"Where there's smoke, there's fire" comes to mind.
Except for scale. Residual leaks work to drain the Macondo Prospect reservoir. That's 100,000,000 barrels or 4,000,000,000 gallons of crude oil.
Senator Nelson (D-FL) references the seabed geysers imaged by Viking Poseidon ROV #1.
UPDATE: BP off-loading finding seabed leaks to NOAA. So-called "undetermined anomalies" rising from the seabed are noted by Coast Guard.
Oil Biz apologists belong on SNL:
-- "I don't see oil."
-- "There are plenty of misleading videos...."
-- "I am calling... you a conspiracy theory nutjob...."
-- "It's pitch black down there."
The ROVs have very good lights and cameras. MTBF:::
New York Times and Washington Post caught news of sub-seabed damage. Here's WaPo from Steven Mufson And David S. Hilzenrath:
"Sources at two companies involved with the well said that BP also discovered new damage inside the well below the seafloor and that, as a result, some of the drilling mud that was successfully forced into the well was going off to the side into rock formations."
"'We discovered things that were broken in the sub-surface,' said a BP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that mud was making it "out to the side, into the formation.' The official said he could not describe what was damaged in the well."
White House talking head Carol Browner had said "American people need to know that it is possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will be finished." She wasn't kidding.
In May the "Top Kill" operation ended up using 30,000 horsepower engines aboard surface ships to pump mud into the well. Based on observed flows, part of that mud went out to sub-seafloor silt and sand. That mud escaped through breaks in the sub-seabed structure.
Nothing was done in the meanwhile that would repair those breaks.
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MSNBC did try to cover these leaks. The media blackout and BP/Oil Biz megadenials don't help. Here is Olbermann interviewing Bob Cavnar:
Dyland Ratigan got Nick Pozzi and Matt Simmons on back at May 26th while "Top Kill" was in process:
The worst case of draining the whole Macondo Prospect comes up. Not pretty.
4,000,000,000 gallons of crude.
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There is nothing subtle about the oil geysers.
Spew comes up from cracks in the ocean floor. And, yes, these images depict leaking oil. Unless some Oil Biz shill wants to argue that environmental activists painted their own CGI FX into the ROV video feed:
The most likely cause for the breakage was the primary pressure blast back on April 20th. There were multiple places where the system could leak.
The main pipe and joints of the Deepwater Horizon well were all subjected to the same pressure and shock wave. Based on planning documents at Bureau of Land Management, the weakest parts down there are the joints. The weakest joints are sub-surface.
Oil from a leaking joint will flow out laterally, filling the silt, sand, and soft rock and eventually coming out some considerable distance from the well site.
That pattern matches what the video displays.
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Here at DKOS the main story line from our Oil Biz crew has been to discredit the ROV images of the seabed leaks. This is carried on without mentioning/addressing the basic evidence.
Same pattern goes for discrediting engineering references that tag the drop from 9,000 PSI in the wellhead to 6,750 PSI as direct evidence of a significant leak.
Anyone who picks up on evidence gets tied to that guy Matthew Simmons who appeared on MSNBC. Typically:
In another thread some of us connected the dots and they all led back from (Senator) Nelson to Simmons.
I don't have time to keep stomping out this ridiculous rumor that oil is leaking up from cracks in the seabed. If you want to know more, you can check my comment history. I'm not the only one saying it's BS.
Aside from "connect the dots" conjecture there is no reason to connect Senator Nelson to Simmons. Still, Simmons gets hundreds and hundreds of DKOS comments.
BTW: Bloomberg News interviewed a Matt Simmons. He repeated someone else's estimate at 120,000 barrels a day early on. That's 5,040,000 gallons a day. He said that the leak could go on for 24 years.
These numbers are high side, but nothing out of the ordinary for industry estimates. Simmons also shorted BP stock. But then... who in the Oil Biz didn't short BP stock ???
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