At the current price of oil, which is around 77 bucks a barrel. That barrel being 42 gallons sounds like an opportunity to me. Float your boat out along the shore and use a shop vac to suck it up and bring it to a recycling point to sell it at a decent price that BP is responsible for paying.
BP can discount the price for water content but at 77 bucks a barrel, it would be a bargain for BP.
We got people scouring the roads for ten cent returnable's in my depressed state so my idea has some merrit.
Quoting yours truly in sci.electronics.design thread "Re: OT: Oil Leak Solution?" a month ago today:
"If there were gold nuggets littering your back yard, would you call someone to get rid of the nasty stuff? (Would you like my number? I don't charge much.)
We have a commodity just laying on and near the surface of the ocean. If you had a 42 gallon barrel of the stuff, you could sell it for 70 bucks. Wait until mid-June and you'll get > $84 for that barrel.
It is *fuel* so conceivably, you could make a nano refinery aboard ship to convert some portion of it to diesel to power the ship and the refinery. (And the tender to transport the heavy byproducts to land).
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Heck, the only problem will be one of *scarcity* as hundreds of independent ships compete for this valuable resource.
I think you basically have tar. All the good stuff has evaporated and dissolved in the water. It is nothing like they are paying $77 for. Besides, the $77 is for contracts for delivery several months in the future, not the actual price a refinery will pay. Shipping and taxes are added on top of that.
This is not petroleum floating around the Gulf, it is magic shakedown-oil. Obama is after BP for $8000/barrel. It is much more valuable as a political MacGuffin than as mere hydrocarbons. Obama is an economic miracle worker; he has turned $77/barrel petroleum into $7923/barrel shakedown-oil.
What's "shakedown" oil, Richard? I heard Barton the Butthead, but he didn't explain how an escrow account is a "shakedown" when the legal liability is likely to run much higher than the amount.
It sounds like the US is securing money in escrow before BP's lawyers figure out a way to strip the company assets and move them out of US jurisdiction.
Or do you have a better answer, documented with facts?
The "legal liability" is just whatever the chief lawman says, which is to say, a shakedown. As I detailed in other rcm/ot threads, there is no rational basis to this "liability". It is a political invention to justify a new $100 billion confiscation, a crisis to be exploited to bring more "stimulus" into the Caesar's hands for dispersal to his buttresses.
(You do know the antecedent of the not-letting-a-crisis-go-to-waste line from the chief's man, right? It proves the cynical motives of the regime. This bit of truth doesn't seem to be widely appreciated.)
It isn't the "chief lawman" says. It's what the courts say. And the estimates of BP's liability are all over the map, mostly around or above the $20 billion figure.
I must have missed your legal thread, but there most certainly is liability by BP, under US law and under the law of any country with a pot to pee in.
You don't even have to go to strict liability, but if you do, their ass will be the property of a lot of people who make their livings on the Gulf coast.
That refers to using a crisis to push some related program or agenda. In this case, it's alternative energy.
But the liability of BP is a separate issue. They screw it up, they clean it up.
It's taken over two decades to collect from Exxon, and they've still paid a pittance of the damage they did. It appears that the Obama administration isn't going to let that happen again. Good for them.
The antecedent is, "never let a good X go to waste", where X = "erection". This aphorism is due to George Carlin or some such clown. In 2008, the X became "crisis", as in the financial crisis. But the point was, the banking crisis was no justification for taxpayers supplying a bailout, just as a man's erection is no justification for a woman supplying satisfaction. But from the swaggering male, it is justification enough.
Bunk. What court demanded a $20 billion escrow this week? What court is applying Soviet-style criminalization to ordinary business mishaps? This is all from the chief executive and his officers.
BP is liable for cleaning up the janitorial mess. Turning this into a catastrophe and confiscating $8000/barrel is orders of magnitude beyond that. Loss of business and such liability is just an invention. The beaches and oceans and fish and not your property because you have a boat. You haven't lost any property if they are taken away. This is just liberal notions of justice. If you are wealthy and you make a mistake, your wealth is subject to confiscation, because the force will split the confiscus with the small people.
Right from day one, BP have stated that even if it wasn't directly their fault, it is their responsibility to sort the mess out. They haven't tried to avoid _that_ liability at any point. Ok, Hayward speaks English, which is a foreign language, but he's willingly committed his organisation to, basically, unlimited liability. I guess the US administration is too used to organisations such as Exxon and Union Carbide to understand that company CEO's can actually say what they mean.
In the mean time, until the relief wells intersect with the original bore, all else is containment. Get off their backs and let the poor, bloody, engineers do the job they're paid for!
Wrong. The banking crisis was justification for a bailout. Without it, there would be no system of credit right now. In other words, there would be no economy. That's why every developed country bailed out their banks -- except Canada, which didn't have to, because they didn't have a libertarian/nutbag system of (non)regulation.
Who "demanded" $20 billion in escrow? What do you know about how Obama convinced BP to escrow the money up front?
You, like Ben Stein, are speculating. You have no idea.
Look up 33 U.S.C. § 1319(c)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 1001. They've been around for decades. Exxon was nailed for $150 million under another one, for negligently destroying wildlife.
For Christ's sake, is checking what you're talking about before blowing smoke too much for you guys on the right?
Tell us specifically what Obama threatened. You have no idea.
Look up the US Code statutes listed above. Those are the ones that legal experts say could be charged against BP.
The evidence of negligence by BP, say most legal experts, is overwhelming.
I'm still sitting on the fence. I hope BP does right. From what I've heard on the telly, your CEO stood his ground today. I hope to catch his comments in the middle of the night on Cspan.
