Due out in September apparently.

The Boston Globe has an interesting photo essay showing the Gulf of Mexico coast just after the BP oil spill and on the first anniversary of the spill - Gulf oil spill one year later. Looks like there is still plenty of oil floating around...

The SMH has an article about the new BP COO saying he'll happily eat seafood from the Gulf of Mexico - BP chief happy to eat Gulf seafood. For some reason I can't get the image of Mr Burns being served a three eyed fish from downstream of his nuclear power plant out of my mind...

BP will begin a legal offensive this month to cap its liabilities from disaster by offering those affected one-off compensation payouts in return for them waiving the right to sue.

It is also continuing its public relations efforts, with its chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, saying on Sunday he would ''absolutely'' eat Gulf of Mexico seafood. ...

Doug Suttles gave his vote of confidence two days after Louisiana state authorities re-opened 6200 square kilometres of coastal waters for fishing, with the Food and Drug Administration saying Gulf seafood harvested from such open areas is safe for human consumption.

Environmentalists worry that not enough testing has been done on the seafood as the use of chemicals to dissipate the oil from the surface leaves lingering questions about toxicity in the fish.

When asked whether he would eat the Gulf's bounty, Mr Suttles didn't flinch. ''I absolutely would,'' he said. ''There's been a tremendous amount of testing done …

''I have a lot of confidence in those agencies and I trust their recommendations and I would eat their food - the seafood out of the Gulf - and I would feed it to my family.''

AP has a report on BP's efforts to finishing capping the Macondo oil spill - Signs of oil spill recovery entering new phase. The Oil Drum has a couple of new posts on the topic as well - BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Windows Can be Short, a Delay, and a Digression and BP Macondo Blowout - Static Top Kill vs. Bottom Kill: Weighing the Risks .

BP's new boss says it's time for a "scaleback" in cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Federal officials say there is no way the crude could reach the East Coast. And fishing areas are starting to reopen.

There were several signs Friday that the era of thousands of oil-skimming boats and hazmat-suited beach crews is giving way to long-term efforts to clean up, compensate people for their losses and understand the damage wrought. Local fishermen are doubtful, however, and say oil remains a bigger problem than BP and the federal government are letting on.

Other people contend the impact of the spill has been overblown, given that little oil remains on the Gulf surface, but Bob Dudley, who heads BP's oil spill recovery and will take over as CEO in October, rejected those claims.

"Anyone who thinks this wasn't a catastrophe must be far away from it," he said in Biloxi, where he announced that former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt will be supporting BP's Gulf restoration work.

After an April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers, BP's blown-out well gushed an estimated 94 million to 184 million gallons of oil before a temporary cap stopped it July 15. Efforts to permanently plug the gusher had been expected to begin as early as Sunday, but the government's point man for the spill said Friday that those plans hit a snag.

Crews found debris in the bottom of the relief well that ultimately will be used to plug the leak for good, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said. The debris must be fished out before crews can begin a procedure known as a static kill that hopefully will make the rest of the job easier.

"It's not a huge problem, but it has to be removed before we can put the pipe casing down," Allen said.

The sediment settled in the relief well last week when crews popped in a plug to keep it safe ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie. Removing it will take 24 to 36 hours and likely push the kill back to Tuesday, Allen said.

Once the relief well is ready, crews can begin the static kill, in which mud, and possibly cement, are pumped in through the temporary cap. The better that procedure seals the blown-out well, the easier it will be to plug it forever by pumping in cement from below using the relief well. The blown-out well could be killed for good by late August, though a tropical storm could set the timetable back.

Inhabitat has a look at some oil spill inspired marketing - Oil-Spill Condoms Want You to "Drill Without the Spill".

The NYT has an article on deepwater offshore oil, hidden under salt layers - Gulf of Mexico's Deepwater Oil Industry Is Built on Pillars of Salt.

Not so long ago -- at least, in geological time -- many in the oil game thought the Gulf of Mexico was tapped out.

Financiers called it "the Dead Sea." Nearly a century of production had run its course. Well after deeper well turned up dry, many drilling into thick layers of salt. And where there was salt, most believed, all hope of oil was lost.

Then, 25 years ago, it all began to change.

Exploration geologists discovered that, rather than signaling oil's end, underground salt -- leftovers of repeatedly evaporated seas -- could lead to a horde of new discoveries. And soon, the finds came, with names like Mahogany, Mickey and Tahiti, and the oil majors followed. The salt was obscuring oil, trapping oil or, through its inherently slippery nature, shifting and reordering the Gulf's sedimentary murk.

