6-part interview with Deepwater Horizon’s chief electronics technician Mike Williams

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Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

Sea life breathing salad dressing--
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

New York Times 5/14/2010

BP confident latest try to capture oil will work

ROBERT, La. – BP was confident Saturday its latest experiment using a mile-long pipe would capture much of the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, even as the company disclosed yet another setback in theenvironmental disaster.

Engineers hit a snag when they tried to connect two pieces of equipment a mile below the water's surface. BP PLC chief operating officer Doug Suttles said one piece of equipment, called the framework, had to be brought to the water's surface so that adjustments could be made to where it fits with the long tube that connects to a tanker above.

Spreading oil is driven by complex currents and eddies

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The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is far different than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. The complex marine environment has currents and eddies that could carry the oil anywhere in the Gulf.
Christian Science Monitor 5/14/2010

Spill could create catastrophic problems during hurricane season

BP's oil spill could make for one of the highest-stakes U.S. Gulf hurricane seasons on record.

Storms may scuttle clean-up efforts, force containment vessels to retreat, or propel spilled crude and tar balls over vast expanses of sea and beach, scientists said.

Meteorologists say that climate conditions are ripe for an unusually destructive hurricane season, the storm-prone period that runs from June 1 to the end of November in the Gulf. Oceanographers say that could hurt the clean-up.

Reuters/Yahoo

New smells in New Orleans

From the French Quarter to New Orleans East, people here have been complaining about a tinge to the air that is unsettling even by local standards.

New York Times May 14, 2010

Fox News: The Culture of Incompetence

Interview with REP. BART STUPAK, D-MICH.

VAN SUSTEREN: Did you have any confidence in the very near future new oil is -- the leak is going to be plugged up or stopped?

STUPAK: No. I think you have to drill the relief wells to finally get it to stop. The top hat they are talking about is pretty dangerous. You have to remove -- or add another blowout preventer. As you do, you could you create a greater gusher than what you have right now.

And this junk shot they're talking about, I don't have a lot of confidence in that, but I'm not an engineer, so maybe it will work. I hope and pray they could stop it right now, today, because the ecological damage to our seafood industry, tourism to that Gulf is going to be tremendous.

BP tries tube to siphon spewing Gulf oil to tanker

By ALLEN G. BREED and CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press Writers

Undersea robots tried to thread a small tube into the jagged pipe that is pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico early Friday in BP's latest attempt to cut down on the spill from a blown-out well that has pumped out more than 4 million gallons of crude.

The company was trying to move the 6-inch tube into the leaking 21-inch pipe, known as the riser. The smaller tube will be surrounded by a stopper to keep oil from leaking into the sea. BP said it hopes to know by Friday evening if the tube works and can siphon the oil to a tanker at the surface.

From the Culpepper (Virginia) Star Exponent

BP's latest: stem the flow with inserterd pipe

BP officials said Thursday they would thread a small tube into a jagged pipe on the seafloor to suck oil to the surface before it can spew into the Gulf and add to a disaster apparently set in motion by a long list of equipment failures.

Engineers will have to make sure the 6-inch-wide tube is inserted deep enough into the 21-inch-wide pipe so gas and seawater don't mix, which can form crystals that could clog the tube. They'll also have to thread the tube into the pipe without hitting debris around the riser.

The smaller tube will be surrounded by a stopper to keep oil from leaking into the sea. The tube will then siphon the crude to a tanker at the surface.

Yahoo!/Associated Press, 5/13/2010

Were oil companies allowed to drill without permits?

“You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an impact,” said one scientist who has worked for the minerals agency for more than a decade. “If you find the risks of a spill are high or you conclude that a certain species will be affected, your report gets disappeared in a desk drawer and they find another scientist to redo it or they rewrite it for you.”