Someone may need hanging, just get the right party over the drop door.
I sure hope the moratorium doesn't extend to relief wells.
Wes
-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller
Meantime, the word from Wall Street is that they've hired investment banks (Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group, and Credit Suisse) as advisors to determine whether they should shift assets from BP Holdings North America to another of their several dozen entities, or pursue some other strategy to limit liabilities:
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The total asset value of BPHNA is $50 billion. The company as a whole is worth $161 billion in long-term assets. By agreeing to the $20 billion escrow, say some experts, they've acknowledged that they probably can't fence off their liabilities completely to BPHNA, but they can force the cases to be heard in British courts, beyond the asset value of BPHNA. That would slow the process down and probably bankrupt individual filers who would sue. Think of it as the Exxon defense.
So far it's mostly lip service, legal maneuvering, and token payments. They're talking a good line while maneuvering to minimize their exposure. Hey, that's business, right?
See above.
They're familiar with multinational businesses and how they operate.
It isn't the engineers who are the problem. One of BP's top engineers has said that the hole is a "nightmare," referring to shortcuts that were taken by management.
You might want to look at these for further entertainment. 'Hope you weren't planning a holiday on the Gulf coast by any chance? It's a beautiful place to see some rare creatures, including marine turtles and birds. Or it was...
The following was posted on rec.woodworking and I've copied the entire post here. (Not a tangent Ed, it supports your statement) Art
----- Original Message ----- From: "Zz Yzx" Newsgroups: rec.woodworking Sent: 17 June, 2010 6:04 PM Subject: The Gulf Disaster: a geologists take
I'm a geologist by trade. In a former life I spent a few years working oil rigs, a couple of those on offshore rigs. Here's my analysis and worst fears, based on what I've gleaned from the news reports.
Analysis:
To save time/$, they didn't circulate the mud in the borehole ("bottoms up") before they set the liner. Had they done so, they would have identified the disasterous conditions before the disaster.
To save time/$, they "hung" the liner (ran it only from the bottom of the previous casing, rather than run it all the way up inside the previous casing to the BOP).
To save time/$, they used only 6 liner centralizers rather than the "recommended" 21 (recommended by whom I don't know). If the hole deviated at all from vertical (which I'm sure it did), that'd mean that in places, the liner would be placed up against the borehole sidewall rather than through the center of the borehole. That'd make it very hard to get an adequate cement seal of consistent thickness and strength along the entire length of the liner.
To save time/$, they used an inferior cement mix.
To save time/$, they didn't run a "cement bond log". To do this, they run a special tool on a wire line through the recently cemented interval, and log the qyaulity of the cement bond between the liner and the formation.
To save time/$, they displaced the drilling mud in the riser (above the BOP up to the drill rig on the surface) with sea water before the inferior cement had completely set, and without the normal plug in the casing below the BOP. This would drastically reduce the pressure head on the formation, and allow formation fluids to enter the borehole.
Now my "worst case" fear:
The bad cement job outside the liner failed; the gas/oil in the formation, under intense pressure (could be as high as 50,000 psi!) blew out and eroded the cement and possibly the liner, allowing it to flow unimpeded and expand quickly due to the pressure release, into the annular space outside the liner, and possibly into the liner, and into the previous casing. THE WORST WORST CASE: if they were to cap the well at the BOP, the pressure would overwhelm the cement-formation seal at the previous casing (where they hung the liner), and break down the higher formations and cement, and flow unimpeded outside the previous casing and BOP to the seafloor surface (cf: the Santa Barbara spill). If that was the case, there would be NO WAY to control the flow until the relief wells are completed (in August). Maybe that's why they "failed" to cap the well at the BOP.
Gawwwd...it sounds awful. Eventually we'll probably get a complete rundown on that stuff, but I hope that scenario isn't anything like the other deep-water wells out there.
As for Barton, in the old days, say a century and a half ago, the other Senators would have tarred and feathered him, and then dumped him in a cold pond somewhere. Sometimes I long for the days when Senators beat each other with their canes -- back when they really adhered to the original Constitution. d8-)
Might as well bring back sidearms and dueling and get back to the real Constitution. ;)
Wes
-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller
Of course, you are correct. I remind you, that several other common sense ideas have been proposed, and the Oh Bomb Us president has refused to allow them to proceed. It becomes clear that there is an agenda. But, not the agenda of serving the US public, and doing the will of the electorate.
You're quite right. For example, the Teabaggers have proposed stuffing a big wine cork into the pipe, but the government refuses to acknowledge this simple, workable, common-sense idea.
Then there's the uncooked oatmeal injection, and the libertarians' solution: use a J.C. Whitney muffler patch...
I notice the Coast Guard shut down some LA guys on barges sucking up oil because they didn't have the proper amount of life preservers and fire extinguishers on board.
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Like it is going to make a rats ass on survival if you set an ocean of oil on fire.
Wes
-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller
You are simply at the mercies of Caesar's whims to either get you or not. We are all literally criminals in the eyes of the federal and state governments, and any of us is without hope if Sauron's eye should turn our way. It is a felony in Florida to say you have something that is toxic to living things, because that is a "hoax weapon of mass destruction". So not only to have a can of bug killer is a felony, but to simply *say* that you have a can of bug killer is a felony:
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Obama's officers this week prosecute the Times Square nut, who possessed gasoline, propane, and toy fireworks, with attempting to use "weapons of mass destruction". Absurd! And surely BP is more criminal than any of that.
Yes, this is not a new problem. The Soviet Union also had laws.
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