OK so one of my professors launched in to an environmentalist political tangent about the BP spill.  I pointed out the fact that the oil shale in the gulf naturally leaks more oil daily (spread over the entire gulf) than the BP spill did at it's height, and that there has been no scientific, or even anecdotal evidence of any harm to marine life, or commercial shrimping/fishing, and she won't believe me, instead citing propaganda sources from environmental groups.  She did however admit to not really knowing geology and requested I bring in alternate sources, so where can I find the information, google just returns 10,000,000 enviro wackos, need some help sorting through the chaff.

i'm a geographer, not a geologist, so i'll limit myself to saying that you're overlooking the issue of scale.  the problem of contamination is usually proportional to concentration.  so as you get your data in ppm or ppb, it might help to make an isopleth map of the plume.

I just resort to strawman attacks (because I'm not in high school debate class and don't give a fuck) and point out that BP would have never gone for deepwater oil had it not been for environmentalists pushing them offshore farther, yet still demanding convenient pricing for consumer items and cost of living.

Not really helpful on my part, but why do so many of you guys insist on arguing with your professors?

I made an environmental ethics philosophy professor question the very core concepts of what he was teaching in class.
Why? Because they need to be held to scrutiny instead of allowed to just copy/pasta.





eta- philosophy not psycology
 

Even a little googling brings up some reef damage claims and issues with oil sinking deeper into colder waters where things will change very slowly.

So what's down there that it will effect?



 

For those interested here's just part of what the Prof and I were talking about, it stemmed as a follow up from a discussion after class, that had bled over from a discussion in class. It was centered around human induced global warming, and how I had brought up that rigorous scientific method wasn't being followed in a lot of cases.  
Click To View Spoiler
 
 


 

Where exactly did you get your info that she won't accept the sources?

What did you cite during this conversation?

Op, one of my offices just so happens to be in the community where I grew up. That place just so happens to be a 20-25 minute drive to Port Fourchon. Port Fourchon wiki Port Fourchon was a popular spot for reporters to do their reports from during the height of the oil spill. Erin Burnette reported from there live for CNBC and Jim Cramer has been there also while he did his show on Energy XXI. During the summer, I spend every weekend either in Fourchon or the neighboring island of Grand Isle fishing and enjoying the breeze. I have several acquaintances who are commercial fisherman who fish for everything from snapper to oysters.

Given my familiarity with the area and it's ecosystem the oil spill did not and does not have any long lasting effects that will alter the course of the estuaries.

Talking Points
1.Your professor probably has images from the Valdez tattooed in their mind about a think viscous goo that covered the sounds and killed all the marine life. The type of crude that was escaping out of the macondo well was much lighter and had a exponentially larger environment for the oil to disperse and not get trapped into a sound as did in the Valdez accident.

2. Yeah but some oil washed up on the beaches and there were tar balls. To answer to that, there have always been tar balls on the beach, like you said from natural seepage. Initially there was alot of oil on the beaches, but that was cleaned up right away.

3.The marine life and estuaries are damaged beyond repair. Nope, the fish are there even thicker than before due to having a whole fishing season cancelled and the reduced fishing pressure helped all of the stocks. All of the crustaceans are out there to be found from shrimp to crabs. The only thing that was affected were some oyster beds right after the spill and in the year following. Since oysters act like water filters this comes as to no surprise but the stocks are coming back to normal again.

4. But all that oil had to go somewhere! Actually when oil gets that dispersed among a body of water as big as the GOM there are microbes in the sea water that eat the hydrocarbons and break the crude down to nothing.

A good news source that had a lot of articles on the Spill is WWL

Good article for your Prof.

Basically at ground zero of the well when crude started to flow out, the marine life GTFO of dodge. I mean can you blame them, then a team with a ROV goes back to that same area 4 years later and there is an abundance of life at ground zero. The main scientist behind the program is very happy with what she is seeing.

