume if everything just falls apart
and the well becomes totally compromised – the BOP just fails.
And those things are, as I said, these things are real
possibilities. They will
happen. It’s just a matter of when. And like I said, I just
don’t see us winning that race. I think that we’re going
to see some sort of catastrophic failure before we can get there with
the kill wells. That doesn’t mean that the kill wells
necessarily won’t work, that we won’t be able to kill it
with those. It gets more difficult to do, so the more difficult it
gets, the more the chances of it not working go up. But it’s
still a chance we have left to kill it.
There can be no
“we’re just going to let this well...” walk away
from it and say there’s nothing we can do, let it go for the
next ten years or whatever, because then we will reach all the
doomsday scenarios where the seafloor could collapse.
There’s
so many other things that can happen long before that, just
destroying all the oxygen in the Gulf, and I can’t remember the
name of it, it’s like anibioxic environment or something like
that. It’s not hypoxic, but it’s basically where most of
the oxygen is depleted and this bacteria begins to grow that exudes
hydrogen sulfide, which is a relatively toxic gas, and things just
become more and more toxic.
We end up eventually, if we let
it blow wide open for a couple of years, we would probably end up
with literally a toxic Gulf of Mexico which would be beyond a dead
Gulf of Mexico, which would happen sooner. So there’s, you
know, the potential for...
When I think of extinction level
event, I think of the entire planet being wiped out. And that also is
possible, but it just, as I said, is the further you go out and the
more and more you want to destroy in these scenarios that everybody
is thinking about, the more you want to destroy, the longer it has to
go on and the more that has to happen correctly to lead up to that
point, so the possibilities of that actually happening go down.
Do
I
think it could possibly kill the planet? If it gushed 2 or
3-hundred-thousand barrels of oil for 30 years, yeah, it probably
could kill the planet with all the... That would be trillions of
cubic feet of gas released into the atmosphere. We’d probably
have a runaway greenhouse effect and all sorts of horrible things,
but that would take a very long time to do.
We would do
something. We would find a way to stop it at that time. If it got to
that I’d be like “might as well just freaking throw
hydrogen bombs down there and blow it up, go for it, because we’re
dying now. So, you know, if this has got even a Chinaman’s
chance of working, we might as well go for it because we’re
dead already. I’ll be dead at that point so I don’t care,
go ahead and throw freaking hydrogen bombs down there.”
But
do I think it’s an extinction level event for the entire
planet? No. Like I said, there’s a lot of things that have to
happen and they have to happen for a very long time and just
basically run away, unchecked, and I don’t think we’ll
let that happen.
But is it going to create dead zones, kill
zones, extinction on a localized level? Absolutely. And the longer it
goes on it’s just the broader path that those reach. So as far
as extinction level on a localized basis? Definitely the potential is
there. We’re seeing some of it happen now. It’s going to
go on for another two months minimum, with whatever amount of oil
leaking out that they can, but that’s a long time and in my
opinion things are going to get worse over those two months’
period. Not worse. Like they can’t not
happen, because they will get worse slowly.
Like
I said: the erosion, the beating up of the system, the leaking
constantly going on, constantly eating up more. It’s like the
Grand Canyon. The Colorado River never stopped running and after
several tens of thousands of years you had a Grand Canyon. It started
as a little trickle, you know, coming down a mountain; somewhere it
started as a little stream of water, and, you know, after all that
time it just eroded a monster canyon. That’s happening every
single day.
But I think that we’re going to see a total
failure or massive failure of some of the components long before we
get a chance to actually go down there and kill it... within weeks,
maybe a month from now. I just don’t think we have a month left
of putting sucker hats on this thing and saying we’re capturing
most of the oil now, whoopee. I just don’t think we have that
much time.
Q:
I wanted to ask you a specific question to the amount of information
now. Of course we all know corporations, just like you said, they can
withhold information in regards to what’s actually going on.
But I kind of want to key in to some of the stuff that we pinned up
today, especially with reporters trying to get information and the
roadblocks they’re meeting against the new brown shirt/ blue
shirt guys there on the beaches.
For
people in the military you can look at some of these guys and I can
already tell very specifically from the body language and the way
they’re communicating and their posturing that I can see in
these videos that some of these guys are not local Gulf guys. Now I’m
not talking about the National Reserve guys. I’m talking about
the guys in and around the areas of the beaches of Louisiana that you
can definitely tell are not local. These guys are actually... and
they’re not $12.00 an hour security guards. These guys make a
little bit higher on the pay scale, I do believe.
