Fools For Deep Water Oil

I hesitate to criticize the folks trying to bring the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to a halt - they are working hard, for sure:

BP says its mile-long tube siphoning oil from a blown-out well is bringing more crude to the surface.

In a news release Tuesday, BP PLC says the narrow tube is now drawing 2,000 barrels a day for collection in a tanker, double the amount when it started operation Sunday.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles has said the company hopes the method can draw about half the leaking oil.

And:

Out at the scene of the gusher, a relief well aimed at intercepting the bottom of the leaking one to flood it with cement is about halfway complete, and drilling began Sunday on a second relief well.

The relief wells will take at least another couple of months, and in the meantime BP probably will try to shut down the well completely late this week using a technique called "top kill," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said Monday.

The process involves pumping heavy drilling fluids into the blowout preventer that sits on top of the wellhead a mile underwater. This would first restrict the flow of oil from the well, which then could be sealed permanently with cement.

The blowout preventer is a massive array of valves and other cutoff devices that BP says failed to provide the last line of defense it should have when well pressure surged April 20.

BP declined to comment on a report Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes" that the blowout preventer may have been damaged in an accident four weeks before the April 20 explosion on the rig and that BP overruled the drilling operator on key operations.

Still, it's clear they were caught unprepared by the scope of this disaster. When you tamper with these oil bodies, you are playing with the Earth's primal forces. The drilling locales are very, very hard to reach and almost impossible to work in. By the time these wells get sealed, the Gulf of Mexico will be laid waste. So why the overconfidence that they could drill there without tempting fate? The entire Gulf Coast is going to be converted into a big tar bowl. And they couldn't see that possibility? That likelihood, in fact? After Ixtoc I, and the various other calamitous disasters of the not-so-distant past? What kind of knavish fools are these?

Fools like this, I suppose:

Before its state-owned operator Petrobras struck big oilfields deep below the Atlantic floor in 2007, Brazil used to be chronically energy-deficient. No wonder President Lula helicoptered offshore to dip his hand in oil, and no wonder his chief of staff said of the discovery that, “We have strong evidence that God is Brazilian.”

The Brazilian oil fields require drilling starting at 3.7 miles below the surface of the ocean. Think they are ready to deal with disaster? At pressures where methane clathrate ices complicate everything and where there's no infrastructure to deal with trouble?

What a sick, sick joke this deep water oil drilling is! Fools everywhere!

Drill, baby, drill!