Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, May 27, 2010

September, 2009 -- Warnings of the Dangers of Deep Water Drilling

By John Ballard



This is too sickening for further comment.

A sixty-page memorandum addressed to Renee Orr, the chief of the leasing division of the Minerals Management Service (MMS), was sent in September 2009 by an environmental investigator, warning of potential disaster in offshore drilling operations and the particular dangers posed by gas hydrates.


It was written as a public comment to the federal government's proposed rule for oil and gas leasing between 2010 and 2015 on the outer continental shelf, and offers a wide-ranging compilation and analysis, based on meticulously documented scientific, industry and government sources, of many accidents little known to the general public.


It warns of the potential for catastrophic environmental disaster in an offshore accident, highlighting many of the potential dangers that the Deepwater Horizon explosion has now put on display. It also raises concern about the ongoing and unrecognized release of vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, a gas 20 times more powerful as a warming agent than CO2.



The link is to a sixty-page Word document but the content is only 45 pages. The rest is footnotes. You know how these scientific types love documentation.
H/T Susie Madrak



Read excerpts at David Sassoon's blog or go to the original for photos and You Tube links.

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Later...



This is disturbing.

Independent Investigator


The 60-page report which opens the window on these revelations was authored by Dan Zimmerman, an independent environmental investigator of the Northcoast Ocean and River Protection Association (NORPA). He has worked with numerous groups since 1975, especially on pesticide, forestry and salmon habitat issues. The executive director of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, Patty Clary, told SolveClimate she has worked with Zimmerman for 14 years and called him "a brilliant researcher."


Zimmerman said that he sent his report last September to hundreds of environmental organizations and individuals, but got no response.


"It's become a popular topic now," he said, with attorneys and environmental groups now examining his report.


Yet Zimmerman was more interested in discussing the Gulf oil spill than his report, expressing concern about the condition of the blowout preventer on the sea floor and the pipe in the bore hole. If the pipe in the bore hole has been perforated, he said, a "top kill" being planned by BP may not stop the leak.


"My concern is that cratering has now occurred and a flow path has been established outside the well bore. If this has occurred we are in serious trouble, more than we currently think."


"If there are plumes of gas and oil rising from the sea floor around the pipeline," Zimmerman said, "that would be an indication. They have submersibles. They should be examining the area around the blowout."


His concerns seem well-founded. One of the most complete and factual chronologies of the events leading up to the BP Gulf of Mexico blowout recounts this situation five minutes before gas shot out of the drill column on the surface of the ocean.


Standpipe pressure increased and decreased twice between 21:30 and 21:42 (standpipe pressure generally reflects bottom hole pressure). This, along with a steady increase in mud pit volume, suggests that surges of gas were entering the drilling fluid from a gas column below the wellhead, and outside of the 7-inch production casing. Gas had probably channeled past the inadequate cement job near the bottom of the well and, by now, had reached the seals and pack-offs separating it from the riser at the sea floor.


Failure of a "top kill" � if it doesn't make matters worse � would leave well control experts with only one final known option for stopping the leak in the Gulf: drilling a relief well. The idea is to reach the oil reservoir with a well drilled on a tangent to the original, and seal it closed. But an industry publication published in 2009 indicates that drilling a relief well to 18,000 feet below the sea bed is beyond the edge of the technical capability of well control experts.


The detection tools used to locate the blowout wells have been successfully used for many years. However, there have been very few relief wells drilled deeper than 16,000 ft. A very deep intercept greater than 20,000 ft will be a challenge to any relief well team. If the deep intercept cannot be made, a shallower depth will need to be chosen. This complicates the kill operation as it will not be made close to the reservoir.


Yet even without a fail-safe option for well control in case of an accident, industry has proceeded to ever greater depths in search of oil. Deepwater boosters proudly speak of the deepest well ever drilled, which reaches more than 30,000 feet down into Earth's crust. It sits off the coast of Texas in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico.


Shorter BP -- "Oh, shit!"

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