Do
you have any comment which direction BP is going... I mean this part
of the story? There are a lot of people trying to get information,
they’re holding back the information. But come on, there’s
got to be something up if they’re trying to keep the media at
bay.
SHR: Well, there is
something up and those aren’t BP guys. Those are our guys.
Those are your Blackwater-type guys, mercenaries. They could be other
agencies but basically those are our guys, okay, because an English
company doesn’t come into America and take over the country and
boss our people around.
BP hasn’t brought any military
in here. Our Joint Chiefs of Staff, regardless of the president, I
don’t care if the president is a fuckin’ pussy and wants
to lay on the ground and scream fuck me fuck me, the Generals, the
Marines, and the Army and the Air Force and the Admirals of the Navy
are not going to allow that to happen. They are not going to allow a
British company to bring in their own soldiers and freaking hold
people off.
Those are our guys. They’re operating at
the direction of our government because our government does not want
you to know either, okay?
You’ve heard it from the
president that they’re calling the shots down there. You hear
it from us all the time but people aren’t paying attention
because it’s just something we hear every day. We expect to
hear the lip service from the government that we’re the ones
calling the shots down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, but BP’s
the one actually running the technical show, which I’m sure
they are.
But when it comes to anything like that, that’s
our government. Okay? I don’t care what the guys on the boats
tell you. They say, “BP’s rule says you can’t go in
here...” they’re just blowing that off on BP. That’s
a bunch of bullshit. Those are our guys, man. BP doesn’t have
any mercenaries out there running around shutting down airspace. The
FAA would tell them to piss off. I don’t care who they’d
blame it on in public, but this quashing of information is coming
from us, it’s coming from our government. And a lot of the
reason of that is that Obama has no idea what to do.
Not that
he would have a great plan as to what to do, but he’s at a
point where, you know, “...this is something I don’t
understand, this is something that isn’t working, I’ve
yelled at people and I’ve told them to fix it and they’re
not fixing it, so I not only don’t know what to do, I don’t
know how to handle the situation of not knowing what to do and I
don’t want people to find out.”
So one thing that
they are good at is manipulation of information. They also have the
media on their side. So while he may get a little indignant media
here and there, who are they blaming it on? Just like you said: “Oh
they have BP running around there telling people not to go in here.”
The first thing, if I was a reporter, I would be like, “Let
me see some of your credentials, buddy. No fucking dude running
around on a boat fucking tells me where I’m gonna go or where
I’m not gonna go. Fuck you. I want to see some identification.
I want to know who you are and I want to know under whose authority
you act.”
Q:
They’ve been guesstimating the pressure and barrels released
from this wellhead but what is the temperature at the wellhead? I’ve
not seen that published.
SHR: Hey dude, I have it. Hold on. Do you want to know all
the temperatures of the well all the way down from the sea floor to
the oil formation? Let me look on my document. I have it.
I
remember it’s 262-degrees F at the well formation. That’s
like at 12,000-some-odd-feet down there, last time they took the
temperature reading. And I remember the top’s 48-degrees F,
which is fairly warm; the oil is a little bit warmer. But the oil is
not coming out boiling or anything. A lot of people are like: Oh,
the oil comes out boiling.
It doesn’t. It cools as it reaches the surface. It’s
262-degrees F in the oil formation and it’s approximately
48-degrees at the top. But if you want the rest I’ve got about
six temperature readings.
Questioner: Thanks. That’s
what I was asking.
Q:
Based on the fact that even BP is saying it could be till Christmas
to even get this well under control, I don’t think anybody’s
thinking about the economic impact on all the Gulf region, because
Obama’s shutting drilling down, the fishing’s down. I
mean, by the end of this year we could have refugees. I mean, the
economic impact could just... the whole Gulf region, don’t you
think?
SHR: The economic impact to the entire United States? It will
be massive, not just the fishing industry or anything like that. He’s
basically shut down oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, you know.
That affects Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, all the
Gulf states and beyond.
There’s a lot of people that
work on those oil wells. There’s a lot of satellite businesses
that rely on the American oil companies, you know. There’s a
lot of people that provide provisions for those oil wells out there.
