Another email:
First there is not any room for a super tanker at the location they have three Dynamic Position (DP) rigs and one 600-foot Drill ship. All the vessels out there are DP 2 class vessel. There are not any DP Class 2 supertankers that I’m aware of. It’s OK to think that you might use tugs when it’s dead calm , but it’s another story when it’s 12 ft seas. We have what we call a 500-meter zone and procedures that happen once we get inside that zone. I counted 18 vessels inside that zone along with the four rigs and 49 vessel and rigs all together in and around the zone not to mention airplanes and helicopters.
Second I agree there’s a lot of oil and gas coming out. If there is 100,000 bbls leaking a day that would be 4,200,000 gallons a day. Exxon Valdez leaked 10.8 million over 11,000 sq miles. I can pump about 360 gals a minute through a 4 in. pipe, with a 150 ft of head pressure—518,400 gals per day. If we use a factor of .3×2 for roughly two ft riser pipe that would figure to roughly 4,147,200 per gals per day. There is drill pipe inside the riser pipe and it’s going to be either six or ten inch drill pipe so that would reduce the inside diameter of the pipe by half. So I would think that it’s nowhere that number those guys were saying on the TV show when the rig sank it pulled a mile of riser and twisted and kinked that pipe until it broke off, so I wouldn’t think that it would be possible to get full flow on a 21 in riser in that shape. They can disconnect the riser, but they still have to deal with the drill stem.
BP also operates in over 100 countries. If it takes 100 days to get this under control it’s only one day worth of oil for BP (400 million barrels of oil each day) spilled in the Gulf.
I like to know where the skimmers are! The oil contracts from what I heard went back to the Reagan days and were set up to where they had to be approve in a 30-day period to be valid. There is not any way they could do a environmental study in thirty days so they rubber stamped them to get them off their desk. The oil company once they purchased a lease have so long to become active on them or they have to forfeit them and it takes a while to get assets in place. It all has to be budgeted from exploration to production. So it became SOP (Standard Operations) to rubber stamp the leases. 400mboed x $80.00 =3.2to the tenth power.
Who ever doesn’t believe this is not about the money has got to be crazy.