BP CEO The Spill is Tiny in a Vast Ocean

Another week has passed and who knows how many another barrels have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico? There are big arguments on how much oil is actually leaking with a Prof from Purdue saying it could be as high as 70,000 barrels a day. The pipe is 21 inches in diameter and that is all that the estimators of leak flow rate can agree upon. Interior Secretary Salazar reported this morning the idea to thread a 6 inch mile long straw into the 21 inch pipe header is not going well. BP reported they are still trying. The problem with this particular leak is that there is also a bunch of associated natural gas and that is why the top hat failed to seal the well. The natural gas also makes the flow of oil look more voluminous than it really may be. An update --- BP has threaded a 4 inch straw into the header and is pumping some fraction of the leaking oil into a ship on the sea surface above the well head. I do not have any data on how much oil is leaking and how much is being recovered through the mile long straw


Fox news reported that the CEO of BP considers the size of the leak tiny relative to size of the ocean.

Quoting Fox:

“The chief executive of BP told a British newspaper that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is "relatively tiny" compared with the "very big ocean."

Tony Hayward, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper at the company's Houston crisis center, said:

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume," he said.

U.S. officials estimate that at least 5,000 barrels of oil per day are leaking from a pipeline more than 5,000 feet deep that was damaged more than three weeks ago by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which later sunk. Eleven workers died in the disaster.

Hayward told the Guardian that BP would "fix" the disaster, which could become the biggest ecological disaster in U.S. history.

"We will fix it. I guarantee it," he told the newspaper. "The only question is we do not know when."

I say that it is not a question of when but a question of why and how? I also do not know why BP has not tried the methanol top hat trick. They have the smaller top hat filled with methanol in place but are still trying to insert the 6 inch straw into the 21 inch riser. It was good to see that the President who has initials (BO) that are very similar to BP got a little mad with all the three ring circus type finger pointing between BP, Halliburton, and Transocean.

I also see that A-One’s stock was up on news from a reporter at Forbes that Navistar Trucks will deploy A-123 batteries in short haul city trucks. Well the truck will cost $150,000 instead of $50,000 per Navistar but they have been promised by A-123 once the very large factory that the US Government funded is up an running the cost of the batteries will drop substantially. The $249 million given by the US Government to A-One is going to be lost just like the 5,000 to 70,000 barrels a day of oil that are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The department of entropy will make a statement that the $249 million is tiny compared to the ten trillion dollars sea of debt the US is drowning under. I have been shopping at the milliner to find a hat to eat if I am incorrect and A-123 does indeed produce much cheaper batteries. I have my eye on a Stetson Ten Gallon hat. The likelihood is that I will be wearing that hat for a long time and looking like the urban cowboy till I die. In the meantime I could use the ten gallon hat to scoop up the oil spill and ten gallons will about fill up my old jalopy.