That’s not something that you can farm out. If you make oil
well bolts, okay, you can sell your oil well bolts to India, China,
Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and the United States. But if you’re
supplying eggs and chickens to oil wells and you live in Louisiana or
Texas and there’s no one out on those oil wells, they don’t
need any eggs and chickens and you go out of business.
And
this is solely a political decision on Obama’s part; he is the
one that decided this. And if you notice, there’s been a little
bit of rumblings from British Petroleum’s attorneys and people
like that when Obama came out and made this statement. And like I
said, this just shows how inept he is. He came out and made this
statement. It was like, “If your business has been affected by
drilling down in the Gulf of Mexico, then we’re going to make
sure that BP is writing your paycheck.”
And they came
out and they were like, “Unh, unh we ain’t doing that. We
will pay people who were damaged directly by the oil spill, which we
are mostly responsible for.” They’re also not the sole
owners of that well. They’re only a 60-some-odd percent owner,
you know. There’s two other companies that are invested in that
well that own the other 30-something percent.
But they
basically came out and said, “No, we’re not doing that.
That was YOU that made the decision to shut down all that oil
production. That has nothing to do with us, and it doesn’t have
anything to do with this spill which we have said we will pay for and
which we’ll step up and pay for all the ‘legitimate
claims’ blah-blah-blah...” Whether everybody gets paid or
not, who knows, you know. They’ll have lawyers fighting over
that forever. I think they’re still fighting over the Exxon
Valdez claims.
But BP was like, “No, bud. That was your
call, so those people that get put out of business by your moratorium
and shutting down production in the Gulf, those are your guys to
worry about. That ain’t our fault. We didn’t do that. You
did that.”
Questioner
responds: Exactly. But here’s the thing, by the end of this
year you’ve got the Gulf of Mexico shut down for fishing and
industry, and what are these people going to do? SHR, did you get
that?
SHR: Yeah, I was just looking for that document with the
exact temperature readings. I’ll try to find it later because
I’ve got a billion documents and I just found about eight
really good ones that I just kind of uncovered, I found actually
after I wrote the thread. So maybe I’ll just put the links...
you know what it is, I’ll give you guys the link to the DOE
site and you can parazoid out and go in there because this is a
government website, so I’m sure you guys will love this. So
here it is, the Department of Energy.gov website here. I’ll
post a link.
Q:
Do you think there’s anything else different they can do to try
to keep more of the oil from coming up on shore? Because it’s
only going to get worse as this goes on. Is there any type of new
technology out there, or anything to try to keep it off the shores as
much as possible?
SHR: There’s a lot more that they could be doing to try
to keep it off the shores than they’re doing now. There’s
a lot of things they could do with barges.
I said it from the
very beginning, we should like be on a war footing, we should be like
we’re ramping up for World War Two. I mean, this is going to be
a really bad disaster that we have to deal with in America and we
just don’t seem like, you know...
Okay, we know we had
a half-assed response to start off, in the first couple of weeks.
It’s like, hey, you know, let’s recover. We’ve
freaking got thrown for a loop and we got punched and rolled over and
hit the wall in a bar and smashed our heads but if you don’t
fucking get up and start either running or start fighting, you’re
just going to end up laying there getting pissed on. And that’s
what we seem to be doing, you know?
It’s like, yeah, we
had a little bit of a disjointed effort within the first couple of
weeks or so but we’ve done absolutely nothing since then. We
could have recovered and started to take action and to get prepared
for it, because these oil industry guys know what this means, what it
can do, better than we do digging out the small pieces of information
that we can get. They know what a worst-case deepwater high-volume,
high-pressure well blowout can do. We’ve seen it before. We’ve
even seen it in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lot different
circumstances; it was a lot less. It was a full blowout; it blew out
30,000 barrels a day, average, for nine months.
We could be
looking at four, five times that, easily. But we can’t sustain
four or five times that for no six, eight, or nine months, so we need
to start getting ready with our superior technology that we have now,
30, 40 years later since the 1970s when that happened for the first
time at that Ixtoc well.
We need to start preparing to start
dealing with a whole lot of oil in the Gulf. We have a whole lot of
oil in the Gulf. We’re not doing shit to prepare for it, to
corral it.