To understand nearly any deepwater oil find in the Gulf, including BP PLC's runaway Macondo well, requires understanding the salt that provides much of the region's deepest bedrock, geologists say. And, unlike the dull sand and dirt on top of it, carried by various ancestors of the Mississippi River, salt has proven a tricky foundation.

"Do you know the old Bible reference, don't build your house on sand?" said William Galloway, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "Well, building your house on salt goes beyond anything in the biblical expression."

Gulf geology is not only about salt, of course, but scientists' improved take on the rock is one of the best examples of how, for 50 years, the Gulf has served as one of the world's foremost geology labs. Backed by society's endless thirst for oil, geologists have guided drillers to ever deeper and riskier oil reservoirs. But they have also put that money to work, filling in the empty sketch held by most of the vast underground world beneath the ocean floor.

Armed with improved, sonar-like imaging that has begun to reliably sound through salt's uncertain geometries, geologists are discovering oil reserves beneath even foundational salt sheets. (Large recent discoveries off Brazil offer prominent examples.) Not only have these sheets hidden oil, but they have also whisked away the earth's heat, allowing the crude to linger in formations once thought unsuitable.

The global push for salt-hidden oil is only gaining steam, geologists say.

"Salt over the decades has been a difficult rock to seismically image," said Clint Moore, a vice president at ION Geophysical Corp, a seismic technology company. "And we now seem to have solved that problem. And that opens up all kinds of abilities to see the geology of the earth more clearly."

Moore, while at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., was one of the earliest geologists to probe beneath the Gulf's salt, helping discover the Mahogany oil reservoir, the region's first producing subsalt field, after burrowing through 3,825 feet of salt in the early 1990s. The productivity of these salt-based fields could prompt a re-evaluation of peak oil's arrival, he said.

"If the volumes are there, this will be a significant addition to the world's resources," he said.

Of course, there are complications. Deeper wells sit at higher pressures, increasing the risk of blowout. The deepest exploration well, drilled by the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon, is 35,000 feet down, several times the depth of BP's Macondo well. And further oil production will only add to the greenhouse gases humans pour into the atmosphere each year, slowly increasing global temperatures.

TOD's Arthur Berman had an interview on CNN last week about BP's oil spill in the gulf - Berman on CNN.

Robert Rapier has a fairly jaundiced look at some of Matt Simmons' claims about what is happening in the gulf - Is Matt Simmons Credible?.

I am going to address a touchy subject in this essay, but I simply can’t ignore it any longer. I have noticed that a lot of people are finding my blog through keyword searches of “Debunking Matt Simmons.” About two and a half years ago, I did write an essay called Debunking Matt Simmons. Because of Matt’s recent claims about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there has been a spike in interest over whether his claims related to the disaster are actually credible. So now seems like a good time to revisit the subject.

The topic is touchy because Matt Simmons has long been revered in the energy business, and some of his fans will be upset with me for writing this.

But Simmons has lately been making what I feel are very irresponsible and sensational claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. ...

Simmons’ Sensational Claims on the Gulf Spill

In these and various other interviews, Simmons claims:

1. Use of a small bore nuclear device is the “only option” to stop the flow of oil.

I don’t want a banker who doesn’t know what fuzzy logic is being taken seriously on the issue of using nukes in the Gulf of Mexico.

2. BP would be insolvent by July 8, 2010. He has also stated several times that the stock is going to zero.

While I have said that I don’t think the BP brand can continue in the long run, I wouldn’t call them insolvent and it will certainly take some time for the legal issues to play out. A prediction of insolvency by July 8th was ridiculous. Simmons has also shorted BP stock, so some of this may be wishful thinking on his part.

3. The “real, untold story” is another leak that is 5-7 miles away spewing 120,000 bbls/day.

I haven’t the faintest idea where he came up with this, but I have spoken to several experts who say the chance of that is zero.

4. That there is an underground lake of oil that is 500 feet thick, 100 miles wide, and may be covering 40% of the Gulf of Mexico.

As one person calculated, that would equate to 500 trillion barrels of oil; total global reserves are estimated in the region of 2 trillion barrels.

5. The leak could last 24 years.

He believes this, because short of the nuclear weapon idea he sees no other way to stop the leak and thinks we may have to wait for all of the oil to come out of the reservoir. Meanwhile, the news is that BP is starting to get the leak under control.

