OT: BP motto =

Lots of folks in Alaska still remember Broken Pipe.

It's much easier to control and cleanup on land. Perhaps they should build a 80 miles pipeline to the well, instead of drilling from open sea.

Don'cha know? We're going to have green/renewable energy... $10/gal gasoline, 50¢/kWh electricity. You will all be happy. ...Jim Thompson

...and they'll still be using coal to fire the power plants. The government won't know what to do with all that money. Oh, wait...

You can bet that all the greedy bastard private power company owners will use this crisis as a mechanism for a price increase. Expect your power bills to climb... again.

Is that why the price of gasoline has been in freefall the last couple of weeks?

Or they hijacked AT&T's motto from the '70's. "We don't care. We don't have to." Art

Notice that your power bill has not followed suit.

My power comes from coal. Obama will take care of that.

So, the emergency holding tanks overflowed? The first news story said that a power failure shut down some of the pumps, but the oil was being diverted into local tanks. The aerial photos of the station look like a pit surrounds it, to collect any spill. That was the plan when it was being built.

BTW, I was living a few miles from there when the pipeline was being built.

"Mycelium" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Your bill is based on contracts for power during peak load seasons. the monthly price of oil does not affect it.

Cheers

"Martin Riddle" wrote in news:hugm13$h52$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

in the US,not much electric power is generated from oil. It's mostly coal(~50%) and nuclear(~20%),then nat.gas,hydro,etc.

I think that is true of all the oil companies. They can bribe politicians and regulators too easily given their very deep pockets.

There does seem to be a mismatch between UK and US safety cultures in that the US system seems to be purely tick box and the UK one allows the employer to make the simplifying assumption that employees have brains.

An oil industry expert on the UK Newsnight programme last week said that the cascade of problems on the Transocean rig leading to this disaster stemmed from a previous CEO deciding that drilling for oil was not needed as one of BPs "core competencies" and he cut overheads by firing everyone that knew what they were doing at the sharp end. After that they contracted all the drilling work out to the cheapest bidder. It remains to be seen if his analysis is correct.

Anyway isn't it the case that most of BPs operation in the US is formerly Amoco (aka Standard Oil). Amoco Cadiz is still a memorable environmental disaster in the UK. They were never very safe.

It looks like BP used cowboy drillers and failed to supervise them adequately. It is also possible that the concrete in the casing was defective in addition to whatever other faults the failsafe systems had. When you have multiple failures and noone sufficiently experienced to make tricky decisions the risk of cascade failure is very high.

Regards, Martin Brown

The hole was drilled. The fault lies with the inspectors and the BP folks that were directly involved with gifting the inspectors.

Those heads should be the first to roll.

Cowboy drillers? They must have imported them from England. US cowboys work on cattle ranches.

Not to mention that Texas oil men are good men and it takes an even more gutsy man to sign up for platform work. So the idiot's entire supposition is lame.

I think that man's biggest downfall is the fact that 100 speculative asswipes push their horseshit through as fact, and 1000 onlookers take it all in like the Barnum and Bailey every day suckers that they are. The next thing you know, we hear shit being touted as fact like "There were no WMDs." and "None were being built either..." When we know that both counts are false.

I say these BP guys were moving assets from day one, and they have done as much as they possibly can, and it is the media and pissed off Gulf border folk that are getting too much camera time. One must remember that thousands of those BP jobs everyone seems to want to trash are US jobs held by US citizens.

All of the things they have done (after the accident) have been as good as could have been done by anyone doing it. You can count on it, and Obama has been there the whole time too. The sad thing is the lack of (or slow as molasses release of) public information release that this country currently operates under.

The mistake was the 'paid inspector' paradigm that got utilized.

I don't think so. What has happened is that industry standard practices, using industry standard parts that 'just don't fail', failed. Maybe it was defective parts, or something not installed right. Or, maybe, it was just a one in a billion high pressure gas bubble that hit those parts and broke them. Ever notice how on a water hose when you get a air bubble to the nozzle how hard the water hits afterwards? It could have been something as simple as that.

Like a lightning strike will take out even the most protected board...

Charlie

Or, in more simplistic terms, "Shit Happens" ...Jim Thompson

If it can make it from way up there to way down here, nothing you do to protect the circuit will keep it from getting flooded over with a bath of rampant electrons.

Even the smallest ones are like 6 Million Volts.