[ale] [STILL OT] Re: BP knew of problems 11 months before the rig blew - further OT

[Tom Freeman]

On 06/01/2010 02:06:58 PM, Damon L. Chesser wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 13:45 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> 
> First things first:  Jim you are a non-name caller!  There, I said 
> it.
> 
> Second, in a more serious vain:  When I heard the news I thought this
> was an example of corners cut.  I am former Navy, 10years, working 
> the
> flight deck of carriers.  Accidents don't just happen, they result
> from
> either previous unknown conditions are from cutting corners.  Ocean
> drilling has been going on for some time, so I have to think we were
> cutting corners (figurative we).  I am not against business, love
> capitalism systems and wish we had one, but it is my gut reaction 
> that
> BP is negligent on this and also the Government is to slow to move on
> this and they should have been moving much, much faster.  This kind 
> of
> thing is what The Government is for.
> 
> I do not believe this should curtail further drilling.  We should
> perform postmortem to find the root cause and then make the resulting
> conclusions codified to prevent the event from happening again.
> 
> The post by some one else listing the retired oil guy was 
> informative:
> If he is right, this happened due to lack of experience in dealing 
> the
> the pressure.  It will still be expensive to fix (the damage of
> surrounding shore line and economic effects of Gulf based 
> businesses).
> But until we can replace petrol, we need to exploit what we have. 
<<snipage>>
An OT alert added just because...

I _think_ we have had some discussions around here about some 
approaches to replacing/supplimenting drilled petroleum, but it has 
been a while. On this list we do have some people with enough 
engeneering background  to make a decent beginning on some approaches.

For the most part, those approaches are not on the table due to the 
percieved cost. After all, the _cost_ of most oil spills seems to get 
dropped on the area residents, the area critters, and so forth, and not 
directly passed on to the rest of the economic system as a price 
increase for well produced petroleum.

Keeping troops stationed in the Middle East appears to have helped keep 
crude oil prices stable. But have we charged a fraction of that cost to 
the cost of fuel/chemicals? (And a great accounting question would be - 
how to apportion that cost)

IMHO, YMMV and so forth.