Free Republic

Energy: Small- and medium-size businesses serving Louisiana's energy industry are shedding employees, dipping into personal savings or moving elsewhere to stay afloat. The administration's war on fossil fuels is taking its toll. The federal six-month moratorium on drilling that was issued in May 2010, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has been officially lifted, but it might as well still be in effect. The glacial permitting process put in place in the aftermath in the name of public safety is killing an industry pledged to wean us from the "energy of the past" will not mourn. A...

Dr. Ann Maest is a managing scientist at Straus Consulting, and she’s the go to expert on all things groundwater. In the press release announcing her reappointment to the National Academy of Sciences, they mention that she is focused on the environmental effects of mining and petroleum extraction and production, and, more recently, on the effects of climate change on water quality. Maest is in high demand as an expert for those looking to stop oil and mineral exploration. She’s also heavily used by the federal government, even though after new details about her past work are coming to light...

BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country’s worst offshore environmental disaster. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said that BP met more stringent safety requirements devised by the federal government in the aftermath of the disaster. The company also planned to follow even tougher voluntary standards that exceeded the government’s rules. “This permit was approved only after thorough well design, blowout preventer, and containment capability reviews,” said bureau director Michael...

How could a bureaucratic bottleneck in the Gulf of Mexico cost the U.S. economy nearly $20 billion and wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs as far away as Ohio, Pennsylvania and California? Unfortunately, with this White House administration, anything is possible. President Obama recently announced yet another jobs initiative -- knowing all the while that one very simple action on his part would indeed create new jobs, infuse federal and state budgets with billions of dollars, and make us less reliant on imports. But that didn't happen. On Oct. 12, 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, "We're open for...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

If the pace of Gulf oil drilling permit awards does not increase, as many as 20 drilling rigs could soon leave the Gulf, a major investment bank announced. BER Capital Investments called the current rate of permitting unsustainable in a report released Wednesday. BER’s report noted that the slow pace of permitting is not due to political factors, instead blaming policies put in place in after the spill. They have directly contributed to the current backlog of permits. “Rather than being political, the [Gulf of Mexico] permitting drag is more reflective of the increased work required to issue each permit...

Energy: A year ago, three oil rigs fled the Gulf of Mexico for better opportunities abroad. Now, it's 10. Make no mistake, the toll is rising on a business environment marked by the Obama administration's uncertainty. It's a sorry spectacle when rigs, the mighty instruments for extracting oil and gas from miles under the sea floor, are quietly pulling away from U.S. coasts for better business environments oceans away — namely the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil. "When you have companies that would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or in some cases billions of dollars, they...

More than a year after the largest oil spill in history, perhaps the dominant lingering question about the Deepwater Horizon spill is, "What happened to the oil?" Now, in the first published study to explain the role of microbes in breaking down the oil slick on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers have come up with answers that represent both surprisingly good news and a head-scratching mystery. In research scheduled to be published in the Aug. 2 online edition of Environmental Research Letters, the WHOI team studied samples from the surface oil slick...

BULLETIN TROPICAL STORM DON ADVISORY NUMBER 1 NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL042011 400 PM CDT WED JUL 27 2011 ...TROPICAL STORM DON FORMS OVER THE SOUTHERN GULF OF MEXICO... SUMMARY OF 400 PM CDT...2100 UTC...INFORMATION ---------------------------------------------- LOCATION...22.2N 87.0W ABOUT 120 MI...190 KM N OF COZUMEL MEXICO ABOUT 755 MI...1220 KM ESE OF CORPUS CHRISTI TEXAS MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...40 MPH...65 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENT...WNW OR 295 DEGREES AT 12 MPH...19 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...1001 MB...29.56 INCHES WATCHES AND WARNINGS -------------------- THERE ARE NO COASTAL WATCHES OR WARNINGS IN EFFECT. INTERESTS IN THE NORTHWESTERN GULF OF MEXICO SHOULD MONITOR THE PROGRESS...

WASHINGTON -- Lawsuits filed Thursday that challenge the federal government's approval of a Shell Oil Co. offshore exploration plan present a major test of regulators' power to swiftly review deep-water drilling blueprints. In two separate but overlapping filings, conservationists argue the government was bound by federal law to first finish a post-spill environmental study of the Gulf of Mexico before approving Shell's plan last month. The legal complaints were filed in the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals — one by the Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the other by Earthjustice,...

Exxon Mobil Corp. has made one of the largest oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico in a decade, the company announced today. The oil major said it made two oil discoveries and a natural gas discovery in its Keathley Canyon blocks, including an oil discovery in the company’s first exploration well since last year’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. Exxon expects the combined finds to yield more than 700 million barrels of oil equivalent. More than 85 percent would be oil, the company said. Drilling early in 2010 turned up oil and natural gas at the well 250...

