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Deepwater Horizon and our emerging ‘normal’ catastrophes
_edit.jpg "Deepwater Horizon and our emerging ‘normal’ catastrophes")
While watching the recently released film “Deepwater Horizon” about the catastrophic well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history, I remembered the term “fail-dangerous,” a term I first encountered in correspondence with a risk consultant for the oil and gas industry.
We’ve all heard the term “fail-safe” before. Fail-safe systems are designed to shut down benignly in case of failure. Fail-dangerous systems include airliners which don’t merely halt in place benignly when their engines fail, but crash on the ground in a ball of fire.
For fail-dangerous systems, we believe that failure is either unlikely or that the redundancy that we’ve build into the system will be sufficient to avert failure or at least minimize damage. Hence, the large amount of money spent on airline safety. This all seems very rational.
But in a highly complex technical society made up of highly complex subsystems such as the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig, we should not be so sanguine about our ability to judge risk. On the day the offshore rig blew up, executives from both oil giant BP and Transocean (which owned and operated the rig on behalf of BP) were aboard to celebrate seven years without a lost time incident, an exemplary record. They assumed that this record was the product of vigilance rather than luck.
And, contrary to what the film portrays, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was years in the making as BP and Transocean created a culture that normalized behaviors and decision-making which brought about not an unavoidable tragedy, but rather what is now termed a “normal accident”–a product of normal decisions by people who were following accepted procedures and routines.
Today, we live in a society full of “normal accidents” waiting to happen that will be far more catastrophic than the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. One of those “accidents” is already in progress, and it’s called climate change.
People in societies around the globe are doing what they are supposed to be doing, what they routinely do, to stay alive, produce and enjoy what they produce. They do not think of themselves as doing something which is bringing about the biggest “accident” of our time, climate change. No one set out to change the climate. And yet, this is the result of our normalized behavior.
Climate change still appears to many to be building slowly. This summer was hotter than last summer and the one before that. But we’ve coped. We stay inside in air-conditioning on especially hot days–ironically so, as the fossil fuels making the electricity for the air-conditioner are adding to the warming itself.
It is as if we are all on the Deepwater Horizon just doing our jobs. We notice there are a few things wrong. But, we’ve dealt with them before, and we can deal with them again. The failures and the breakdowns are accepted as just part of how we do business. And we’ve managed to avoid anything truly bad up to now. So, we conclude, we must be doing things safely.
Part of the normalization of our response to climate change is the spread of renewable power sources. I have long supported the rapid deployment of renewable power, suggesting that we need the equivalent of a warlike footing to deploy enough to bring about serious declines in fossil fuel use. And, while renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds, it is not growing nearly fast enough to meet the challenges of climate change.
And yet, society at large has relaxed into the idea–promoted by the industry–that renewable energy is well on its way to creating a renewable energy society despite the fact that more than 80 percent of our energy still comes from fossil fuels. We have normalized this response as adequate in the public mind. There remains no generalized alarm about climate change.
Certainly, there are scientists, activists and others who are genuinely alarmed and believe we are not moving nearly fast enough. But this alarm has not translated into aggressive policy responses.
The argument that things have worked just fine in the past so there is no reason to believe they won’t work out in the future is a well-worn one. And, it seems to be valid because so many people say it is. (Steven Colbert might even say that this assertion has a certain “truthiness” to it.)
But there is a reason that financial prospectuses say that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Likewise, no bad accidents in the past are not a guarantee of no bad accidents in the future. It is in the structure of how we behave that the risks build. The tipping point finally reveals that we have been doing risky things all along.
If you play Russian roulette with a gun having 100 chambers, you won’t think that skill had anything to do with the fact that you aren’t dead after five pulls. But if you don’t know you are playing Russian roulette (hidden dangers with hidden connections), then the fact that you aren’t dead after 50 pulls (50 repetitions of the hidden dangerous conduct) won’t seem like luck, but simply the result of sound procedure.
Climate change, of course, isn’t the only place where we have normalized procedures which appear to be reducing risk, when, in fact, we are increasing it. Our monocrop farms and the small variety of major crops grown on them using modern industrial farming methods are supposed to reduce the risk of major crop losses and thus of famine. In fact, these methods are depleting the soil and undermining its fertility in ways that will ultimately lower farm productivity. And monocrop farming is an invitation to widespread crop loss. Polyculture tends to prevent the spread of devastating plant diseases while monoculture tends to promote that spread.
