U.S. District Judge Martin Feldmanin New Orleans lifted the 6 month moratorium on deepwater drilling in US waters. He also “immediately prohibited” the U.S. from enforcing the ban.
Good or bad?
“Although no one fully knows why yet”? That seems like a damn good reason to keep the moratorium in place. Stupid.
I’ll wait until the appeals process is over before weighing in on this. There’s a lot of road to travel on this issue before we get to the destination.
The majority of the deepwater wells in progress are Andarko and BP. That is very comforting isn’t it? How could the judge presume the others will be safe when the same people are drilling them?
So if a 727 crashes in Ames, Iowa and the airline, Boeing, the FAA and other agencies cannot determine the cause of the crash, should all US air traffic be stopped?
If that crash ruined the economy and ecology of an entire region of the the country? I vote yes.
Who says they do not know what caused the blowup? However if there is something fundamentally wrong with the 727 and the others are the same, they should all be grounded until they are fixed.
So your criteria for grounding planes would have been the damage that resulted from a single crash, not the understanding of the inherent risk and safety measures of operating aircraft. Interesting logic.
Agreed.
Thing is we have seen the disaster plans in place from the various oil companies regarding an issue like this. The plans are near carbon copies of each other, reference dead people to be called in case of an emergency and, IIRC, talk about things like saving walruses (which do not live in the Gulf).
We also know from this that in case of a blowout the oil companies really have no ready answer on hand to fix it. The safety mechanisms in place to keep it from happening are not well tested (if at all) at those pressure and temperatures. Clearly the BP blowout preventer fails as did the blind shear ram (last resort).
Sounds to me like abundant evidence to worry about the operation of these sites. Till they can be assessed and the equipment determined to be safe I see no problem with keeping them shut down.
If the oil companies had actually written a proper emergency plan and shown the tech to be reliable that’d be one thing. They haven’t so they need to sort that out.
The briefing by the Federal judge in the case states that the cause of the explosion on the Horizon rig is not fully known…it is his opinion that this is not criteria for stopping all deepwater drilling.
In my analogy, I asked if a plane crashes and the cause is undetermined should all air traffic stopped. You state that it should be stopped if it is determined that there is something fundamentally wrong with all models of the aircraft.
So can I interpret that to mean, that you would only recommend the banning of deepwater drilling if it is determined that there is something fundamentally wrong with the process similarly used? There have been numerous deepwater wells drilled in the gulf of Mexico for decades, without incident. What makes you think that all others being done are similar to the Horizon well and not similar to the hundreds drilled safely previously?
Forgetting about the oil companies for a moment, the gov’t may need some time to get it’s own regulatory shit together. It’s pretty clear the MMS was asleep at the wheel. Whether that is 6 months or not, it’s hard to tell. But from what I know about the gov’t, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I think it is entirely appropriate to consider the effects from a single crash and adjust the proper response to that problem.
Cars crash all the time. We could make them a lot safer but the costs of doing so could be extreme and the downside of a crash is not all that dramatic (compared to, say, an airplane crash).
If you are operating something that has the potential for a huge amount of damage over a wide area then yeah…deserves more and closer scrutiny.
I’m surprised you don’t get this. It’s why nuclear power plants get a lot more scrutiny than the portable generator you (may) have at home.
So commerce and economic interest of the states and the citizens should just sit on its hands while they wait on the Federal government to get its shit together? And it takes 6 months to wake some bureaucrats up and to see that current regulations are being adhered to at the existing drilling sites? I don’t buy it. This is an agency that is already in existence, the programs are in place. Most people have blamed BP for not following regulations as the cause of the problem. It would seem that maintaining the status quo of monitoring and enforcing existing regulations would not require a 6 month gearing up.
Of course the potential for damage is a factor. Look at what one rig accomplished. Why on earth should we allow more rigs to be built, presumably to the same or similar specifications due to the nature of the surrounding environment, without understanding why this one broke and correcting the flaw?
I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m just assessing the situation. Does Obama have the authority to do this? If he does, then it’s his decision.
After 9/11, we had planes back up in the air 3 days later. Anybody that flies knows that the TSA regulations that have been instituted are really about the appearance of security not real security. There have been numerous incidents where random tests have been done and exlposive devices have been taken past TSA agents.
The reason for the quick release to get planes back in the air, is economic benefits outweigh the risk.
I believe that the same issue should be considered with regard to the deepwater drilling. One explosion is not enough to establish that the entire process of deepwater drilling is a great risk. At least not yet.
Apparently not unilaterally. The courts overturned his ban.
Not analogous.
There was not a problem with the planes, there was a problem with security.
The equipment needed to protect the rigs and the environment from this occurrence are not well tested. I encourage you to read this article. It notes, among other things, that the blind shear ram is dependent on one little valve. If that thing breaks or leaks there is no backup.
Further, I believe only 33 rigs were affected by this moratorium. There are hundreds (thousands?) such rigs out there so this is not a blanket, shut down the oil industry thing.
I also noted above the oil companies have practically nothing in the way of real plans to deal with this stuff. What was submitted to MMS seems to be a cut-and-paste job that they all seem to use. The same document with barely any differences despite where they are drilling (protect Gulf walruses?), how deep they are drilling and so on. Add in almost no testing of equipment at these depths.
Put all together and I’d say it is the oil companies who need to provide these assurances as they should have all along (and yeah…MMS is asleep at the wheel but whether through incompetence, laws that hog tie them or being in the pocket of the oil industry I have no idea).
Who gets the benefits, who assumes the risk?
It doesn’t appear that the two groups are the same people.
I know I sure don’t want my tax dollars going to bail out Louisiana etc if they go ahead and let companies resume drilling willy nily, and then blow another couple hundred million barrels of crude into the gulf when another well goes wild.
I’m sure that at this point, no one could ever imagine something like that happening, but when it does, the fuckers who couldn’t see a credible risk will need to be prepared to foot the bill without help from Obama and the feds, who told them it was a bad idea.
I don’t think your tax dollars are going to fix or clean up the current mess. BP is wealthy enough to cover their mess. What makes you think they want to risk billions of dollars on another failed well? The incentives are aligned. Not one single company wants to go bankrupt because of a failure like the one that occured.