As far as new technology, you know, like is there
some kind of magic beam or pill or, you know, some kind of magic
system that will do stuff, incredible, you know, that the old
fashioned kind of physics, physical labor, can do? No. Not really. We
don’t really have anything. Like I said, a lot of it is asses
and elbows and getting guys ready, you know, getting manpower on the
job of building shit. We can try to surround the area with barges.
You know, we have better polymer technology now.
Someone a
long time ago said why can’t we make a series of curtains that
literally go down to the seafloor, like giant plastic curtains, and
kind of almost weld them together, but stick them together and more
or less create an enormous plastic tube that goes down to the ocean
floor, that comes up very near the surface, so that the oil doesn’t
have a chance to get miles and miles away and spread out over tens or
hundreds of square miles before it even gets to the surface where we
can get it?
You know, I thought that was a good idea. That
made good common sense. You know, it’s basically make like a
gigantic thin plastic hose. It only has to corral the oil and keep it
close and in an area where we can get at it.
We have ships,
you know, that have the ability to suck up the oil and separate it
and process it and they can offload it. We can bring in these big
tankers and we can run back and forth to refineries. Even coastal
tanker-size ships, you know. If they can get at the oil and offload
it, we can get it processed and we can deal with it, and we can
corral, keep it tighter in the open ocean out where it is. If we can
get it up, the majority of it’ll never reach the shore. It’s
not that bad, it’s not that damaging, if it’s out in the
open ocean if we can corral it and keep it in tight.
And
there’s things that we can do; we can do series of booms,
series of barges, big ones, a lot bigger than we have in-shore and we
would need a lot less of them if we could corral it in a tighter area
in the open ocean and begin to attack it by literally removing it
from the water. Removing it from the water is the best and really the
only way to deal with it.
The last I heard we have
50-some-odd huge tankers from other countries that have the
capabilities of doing this. You know, it was done in the Persian Gulf
when Saudi Arabia had their massive oil spill and Saddam lit Kuwait
on fire and they had this oil that poured into the Gulf. I forget how
much it was, it was ridiculous, 900-million gallons or 90-million
barrels or something like that – a huge, huge amount –
and they cleaned it up by literally vacuuming it out of the ocean and
they recovered it and they fucking sold it to us, you know. That’s
not a bad idea.
I’d
tell these tankers, “Get out there, dudes, it’s free oil
and fucking go over here to this one-mile-diameter corral that’s
freaking black with all this oil coming up from the seabed and stick
a straw in it and go at it, man, it’s yours. Have it for free.
Bring in all the ships you want.” But we’re not allowed
to bring in these... it’s either vessels of foreign manufacture
or vessels of foreign flag or something like that... within our
economic zone because of some stupid 1920-some-odd act called the
Jones Act; they’re prohibited from doing so.
We had
some Dutch company, the name was called like SuperSuck, as ridiculous
as it sounds, but that’s what it was. But some Dutch company
that has like three big processing ships they can bring in, they have
these big vacuum pumps and long tubes and they’re like, “You
know, we can get like real close to the source of the oil with what
we have already. We’re ready to go.” They offered it in
three days and the State Department told them no, you’re not
allowed because of this 1920-something act called the Jones Act.
Q:
I
got a follow-up question from Nationalist because you talked about
the Ixtoc and he is writing: How will a hurricane affect the progress
of the relief well? Not what the hurricane’s gonna do, but how
it will affect the progress? Ixtoc took nine months in their attempt
to get that done, but with the depth of this, will a hurricane cause
them to start a new well at the depth of where this one is at?
SHR: I don’t think it would cause them to start a new
well. It would cause them to abandon and suspend the current one, you
know. If the hurricane was a week out, they’d probably pull up
about a week out because they’d have to prepare, they’d
have to pull the drill string out, rack all their drill joints and
pipes and everything, rack and stack it all. So that might take a
week or two to abandon the well. So they would, you know, prepare to
abandon the well. Whether there was any plugging or cementing
involved in that, I don’t really know. I don’t know if
they’d just pull the drill string up and close all the rams on
the blowout preventer and use that and then go away.
But
there’d be a week or two before that they’d have to
prepare to leave. Then they’d have to leave, and I’m sure
they’d have to wait a week or so at least for everything to
calm down to go back. You know, it could set the relief wells back
three weeks to a month. Two to four weeks easily... three weeks, give
or take a week, let’s put it that way.
So yeah, I mean,
a hurricane sets it back a month, easily – if everything goes
well.