6. The gulf states need to be evacuated.

Simmons says “We’re going to have to evacuate the gulf states. Can you imagine evacuating 20 million people? . . . This story is 80 times worse than I thought.”

That last claim was in the Washington Post, leading one critic to ask of the story’s author:

Did he consider that Simmons is a financial analyst and may have an agenda in creating heightened hysteria surrounding the spill?

Did he consider the effect printing this claim could have on the people of the Gulf Coast?

Stuart Staniford has some additional commentary - Robert Rapier on Matt Simmons.

I am uncomfortable having to deal with this kind of thing: I have talked with Matt on several occasions, and emailed with him more often. He is a decent and well-intended man, has been helpful to me personally, and he has in the past had a track-record of good calls in the oil and gas industry, back before he got so famous. However, I'm afraid that Robert is now right: there is a history of sensationalistic overstatement in recent years, and since Matt is the premier peak oil spokesperson that can actually get attention from the mass media, that is a real problem. Robert shouldn't be the only voice to say so.

I think the most salient issue to me is the famous Tierney-Simmons bet, where Matt intentionally set the terms of the bet far out of the money. 2010 oil futures were $59/barrel back in 2005, so setting the terms at $200 was very disadvantageous to his chances of winning. It now looks extremely unlikely that oil will break the $200 level before the end of this year and so Matt will lose, and this does no good at all for the cause of getting people to do what is required to reduce their dependence on oil. It didn't have to be that way if Matt were a little less certain of his own rightness.

TomDispatch has an article on the history of oil pollution around the globe - Ellen Cantarow, Blowback Crude. From Tom's introduction:

I don’t know about you, but when I see a headline like this one (from the July 11th Washington Post), “White House Confident Latest BP Effort Will Work,” my heart immediately sinks. Of course, there’s a first time for everything, but amid the ever worsening news from the Gulf of Mexico’s waters about astonishingly high methane concentrations, dangerous levels of arsenic, the lack of testing of seafood for absorption of toxic compounds from the dispersant BP has been massively pumping out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “hoarding” of raw scientific data about the disaster, and both BP's and the government's “stranglehold on media access” in the Gulf, that oily undercurrent of a positive narrative has been relentless (even as press coverage slowly begins to drop off). At the end of the storm lies hope and a rainbow. Or at least a permanently sealed well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, three days after that confident headline, the same government showed something less than confidence in BP. It suddenly moved to freeze that company’s work on closing the new version of “top hat,” the massive "3 ram capping stack" meant to seal off the well, until further testing could be done. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu and his experts feared that closing the cap’s valves might actually cause even more harm to a possibly already damaged well bore. In the meantime, the oil, essentially cap-less, continued to gush forth, as it had for days, even as work on the first relief well, the supposed permanent solution to the problem, was halted for fear of further problems while the testing went on.

Late Wednesday, the test of the cap finally began, only to be briefly interrupted by the discovery of a leak on a line attached to one of its valves. Everything was again halted briefly before those valves were finally closed and the oil did stop for the first time in 87 days; and yes, in the next few days, for all we know, that seal may hold, or maybe this nightmare won’t really end until the dog days of late July or mid-August, all dates repeatedly promised for the completion of the relief well. Or maybe not then either. The positive story line has been offered up and deep-sixed so many times already that, as with warnings on a cigarette pack, even with good news coming in, caution is still advised. Worse yet, if the happy ending does come, we already have a reasonable hint about how this story works out. As with the Exxon Valdez spill, big oil may prefer to learn remarkably few lessons from this disaster, as it prepares to head into far rougher waters in search of ever tougher oil to extract. After all, the big oil companies have preferred to learn next to nothing, as Ellen Cantarow makes clear, from a 50-year history of disastrous spills in Nigeria and a decades-long version of the same in the Amazon.

And of course, in these last weeks when the Northeast has been sizzling under record temperatures (with more to come), and researchers at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center have concluded that the first five months of 2010 were the second hottest in human history (runner-up only to 1998) -- and this decade the warmest on record for the planet -- the worst disaster may prove to be not the gusher in the Gulf, but the gas in our tanks.

Newsy.com reports there are some concerns about the cap that BP has put on the Macondo well - BP Halts Oil Leak During Test.

The SMH reports that BP are claiming a new cap fitted over the leaking Macondo well has is capturing the oil flow - After three months, oil gusher plugged, says BP. The SMH also reports that BP's role in the release of the Lockerbie bomber is being viewed with suspicion in the US as the companmy looks to expand operations in Libya - BP faces grilling over oil deal links to Lockerbie.