We can talk about the normalization of industrial fishing as well. It is designed to increase our harvest of food to feed growing human populations thereby reducing our risk of food shortages and giving us another source of nutrition. In fact, industrial fishing practices are threatening the viability of practically every fishery around the world.
In addition, temporarily cheap oil and natural gas are lulling us into a complacency about our energy supplies. Energy depletion that just two years ago seemed to be indicated by high prices is rarely discussed now. We are projecting the current moment into the future and believing that the rising energy price trend of the last 15 years is meaningless.
Practically everything we do to reduce risks to human populations now creates broader, longer term risks that could turn catastrophic. The Slate article linked above references the “high-reliability organization.” Such organizations which seek to avoid catastrophic failures share certain common characteristics:
1) Preoccupation with failure: To avoid failure we must look for it and be sensitive to early signs of failure.
2) Reluctance to simplify: Labels and clichés can stop one from looking further into the events.
3) Sensitivity to operations: Systems are not static and linear but rather dynamic and nonlinear in nature. As a result it becomes difficult to know how one area of the organization’s operations will act compared to another part.
For our global system as a whole to act like a high-reliability organization, we would have to turn away from technopian narratives that tell us we will always come up with a new technology that will solve our problems including climate change–while forcing us to change our lives very little.
Instead, we would anticipate and scan for possible failure, no matter how small, to give us warning about perils to our survival. There are plenty of signs flashing warnings to us, but we have not fully comprehended their gravity.
When it comes to energy supplies, we are often faced with the simplifying assertions as mentioned above that are designed to prevent us from examining the topic. People in the oil industry like to say that the “resource is huge.” They don’t tell you that “resource” simply refers to what is thought–on sketchy evidence–to be in the ground. What is actually available to us is a tiny fraction of the resource at today’s prices and level of technology.
The effects of the recent bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest ocean freight companies have given us a window into the outsized effects of a failure of just a small portion of our complex system of worldwide logistics.
If we had run our society as a high-reliability organization, we would have heeded warnings made decades ago. I like to tell people that the American public first learned that oil was a finite resource when Clark Gable told them so near the end of the 1940 film “Boom Town,” a remarkable speech for the time.
American leadership found out that we would have to make a transition to a non-fossil fuel economy way back in 1954 in Harrison Brown’s widely read The Challenge of Man’s Future—and, that such a transition would be fraught with peril if not begun early enough.
Other warnings included Limits to Growth in 1972, a book widely misunderstood as predicting rather than modeling our predicament. More recently there was Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
In general, what we as a society have chosen to do is to create narratives of invincibility, rather than heed these warnings. We are, in effect, normalizing highly risky behavior.
Perhaps our biggest failure is noted in item three above. We think of the world we live in as static and linear rather than dynamic and nonlinear. That has given us a false sense that things move gradually and predictably in our world, the same false sense that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
20 Comments on "Deepwater Horizon and our emerging ‘normal’ catastrophes"
rockman on Sun, 16th Oct 2016 2:57 pm
I know Kurt. Years ago I helped give him a quick lesson on 3d seismic on our work station. He does take researching tech to support his writings seriously. But I think I need to drop him a line and go over the details of the blowout.
“…a product of normal decisions by people who were following accepted procedures and routines.” As explained a few weeks ago there was nothing routine about the specific procedure that directly led to the accident. The displacement of some of the heavy that was designed to prevent the well from flowing with sea water was the root cause. As I said before not once in 4 decades has the Rockman seen this done at this stage of the process. Not once by any company. Had the back pressure from the combined mud/salt water column in the well bore not been lowered below the reservoir pressure the oil/NG would have not flowed upwards. It would not have happened even if there were NO CEMENT holding it back let alone a failed cement job. Think about: the well didn’t blowout when the reservoir was initially drilled. Why? Because the pressure of the mud column was higher then the reservoir pressure. The physics are just as simple as it sounds.
Now as far as “following accepted procedures and routines”…not even close. When drilling it’s very easy to tell when a “kick” (down hole flow of water, oil or NG into the well bore) begins: with the mud pumps off there should be no mud flowing out of the well. Take a kick and the down hole flow pushes the mud up. So while drilling (and at any other time there’s a reason for concern) we do a “flow check”. Not complicated science: you just turn the mud pumps off for 60 seconds. No mud flow…just carry on.