Op you are going to have trouble getting the truth from people who were effected by the spill when talking to the press.
Reasons:
1. The store owners and fisherman are pissed that they lost out on revenue
2.Because of #2 they can file claims and get compensated and the worse the situation the more money Lord Feinburg will give them.
3. You will hear more about the negative effects of the oyster stocks than the fish stocks. Why, because they are treated differently when getting awarded compensation by BP. Claims for the fisherman run fro 100k - 300k depending on what size fleet you had and if you actually filed your taxes correctly. The oysters on the other hand since in Louisiana you actually own the land they are own below the water are considered more like crops/farmland. Your average oyster bed owner will get a settlement around 2-3 million. That and the year of and after they oysters were affected by the spill. Like I said preciously the oyster stocks are bouncing back.

All In all stuff is back to normal, and I don't see any long lasting effects to the environment.

Now on the other hand if you would like to point out to your prof the biggest destruction of coral reef in the history of the US you can enlighten your prof about the Idle Iron policy in the gulf.

Idle Iron Info

Dept of Interior Press Release

The irony from the Liberals is out right ridiculous. In 2010 Idle Iron goes into effect, that means that hundreds of oil platforms and the coral reefs and fish habitats now have to be permanently removed as if nothing ever existed there. To remove the platform and reef, you blow it up and remove it piece by piece, using that process you kill all of the fish that inhabited the reed/structure. So that's millions of fish that were killed for no reason. Well in 2012 Obama gets the endorsement of both the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters. All while his policies are permanently destroying coral reefs and killing millions of fish.

So if your professor wants to talk about damaging the environment and killing marine life, tell her This administration has caused more death and permanent destruction than the BP oil spill ever could.

I never said that.  I said she was citing environmental propaganda as sources, but asked that I find refuting sources.

BP screwed the pooch, boys, you can't even argue that one, and it was all based in greed and stupidity. Google natural oil seeps. There are some bad ones out there, Santa Barbara comes to mind. In fact there was an environmental group that was trying to get the drilling permit approved for Santa Barbara to cut down on the pollution in the area. Other environmentalists put a stop to it.

Tell her to bring her own alternate sources to prove her point.

Those damn corporations and all that damn free market bullshit.  Amirite?

BP has a bad track record for cutting corners. When those "corporations" put greed ahead of everything else we end up with bad situations, like an unecessarily massive oil spill in the ocean. If regulations were completely removed from the market then the quality of life will plummit. Just how it is. BP has made that fact fairly clear.

 

If you mean by still working on a high pressure well while the blowout preventer had a known issue and only using one blowout preventer? then yes they did drop the ball. It was an incident that could have been avoided 100%

Briefly, they cut corners on completing a well despite a number of red flags indicating that disaster was looming, because they were behind schedule and over budget on the project. So to save a few million dollars in day rate and some asshole's bonus they cost themselves tens of billions of cash and untold billions in future opportunities both for themselves and other innocent third parties that had been doing things the right way. If you want to understand it you need to speak with someone in the know at another oil company and get their opinion. Independent operators have gone the way of the dodo thanks to BP's fuckups... so ironically they've benefitted from their own fuckup by having less competition.

Any information from agenda driven groups like the sierra club, and others is automatically discarded.

BP is notorious for assbackward procedures that they claim provide better safety. I am not arguing with you, but what do you mean by independent operations?

FO REAL

 

Obama just needed to know who's ass to kick.

Petroleum products such as oil and natural gas are the pressure cooked remains of organic matter within the rocks from when the soft sediments that formed those rocks was first deposited.

Natural Oil Spills - Live Science

SD article

Jumped the gun and assumed you meant they were being greedy just by drilling.  My bad.

You never said what?

I just quoted your post and asked what sources you offered for your info.

Facts have sources.

You stated you told her facts and she wont believe them, that she offered up propaganda sources.

What sources did you offer in rebuttal?

Small independent oil companies, that used to drill about half the wells in the GOM. Now they've been bought out or folded or did some other damn thing, I don't know, but they don't seem to be drilling for oil anymore.

I don't need to find the earlier thread I lived it, and it still affects me to this day.

Did your BP buddy happen to mention that they didn't circulate the well adequately due to time and budget constraints before displacing the liquid mud? The liquid mud they were trying to reclaim to save a few hundred thousand dollars by replacing it with much less effective mud that happened to be much cheaper as well, and which led directly to the blowout? And we haven't even brought up the spacers BP omitted to (drum roll please) save time and money at the cost of safety and against the recommendation of Halliburton.

