Oh my God it's worse. It's already worse.
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This shit is making me nuts.BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay:
McKay compared efforts to try to trigger the blowout preventer to stop the flow of oil from the sea floor to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines."
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock! We got that! That’s why environmentalists wanted things like acoustic triggers, blowout preventers, yada yada. Which you in your brilliance lobbied against because you said an incident would be “unlikely.”
Let me repeat: you are drilling the world’s deepest oil well, which requires some very specialized technology, yet from a safety and risk standpoint you acted as if this was just any ol’ offshore well. And you claim that you didn’t put “blowout preventers” on these wells because an accident like what we’re seeing “seemed inconceivable”.
I repeat: You are doing something that has never been done before and yet in your brilliance an accident was "inconceivable."
You think we’re stupid, don’t you?
For starters, you assholes at BP know you had a history of problems on your offshore rigs:
BP faces fresh questions over the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill after it emerged that problems with the type of equipment that led to the disaster were first reported a decade ago.
In June 2000, the oil giant issued a "notice of default" to Transocean, the operator of the rig that blew up last month. The dispute was over problems with a blowout preventer, a set of iron slabs that should close out-of-control wells. It failed on the Gulf of Mexico rig, triggering the explosion and oil spill.
Transocean acknowledged at the time that the preventer did "not work exactly right". The rig in question, the Discover Enterprise, was unable to operate for extended periods while the problem was fixed.
The preventer was made by Hydril, now owned by GE's oil and gas arm, and Cameron International, a Houston company. Cameron also made the preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded. Its preventer was fitted at about the same time BP was complaining of problems with its sister vessel.
Oh this is peachy. So excuse me if I don’t take Mr. McKay’s PR bullshit seriously.
And I have a very special fuck you to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar:
He expressed confidence that the oil industry "can operate safely."
Salazar said, "There are 30,000 wells that have been drilled out in the Gulf of Mexico, and so this is a very, very rare event."
Okay, let me take a deep breath and try to explain this stuff slowly and carefully to you. I’ve said this before a thousand, gazillion, bazillion times but I will say it again: there is a reason these deep water oil reserves are untapped. They are really, really, hard to get to. And expensive. And hard. And did I mention expensive?
So when BP execs tell you that blowouts were “inconceivable” let me point out that they are talking out of their ass. Look, not all offshore oil wells are the same, got it? This was the deepest oil well in the world. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax than what you're dealing with everywhere else. And the very last thing in the world I want to hear right now is Administration officials repeating oil industry talking points. So I have a steaming cup of STFU with Ken Salazar's name on it.
Look, the oil wells close to land are done, tapped, finished, over. We are going further and further out into the deep water, which presents new technological challenges. We are, quite literally, in uncharted waters here, people.
Here, lookie, Wired did a wonderful piece on this waaaay back in 2007. Read it and stand in awe at what it takes to pull oil out of the deep, dark, cold water. BP knows this, it’s their business to know this. Hell, even folks who work for Chevron call deep water oil drilling “a total crap shoot.”
Meanwhile, assholes like Bill Kristol, who say we just need to drill closer to land, don’t have a fucking clue. We’ve been there and done that and that oil is gone. Got it? The easy oil is gone. We are going after the hard stuff. The expensive stuff. The difficult-to-extract stuff. That means that extra precautions need to be taken. Extra safeguards. Belt-and-suspenders stuff. Acoustic shut-off valves and whatnot. Hell, I don’t know. I just know that when you are walking on the Moon you don’t pretend it’s an afternoon in Central Park. You do, you know, extra shit to be extra careful.
Because these deep water oil wells are not like any other well. So when you say, “Oh gosh there are tons and tons of offshore oil rigs and they haven’t blown,” well let me point out the very fucking obvious to you: This is what the oil industry refers to as “The Last Frontier.” This isn’t business as usual. This is special circumstances.
Got that?
Special fucking circumstances. And when you are operating in special circumstances as if it’s the same ol’ same ol’ to maximize your profts and keep Big Government off your back then you, in my opinion, are a greedy fucking asshole. And if there is any justice in the world then Corporate Person BP will be given the death penalty for this crime it has inflicted on the American people.
That is all.