In the year since the wellhead beneath the Deepwater Horizon rig began spewing rust-colored crude into the northern Gulf of Mexico, scientists have been working frantically to figure out what environmental harm really came of the largest oil spill in American history. What has emerged in studies so far is not a final tally of damage, but a new window on the complexities of the gulf, and the vulnerabilities and capacities of biological systems in the face of environmental insults.

While President Obama promotes offshore drilling in Brazil, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar now promises to revitalize America's oil and gas industry. It's like Jack "Dr. Death" Kevorkian promoting himself as a lifesaving CPR specialist. This week, Salazar announced that the administration has just approved the first deepwater-oil- and gas-exploration plan since last spring's BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Mind you: This is not a granting of permits, but a green light for Shell Offshore to seek drilling permits for three new exploratory wells off the Louisiana coast. Shell first submitted and received approval for its original exploration plan in 1985. Salazar's...

Black Swan Clusterflock +1. As if earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns and war was not enough, the Examiner now discloses that a replay of the BP oil spill could be in the making, sending WTI to the (super)moon, the economy collapsing, and Ben Bernanke starting the printer in advance of QE 666. To wit: "The U.S. Coast Guard is currently investigating reports of a potentially massive oil sheen about 20 miles away from the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion last April." There are no definitive reports yet, but we should now for sure within hours, if the Keppel...

On top of everything else, some potentially troublesome environmental news out of the Gulf of Mexico again. The Times Picayune is reporting that the Coast Guard is investigating reports of a brand new deepwater oil spill. Multiple callers have reported that they have seen a huge sheen of oil not far from a deepwater rig....

Oil Industry Says Obama Didn’t Tell the Truth Fox News (blog) - Jim Hoft - 45 minutes ago Last week, at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told Congress that oil production in the Gulf of Mexico “remained at an all-time high.” Salazar claimed: “In 2009 there were 116 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010 in February, 120, in February 2011, 126.” He was lying. Energy Tomorrow blog reported Salazar’s numbers distort the true number of working rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Baker Hughes: * Four days before the Deepwater Horizon...

A federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster said Friday that its probe might not be complete until July 27 — 15 months after the well blowout that killed 11 workers and triggered the nation’s worst oil spill. The joint inquiry by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department had already received one extension and had planned to wrap up work by the end of March. But delays in testing the blowout preventer that failed to stop gushing oil at BP’s doomed Macondo well prompted the government to ask for more time. “The condition of the BOP, as well...

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that U.S. regulators would not bow to political pressure to restart deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico before they are certain the oil-and-gas industry is capable of containing an oil spill like the one that followed last BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. Salazar and Michael Bromwich--the head of the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which oversees offshore drilling--were in Houston Friday to meet with oil industry executives to assess the spill-containment systems they have developed in the wake of nation's worst-ever marine oil spill. Bromwich said he was "quite confident that...

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad. The Obama administration's trouble with the courts has continued with a judge's ruling last week that the Interior Department's reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt. The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that...

<p>NEW ORLEANS – A 4,200-square-mile area of the Gulf of Mexico near BP's blown out well will reopen to deep water shrimping after federal scientists found the fishing grounds free of oil.</p> <p>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it will reopen the area in federal waters off Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Wednesday.</p>

Federal study confirms microbes have eaten most of the Gulf Oil Spill A study by researchers from Texas A&M and University of California in Santa Barbara have found that all of the methane gas released from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been consumed by tiny microbes. Methane gas amounts 100,000 times higher than normal at the time of their release have completely disappeared after only 120 days. Some scientists had raised concerns that dissolved methane and other oil residue would continue to plague the Gulf for years or even decades. This is turning out not...

Because of the Obama administration's reaction to the BP oil spill there could be no new leases on oil drilling in the Gulf in 2011. That could lead to higher gas prices.

The day after the midterm elections in November, panelists at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy discussed the various factors that had contributed to the Democrats’ losses—most surprisingly, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One speaker with excellent Democratic connections in Washington noted that top White House staff were consumed by the spill and its political fallout for much of the spring of 2010. As staffers now lamented privately, this had diverted attention from other pressing issues—above all, the sputtering economy. The political fortunes of the Democratic party were not the only collateral damage from the...

Three Republican senators demanded Friday that the White House explain last-minute editing changes to an Interior Department report on the BP oil spill that falsely implied that a group of independent experts had endorsed a political decision to temporarily halt all deepwater oil drilling. The senators, members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called for hearings into the matter, contending that the White House had manipulated science for political ends, a claim Democrats frequently made about the George W. Bush administration. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a report this week asserting that officials in the office of Carol...