Engineers have stopped oil flowing freely into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in almost three months - but stress tests over the next 48 hours will determine whether the new cap on the deep-sea well will hold.

The chief operating officer of BP, Doug Suttles, was cautiously optimistic. "Clearly, it's encouraging for the first time in 86 days not to see oil gushing out of this well ... But it's way too early to celebrate," he said.

Officials claimed the next two days would be critical as engineers keep a close watch on pressure levels within the well. The new construction includes a containment cap with a built-in "blow-out preventer", the device that failed to cut off the oil flow when the Deepwater Horizon drill rig caught fire after an explosion in April.

BP, the well operator, hopes that pressure levels beneath the cap remain high, indicating there are no leaks beneath the sea bed. Six-hourly tests are planned over the next 48 hours.

The discovery of a new leak would force the company to resume recovering as much oil as possible through lines from the well to vessels on the surface of the Gulf, Coast Guard boss Thad Allen said.

"The number one goal is to shut in the well and kill it and stop it at the source," Admiral Allen told reporters in New Orleans. "This is merely an intermediate step to plugging the hole."

Stopping the oil is a long-awaited milestone in the worst environmental disaster in US history. The well has been spewing between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of crude a day into the Gulf, according to a US government-led panel of scientists, inundating sensitive coastal habitats and disrupting fishing and tourism across four Gulf states.

The cost of the mishap has been put at several billions of dollars with Louisiana and Mississippi bearing the brunt of the disaster.

Plugging the well for good will depend on relief wells being drilled simultaneously. The first is within 30 metres of intercepting the well, which taps into the rich Macondo oil field, and could be in a position to divert the flow by the end of the month, BP said.

The SMH has a report on the collateral damage being created by BP's burn off efforts for the oil spill - BP sued for burning turtles alive.

Animal welfare groups are suing BP for burning endangered sea turtles and are asking a US court to stop the oil giant's "controlled burns" on the Gulf of Mexico spill.

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday says BP is violating the Endangered Species Act and other laws with their "controlled burns" in the Gulf of Mexico.

The complainants, Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), Centre for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network and Animal Legal Defence Fund, have asked the federal court for a temporary restraining order to stop all burning activities "until ... mechanisms are implemented that will prevent any additional sea turtles from being burned alive."

"It is horrifying that these innocent creatures whose habitat has already been devastated by the oil spill are now being burned alive," AWI president Cathy Liss told the court in Louisiana.

Containment efforts put in place since a BP-leased offshore oil rig exploded April 20 unleashing the worst oil spill in US history include "controlled burns", in which oil is gathered by ship-towed floating booms and set on fire.

"Endangered sea turtles, including the Kemp's ridley, one of the rarest sea turtles on Earth, are caught in the gathered oil and unable to escape when the oil is set ablaze," the animal welfare groups said.

The Houston Chronicle has an article on disappointing oil production from BP's Thunder Horse field in the gulf of mexico - In deep, and falling far short.

BP has a big problem in the Gulf of Mexico — and it's not just the oil spill emanating from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon.

At another platform in the Gulf — this one owned and operated by BP, unlike the Horizon — the problem is the opposite: Not enough oil is coming out.

Thunder Horse is the massive 60,000-ton, $1 billion production platform that BP, after some engineering difficulties, brought into operation in 2008. It was supposed to produce 250,000 barrels of oil a day.

It hasn't gotten close.

Production from Thunder Horse's main field reached a peak of about 172,000 barrels a day in January 2009, then began declining, falling to 61,000 barrels by December, according to data from the Minerals Management Service.

“The field has collapsed,” said Matthew Simmons, CEO of Houston-based Simmons & Company International, an investment banking firm specializing in energy. Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert, has studied the Thunder Horse data along with production at most other deep-water wells.

BP's initial projections that Thunder Horse would produce 1 billion barrels of oil now seem unrealistic, Simmons said.

A BP spokesman said the company won't discuss Thunder Horse production until year's end. However, he noted that the main Thunder Horse field is undergoing maintenance, which will affect production numbers for the current quarter.

The maintenance, though, doesn't address the declining production that has been going on for more than a year. Geologists who have studied the data and posted their findings on the energy website The Oil Drum have estimated that Thunder Horse's production is falling by as much as 3 percent a month, even though additional wells have been brought on line.

It's also curious that BP would be slowing production at the field for maintenance after just 18 months, Simmons said.

