It seems pretty obvi­ous to me that the rig was sab­o­taged. All the clues are there while the offi­cial story, like it is often the case, doesn’t make sense. Acci­dents hap­pen but not on that scale. But the best clue remains the fact that the “acci­dent” hap­pened on April 20th...which is Hitler’s birth­day! Many moti­va­tions could have been at play in this scheme. Suf­fice it to say that the far right can’t stand the fact of hav­ing a “social­ist” and a black man, on top of that, as pres­i­dent! They will do any­thing to embar­rass him while try­ing to make it prof­itable at the same time.

@Claude: Hey there, Claude. I absolutely agree with you here; not only does it look like the rig was indeed sab­o­taged, but I also now sus­pect that a very deep con­spir­acy was also involved.

I won­der if Tepco’s chief of dis­as­ter response should be “avoid­ing planes too:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111025p2a00m0na007000c.html

Unedited Fukushima acci­dent man­ual released, loss of power sources not envisioned

The government’s Nuclear and Indus­trial Safety Agency (NISA) released part of an unedited severe acci­dent man­ual for the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on Oct. 24, reveal­ing that Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co. (TEPCO) had not envi­sioned the pos­si­bil­ity of all power sources at the nuclear com­plex being lost.

TEPCO, the oper­a­tor of the crip­pled nuclear power plant, had ear­lier sub­mit­ted to a spe­cial House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives com­mit­tee largely blacked-out emer­gency oper­a­tion man­u­als for the Fukushima nuclear facil­ity. The man­u­als were in fact used when the Great East Japan Earth­quake and ensu­ing tsunami struck the nuclear com­plex. On Oct. 24, NISA released part of an unedited man­ual after sub­mit­ting it to the same lower house panel. The man­ual revealed the fact that there was no oper­a­tional man­ual that envi­sioned a loss of all power sources needed to acti­vate emer­gency con­densers and back-up water injec­tion devices to cool down nuclear reac­tors. The rev­e­la­tion high­lights flaws in TEPCO’s con­tin­gency plan in the event of a loss of power sources.
...
”

Just FYI, if you hap­pen to spot any oil wash­ing up on the coast down there or in your seafood, it didn’t come from BP:

NOVEMBER 9, 2011, 11:27 A.M. ET

BP Spill Cleanup Winds Down

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW ORLEANS—BP PLC will no longer be respon­si­ble for clean­ing up oil that washes up on the Gulf Coast unless offi­cials can prove it comes from the company’s well that blew out in 2010, caus­ing the worst off­shore spill in U.S. his­tory, accord­ing to a plan approved by the Coast Guard.

The plan marks the near-end of the cleanup phase of the oil spill, accord­ing to the Nov. 2 agree­ment obtained by the AP on Tues­day. Now, BP will turn its atten­tion to restor­ing areas dam­aged by the spill that began on April 20, 2010, when the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 work­ers. About $1 bil­lion has been set aside for those projects, an offi­cial says.

Roughly 90% of the Gulf Coast has been deemed clean, accord­ing to offi­cials. The plan spells out pro­to­col for when an area still needs to be cleaned and when BP’s respon­si­bil­ity for that ends.

Louisiana offi­cials wouldn’t give their approval because they were con­cerned about what they per­ceived as a lack of long-term mon­i­tor­ing in the doc­u­ment. They also com­plained that the Coast Guard gave them only five days to review the plan, accord­ing to a let­ter sent to the agency by Gar­ret Graves, a top aide to Gov. Bobby Jin­dal for coastal affairs.
...

On Florida’s Pan­han­dle, some peo­ple reacted with skep­ti­cism. Ken­neth Collins, who rents fish­ing poles to tourists and spends his days with local fish­er­men at the Pen­sacola Beach pier, said he doesn’t think the effects of the spill are over.

“It’s not ok at all. We aren’t sci­en­tists or any­thing, but we are out there all the time and we can tell things aren’t right,” Mr. Collins said. Red­fish, cobia, grouper and other species caught off the beach pier have oily deposits in their intestines when they are carved up for clean­ing, he said.

“Every­thing is just not how it used to be. When you pull a fish up, it doesn’t look like it is sup­posed to look, like they did before” said Ryan John­son a fish­er­men on the pier. Mr. John­son said many fish now have an unnat­ural brown­ish color.

Despite the con­cerns, the Coast Guard said its final­ized plan would apply to Louisiana and all the Gulf states.
...

And they seemed like such a nice cou­ple:

BP: Hal­libur­ton destroyed key oil spill evidence

By CAIN BURDEAU, Asso­ci­ated Press
12/05/2001

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — BP in a high-stakes court fil­ing on Mon­day accused Hal­libur­ton of destroy­ing dam­ag­ing evi­dence about the qual­ity of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the worst U.S. off­shore oil spill.

...

Also in the doc­u­ments filed in a New Orleans fed­eral court, BP accused Hal­libur­ton of fail­ing to pro­duce incrim­i­nat­ing com­puter mod­el­ing evi­dence. BP accused Hal­libur­ton of claim­ing the mod­el­ing is gone.