Congress was still convulsed over the Exxon-Valdez oil spill on Dec. 6, 1989, when Shell Oil flashed an announcement that would revolutionize American energy policy: The Anglo-Dutch giant had hit oil—a lot of oil—nearly 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The bulletin on the Auger Field discovery marked the start of a rush into the Gulf's deep waters. At the time it looked as if the Gulf might be a magic-bullet solution to America's energy and national-security needs. It made nearly everyone giddy. Politicians in both parties offered incentives to boost offshore production. Regulators—especially under President...

SITUATION: One indirect consequence of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is the impact it may have on the financing of the many tourism projects that have sprouted along the Caspian Sea. Bordered clockwise from the North by Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia, the Caspian Sea is one of the largest bodies of water and an object of strategic ambitions. Though the global financial crisis put may grandiose Caspian Sea tourism projects on hold, some of them are coming back to life, but investors should be alert to tourism trends, corruption, and unanswered questions about demand and potential profit....

Two weeks into Kenneth Feinberg's reign as oil spill claims administrator, he's failed to live up to expectations he set for the process -- and he admits it. "Those critics who say Ken Feinberg raised our expectations and then is not living up to those expectations, they're absolutely right, and I owe them an apology," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday. Specifically, Feinberg, who took over control Aug. 23 of a $20 billion fund established by BP to pay for losses caused by its oil spill, promised to issue emergency payments for up to six months of lost wages...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site where BP's undersea well spilled after a rig explosion. The Coast Guard said no one was killed in the explosion, which was spotted by a commercial helicopter flying over the site Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for, with one injury. The extent of the injury was not known. They were rescued from the water by an offshore service vessel, the Crystal Clear, said Coast Guard...

President Obama welcomed the New Orleans Saints to the White House on Monday to celebrate the team's Super Bowl victory. It's arguably the most attention he's given Louisiana since visiting the state in early June. Obama made three trips to Louisiana during the course of the oil spill. The last came on June 4, six weeks before the well was capped. Despite the fact the Deepwater Horizon explosion resulted in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history -- just 50 miles off the Louisiana coast -- his administration is instead showering attention on the political battleground of Florida. Louisiana residents...

You will find this very interesting. This is new but backed with the public documents BP filed when it planned to drill 2 wells a few hundred feet from each other in MC252. Testimony says they abandoned the 1st well. Guess where the rovers and cameras are? On the exact coordinates of the 1st well. No rovers or cameras are on the 2nd well a few hundred feet away. That would make Matt Simmon’s analysis, where he was saying that could not have put all the oil in the gulf. Something is very fishy will all this. The spill covered...

Coughing up blood is among horrors that eyewitnesses are reporting in south Louisiana where BP medics diagnose the sudden widespread, burning, itching skin, lesions and marks as "scabies" or staph and government health focus on "stress" and mental condition of millions of people poisoned with what scientists report is 11 times more lethal than crude oil toxins now in Gulf and coastal water and air. Americans are still encouraged to eat Gulf seafood.

I am going to address a touchy subject in this essay, but I simply can’t ignore it any longer. I have noticed that a lot of people are finding my blog through keyword searches of “Debunking Matt Simmons.” About two and a half years ago, I did write an essay called Debunking Matt Simmons. Because of Matt’s recent claims about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there has been a spike in interest over whether his claims related to the disaster are actually credible. So now seems like a good time to revisit the subject. Claims like "BP will...

AP has released this story (link here), entitled "(Anonymous) Official: Seep found near BP's blown out oil well." The last open thread where this was being discussed (all throughout, but especially towards the bottom) was http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6745. Doug Suttles was the BP representative on this morning's (Sunday morning) technical update. Mr. Suttles said that pressure is now at 6,778 psi, and continues to build at one to two psi per hour, and this is encouraging. BP still does not see any problems. BP now thinks that there is a possibility that the test can continue from now until the well is...

Doug Shuttles was the BP representative on this morning's (Sunday morning) technical update. Mr. Shuttles said that pressure is now at 6,778 psi, and continues to build at one to two psi per hour, and this is encouraging. BP still does not see any problems. BP now thinks that there is a possibility that the test can continue from now until the well is killed by the relief well, probably in August. But this is not a decision that can be made all at once. Instead, careful monitoring will be continued, and a decision made on a day by day...