While the energy industry talks up the potential of deep-water production, many of the wells drilled so far show rapid declines similar to those that appear to be happening at Thunder Horse. The wells are among the most expensive drilling projects in the world, and the exploration companies need rapid payouts to generate a return on their investment, Simmons said.

In all, he's tracked as many as 25 deep-water wells that show rapid declines. “That's been the pattern in all the deep-water fields,” he said. “We are at the twilight of offshore oil and gas.”

Because of the high drilling costs, companies typically drill few secondary, or appraisal, wells, which help determine the size of a reservoir.

At the same time, generating the return to cover the drilling expenses requires draining the reservoirs quickly, which shortens the life of recoverable oil. The result is a faster decline and smaller reservoirs than are initially announced.

I haven't done any Friday Night Fear Mongering in a while and amusing tinfoil has been pretty rare too - but I thought I'd throw in this one from Infowars about impending doom for the Gulf of Mexico and all who live near it (in a way these guys do a better job of putting things in perspective than BP and their PR agencies are capable of - things could be much worse !) - Methane and Martial Law in the Gulf of Mexico.

Earlier this week Reuters reported on a massive amount of methane discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler said methane gas levels in some areas are “astonishingly high.” Kessler recently returned from a 10-day research expedition near the BP oil gusher. Kessler’s team measured both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP’s destroyed wellhead. “There is an incredible amount of methane in there,” Kessler told reporters. He said the level may be as much as one million times the normal level.

In late May BP said methane makes up about 40 percent of the leaking crude by mass. In addition to methane, large mounts of toxic hydrogen sulfide, benzene and methylene chloride are leaking into the Gulf according to the EPA and others.

Lindsay Williams, a former Alaskan pipeline chaplain with high-level oil industry connections, told the Alex Jones Show on June 10 that deadly gases are indeed escaping from the breached wellhead.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, writing for Oil Price, states that his sources inside the federal government, FEMA, and the US Army Corps of Engineers are dealing with a prospective “dead zone” created by the escaping methane within a 200 mile radius from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

In addition, Madsen reports, Corexit 9500, the oil dispersant used by BP, is viewed by FEMA sources as mixing with evaporated water from the Gulf. This deadly mixture is then absorbed by rain clouds and produces toxic precipitation that threatens to continue killing marine and land animals, plant life, and humans within a 200-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site in the Gulf.

The “dead zone” created by a combination of methane gas and Corexit toxic rain, Madsen continues, will ultimately result in the evacuation and long-term abandonment of cities and towns within the 200-mile radius of the oil gusher.

“Plans are being put in place for the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Hammond, Houma, Belle Chase, Chalmette, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pensacola, Hattiesburg, Mobile, Bay Minette, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Crestview, and Pascagoula,” Madsen writes.

On June 13, SoCal Martial Law Alerts (SCMLA) predicted that Gulf states would be evacuated. “Greg Evensen, a retired Kansas Highway Patrolman, estimates that 30-40 million people would need to be evacuated away from the Gulf’s coastline (i.e. at least 200 miles inland),” SCMLA reported.

In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, the federal government (through FEMA and other agencies) would most likely seek first to control and manage the transportation system and then operate relocation centers to manage evacuees. Toward this end, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already declared the airspace over the oil spill site to be a no-fly zone until further notice. Various sources have indicated that local police, highway patrol, National Guard, US military and foreign troops may be involved in an operation to evacuate the Gulf Coast. In fact, the Governor of Louisiana has already requested evacuation assistance (i.e. National Guard) for his state from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Madsen’s trusted sources now lend credence to the SCMLA report.

DK Matai reports that by some geologists’ estimates, the methane now escaping into the Gulf may have been part of a massive bubble trapped for thousands of years under the sea floor. “More than a year ago, geologists expressed alarm in regard to BP and Transocean putting their exploratory rig directly over this massive underground reservoir of methane. Warnings were raised before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that the area of seabed chosen might be unstable and inherently dangerous,” writes Matai.

Matai and others fear the methane — under intense pressure (experts estimate the pressure to be between 30,000 and 70,000 pounds per square inch) — may form a bubble that would then rupture the seabed and erupt with an explosion.

“The bubble is likely to explode upwards propelled by more than 50,000 psi of pressure, bursting through the cracks and fissures of the sea floor, fracturing and rupturing miles of ocean bottom with a single extreme explosion,” Matai explains. “If the toxic gas bubble explodes, it might simultaneously set off a tsunami traveling at a high speed of hundreds of miles per hour. Florida might be most exposed to the fury of a tsunami wave. The entire Gulf coastline would be vulnerable, if the tsunami is manifest. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and southern region of Georgia might experience the effects of the tsunami according to some sources.”