Q:
Based on the trajectory of government response, and even BP’s
response so far has gone from bad to worse to really bad, it seems
like there’s no leadership, no cleanup. Everything you
suggested has not been done. It just seems like nobody is really
serious. Like you say, a World War Two response. If this continues
until Christmas, I mean, just off the top of your head, what’s
the worst-case scenario we’re expecting here by the end of the
year?
SHR: I mean, if this continues till Christmas... you know, we
don’t have no four months left of that shit holding together. I
don’t think we have two months left. That’s what I said
in my post. It’s a race we’re not going to win, so we’re
not only talking about like the current rate of spill till Christmas.
We’re talking about it going up exponentially.
So I
mean, what would I expect? I would literally expect all coastal
habitation of sea life, wildlife; probably a lot of humans would be
evacuated from the immediate closest vicinities. That includes
Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama. Mobile Bay would be inundated with oil.
It would be really....
Mississippi... the coastal area in
Mississippi would be gone. Most of the beaches on the Florida
panhandle would no longer be white, they would just be black. You
would have devastation for decades to come of all the marshland and
the coastal estuary area.
See, the beaches are not so bad if
they get hit with oil. I mean, it’s bad, but you can go and
take a front-end loader and dig up the sand on a beach and replace
the sand. You can’t get in there in the marshes and do that, in
the oyster beds, and do that. You can’t go and dig up all the
oil from the oyster beds and just replace the oysters and it’s
okay as soon as you do that. You can do that on a beach.
But
it’s all the inland marsh areas, all the rookeries of birds,
all the... not only commercial, but just the natural sealife that are
the bed-type life, the shrimp, the oysters, the clams, those would
utterly just be erased from existence.
Probably if you took a
radius and went from western Louisiana all the way over to central,
northern Florida would just be erased from the coast.
By then
it would be coming around the Keys and it would probably also get the
Keys wildlife area, too. The Keys have a lot of wildlife. You know,
there’s a lot of commercial fishing type wildlife out there,
you know shrimp, and all that and just reefs and everything would
just be destroyed. It would just be annihilated. They would take
decades to come back, at least.
If it gets into the
Everglades from the west coast, which is possible, because they
connect to the Gulf of Mexico... I know because I can actually get to
the Gulf of Mexico from my house if I want to go through Lake
Okeechobee, to whichever canal it is... I don’t remember. It’s
the C-14 canal, I believe, that takes Lake Okeechobee to the east
coast and I’m not sure, it may be the C-100 canal or something
like that that connects Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico. So if
you have oil that gets so dense so far and we can’t stop it
that it begins to get into, you know, national wildlife parks like
the Everglades, they’re just gone.
You know, it will
destroy the food chain. Every little creature that the bigger
creatures feed on is dead, so the bigger creatures die, so we’re
talking just devastation of sealife in the Gulf and we probably...
If it lasted till
Christmas, or if it lasts even one year, we’re talking about
we’re probably going to have evacuating people from coastal
communities because just the fumes from all the volatile organic
compounds, like somebody said before, in the oil slicks itself would
just become more and more overwhelming as the volume of it went up.
And like I said, we’re only barely not even two months
into it. It’s day 52 today or day 53. That’s just a
little over a month and a half, so we can’t hack another six
months of this.
And
with the volume output increasing... and do something to contain it
out by where it’s happening, and keep it there, and keep it
from getting away, and keep it from getting out into the open sea,
and corral it, and assault it right there by literally, as I said,
removing it from the water. I mean, we have the refineries in Texas.
We have the refineries in Louisiana. We need to tighten up the game
and get it so that we’re not looking at ten-mile-long slicks of
any substantialness, anyway.
A little oil sheen on the water
is bad but that’s not going to kill anybody. We’re
talking about oil slicks that contain hundreds of thousands of
gallons of crude oil, just out there, loose, running around. We can’t
have that go on till Christmas because utter devastation to the whole
Gulf coastal community, which is millions, tens of millions of
people, would just be incredible. The country just wouldn’t be
able to sustain it.
We’d probably have all sorts of
horrible scenarios start to become very more real-looking at that
point because our economy wouldn’t be able to take it.
What
would we do with all those people? We would have tens of millions of
literal refugees. How would we handle it? We could be talking a
backbreaking blow to the economy, not only with what we lose but the
need that we create. We’re not talking no hundred-thousand
refuges from Katrina. We’re talking 30, 40-million
refugees from the Gulf coast, and we just don’t have the means
to deal with it.