At this morning's press briefing, Kent Wells of BP reported that pressures have now reached 6,745 psi, and are building at about 2 psi per hour. BP is estimating ultimate pressure will be around 6,800 psi. While this is not as high as originally expected, there are several reasonable explanations for this lower pressure reading, including the possibility that the well is now somewhat depleted, and therefore has lower pressure. BP seems to be encouraged by the results. Mr. Wells said several times, "We are encouraged that we have integrity," and "We find no evidence of lack of integrity."

For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation. BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company's lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research. The Press-Register obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data...

Energy Policy: As the job-killing deepwater drilling ban continues offshore, our interior secretary defends an onshore ban imposed in Utah. If we could drill in places like that, maybe oil wouldn't be gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. The 64-million-gallon question in the Gulf oil spill is why we were drilling 5,000 feet down in the first place. The administration line, as expressed by the president in his recent Oval Office speech, is that oil resources on land and just offshore are running out. The falsity of that claim can be seen in the battle over 77 oil...

BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf for the first time since April. The company has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a test on a new cap. Engineers are now monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds.

When things are going well down at the Deepwater oil spill site in the Gulf there are press conferences, data flows in a timely manner and the public can understand what is going on. When there are problems, these get delayed. Then as I noted yesterday we become dependent on the videos that BP release, to get a closer and more immediate view of the actual situation. That can at least show the occasional something significant. Today’s such topic is the picture of the well from the Skandi ROV that I took at around 6:15 pm CDT Wednesday (though Admiral...

Tweeted by BPGulfLeak YouTube - Leaked video2 of fly over of BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: http://bit.ly/c2fnqs Good God, are you kidding me?

On that little note of caution, there does seem to be some delay, or perhaps “slow, methodical, unseen progress” in regard to closing the valves etc in order to test the integrity of the well. At roughly 10 pm Eastern, the flow does not appear to have changed much, if at all, and the BP site notes that the test has not yet started. (Nor has it two hours later having finished writing this post). The white pipe is injecting dispersant that changes the color of the oil/gas to more brown and seems to be coming in spurts rather than...

NAVARRE, Fla. -- British Petroleum says its latest fix is working to stop the oil leak, but it doesn't look like it. More oil is spewing out and more tar balls are washing ashore on Florida beaches. Now, people are frustrated crews are standing around instead of cleaning them up. Crews are working for only five minutes at a time to clean up the tar balls, because it's so hot to work on the beach. They have to follow federal rules and take lots of breaks.

The economic damage from the BP Plc spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be dwarfed by the Obama administration’s moratorium on deep-water drilling, the chief executive officer of a New Orleans business group said. The six-month drilling ban, which the U.S. Interior Department revised today following lawsuits from local businesses, may affect as many as 24,000 jobs in Louisiana, Michael Hecht, president and CEO of economic-development group Greater New Orleans Inc., told a presidential commission today.

Using a nuclear explosion to try to plug the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico might sound like overkill, but a Russian newspaper has suggested just that based on past Soviet successes. Even so, there are crucial differences between the lessons of the past and the current disaster unfolding. .The Russians previously used nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. A targeted nuclear explosion might similarly help seal off the oil well channel that has leaked oil unchecked since the sinking of a BP oil rig on April 22, according to a translation of...

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one -- not industry, not government -- is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows. The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing. The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells -- those characterized in federal government records as "temporarily abandoned." Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies...

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Drilling of a relief well seen as the most promising way to plug the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a week ahead of schedule, the U.S. official overseeing the spill response said on Tuesday. But crews were still aiming to reach BP's blown-out well only in mid-August, Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said on Tuesday, 78 days after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 people and burst an oil well, now spewing up to 60,000 barrels of crude into the Gulf each day. BP's shares rose nearly 9...

Fox Station exclusive report on board "A Whale" that just arrived in the Gulf, the ship is capable of skimming 500k barrels of oil a day...(Video)

'SHR' speaking for two hours answering technical questions on The BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo Well Blowout and what we are facing in the Gulf. The BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo Well Blowout and what we are facing in the Gulf In my opinion this is the best audio orientation about the problem currently available. When he really gets going, pin your ears back and enjoy. He pulls no punches, is very well-informed, and knows exactly what he's talking about. snip I mentioned this on 13 June below, but the Project Avalon Forum thread Questions and Answers about the Gulf Oil Catastrophe...

With each day that passes, the rate at which BP is spending money on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill grows. The company said Monday it has now spent $2.65 billion on its operations in the Gulf, a rate of $100 million per day over the last three days. [Read the press statement here.] This figure has grown steadily since the spill began. In late April, when the oil flow from the leaking Macondo well was thought to be just 1,000 barrels a day, BP was spending just $6 million a day and had deployed just 275 vessels to skim...

Local Lousiana housewife reporting on BP internal meetings; family are all commercial fishermen.