Posted on 06/10/2010 8:10:52 AM PDT by Bulwinkle
Three days after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the Netherlands offered to help. Ships could have set about clearing the oil using Dutch sweeping arms, but the US government didn’t take up the offer. Dutch Consul General Geert Visser in Houston told Radio Netherlands Worldwide he was disappointed.
The US response, says Mr Visser: “‘Thanks for your help, but at the moment we can manage ourselves.’ And that was it.” He puts the reticence down to pride.
(Excerpt) Read more at rnw.nl ...
Where’s the leadership?
Mrs. GBC and I chalk it up to a desire to destroy the Gulf Coast...
Isn’t it obvious by now that the obama regime is purposely dragging their feet? They cannot be that inept. They must be letting it linger on as a distraction from other nefarious deeds that could get barry soetoro impeached. Could be any one of 3 or 4 things, at a minimum.
As with other workable solutions that were turned down, this would not work with the use of dispersants. They had to use those in order to funnel money back to the major supporters of the regime.
Obama had to make a choice:
Was this offer going to help or harm the United States of America?
LIKE EVERY OTHER DECISION OBAMA HAS MADE, HE CHOSE TO HARM AMERICA.
If that oil makes it all the way to the beaches of Africa and Europe, we’ll see just how much those international types love Obama. He, and he alone, is responsible for the breadth of this disaster.
50 ++ days later, we know that it ws indeed a MOMENT.
Weeks later the pride was forgotten and the US came to the Dutch for help after all. “Almost a month later – a month too late, of course – Washington did make a request to send the sweeping arms to Houston in Texas,” says Mr Visser. “They arrived in three 747s, ten days later. They were then transported to Louisiana to be mounted on ships.”
US ships are now fitted with the arms and should be operational within a few days. Each pair of arms can clear around 20,000 tons of oil a day.”
If this type of idiocy had occurred under W’s watch we would be hearing shouts of incompetency day and night. 20,000 tons per day of oil per set of arms is a phenominal amount. That’ over 120,000 barrels/day/set of arms.
Somebody needs to answer for this but I’m guessing that special somebody won’t.
In the wake of the oil spill, President Obama asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to produce a report on new drilling safety recommendations. Then on May 27 Mr. Obama announced a six-month deep water drilling ban, justifying it on the basis of Mr. Salazar’s report, a top recommendation of which was the moratorium. To lend an air of technical authority, the report noted: “The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.”
That would be false, sir. In a scathing statement this week, the seven experts explained that the report draft they had reviewed did not include a six-month drilling moratorium. That was added only after they signed off. “The Secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions,” wrote the seven in a letter to Gulf Coast politicians.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/thousands-of-louisianans-are-going-to-be-out-of-work-because-the-president-wanted-a-get-tough-headline-96052504.html#ixzz0qSsZ7q8C
One would suspect the current regime in Washington would much rather have the issue than the resolution, as it is a powerful argument for the “dangers” of using petroleum as a means to drive our economy.
A great rationalization for going to “alternative” sources of energy. Too bad so few of them are economically feasible.
Natural gas, or extraction from the beds of Methane Hydrate that cover so much of our ocean bed everywhere, would seem to be a suitable bridge, and in nearly endless supply, it would seem.
A simple and elegant solution, that removes the waste stream, generates power, and once in operation, is practically carbon-neutral, something called Plasma-arc trash reduction.
If the nascent obama regime is SERIOUS about clean energy, they would promote this technology, a process by which ALL forms of trash are reduced to their constituent atomic structure, then the heat generated by this process is used to drive electric power generation. The primary products of this process are “syngas”, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, both of which are excellent fuels that may be used to drive the generation of electric power, and a silica slag which contains practically all other components of whatever went into the trash stream.
The volume of the slag that comes off is about a quarter to a tenth of the volume of the original trash, and it may be mined for various metallic content, as it is a higher grade of ore than is most of the material that is hauled up out of the ground by various mining operations all over the world. It may be hot-formed into building blocks, and depending on how it is cooled (rapid quench or slow radiant cooling), it forms various grades of igneous stone. Or it may be crushed as aggregate for concrete or for road building purposes.
Once up and running, the operating temperature of the plasma torch is about 33,000 degrees F., about three times the temperature of the sun’s surface. The syngas generated is about 2,200 degrees F., and is passed over a heat exchanger to generate superheated steam, in the process of cooling it. Once cooled, the stream of hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be separated, yielding up pure hydrogen which may be used to power a fuel cell, or burned directly in the presence of oxygen to yield a very hot flame, which may be used to further produce power through the medium of superheated steam. Carbon monoxide itself is an excellent fuel which when combined with oxygen, forms carbon dioxide, a safe, NON-POLLUTING fraction of our atmosphere, and one that is vital for the photosynthesis of oxygen and carbohydrates in green growing plants. The carbon dioxide may also be captured, cooled and compressed into either liquid CO2, or allowed to become “dry ice”, an intensely cold and solid form of CO2, and an important industrial product.
The hydrogen, of course, when combined with oxygen, becomes water vapor.
Empty out our land fills and turn those blighted acres back into “greenfields”, divert all the existing and continuing waste stream into electric power, reduce need for and dependence on fossil fuels, assure a continuous supply of building materials that will prove to be the equal of our current supplies, and provide a way of reclaiming metallic elements otherwise lost when merely dumped in a hole in the ground. And not only the land fills, the sewage sludge that is now dumped there could go through this plasma arc, with the decomposed fecal matter adding its bit to the “syngas”, and simultaneously extracting all the dreaded metals like cadmium and mercury from circulation in the soil and groundwater.
I don’t see a downside. Most elegant solution.
It has been estimated that perhaps fewer than a dozen of these processing units could both clean up all the existing waste dumps, and the current waste stream, for a municipality the size of New York City, and generate enough electricity to keep it lit and industry-capable, without tapping into outside sources.
There is a place to spend the funds for infrastructure that does NOT have to be only for the roads and bridges. This is infrastructure that actually IMPROVES our environment. And generates a number of useful by-products, not the least of which is relatively cheap electric power.
And carbon-neutral to boot. NO fossil fuels are used once the cycle is started.
Can’t get greener than that.
This is a huge story. It is the smoking gun. It destroys Obama’s lie that he has been on top for this from day one. Someone made the decision to turn down the Dutch offer. That person needs to be called before Congress to explain. I don’t have a rep here in CT who will do anything but if anyone does, please encourage them to get to the bottom of this. We can’t have bureaucrats making decisions such as this one and then slithering back into the woodwork and hiding out.
I think Sarah will take this and run with it since the LSM clearly won’t. 0zer0 is clearly vulnerable on this issue and Palin has the platform to make this known. Bobby Jindal as well should be out front and center on this as he’s been pleading for dikes and the Dutch have offered the equipment and know-how in that area as well.
The Dutch are the best in the world at managing water and this admin told them to get lost.
Excellent. Hadn’t thought of Sarah. A mention of this on her facebook page will make the MSM report it. Really amazing the monster they created for themselves.
Unbelievable.
John Gibson doing a show on this right now. It's unbelievable...it appears that Obama is deliberately preventing the clean up of the oil?
But why?
We should be calling in everyone with a brain from around the world to help us! We have a Marxist community organizer as our President. We are so screwed.
The Obama Admin has now said they want BP to pay for the laid-off workers affected by the moratorium.
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