Q:
... just a question, when the hurricane rolls into the Gulf and slams
Florida from the west side and rolls all this oil into the
marshlands, into the wetlands and everything, I mean, what is really
gonna happen? Are people just gonna abandon their homes and just go
north? Or what?
SHR: Exactly. What would they do? You know, what would you do
if you lived in coastal Mississippi and there was a giant hurricane
coming?
A hurricane coming into the west coast of Florida –
unless it really got out in the Gulf and really got into that area,
which usually doesn’t happen when hurricanes hit us from the
west side – they more or less come up the straits and, you
know, they’re formed down by the Caribbean, not like off of the
Yucatan, so they would skirt a lot of the oil.
A hurricane
that basically formed down by the Yucatan, came up, and slammed into
Alabama and Mississippi or the Florida panhandle, would be worse
because it would go right across the oil and it would blow all that
oil inland.
But... exactly. What would people do? So what are
you going to do, just pack up and move north? It’s like, I
don’t know. Does anyone have a plan? What would you do with 30,
40-million, 50-million people who all of a sudden were just like,
“We’re all toxic, where do we go?” You know, they
couldn’t handle dealing with a few ten-thousand refuges,
basically wreaked havoc not only on the city they left but the cities
they went to. What would you do with 100 or more times that, you
know? Like I said, it would be utterly devastating; it could break
the back of our economy. I don’t really know what would happen.
I would imagine a lot of people would stay even if we were
warned, you know. Like you got a bunch of oil, people would clean
their houses off, people would just basically try and mitigate it
themselves, and I think a lot of people would opt to stay.
Some
people would be stuck, they would have no place else to go. What are
you gonna do when you have no friends, no family, no place else to go
to? What are you going to do? Just put all your stuff in a vehicle
and head north, hope for the best, crash out somewhere along the way
and, like, become a freaking homeless person or something just to get
away? Leave everything you own behind? People wouldn’t do that,
so a lot of people would stay even if there was toxic stuff. A lot of
people may be poisoned if they did that but they would probably do it
anyway.
So like I said, the myriad of doomsday scenarios of
ultimate-worst-case chaos happening, while they still may be
improbable, the odds of them happening have greatly increased, you
know, and it’s not a good situation to be in.
There’s
nothing good that can come of this, or nothing good that is coming of
it, and it’s only going to get worse. It’s because it is
such a complicated and bad thing and worst-nightmare sort of thing,
you know, case scenario. I don’t want to keep using the same
words over again, but it is a worst-case disaster of epic proportions
that we have on our hands.
It’s
because of the timeframe. You know people are like, “Two
months? What the fuck, man, we can’t do nothing till then?”
It’s like no, you can’t. You can’t stop it for two
months and there’s nothing you can do to stop it in less time.
No matter how pissed off you get or no matter how frustrating it is,
there’s nothing you can do to stop it for two months. And two
months is a really optimistic outlook.
So it’s like I
keep saying, we need to prepare for the worst because between now and
two months or four months from now, it IS going to get worse and
we’re not even dealing with what we’ve got now and we
need to get prepared for more.
But it cannot be stopped, it
will not be stopped, and it is going to get worse and it’s not
going to go away and they ain’t kidding when they say it’s
going to go on for a couple of months and there ain’t no amount
of getting mad that’s going to make it happen any faster. It’s
just not. So we need to start to get ready.
Q:
..... but what about the air quality? I mean, the hydrogen sulfide,
the benzene and everything that’s been released? You know, what
are people going to do? Because they can’t protect themselves.
I mean there’s no mask or anything that can mitigate this. What
are they going to do?
SHR: You’re going to die.
Q:
I’m trying to get a question in here from Cheebs. He wants to
know what you think of the potential surface area of the floating oil
and how it might affect evaporation and the ocean temperatures and
possibly the climate?
SHR: There was a couple of really good threads, or some
really good replies to threads, that I read about that with people
speculating on it, on how the oil doesn’t quite allow
evaporation so it may make the surface get hotter. But then again, it
actually traps heat in and it actually... it doesn’t allow the
sun’s rays to kind of heat up the ocean, so there was
speculation it could actually make it cooler.