As I’ve said before with the heated argument onboard as to whether the cement test was valid or not extra attention shouild have been paid for an indication of a kick. That should have been the “accepted procedures and routines” even if there weren’t specific concerns. That duty was normally shared by several hands. But obviously none of them were paying attention. Had they seen the well kicking they would have shut it in and raised the mud weight. Such scenarios have happened THOUSANDS of times in the GOM but very few outside the oil patch are aware of that FACT because very seldom did they lead to a catastrophic event.
It’s never feels good to point a finger at the folks involved especially those that didn’t survive. But the decisions and routines followed on the Deepwater Horizon were far from accepted by most in the oil patch.
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 16th Oct 2016 3:38 pm
Teacher, over here in the back row, I got a question.
Mr Rockman, I saw the movie, and if you wanna make the mud heavy, how is it done?
Cause the mud has to be heavier than water right? It is a density thing, so do you add lead flakes to the mud? Or is it extra dense with dissolved salt?
What if you were only drilling to a reservoir 200 feet down, then the weight of the mud is irrelevant? Then you do it the old way, and get a gusher?
What about the giant round tire O-ring at the top of the blowout preventer? It gets squeezed around the drill shaft to choke off flow. Rumor is they drilled into it, and chunks of the rubber came out with the mud. Why did not the movie portray that?
They showed a mud washing department st the rig. Where they can see what’s in the mud by diluting with water spray. Why did the movie depict that function, but without showing anything conclusive?
rockman on Sun, 16th Oct 2016 7:14 pm
Racer – All good questions. Mud weight is measured as pounds per gallon…ppg. Just as simple as it sounds. A simple explanation: drill mud is water, clay, various chemicals and powdered BARITE…not lead. Barite is a very dense mineral. “Normal mud weight (mw) is around 9.5 ppg. As the reservoir pressures get higher you add more “bar” (barite).
Tricky but try to follow close: the deeper the hole the taller the volume of mud and the greater pressure at the bottom of the hole (bhp). But it doesn’t matter how deep the hole is (200′ or 12,000′) if the rocks are “normal pressure” the same 9.5 ppg mud exerts enough bhp to stop flow because the pressure in the rock is the same as would be produced by a column of salt water the same height… 200′ or 12,000′. Like I said: not exactly intuitive.
We always drill with a mw a bit higher then the reservoir pressure: bhp in rocks = 8 ppg so mw would be 9.5 ppg. If you increase mw too high you can force mud into porous rocks… called “lost circulation”. IOW not all the mud circulates back up the hole. Can be costly and dangerous.
At some depth the bhp will increase a little 2 to 4 ppg (soft geopressure) or a lot like 6 to 8 ppg (hard geopressure) either slowly (hundreds of feet) or quickly (tens of feet). That depth varies greatly. In some areas you hit 16 ppg bhp at 4,000′. In others it can still be 9.5 ppg at 17,000′. And offshore you can go from 9.5 ppg to 14 ppg by moving just 1,000′ laterally between locations. Tricky business if no wells drilled near by. Prior to my current gig I was a wellsite PPA on Deep Water GOM wells…Pore Pressure Analyst. Too complicated to explain how a PPA does it…high specialized skill set.
Back to the BP well. Despite the MSM saying so it was not “high pressure”…just higher pressure. The bhp was equivalent to about 12.5 ppg…about 12,000 psi at that depth. So a 14 ppg mud did fine drilling it. Many thousands of wells drilled in the Gulf Coast Basin with 16 to 17.5 ppg…17,000+ psi. The serious flaw in the plan: when BP swapped some salt water for mud it reduced the weight below 12.5 ppg. IOW the bhp of the mud/water column was less then the reservoir pressure. So when the cement in the annulus failed the laws of physics took over: stuff flows from high pressure to low pressure. Again this didn’t require complicated engineer calculations: 12,500 psi on one end of pipe with 10,000 psi at the other end. Which way does the water flow?
BOP: I never got too deep into the post-blowout analysis. The truth: BOP’s are not the “last line of defense” but the worst line of defense. First, a BOP is useless if it isn’t activated. Since the crew didn’t know they were taking a kick until oil/NG started blowing all over the drill floor it was a tad late to activate the BOP 5,000′ below the rig. It might have malfunctioned on its own (not that uncommon) or was damaged by the kick.
