good-bye gulf of mexico — UPDATED

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The first post on this subject was before they tried all the stuff that has already failed, but you might want to read it if you don't understand how what's left of the drill apparatus is being eroded and will blow off completely. So maybe you want to read that too. There is no if about this.

[In case you did not catch it earlier, all my notions about the pressure problem were based on the assumption that we were talking about FOSSIL fuel in an underground stratum NOT approaching magma. What's in this oil field may not be dinosaur remains, and even if it were, it's down there where really hot stuff is nearby and avid for a route to the surface. So my ideas about the pressures used to keep reservoirs patent from adjacent rigs wouldn't really bear on this particular animal... I think... it seems... but I'm still not 100% sure. The reason for that is how much information we are NOT getting. The excuse is the general panic it would cause, and I think that, yes, it would cause that, but if they hadn't been doing all this stuff without any oversight and general public understanding, this wouldn't be the case.]

And I don't know if you can hang with the way my brain works, but I think there's a direct correlation between how they run things like drilling to the center of the earth and how they run economies... and we just keep LETTING them.

[from 12 June 2010, 10pm]

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UPDATE, 13 June 2010, 2pm

From an article BB2 linked in comments and Old Uncle Dave sent me in email:

One last point that the public does not understand. It is not about deep water drilling where the problems have arisen. It is about high pressure oil and gas drilling that creates the problems. These zones can be found on land as well as at sea and can start from as little as 10000 feet, not the 20000 of this well. These high pressure wells have always been a problem. Of the millions of wells drilled, there are thousands of these ticking time bomb, high pressure wells in existence and new ones are being drilled every day. New risks are being taken daily.

This speaks to my confusion about pressure. I didn't realize, hadn't put it together, that this drill wasn't just deep in terms of WATER depth, it went waaaaay down in the earth itself too.

This happens to me often. Stuff to which I do NOT want to pay strict attention, so as not to crack open my own skull with the electrical flashes, so as not to distract me from the bigger picture, ends up forcing me to go back and try to straighten out all the bent assumptions fed into me at school and through the media so I can end up trying to SEE what the heck is real. I started out not wanting to be distracted or hypnotized by this mess because this sort of thing has proven so lethal BEHIND the distraction so many times before. If you hit my bpgom label you will be able to see the progression of this, and find a bunch of major links that go to places with even MORE major links... suss out what's going into it when I tell you THIS CATASTROPHE IS GOING TO BLOT OUT ALL THE OTHERS.

We learned earlier that BP's Thunder Horse production had suddenly fallen off somewhere late last year or early this year and the author of that piece thought it was either because they'd miscalculated its size and productivity or that they had throttled back on the production to keep the reservoir from being fouled by water. THAT is what set me off on my adjacent field pressure thing. Throttling back means raising the pressure inside the reservoir, and since the Deepwater Horizon and Thunder Horse rigs are SO close together that Deepwater Horizon was actually even working part of the Thunder Horse field, that seemed to me to indicate BP was causing the added pressure that made the thing blow.

Then I heard about the abiotic oil thing. Then I realized we were talking MUCH deeper into earth's crust than I thought, clear down into the mantle, maybe even dazzlingly too close to the core... and since those distances are not the same everywhere, this really gets complicated. And THEN when you consider the depth and pressures, excuse me, you have to be nuts to insist this is dinosaur ooze that has seeped down into the mantle in such fantastic quantities.

So JUST like the apparent entire arm of COMPLETE physics we don't get to know about from even our fanciest universities, it seems we have the same bullshit going with geology too. Oil isn't what they taught us in school, and BP has tapped into the apocalypse. I know it's a lot of reading, but there isn't any stopping this thing. Something went wrong at Thunder Horse at least as far back as the Haiti quake and maybe back to Hurricane Dennis. BP has been trying to manage it. It got away from them. And they can't stop it. The nuke idea is, at best, a total crapshoot... but seems to me to be just going to end up having caused the supervolcano we have all dreaded blowing at Yellowstone for so long.

Even if this disaster falls short of that, it is very clearly going to have emitted all the greenhouse gasses in the space of a few months that the scientists have been telling us our own activities would be causing in the coming decades. So even if we avoid a supervolcano scenario now, we have brought on by drilling, baby, now what so many have sought to avoid by stopping drilling for so long with all our yelping and whining and music festivals... ANYTHING but force.

So, my idea about the manmade pressure problem actually DOES obtain, just for a wildly different reason than I originally thought. I wish I could be happy about this new way to update the addled "teachings" of authority figures who are not authorities, but, well, it's cold comfort just now.

[And, as I was writing this update, jo6pac has just added this link....]

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