The press Register has a great picture of the BP oil spill, as seen from underwater in an Alabama wildlife preserve - Lots of sharks, lots of oil seen off Bon Secour.

Billmon has a post at Daily Kos looking at some of the stranger theories floating around about the compensation fund BP has set up to deal with the oil spill aftermath - Dear Teabaggers.

Your stupidity, fanaticism and all around mean spiritedness continue to astound, with your bizarre and – dare I say it – unpatriotic defense of British Petroleum only the latest example.

While I realize facts and logic are completely lost on you, can you at least TRY to get it through your tiny, floresiensis-like skulls that:

1.) The Constitution in your head notwithstanding, the REAL one doesn't forbid the president and/or his Attorney General from negotiating settlements of this kind. The Justice Department does it in environmental enforcement actions all the time, although usually without the 24/7 hysteria.

2.) The money is going to be held in an ESCROW account. Are you familiar with the term? Have you ever closed on a house? It means the money cannot be spent or disbursed without the approval of the trustee, who in turn will need to get approval from the courts. Again, this is a completely standard way of handling settlements in environmental cases.

3.) The money is NOT going to ACORN, your favorite all-purpose boogeyman. ACORN doesn't exist any more. Deal with it.

4.) BP agreed to the deal BECAUSE IT IS IN ITS OWN CORPORATE INTEREST. Lately investors have been shunning BP until they have some kind of idea of the company's potential legal liability. This has caused yields on BP bonds to soar and made it hard for the company to roll over short-term debt, threatening the company (and the entire financial system) with insolvency. While the settlement is not final, it does give investors some reason to hope the company will remain viable -- which in turn makes it more likely that it WILL remain viable.

5.) BP, its shareholders, and the wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico aren't the only ones at risk here. Do you by chance remember what happened to a company called Lehman Brothers when it couldn't roll over its short-term debt a couple of years ago? Do want to see a repeat of that fun-filled episode?

6.) If anything, Obama is doing BP a favor by coming to terms so quickly. The fact that BP was so eager to accept those terms is a clear sign it understands just how MORE humongeous its liabilities could be if this ends up in court. If you want to blame Obama for subverting the course of justice, go right ahead (although I'm not sure he had any realistic choice) but it's ridiculous to blame him for that with one breath and then accuse him of "shaking down" BP in the next. There was no shakedown – or, if there was, the muscle behind it was provided by Wall Street, not Chicago (unless you mean the futures pits).

Even for you, this is mendacity on a pathological scale, amounting practically to a psychotic break from reality. Your movement has become the social equivalent of BP’s blown out well: completely out of control and spewing toxic crap in every direction. Joe Barton, at least, had the excuse of being a well paid prostitute on permanent retainer to the oil industry. What’s yours? Only fools give it away for free.

Sincerely,
Billmon

TED has an interesting set of oil slick images - Aerial photos of the oil slick.

CNet has an article on a wave powered desalination device in the Gulf Of Mexico (hopefully it will work even when covered in a coating of BP provided oil) - Wave-powered desalination pump permitted in Gulf.

The waters of the Gulf of Mexico will see a novel offshore platform later this year, one that will use wave power to desalinate water.

Independent Natural Resources, which makes the Seadog water pump, on Wednesday said that it has received a permit for a wave power generation facility off the coast of Freeport, Texas. The company says it's the first to receive a "section 10 permit" from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to operate a wave generator in the U.S.

The facility, which the company hopes to put in the water by the end of the year, will be a platform with 18 wave pumps underneath it. Each pump, which is about seven feet in diameter, will send water up through three water wheels connected to a generator. The electricity from the generator will be used to power a standard reverse osmosis desalination machine.

The wave energy generator is larger than Independent Natural Resource's prototype machines which it installed in 2007 but this new facility is sized to operate at commercial scale in Gulf waters. Rather than sell electricity or water, though, operators will be taking data to measure impact on sea life, the generator's performance, and the cost of operation, said Douglas Sandberg, the vice president of the privately funded company.

The platform will be about 150 feet by 75 feet in area and be 1 mile offshore to take advantage of swells. The pumps themselves will work 25 feet below the surface of the water and be able to generate about 60 kilowatts.