But as I said they could have shut the well in by closing those O-rings (not the correct term) if they saw the kick coming up. Unfortunately when the abrasive mud flowing up under high pressure around the “pack off” it can rip it apart. Chicken and egg: what came first: failed system caused wild flow or wild flow damaged the system. Can be difficult to distinguish.
Did I cover it all? More questions? And no: didn’t watch the film and don’t plan to. Enough memories of near misses…don’t need borrow someone elses. LOL.
rockman on Sun, 16th Oct 2016 7:24 pm
“…a mud washing department st the rig. Where they can see what’s in the mud by diluting with water spray”. Hmm…sounds like the mud logger. He catches samples of the returning mud and washes it through a screen so he can analize the rock samples (cuttings). He doesn’t add water to the mud system. He also monitors the return for oil and NG. Also checks mw of the returning mud: water, oil or NG flowing slowly into the well can “cut the mud”…lower the mw. Called a ” mud show”.
They use such terms in the movie?
Go Speed Racer on Mon, 17th Oct 2016 4:06 am
Aw, shucks if you need a ticket, I’ll buy ya one. Probably worth watching just to see all the Hollywood goof ups and technical errors.
At least this movie plot, the exploding gas cans were a real story, not fiction.
I saw that lead flakes are twice denser than Baryte, however, i bet lead flakes would cost more.
Or use Corn Flakes, those are fairly dense too :O)
One more question Mr. Rockman sir, sounds like ya figure the reservoir pressure is proportional to what presses down on it (5000 feet down, its’ twice the pressure as 2500 feet down).
BUT wouldn’t it be kinda arbitrary? If the reservoir all shook up like a can of soda pop, it could have plenty pressure inside it even if only 50 feet down, true? Then the mud column would not work.
Isn’t the reservoir pressure kind of unpredictable?
I saw the coolest internet picture, its a drill rig called Troll A. Can ya believe it?
http://twistedsifter.com/2015/09/troll-a-tallest-structure-ever-moved-by-mankind/
rockman on Mon, 17th Oct 2016 9:42 am
Racer – From a review by an oil patch hand Hollywood didn’t screw up the technical stuff too badly.
“Isn’t the reservoir pressure kind of unpredictable?” Not kind of but completely unpredictable. That’s why it helps to have nearby wells already drilled. We’ll study those “mud recaps” to learn.
First: pressure gradient: The hydrostatic pressure gradient is the rate of change in formation fluid pressure with depth. Fluid density is the controlling factor in the normal hydrostatic gradient. In the U.S. Rocky Mountains, a formation water gradient of 0.45 psi/ft is common. In the U.S. Gulf Coast, a gradient of 0.465 psi/ft is common.
The Gulf Coast the NPG (NORMAL pressure gradient) is essentially that exerted by a column of salt water. Thus the NPG remains constant while the bhp increases with depth. Just as the NPG of 9.5 ppg mud stays constant the bhp it exerts increases with depth.
Until it doesn’t. Geopressure: as the rocks get buried deeper and deeper the pressure increases but won’t exceed the NPG because of their connectivity to shallower rocks. Think of it as a relief valve. But if those deep porous rocks get isolated from the shallow (like a sandstone fully encased in impermeable shale) the relief valve can be partially closed (soft geopressure…12 to 14 ppg) or fully closed (hard geopressure…16 to 18 ppg).
When drilling in an area with no previous drilling we monitor a variety of parameters to estimate bhp. What a PPA does. As much art as science. One of the most reliable indicators that you’ve “drilled into pressure” is the well “kicks”…the prelude to a blowout if you don’t handle the kick properly. And a guaranteed sign is mud flowing out of the well with the mud pumps off. Why we do a lot of “flow checks” in an area without much previous drilling history…no mud redcaps.
But BP had drilled the well properly with 14 ppg mud that prevented the 12.5 ppg reservoir from blowing out. And yes: we use ppg as and indication of psi, the reservoir pressure. So they knew exactly what mw was needed to keep the oil/NG from flowing out of the reservoir.
Now casing design. Casing was run to the bottom of the hole. And cement was pumped into the “annulus”…the narrow space (a couple of inches) between the outside of the casing and the reservoir. Critical that you get a good hard cement job: eventually the mud will be removed from the casing during the COMPLETION of the well. On every well the Rockman has completed he reduced the pressure gradient below that of the reservoir. Called “putting a well in imbalance”. Thus when holes are shot thru the casing the reservoir starts immediately flowing upwards. Safely because we are expecting it and can control it at the well head.