New York Times May, 14, 2010

5,000 or 26,000 barrels a day--size of gulf oil spill is a guesstimate

Experts say emphatically that anyone who makes an estimate of the leak by looking at the video is simply arm-waving. There are too many variables. The stuff coming out of the pipe isn't just oil, for example, but a frothing cocktail of oil, gas, brine and sediment from miles below the sea bottom.

BP, however, could try to measure the flow directly with off-the-shelf instruments routinely used in research on deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold hydrocarbon seeps, according to scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They said devices that can essentially take a sonogram of the plume could be strapped to one of the robotic submarines that BP has deployed around the damaged well.

NPR Report: Gulf Spill Could Be Much Worse Than Believed

The volume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig may be at least 10 times higher than previously estimated, NPR has learned.

The U.S. Coast Guard has estimated that oil was gushing from a broken pipe on the Gulf floor at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.

But sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday by the oil company BP shows that the true figure is closer to 70,000 barrels a day, NPR's Richard Harris reports.

Gulf spill reportedly 70,000 barrels a day

Update at 7:31 p.m. ET: NPR says it has obtained "sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video" showing that the oil gushing from the ruptured pipes is "closer to 70,000 barrels a day," more than 10 times the Coast Guard's earlier estimate of 5,000 barrels. That works out to 2,940,000 gallons of oil a day. (A barrel contains 42 gallons.)

If confirmed by the Coast Guard it would mean the spill long ago eclipsed the 11 million gallons the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989.

Today is the 24th day since the blowout, so that would work out to more than 70 billion gallons of crude oil that have poured into the Gulf — 70,560,000 to be exact.

Alaska senator blocks move to raise oil spill liability

A week ago, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) teamed up with her Democratic senatorial counterpart, Mark Begich, to introduce a bill that would raise the $75-million liability fund on economic damages from oil spills to $10 billion.
On Thursday, she blocked an attempt by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to expedite a bill seeking to raise liability, saying it needed further study.
Murkowski, who has received $1.2 million from energy and natural resource interests in her political career, said she feared the impact on independent operators in her state. She noted that the Exxon Valdez spill resulted in a $5-billion court judgment against Exxon, now Exxon-Mobil.
Menendez had harsh words for her reasoning, at a press conference Thursday:
"Some of the independent operators are $40-billion companies. So
this isn't mom and pop on the grocery store on the corner. And by the
way, even if you are smaller than a $40 billion independent company,
if you're drilling, if you're doing deep-sea drilling and the risk as
we have seen the risk be actualized, should you not be responsible?"
Menendez's Garden State colleague and fellow Democrat, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, chided Murkowski's representation of the 1994 Exxon Valdez judgment, which he noted was fought fiercely in courts, and was reduced in 2008 to $507 million.

NBC News Video: Oil spews from the seabed

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Scientists: oil could hit south Florida

LA Times: Climate change is the true crisis

"Coal and oil have more in common than a tendency to produce explosions when mistakes are made in the extraction process. Together, they account for the main reason the Earth's climate is gradually changing. The deaths of 29 mine workers and 11 oil workers were tragic, and the economic consequences of the oil spill to the gulf's fishing and tourism industries could be devastating, but they're dwarfed by the deaths and financial losses that will come with global warming."

Sierra Club Petition: stop offshore drilling

A new Sierra Club campaign on change.org asks people to sign a petition demanding a permanent end to offshore drilling:

"We need President Obama to stop all new drilling off America's coasts immediately and permanently. The Gulf coast will be impacted by this tragedy for years to come and President Obama has the power to make sure this never happens again..."

You can also writre your own at Greenpeace.org.

CPI: Spill Training Exercises Showed Botched Response, Gaps in Government Preparedness

Center for Public Integrity Report:
"Over the last eight years, the U.S. government has conducted four major drills to prepare for a massive oil spill, the results of which foreshadowed many of the weaknesses in coordination, communication, expertise, and technology that have plagued the federal response to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico."


Among the report's major concerns:
"A lack of expertise and modern technology for closing a spewing oil well leak and containing a slick through controlled burns and dispersants."

The Center for Public Integrity