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Okay, I don’t think its too soon to start really freakin out about the disaster unfolding in the Gulf right now.
There have been rumors on the internets for at least a couple of weeks that the situation is a hell of a lot worse. Instead of just a blown out Blow Out Preventer (BOP) leaking oil and gas out of a 21 inch diameter pipe where it rises vertically from the bottom of the sea floor, oil is also leaking up from a much larger area, spread over miles because of an underground explosion affecting the whole damn reservoir.
In the first video clip, KO interviews his expert, Rob Cavner, about the prospects of “a doomsday scenario” that would follow if that is indeed the case. Cavner says that if the entire well casing has given way, first from the initial explosion that destroyed the Deep Horizon drilling platform (the size of an aircraft carrier); or if that hadn’t done the job, by the failed (highly pressurized) Top Kill procedure, then the amounts of oil and gas being released into the environment could be an order of magnitude greater than the current official estimate of 25,000 barrels per day, the worst case scenario described in BP‘s original permit application.
In contrast to Cavner, who believes the the relief wells will succeed once they are finished a few months hence, Dylan Ratigan‘s expert, Matt Simmons (see his Bloomberg interview here) is not so sanguine. Beginning with the fact that not all relief wells succeed, it might be years before the last of the oil in that reservoir is exhausted.
Meanwhile, BP after having heroically resisted the release of video showing the leak at the BOP that made calculating the leak flow possible but difficult because of its low res quality, just grudgingly released a high res vision that makes the calculation much easier. How is it possible that the Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen didn’t know it existed? Or assuming he did, why he didn’t insist that it be released before now?
And NOAA just confirmed the existence of at least one huge undersea oil plume that BP’s CEO Tony Hayward denied was even possible.
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— h/t to blogger Alexander Higgins for a truly excellent site and for compiling much of the info I used above. It was this post of his that first alerted me to the possibility of the sea floor collapse beneath the Deep Horizon platform. It also cites a New Scientist article that hypothesizes that it was the release of huge amounts of methane hydrates from a meteor impact some 60 million years ago that was the proximate cause of the dinosaurs’ demise. The same gas that caused the Top Hat device to fail and whose continued release could be more harmful to the planet than the oil it accompanies, given that methane is some 24x more powerful than CO2 as a global warming gas, and that its release from this one site alone could go on for years.
Happy days.
