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WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- Washington has given Petrobras America Inc. permission to start oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, a regulator said. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement gave Petrobras approval to use a floating production storage offloading facility at its Cascade-Chinook project in the Gulf of Mexico. The approval marks the first time FPSO technology will be used in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The oil and gas project is about 165 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 8,200 feet of water. The FPSO has a production capacity of...

<p>The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern.</p> <p>Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.</p>

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...

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...

Bill Clinton: We May Have to Blow Up Oil Well Posted by Brian Montopoli 13 comments Former President Bill Clinton said during a panel discussion in South Africa that it may become necessary to blow up the Deepwater Horizon well that continues to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico. "Unless we send the Navy down deep to blow up the well and cover the leak with piles and piles and piles of rock and debris, which may become necessary - you don't have to use a nuclear weapon by the way, I've seen all that stuff, just blow it...

I believe Obama's team is on record saying no border fence until Amnesty, so it's not beyond their boundaries to use a real human tragedy for political gain. I am also pretty sure Obama said he's been in control since "Day 1" on the oil spill. Now, the moment the "Oil Drilling Ban" is overturned a ROV knocks the cap off the oil well and "we have a full scale out of control leak again". Anybody buying it? I don't have a newsletter you can subscribe to but I am logged in ...

It appears that the top hat on the BP well has been blown off. It also appears that they riser has been further damaged. Except for the flow to the ship Q4000, the flow from the well is currently unabated.

In a little more than 18 months, President Obama has managed to destroy America’s reputation around the world by damaging relationships with our traditional allies and making America appear as a weak and appeasing beggar to some of the most totalitarian and evil regimes in the world. Meanwhile, his destructive obsession with restructuring the U.S. economy to mirror the socialist systems of Europe and several Third World nations are doing such long-term damage to our future prosperity that today’s college-age generation, (Gen Y or the Millennial Generation-born between the early 1980s-late 1990s), will have a less prosperous lifestyle and far...

The US has sent a team of nuclear physicists to help BP plug the "catastrophic" flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its leaking Deepwater Horizon well, as the Obama administration becomes frustrated with the oil giant's inability to control the situation. The five-man team – which includes a man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s – is the brainchild of Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary. He has charged the men with finding solutions to stop the flow of oil. President Obama yesterday promised a "relentless" effort to resolve the problem as he...

As the Deepwater Horizon's well continued to gush 42,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, response teams that were unable on Sunday to seal off the wellhead about a mile underwater turned their attention to containing the spill at its source. Officials at BP, responsible for the environmental clean-up efforts as the rig's lease operator, said they were engineering a system to lower a dome-like structure over the well to capture the oil and funnel it to a collection tank on the surface..... Efforts to staunch the flow were being complicated by the sheer depths...

E.O. “Coots” Matthews, the famed oil well firefighter and founding partner of Houston-based Boots & Coots — a company legendary for putting out some of the world’s most spectacular fires — died at an advanced age on Wednesday of natural causes. Matthews, whose age was not immediately available, [86 by another article] was raised in Porter. He began his oil field career with Halliburton in 1947, after serving as a tail gunner on a B-17 during World War II in Europe. Later that year, he joined M.M. Kinley Co., where he met Asger “Boots” Hansen and Red Adair to...

OLIVER SPRINGS, TN -- Firefighters at the site of an oil well fire in Oliver Springs expect the fire to burn for a few more days before it is extinguished. They plan to use heavy equipment and water to extinguish the blaze. Three firefighters from Wild Well Control will are figuring out how to get the oil to stop flowing so the fire can be extinguished. "While it's burning, it's really safer for us, working around it, versus if the well was just blowing around a bunch of oil and gas," Wild Well Control, Inc. Executive VP Freddy Gebhardt said....

Lake Peigneur is in the heart of the Louisiana Bayou near New Iberia, which is a two hour drive from New Orleans. It was a freshwater lake that was up to 11 feet deep. However, that would all change on November 21, 1982. Diamond Crystal Salt Company operated a salt mine under the lake, while Texaco had a oil rig drilling down for oil. Most likely, it was a miscalculation that led up to this drastic change of Lake Peigneur. The drill hit the Diamond Crystal Salt Company's salt dome. The water starts to drain into the hole. The salt...

Kuwait, 29 March: The American oil fire fighting team has [put] out a second burning well in Iraq's Al-Rumaylah oilfield in the south of the country Saturday morning [29 March], a Kuwait oil source said. The source told Kuwait News Agency that he saw the American firefighters dousing the well known as A4 this morning. This is the second well extinguished by teams working to cap a number of wells set ablaze by the Iraqi regime forces before withdrawing from parts of southern Iraq as coalition forces advanced northwards. The first blazing oil well in Al-Rumaylah was capped by the...

<p>Greenpeace claims, "Fires from 600 deliberately damaged Kuwaiti oil wells … created a blanket of soot, gases and aggressive chemicals [that] led to immediate respiratory problems in local populations and generated serious long-term risks of birth defects and cancer in exposed people."</p>

<p>Let's imagine that Hizbollah's stated policy of "mega-terrorism" bears fruit, and a second Pi Glilot attack succeeds. Alertness and sharpened contingency plans mean that the blast and oil-fed fires kill fewer Israelis than expected, and "only" 2,500 die. Two weeks later, Hamas' new strategic direction bears fruit and they manage chemical attacks at several points in and around Tel Aviv. A couple thousand people are hospitalized, a couple hundred die. The total for both attacks is now 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured, many severely.</p>