The efficiency of the system in converting wave energy to electrical energy is about 22 percent but can get over 50 percent, Sandberg said. Rather than only convert the energy of an incoming wave, the pump also captures some of the potential energy of air movement in the pump, he explained. The electricity generated on board will be used to power the facility and desalinate 3,000 gallons of water a day for testing, although it's capable of doing 20 times that, according to the company.

The SMH reports that BP's "top kill" approach to stopping the Deepwater Horizon leak in the gulf of mexico has failed - BP's gulf well plug fails.

BP's "top kill" operation to plug the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico has failed, in a stunning setback to efforts to stem the worst oil spill in US history.

BP and federal authorities are now turning to a new strategy to stop the leak, but it will take at least four to seven days before it can be put in place.

At least 75 million gallons are now estimated to have gushed into the ocean since the disaster unfolded five weeks ago, threatening an environmental and economic catastrophe across hundreds of kilometres of the US Gulf Coast.

"After three full days of attempting 'top kill', we have been unable to overcome the flow from the well, so we now believe it's time to move on to the next of our options," BP Chief Operations Officer Doug Suttles told a news briefing.

Engineers had spent days pumping some 30,000 barrels of heavy drilling fluid into the leaking well head on the ocean floor in a high-pressure bid to smother the gushing crude and ultimately seal the well with cement. ....

The announcement marks the latest failure for BP, which despite a series of high-tech operations over the past month has appeared powerless to bring the disaster to heel since an explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20 that killed eleven workers. The rig sank two days later.

The British energy giant had stressed that "top kill" was the best chance at stopping the leak other than drilling an entirely new relief well, a process that has already begun but is expected to take another two months.

The Oil Drum has been doing continuous coverage of the spill lately (with traffic starting to head back to the record levels of 2008), and reports BP's latest tactical plan is to try another containment dome style approach while waiting for relief wells to be drilled, this one dubbed the LMRP (lower marine riser package) - Deepwater Oil Spill - The LMRP Attempt Continued and Sunday's Open Thread .

BP said preparations have been made for the possible deployment of the lower marine riser package (LMRP) cap containment system, which would be complex because of the depth of the oil leak.

Deployment would first involve removing the damaged riser from the top of the failed BOP to leave a cleanly-cut pipe at the top of the BOP's LMRP.

The cap, a containment device with a sealing grommet, will be connected to a riser from the Discoverer Enterprise drillship, 5,000 feet above on the surface, and placed over the LMRP with the intention of capturing most of the oil and gas flowing from the well.

Mr Suttles said it should capture "most of the oil" and was expected to last at least four days but "we cannot guarantee success at this time."

Zero Hedge points to a Bloomberg interview with Matt Simmons talking about using a nuclear explosion to plug the well, Russian style - Matt Simmons Tells Bloomberg Only Way To Contain Oil Leak Is With Small Nuclear Bombs, "Top Kill" Is Just A Distraction. It might stop the leak, but presumably the environmental issues will be just as large, albeit different....

In his May 28th interview with Bloomberg's Mark Crumpton and Lori Rothman, Matt Simmons of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, provides some stunning revelations on what is really occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, and proposes that the only effective way to contain the leak is to relieve BP, bring in the military, and do what the Russians have done on comparable occasions, namely explode nuclear weapons within the wellbore. Simmons knows what he is talking about. As Jim Bianco points out: "Matt Simmons gained fame with his book 2005 Twilight in the Desert where he claimed that the Saudis were overstating their oil output because they hit “peak oil.” Right or wrong Simmons claimed the price of oil was going to skyrocket and three years after the book’s release the crude oil hit $147/Barrel.

Grist has an article wondering if people are starting to lose the plot - Is the Gulf oil spill spinning out of control?.

op Hat, Top Kill, Junk Shot, Hail Mary. I don't know about you but it sure feels like nobody's going to stop this leak. Even BP CEO and chief spinmeister Tony Hayward is lowering expectations. This mess is officially out of control.

"Plug the damn hole"

Presidents don't do impotence -- usually. But while BP pipes spew non-stop on webcams, President Obama reduced to sending Cabinet members to the scene where they hold daily press briefings to explain what BP is (or is not) doing. Should we be surprised then at Obama's "Plug the damn hole" outburst at a recent White House meeting?

In his Washington Post blog Joel Achenbach calls BP the ballerina and the federal government the Stage Mom. But here's an alt analogy: BP is the teen learning to drive and the government is the parent in the front seat. Only he doesn't know how to drive either.

They got nothin'

The speculation in Washington is that if BP can't pull off its "top kill" gambit tomorrow, the White House will need to do something dramatic, like take over.