But I’ve never seen a well left in imbalance when moving the drill rig off. Always left the mud in the casing. After moving a work over rig in to complete the well we’ll displace the mud with “completion fluid”…a clear liquid with a weight gradient less then the reservoir pressure.
Cement failure: I’ve never worried about a cased hole blowing out while waiting on the work over rig to move on even if the annuilus cement failed: the heavier mud wouldn’t let the oil/NG flow up. But this is exactly what BP did wrong: displaced the mud with enough sea water to lower the bhp of the column below the reservoir pressure. By doing so only a good cement job would prevent the reservoir from flowing. Which made testing the cement job EXTREMELY critical. Will skip those details. But there was a huge argument between managers in front of the crew as whether they got a valid cement test. The loser of the argument said, in front of the crew: ” Well, I guess that’s why we have BOP’s”. That was not a casual flippant remark. Translation: “If things go south I’m going to help them crucify you”. I’ve seen fist fights almost start over such a comment. Seen hands fired for saying it. Once the Rockman had his contract cancelled for saying it.
And thus what I can’t explain: with that level of concern why wasn’t closer attention paid MORE THEN WHAT WOULD BE SOP. But I’ve been on rigs shutting down and everyone is rushing to get the hell out of Dodge. And one more time: it ain’t rocket science: you simply look at the pipe from the well head to the mud tank. If the mud is flowing into the mud tank with the pumps off the well is flowing oil/NG up the casing pushing the mud out ahead of it. They could have put a 10 yo boy watching the return flow line and he could have alerted the crew in enough time to prevent the blow out.
How insane is that? I doubt the movie showed the details of that dynamic. I wonder how the public would react if they understood what happened? To make the story even worse: someone did see an indication the well was “unloading” the mud: a boat captain. They were transferring mud from the rig tanks to his tanks. He radioed the rig to stop pumping…his tanks were full. The rig said they couldn’t be full because the rig’s mud tanks still had a lot in them. The extra mud in the rig tanks was that being unloaded from the casing as it was being pushed out by the oil/NG.
The disaster could have easily been avoided if STANDARD PRACTICES AND PROTOCOLS had been followed. Did the movie even make that generality?
rockman on Mon, 17th Oct 2016 12:39 pm
Just ran across this book. On Amazon:
http://gcaptain.com/books/
Fire On The Horizon – The Untold Story Of Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Some of the reviews:
Konrad writes of the rig with easy familiarity, while comfortably populating it with its maritime and drilling crews and warmly conveying the camaraderie that suffused the platform…. he turns the drilling process into a fine choreography, offering an effective critique of the corporate edicts that jeopardized the safety of the rig’s people and the integrity of the exploratory well.” -Editor, Kirkus Reviews
I’m well into ‘Fire on the Horizon.’ It’s the fifth book on the spill that I’ve read and wish I had read it first. Head and shoulders above the pack…. Artfully and compellingly told, the book marries a John McPhee feel for the technology to a Jon Krakauer sense of an adventure turned tragic.” –Geoffrey Mohan, LA Times
“THIS BOOK IS THE TRUTH – I know my son was there” -Evelyn Alland
Dredd on Mon, 17th Oct 2016 6:02 pm
Lots o deep thoughts in Atwater Valley where the Deeptwatter Whoreicon ejerkulated (Danger Lurks In The Deep Water – 3).
Kurt Cobb on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 11:52 am
Rockman,
Thanks for the gentle lesson. I am certain that what happened on the Deepwater Horizon would not have been categorized as normal procedure elsewhere. But the point the author of the Slate article was making was that the kind of slipshod procedure we see on the Deepwater Horizon had become standard procedure for BP and Transocean over time. It’s the slippage in standards that I’m really speaking to and I didn’t make this clear enough. BP and Transocean thought they had such a good safety record up to that point because their deteriorating standards hadn’t led to a big accident. In fact, they were simply lucky that they hadn’t had other big accidents. So, I’m applying this slippage in standards to the way we govern other important systems, agriculture, greenhouse gas emissions, fisheries, etc.