As for BP's supposedly sterling track record, well it speaks for itself, now doesn't it. Even if you ignore the Macondo disaster.

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bps-dismal-safety-record/story?id=10763042

BP is short for Biggest Piece of Shit Oil Company Evar.

Some good info already given to you OP so let me just leave you with this nugget of information.
Do you remember the Coast Guard and some of the cleanup companies tried In Situ burning?  They stopped because after they would burn a large area and then go into that area for observation, they were finding hundreds and hundreds of cooked sea turtles
So the govt stopped the burning and said it wasn't effective.  They didn't want word getting out that the govt regulators killed more sea life then the actual spill.

Most of the oil in the ocean is naturally occurring because it seeps up through fissures in the ocean floor.

FBHO

What is not common practice is failing to circulate free gas out of the well before displacing expensive rental mud with the water based el cheapo shit. There's a reason the expensive shit is expensive too, partner, it's because it keeps the little champagne bubbles where they're supposed to be for a whole lot longer than the cheap shit. And whose call is all that, hmmm? Wouldn't be the BP company rep and his asshole engineer / bean counter bosses in Houston, now would it? But don't let those bits of information interrupt your BP circle suck.

 

So do you have a ratio of successfully pumped barrels to unsuccessfully pumped barrels for BP?



 

Perfect irony, in case anyone was wondering: "You actually have no idea what you are talking about here. I mean none." So you know about land based drilling? Totally different animal, brother.

Mud comes in several forms but most drilling mud is a suspension of silica gel, heavy dirt called barite, various chemicals and some type of base oil and it is recyclable. That is why mud is rented by oil companies. Yes rented and returned for credit and recycled for future use. It can be made on site or it can be transported to the rig. Normally a large batch is transported to the rig to start drilling. They make additional mud on the rig as needed, or more often simply reprocess it (weight it back up, etc.). If their loss rate is too high they will continue to need fresh infusions of it delivered by supply vessel.

Mud serves several purposes. It lubricates the drill string. It displaces and removes cuttings. And it maintains pressure on the well to ensure that gas is not allowed to expand causing a blowout. Technically the Macondo well was a blowout. They had poor control over well pressure during completion, because they were getting large amounts of gas in the mud. This meant that ideally they should have circulated the entire mud column in the well to liberate all of the free gas. Instead they circulated about 2% of the well. Gas in the drilling fluid could lead to failure and channeling in the cement job, as Halliburton warned BP numerous times when it recommended circulating the well. BP ignored them of course because they didn't want to spend a few more dollars doing it the right way. Halliburton also told BP that the cement job would likely fail unless 21 additional centralizers for the well were used. BP ignored them.

Nope, pal, this one is their baby most definitely. BP has to carry the weight here.

And it was a drilling collar that was caught in the BOP. That was just bad luck as you say. But BP built every other link in the disaster chain. It's too bad the BOP didn't save them from themselves.

Not normally a fan of Waxman's but it's hard to argue with this letter:

http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Hayward-BP-Well-Blowout-Causes-2010-6-14.pdf


Mr. Tony Hayward


Chief Executive Officer

BPPLC

I St. James's Square

London SWI Y 4PD

United Kingdom

June 14, 2010

Dear Mr. Hayward:

We are looking forward to your testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Thursday, June 17,2010, about the causes of the blowout ofthe Macondo well and the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As you prepare for this testimony, we want to share with you some of the results of the Committee's investigation and advise you of issues you should be prepared to address.

The Committee's investigation is raising serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. On April 15, five days before the explosion, BP's drilling engineer called Macondo a "nightmare well." In spite of the well's difficulties, BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure. In several instances, these decisions appear to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP's own personnel and its contractors. In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.

At the time of the blowout, the Macondo well was significantly behind schedule. This appears to have created pressure to take shortcuts to speed finishing the well. In particular, the Committee is focusing on five crucial decisions made by BP: (I) the decision to use a well design with few barriers to gas flow; (2) the failure to use a sufficient number of "centralizers" to prevent channeling during the cement process; (3) the failure to run a cement bond log to evaluate the effectiveness of the cement job; (4) the failure to circulate potentially gas-bearing drilling muds out of the well; and (5) the failure to secure the wellhead with a lockdown sleeve before allowing pressure on the seal from below. The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety.

