Why didn't BP just do this "top kill" thing the very first day of the spill?

Oil is formed from dead microscopic sea creatures that pile up on the ocean floor. That is why it is in the ocean sometimes. It is also under land that used to be covered by oceans.

Coal is created from dead plant matter, land animal don't contribute much.

}}}}}}} wrote:

The earth is only 6,000 years old, so that's not enough time for oil to form naturally. Most likely, our Intelligent Designer cast the oil deposits into the earth as he created our planet.

Too funny, I was actually thinking along the same lines when I read that question - but your response was better than the one I was conjuring up.

staunchy mustachio wrote:

No seriously. Think about my question and see if you can answer it without looking it up.

Are you unaware of the fact that the surface of the earth is not stationary?

See: California.

I'm not sure it's a complete fact. There is a lot of science we don't understand.

Precious Roy wrote:

The sad answer is that they did not. But that is what you get when you have had 8 years of a pro-oil administration and a "drill baby drill" attitude. And BP is operating a rig, "Atlantis", that is twice the size of the deepwater Horizon. I doubt BP knows how to cap a blowout that is twice the size of deepwater Horizon.

Can you please show my how Bush Jr is responsible for all history of deepwater oil drilling? Was he born yet when we started doing that?

Acting like he is responsible is just as absurd as acting like Obama is responsible, given that he's currently in charge of everything.

Think it took time to get all of the oil to cram down the piehole.

followthe$$$$ wrote:

My guess as to why they didn't try this potential solution first is because others, such as the "dome" idea would have allowed them to siphon off oil into a tanker and then sell it. I assume that the top kill solution pretty much shuts off the well and they can't get anymore oil from it unless they were to drill another hole which would take a lot of time and $. Yes this is just speculation but it doesn't seem that far fetched that they would be hesitant to give up on the millions of $ (or however much the oil in the well minus the cost of having to drill another hole is worth) if they can sell it to the public that that they were at least trying something even if it put their $$ before actually stopping the leak.

That's exactly what I thought. Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting it. Can anyone knowledgable comment if this is accurate?

To the best of my knowledge, they weren't producing oil from this well anyway. It was an exploratory hole, designed to get some of the oil out to see if it was a viable deposit and place to drill.

Because of this, the 25000-100000 barrels/day that are being lost weren't part of the 85 million barrels/day that are produced worldwide.

AnEngineer wrote:

Precious Roy wrote:

The sad answer is that they did not. But that is what you get when you have had 8 years of a pro-oil administration and a "drill baby drill" attitude. And BP is operating a rig, "Atlantis", that is twice the size of the deepwater Horizon. I doubt BP knows how to cap a blowout that is twice the size of deepwater Horizon.

Can you please show my how Bush Jr is responsible for all history of deepwater oil drilling? Was he born yet when we started doing that?

Acting like he is responsible is just as absurd as acting like Obama is responsible, given that he's currently in charge of everything.

Under the Bush administration, the Mineral Management Service, the government agency responsible for regulating off-shore drilling, was literally in bed with industry:

Thus, the Bush adminstration permitted the deepwater Horizon and did absolutely nothing to ensure that BP would be able to cap a blowout one mile deep in the ocean. President Obama is also responsible for failing to listen to critics of deepwater drilling who have warned of the potential for an unending environmental disaster like this one and for listening instead to the "drill baby drill" idiots.

But the government's responsibility is secondary to BP. BP has a long and notorious history of reckelessness (Texas City explosion, for example). Evidence has already emerged that BP pushed Transocean to ignore safety issues the day of the blowout. Government regulators can't be on the rig 24/7. But it doesn't help when the relevant regulatory agency has a history of being an industry lackey.

No One has said Topkill has ACTUALLY WORKED.

Effort to continue as BP prepares for two other options

By Kristen Hays

HOUSTON, May 28 (Reuters) - BP Plc's (BP.L) critical "top kill" effort to smother a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is making progress, but the company can't call it a success or failure until Sunday, Chief Executive Tony Hayward said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2819417820100528?type=marketsNews

Has anyone heard how deep the well goes into the ocean floor before the main oil deposit? Presumably it is pretty deep, at least thousands of feet. So why not have the U.S. navy put some serious explosives into the sea floor to 'cave in' the sea floor around the leaks? Maybe the pressure of the oil coming out is way too great? Equivalent to trying to shovel sand onto a firehouse....?

I'd like to see a geophysicist's ranking of possible ways to stop this thing.

I think the well goes down something like 12 million feet. It's VERY deep.

staunchy mustachio wrote:

I'm as smart as Obama? Wow, thanks!

No seriously. Think about my question and see if you can answer it without looking it up.

I would guess that the carbon-based organisms died on land, became sediments, sank as more sediments piled on top, then under pressure became oil underground (but still above sea level!). Then, somehow, this layer containing the oil and those above it became part of the ocean crust instead of a continental plate? This is where I get lost.

Oil and NG is composed not of dead plant and animal matter, but of dead microorganisms, most from a few hundred million years ago to a billion years ago.

Think prehistoric plankton. Its biomass far outweighed anything else in earth's history.

Some plant matter has become oil however, many surface deposits of oil are likely partly composed of plant matter, just like peat and cole.

my guess is the had had priority of objectives at the start

they wanted to try to recover the oil that leaked and keep the well working so they tried methods that would do that first.

Stopping the leak at all costs wasn't their highest priority.

There is a very easy link to an article in the Economist that someone posted on page 1. 3 minutes of reading will answer questions like this, and in general inform you of the intricacies regarding all of this.

From the article- the oil is "4,300 metres below the sea bed." So over 2.5 miles. Hard to implode that much matter.

there's a lot of bad oil company behavior here, dead batteries, lack of maintenance, payoffs to inspectors, quid pro quo, etc., but some of it does have to do with the Bush administration, because it greenlighted every project with its cozy relationships and rejected any kind of automatic remote cutoff switch or real safety testing. Are you kidding me that they didn't even KNOW how to cut off the flow of oil? So, here we have the largest oil spill in U.S. history and they were allowed to work a mile under the sea with no tested plan for a mishap like this??? Unf'nbelievable. There's the Bush administration's MMS for you. Halliburton is involved, of course. And only this kind of event got Obama's attention enough to revamp the MMS and how they do things.

value wrote:

my guess is the had had priority of objectives at the start

they wanted to try to recover the oil that leaked and keep the well working so they tried methods that would do that first.

Stopping the leak at all costs wasn't their highest priority.

Seeing as the well, exploded and sank - keeping it working wasn't really an option. Just read the article on the first page of the thread.

It's funny how people love to point fingers rather than first correcting the situation.