And it's a shame because there is so much to comment on - BP's bill from the government, Sestak, Jindal and Romanoff, to name a few.
Regular blogging will continue tomorrow. I hope.
June 3, 2010
June 2, 2010
Oil Spill Implications For US Oil Production
According to a seemingly not well publicized Bloomberg report last week, President Obama's ban on deep water drilling has serious implications for future US oil output;
May 28 (Bloomberg) -- Energy companies are scrambling to cope with the extension of a deep-water drilling ban, a situation many never foresaw before BP Plc’s oil well began spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico last month.
President Barack Obama yesterday said the suspension is being lengthened by six months and work on 33 exploratory wells will be halted. The decision follows an April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers and sent oil from BP’s Macondo well gushing toward the U.S. coast.
Companies can’t plan for an event such as the extended moratorium, said Gene Shiels, a spokesman for oilfield-services provider Baker Hughes Inc., based in Houston. The industry may move personnel and equipment to other markets, such as Brazil and West Africa, and may see job losses, he said.
“The spill is like the 1,000-year flood: it’s the worst- case scenario,” said Brian Youngberg, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis. “It’s hard to prepare for those extreme situations like that.”
Obama also dropped plans to open waters off the coast of Virginia to drilling, canceled a lease sale in the Gulf, and suspended the permitting process for Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s planned wells off of Arctic Alaska. He said new safety rules will be imposed on offshore drilling.
U.S. oil output may be cut by 160,000 barrels a day next year as a result of the ban, according to Deutsche Bank AG. A one-year delay to deep-water projects would reduce global supplies by 500,000 barrels a day between 2013 and 2017, Sanford C. Bernstein said.
[Emphasis added.]
Needless to say, that's not a good thing.
I have a question for environmentalists about Al Gore
Note: I don't want to seem like I'm piling on here, given his recent separation. That may in part explain away my question. But not entirely. Marital problems don't spring up overnight and Al Gore during the course of those personal issues (however long that may have been) has been in the public eye and working on other things. But not lately. Which leads me to my question.
I have questions for environmentalists about Obama
If you believe Obama is a green President, and the White House is directing BP, then why hasn't he ordered the explosive destruction of the well at the source?
As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
I'm not convinced the effort would require a nuclear detonation. Something substantially smaller and localized could possibly do the trick. I'm not even convinced it would necessarily work. But it could stop the flow. It wouldn't take months - the US wouldn't have to wiat for BP either. The federal government does have explosives. But it would cost BP billions in lost revenue and alternate development costs. BP donated big to Obama's presidential campaign.
June 1, 2010
Finally! Eric Holder Takes Action
Eric Holder today did not start acting like an independent Attorney General and decided to launch an investigation and potentially prosecute anyone found guilty in the BP oil spill. Holder has NOT stood up and decided to go after activity based on the potential political implications.
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