Well Design. On April 19, one day before the blowout, BP installed the final section of steel tubing in the well. BP had a choice of two primary options: it could lower a full string of "casing" from the top of the wellhead to the bottom of the well, or it could hang a "liner" from the lower end of the casing already in the well and install a "tieback" on top of the liner. The liner-tieback option would have taken extra time and was more expensive, but it would have been safer because it provided more barriers to the flow of gas up the annular space surrounding these steel tubes. A BP plan review prepared in mid-April reconunended against the full string of casing because it would create "an open annulus to the wellhead" and make the seal assembly at the wellhead the "only barrier" to gas flow if the cement job failed. Despite this and other warnings, BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer.

Centralizers. When the final string of casing was installed, one key challenge was making sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. As the American Petroleum Institute's recommended practices explain, if the casing is not centered, "it is difficult, ifnot impossible, to displace mud effectively from the narrow side of the annulus," resulting in a faiku cement job. Halliburton, the contractor hired by BP to cement the well, warned BP that the well could have a "SEVERE gas flow problem" if BP lowered the final string of casing with only six centralizers instead of the 21 recommended by Halliburton. BP rejected Halliburton's advice to use additional centralizers. In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "it will take 10 hours to install them . ... I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."

Cement Bond Log. BP's mid-April plan review predicted cement failure, stating "Cement simulations indicate it is unlikely to be a successful cement job due to formation breakdown." Despite this warning and Halliburton's prediction of severe gas flow problems, BP did not run a 9- to 12-hour procedure called a cement bond log to assess the integrity of the cement seal. BP had a crew from Schlumberger on the rig on the morning of April 20 for the purpose of rUlUling a cement bond log, but they departed after BP told them their services were not needed. An independent expel1 consulted by the Committee called this decision "horribly negligent."

Mud Circulation. In exploratory operations like the Macondo well, wells are generally filled with weighted mud during the drilling process. The American Petroleum Institute (API) recommends that oil companies fully circulate the drilling mud in the well from the bottom to the top before commencing the cementing process. Circulating the mud in the Macondo well could have taken as long as 12 hours, but it would have allowed workers on the rig to test the mud for gas influxes, to safely remove any pockets of gas, and to eliminate debris and condition the mud so as to prevent contamination of the cement. BP decided to forego this safety step and conduct only a partial circulation of the drilling mud before the cement job.

Lockdown Sleeve. Because BP elected to use just a single string of casing, the Macondo well had just two barriers to gas flow up the annular space around the final string of casing: the cement at the bottom of the well and the seal at the wellhead on the sea floor. The decision to use insufficient centralizers created a significant risk that the cement job would channel and fail, while the decision not to run a cement bond log denied BP the opportunity to assess the status of the cement job. These decisions would appear to make it crucial to ensure the integrity of the seal assembly that was the remaining barrier against an influx of hydrocarbons. Yet, BP did not deploy the casing hanger lockdown sleeve that would have prevented the seal from being blown out from below.

These five questionable decisions by BP are described in more detail below. We ask that you come prepared on Thursday to address the concerns that these decisions raise about BP's actions.

The Committee's investigation into the causes of the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig is continuing. As our investigation proceeds, our understanding of what happened and the mistakes that were made will undoubtedly evolve and change. At this point in the investigation, however, the evidence before the Committee calls into question multiple decisions made by BP. Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig.

During your testimony before the Committee, you will be asked about the issues raised in this letter. This will provide you an opportunity to respond to these concerns and clarify the record. We appreciate your willingness to appear and your cooperation in the Committee's investigation.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman, Chairman, Committee on Energy and Commerce

Bart Stupak, Chairman, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

I offered knowledge not specific sources, I do not carry a mental bibliography.  she asked for sources, hence this thread.

 

No actually I have already availed my self of those, heaven forbid I ask for some others.

disregard.  i realized that i'm cranky and taking it out on the OP.

Hey, it was still pretty funny, so there is that.
 

it wasn't the crude it was the Corexit