The film much more than the Slate article makes it clear that there was a heated argument over the well test. But the film can’t really explore the deterioration of standards over time– though you get a hint of it because of all the equipment on the rig that is not working or at least not working at 100 percent.
rockman on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 2:59 pm
Howdy Kurt. I figured you probably had a better grasp. “…the kind of slipshod procedure we see on the Deepwater Horizon had become standard procedure for BP and Transocean over time.”. Never worked with either of them so don’t know how safe they ever were. But about that “good safety record”…maybe, maybe not. You can’t cover up blowouts, deaths or serious injuries. But I’ve seen serious near-misses first hand that never made it into WRITTEN reports. I’ve seen hands with minor injuries have their tasks covered by other hands so they can get treated back home. That way no “lost time accident” gets reported. Drill crews can get nice bonuses for long periods with no LTA’s. Twice I came close to serious injury (maybe even fatal) and nothing reported. I’ve seen safety systems turned off because of irritating false alarms. But when you’re a consultant you keep your mouth shut and just mail your invoice in. But as I mention I did use the “I guess that’s why we have a BOP” line once. And did not get invited back after the job was finished. Which was OK because I didn’t really care to ever work with that company again. LOL.
But I’ll shock everyone now: after doing this for forty years in the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mnts and Africa by far the most safety focused company I’ve ever dealt with directly has been ExxonMobil. And not necessarily because they are saints. It’s due to their lawyers. XOM knows it walks around with a big “Sue me” sign on its back. Everyone knows how deep its pockets are. Last hitch with them was on a Russian drillship off the Africa coast. The local African workers (required by the govt) were so unsafe XOM stationed 2 full time safety engineers on board. And that was after having a weeklong safety/team building school at the shorebase. And still so unsafe they shut the rig completely down one morning (expensive to do) for 6 hours and had a “safety meeting” on the chopper pad. Not the most comfortable place to stand with rolling seas. LOL. Pissed off all the US hands that didn’t need to be lectured (you didn’t get the job if you didn’t have a spotless saferty record) but it would have been politically incorrect to just do it for the African hands.
Didn’t do much good. Instead of occasionally walking the rig for exercise stayed in my office for 28 days each hitch. It was the only time in my career to wake up from a nightmare while offshore. In fact I very ever have nightmares anywherd. Actually now that I remember it I didn’t just wake up: being in the top bunk I put my foot thru the ceiling panel. LOL.
Apneaman on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 3:01 pm
The new normal will be fleeting as physics and chemistry will be constantly worsening the new normal and catastrophes for the rest of our short stay.
Record Hot 2016 Marks the Start of Bad Climate Consequences, Provides “Fierce Urgency” to Halt Worse Harms to Come
“And just maintaining current rates of warming without significant added feedbacks from the Earth System would result in Earth hitting close to 3 C warming by 2100 — a level that would inflict severe harm both to life on Earth and to the human civilizations that now inhabit this world.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/10/18/record-hot-2016-marks-the-start-of-bad-climate-consequences-provides-fierce-urgency-to-halt-worse-harms-to-come/
“…without significant added feedbacks from the Earth System…”
Yeah feedback, we don’t want to think or talk about those do we? Lets pretend they don’t exist lest everyone give up.
rockman on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 3:03 pm
BTW: “…makes it clear that there was a heated argument over the well test.” Glad to hear that. At least gives the impression this was not a one-off act of god situation. At least it showed someone out there didn’t have their head up their arse. LOL.
Go Speed Racer on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 4:29 pm
Mr Rockman, thanks for the oil drilling lessons.
Here is an idea. Let’s go into business together. I have some old iron pipes and a lot of 4×4’s. We can drill for oil. We will hit a gusher . We will be rich.
Jed Clampett did it. We can too. Good Plan?
I think ya gotta see the movie, Mr Rockman, cause then you can critique it for us. Also, I think the movie included the mud boat, and the extra mud.
makati1 on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 8:36 pm
Ap, ignoring the problem is the only thing most people can do, until they cannot. So they spend their time talking about the cost of oil or NG or ‘alternates’, and pretend that that is the real problem. Permafrost melting or the release of methane clathrates is not on their minds or even in their vocabulary.
rockman on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 9:05 pm
Racer – I’ll still pass but will look for some technical reviews now.
rockman on Tue, 18th Oct 2016 9:38 pm
Various rerveiws:
1) No hint how accurate but: “And yet, despite the fact that director Peter Berg presents the action as if everyone in the audience is an engineer, the excitement is undeniable. For a movie in which you can’t follow what’s going on for 75% of the time, “Deepwater Horizon” proves remarkably thrilling…”
2) Perhaps referring to the questionable cement test: “His senior, a gruff Kurt Russell, is warring with visiting BP execs, who insist a drilling operation go ahead despite safety concerns. The most ruthless suit, a drawling John Malkovich, appears unmoved by complaints about faulty equipment and unfinished checks.” “…the dialogue is terse, tense and delivers often complex technical minutiae clearly, without anything feeling as if it has been dumbed down.”