It probably
will make it hotter, which is not good for hurricanes, because
hurricanes, the warmer the water is, the faster they go. So you may
have a Category One enter the Gulf and within a matter of a couple of
days it’s a Category Three pushing Four when normally it may
have stayed a Category One or only got to a Category Two. So that
doesn’t help a lot.
As far as evaporation and affecting
like weather patterns throughout the globe, I think it’s kind
of one of those things where one thing almost cancels out the other,
like the amount of heat trapped in versus the oil actually stopping
evaporation to a degree, they kind of balance each other out. So I
don’t think it’s a huge weather pattern changer.
Q:
I just want to say thanks for your insight tonight... really an
eye-opener. Good luck to you and keep up the good work.
SHR: I appreciate that and I appreciate all the thanks and
everything, you know, all the thank-you’s I got from everybody
about the threads and everything like that. You know, I put some time
in doing them. I put some time in over some time, so I don’t do
a 24-hour marathon or something like that to make these threads.
But I hope they’re informational for people and I hope
this will help educate people and kind of make these things explained
in layman’s terms so that more and more people can understand
them so that more and more people aren’t afraid to ask
questions. Because if you don’t have a decent grasp of the
subject and you’re afraid your question is going to be stupid,
you’re kind of intimidated to the point where you might not ask
it. Now, I don’t want to see that happen. I want to see people
have at least enough of a basic understanding so that they have
enough confidence that if they have the opportunity to ask somebody
something, they can ask and they feel confident in asking, they have
enough of a grasp of the situation to be able to ask a question.
And also, more importantly, that people have enough of a
grasp or an understanding of the situation to answer other peoples’
questions, to help to spread real information out there, because
there’s just a lot of people that are clueless, that I don’t
even think... There’s a portion of the population that don’t
even know the well’s leaking, you know. If you said to them,
“Hey, how about that oil well in the Gulf?” they’d
be like, “Is that thing still leaking?” ... watched too
much TV lately and they didn’t have it on American Idol... “I
just figured they would have had it fixed by now”. You know,
they’re clueless.
Like I said, if these threads can not
only be a source of information to you to where you feel confident
enough that you start to think about it and you feel that you have
enough grasp on the situation that you start to even ask your own
questions and answer them yourself by researching, but now you have
enough tools to know what to look for and you have an understanding
of things so that you’re not getting these ridiculous answers
if you do go search.
So you can go find out more information
on our own, but more importantly is that you can answer questions and
you can enlighten other people about the situation and have a real
basic knowledge and understanding of it. You can be that guy that’s
knowledgeable. You can be that girl, that person, that’s
knowledgeable about it and you can talk on the subject and have that
basic understanding so that more and more people are aware of what we
face out there – because it’s not good.
We’re
in a bad situation. This is a desperate situation for us. This is a
disaster, crisis-level situation that we’re facing. All those
adjectives apply and like I said, it’s not going to get better
and we have a long, long way to go, so we need to start taking this
seriously.
And I’m not seeing serious effort from our
government and our people. I see a lot of people that are scared,
that want to do something, but they’re either not allowed to do
it or they don’t know what to do. And people aren’t
asking the right questions. And if we don’t ask, if we don’t
have that base knowledge, then nobody’s going to take us
seriously and nobody’s gonna do dick because nobody really
cares about us, you know. We have to care for ourselves.
So I
hope these threads do that, that they give everybody that foundation
to move forward on their own from there. And I really appreciate the
thanks that I get from everybody and I enjoy talking to you guys. I
know I ramble on and I talk a lot and I talk fast but that’s
just how I am. So it was really nice having you guys here and I enjoy
answering your questions and stuff and, you know, hang around for a
while. But I think if you want to basically say the show is wrapped
up, I think we should wrap it up now.
Q:
[many voices]... about a guy by the name of John P. Craven and he
worked for the Navy. He was head of their special projects division.
This guy is phenomenal. He knows a lot of stuff about the ocean and
how to fix things and he’s been fixing a lot of special
projects, leaks of wells that were leaking over in California, and
all kinds of stuff. He’s been involved with the boring machines
through the mountains. Start calling the numbers on there, telephone
numbers, to get this man to the front of all this stuff that’s
going on. He may be able to help, who knows? But nothing ventured,
nothing gained.
[closing... wrap up... thanks to everyone... GLPs The Raw
Feed...]
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Bill Ryan
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