The feds do have the authority. But what would they do if they took charge of the unstoppable spill? The government's top man in the field, Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, flat out concedes that the feds are out of their league-technically-when it comes to plugging the damn hole.

Got any ideas?

Andrew Revkin, in his Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, wants a swat team, of gung-ho geologists and engineers. David Gergen, writing for CNN, wants to rally the country's best and brightest to brainstorm a solution.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) wants to send in the troops. Let the U.S. military take over the cleanup operation.

Screw the army, we want Bruce Willis!

There is one other option out there, a dark option that BP wants nothing to do with. Nuclear weapons. Hey, we're serious here, people! The Soviet Union has used nukes four times in the past to cap leaking oil and gas wells. Sure it sounds crazy, but according to Russian writer Vladimir Lagovsky, the explosion "compresses the rock and squeezes the channel shut."

Of course, resorting to nukes could be a tough call for a Nobel Peace Prize winner, notes Christopher Brownfield, writing in The Daily Beast.

... using nuclear weapons, even for peaceful purposes, would be problematic for a president who stood in Prague and declared that the world should rid itself of such devices. If President Obama were to use a nuke to close this well, he would give other states an excuse to seek nuclear weapons of their own.

Elizabeth Kolbert has some background on oil spills and why these may become more common due to peak oil at The New Yorker - Oil Shocks.

n September of 1968, Union Oil Company of California, which later became Unocal and is now part of Chevron, erected a drilling platform off the coast near Santa Barbara. Over the next four months, four wells were constructed. Work on a fifth had begun and was proceeding uneventfully until, on January 28, 1969, the new well suffered a blowout. It took ten days’ effort before it was finally plugged, with cement slurry. By the time the flow had stopped completely, an estimated hundred thousand barrels of oil had poured into the Santa Barbara Channel. The slick it created covered eight hundred square miles. The area’s fishing industry was shut down, and pictures of blackened beaches filled the news.

Americans had never seen a spill like this, and they were shocked by it. There were protests—Californians stuck their gasoline credit cards on skewers and lit them on fire—followed by new horrors. In June of 1969, Ohio’s spectacularly polluted Cuyahoga River burst into flame. By the end of the year, Congress had passed the National Environmental Policy Act, known by the acronym NEPA, which requires federal agencies to file impact statements for all actions that could have a significant ecological effect. The following spring, millions of people took to the streets for Earth Day, and by the second anniversary of the spill President Richard Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Clean Air Act.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill makes the Santa Barbara spill look like a puddle. By some estimates, the BP spill is spewing as much oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day as the Union well spewed into the Santa Barbara Channel in all, and the BP spill is now in its second month. The news out of the Gulf continues to range from grim to grimmer. Recently, it was revealed that the spill has created an undersea plume of oil ten miles long, and that some of the oil has already entered the loop current and is being carried toward Florida. Then the federal government doubled the area of the Gulf that had been closed to fishing. On Friday, the government increased that area again, to forty-eight thousand square miles. President Barack Obama has called the spill a “massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” a characterization that, if anything, probably understates the case.

In an immediate sense, the causes of the catastrophe are technical. Apparently, the Deepwater Horizon well was inadequately sealed, and natural gas built up inside it. When workers on the rig tried to activate the well’s blowout preventer, it failed. An attempt to activate the blowout preventer after the fact, using undersea robots, also proved unsuccessful. Another effort to cap the leak, by using what amounted to a hundred-ton steel funnel, flopped as well. Last week, BP finally succeeded in inserting a mile-long tube into the riser leading from the well. The company said that it was capturing a thousand barrels of oil a day, which is what it originally claimed that the well was leaking; nevertheless, crude continued to pour into the Gulf. (In a recent column in the Miami Herald, the author Carl Hiaasen joked that BP’s next move would be to try to seal the well with thousands of tons of instant oatmeal.)

But the real causes of the disaster go, as it were, much deeper. Having consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet. (By contrast, the Santa Barbara well was drilled in less than two hundred feet of water, to a total depth of thirty-five hundred feet.) While the point of “peak oil” may or may not have been reached, what Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has dubbed the Age of Tough Oil has clearly begun. This year, the United States’ largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, no matter where oil comes from or how it has been extracted, burning it is destructive: oil combustion accounts for nearly a third of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences called on Congress to enact legislation to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, by, among other things, “reducing oil use.”

The NYT reports that huge columns of oil are floating under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico - Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.