3) This sounds like someone who knows the biz helped the screen writer: “The movie certainly impresses when it comes to presenting the nitty-gritty details of everything that went wrong during the real-life disaster, but that does come at the expense of creating a more thematically-rich narrative…”
4) “Peter Berg’s account of the explosion on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, in 2010, is so expertly done, and so thrilling to behold, that you end up slightly troubled by your own excitement. Should the story of a true catastrophe, which left eleven people dead and wrought havoc on the environment, really be this much fun?”
5) And why many hands won’t care to see tyhe movies and, in particular, won’t take the family. Kinda like a serious version of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. “…and there’s a nice decision, late in the film, to focus on his (Walberg) shock back on land rather than a sugary reunion with his family.
A general rule: “You leave it on the rig”. Whatever “it” is.
Apneaman on Wed, 19th Oct 2016 12:02 pm
October Heat Wave: 99 Records Toppled in One Day Alone
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/video/october-heat-wave-99-records-toppled-in-one-day-alone-788658755992
Apneaman on Wed, 19th Oct 2016 12:13 pm
World’s mammals being eaten into extinction, report warns
First global assessment finds 301 species are primarily at risk from human hunting for the bushmeat trade
“Hundreds of mammal species – from chimpanzees to hippos to bats – are being eaten into extinction by people, according to the first global assessment of the impact of human hunting.
Bushmeat has long been a traditional source of food for many rural people, but as roads have been driven into remote areas, large-scale commercial hunting is leaving forests and other habitats devoid of wildlife.
The scientists behind the new analysis warned that, without action, the wiping out of these species could lead to the collapse of the food security of hundreds of millions of people reliant on bushmeat for survival.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/19/worlds-mammals-being-eaten-into-extinction-report-warns
Better hope they don’t develop a taste for white meat.
Apneaman on Wed, 19th Oct 2016 12:19 pm
There won’t be a movie about this one.
Where Has the Waste Gone? Fracking Results in Illegal Dumping of Radioactive Toxins
“You’re talking hundreds of dollars to transport, versus tens of thousands of dollars if regulations are changed,” Kari Cutting, vice president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council told the Dickinson Press.
The oil companies got what they wanted. The North Dakota state legislature approved a bill allowing Department of Health to create a new radioactive waste limit. Then, on August 11, 2015, the North Dakota Health Council, an 11-member governing body of the Department of Health, held a meeting to increase the picocurie limit from five to 50 picocuries per gram. Picocuries are how radiation is measured. The council did not properly notify the public, and two citizen’s groups, the Dakota Resource Council and the North Dakota Energy Industry Waste Coalition sued the North Dakota Health Council claiming the meeting was held illegally.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38022-where-has-the-waste-gone-fracking-results-in-illegal-dumping-of-radioactive-toxins
Apneaman on Wed, 19th Oct 2016 5:59 pm
Climate Change — Seas Are Now So High it Only Takes a King Tide to Flood the US East Coast
“Rising ocean levels due to human-forced climate change is resulting in worsening instances of tidal flooding at times of high tide. In this video, a simple seasonal high tide is enough to flood major roads in Fort Lauderdale on October 17.)
King Tides — Turned into Flooding Events by Climate Change
During past years, these events were called astronomical high and low tides. They weren’t typically a news item because such tides often did not produce flooding. Past construction had placed buildings and key infrastructure above the typical annual range of even the astronomical high tides.
However, during the past century and, ever more-so during recent years, seas have been rising more and more rapidly due to human-caused climate change. A warming of the Earth due to fossil fuel burning that has melted glacial ice — flooding the oceans and causing its waters to thermally expand. As a result, parts of the U.S. East Coast now see ocean levels that are 1.5 feet or more higher than they were at the start of the 20th Century.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/10/19/climate-change-seas-are-now-so-high-it-only-takes-a-king-tide-to-flood-the-us-east-coast/
Any year now and the Florida real estate fire sale/panic will begin. My bet is most club members will have their asses covered courtesy of the non club majority.