BP asked U.S. Dis­trict Judge Carl Bar­bier to penal­ize Hal­libur­ton and order a court-sponsored com­puter foren­sic team to recover the miss­ing mod­el­ing results.

...

In Monday’s court fil­ing, BP accused Hal­libur­ton employ­ees doing an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion of the Macondo dis­as­ter of dis­card­ing and destroy­ing early test results they per­formed on the same batch of cement slurry used in the Macondo well.

BP said Halliburton’s chief cement mixer for Gulf projects tes­ti­fied in depo­si­tions that the cement slurry seemed “thin” to him but that he chose not to write about his find­ings to his bosses out of fear he would be misinterpreted.

“I didn’t want to put any­thing on an email that could be twisted, and turned,” Rickey Mor­gan, the Hal­libur­ton cement expert, said in depo­si­tions. He worked at a lab­o­ra­tory in Dun­can, Oklahoma.

“Upon review­ing these lat­est test­ing results, Hal­libur­ton employ­ees destroyed records of the test­ing as well as the phys­i­cal cement sam­ples used in the test­ing,” BP alleged.

Here’s another fel­low that might want to avoid small planes:

TPM
Law­suit Claims For­mer BP Employee Was Fired For Refus­ing To Skew Clean-Up Data

Jil­lian Ray­field Jan­u­ary 25, 2012, 8:56 AM

Updated Jan­u­ary 25, 2012 at 11:29 am.

A for­mer employee of BP Amer­ica is suing the oil com­pany for wrong­ful ter­mi­na­tion, alleg­ing that he was canned for refus­ing to alter data about the progress of the clean-up of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill.

In a suit filed in U.S. Dis­trict Court in Louisiana, August Wal­ter asks for dam­ages over his ter­mi­na­tion from BP, where he was employed for about a year as part of the Gulf Coast clean-up. Wal­ter served under BP’s Gulf Coast Restora­tion Orga­ni­za­tion (GCRO) as State Plan­ning Lead “for the pur­pose of devel­op­ing a descrip­tive plan to accom­plish the clean­ing of oil caused by the BP spill.”

BP Amer­ica has been run­ning a clean-up oper­a­tion since the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil rig exploded in April, 2010, killing 11 work­ers and dump­ing 4.9 mil­lion bar­rels of oil into the Gulf. The spill affected the coasts of Louisiana, Mis­sis­sippi, Florida and Alabama.

Accord­ing to the suit, Walter’s job involved cre­at­ing plans for the clean-up, known as Shore­line Treat­ment Rec­om­men­da­tions (STR), which were pre­pared and approved with the over­sight of the U.S. Coast Guard Fed­eral On-Scene Coor­di­na­tor (FOSC) “to be in com­pli­ance with fed­eral and state envi­ron­men­tal rules and reg­u­la­tions.” BP would then be respon­si­ble for imple­ment­ing the plans.

But, Wal­ter claims, in May and June of 2011 he “began to con­vey his con­cerns that BP Mis­sis­sippi oper­a­tions were inten­tion­ally not fol­low­ing the plans for clean up delin­eated by U.S. Gov­ern­ment, the Coast Guard and the Depart­ment of the Interior.”

“Cory Brown, BP’s Deputy Oper­a­tions Branch Director/Response Lead con­veyed that he was defy­ing the [rec­om­men­da­tions] by insist­ing that BP was only pick­ing up tar balls and not other smaller oil debris as required by the” Shore­line Treat­ment Rec­om­men­da­tions. In Sep­tem­ber of last year, Wal­ter told BP that he was required to inform stake­hold­ers that the com­pany was not fol­low­ing his recommendations.

Shortly after, Wal­ter claims that “BP began a mali­cious cam­paign to dis­credit him in retal­i­a­tion for his oppo­si­tion to BP refusal to rea­son­ably fol­low envi­ron­men­tal rules and reg­u­la­tions.” At one point, Wal­ter says, he was called in for a meet­ing with the VP of Oper­a­tions who said that the “focus was to have the [Coast Guard] be con­fi­dent in BP” so that they could more quickly tran­si­tion to a new plan for clean-up and over­sight that would be ben­e­fi­cial to BP stock prices. Wal­ter claims he was “specif­i­cally threat­ened” and told that there were “peo­ple watch­ing him” that would report him if he con­tin­ued to hin­der BP’s plans.

Wal­ter also claims that fol­low­ing a Deep Dive to assess the clean-up’s progress, BP’s Oper­a­tions Sec­tion Chief Mike Har­ri­son said he “did not like the data as to Mis­sis­sippi because as he stated ‘it did not fit with the story’ he wanted to tell” the Coast Guard. “[Har­ri­son] specif­i­cally — with­out back-up data — insisted that the amount of seg­ments that needed to be cleaned had to be lower than the data was showing.”

“Mike Har­ri­son basi­cally demanded that Wal­ter fal­sify the data by chang­ing the num­ber of seg­ments that still needed to be cleaned to a lower num­ber,” the suit alleges.

In Novem­ber, Wal­ter was put on admin­is­tra­tive leave pend­ing inves­ti­ga­tion, and offi­cially ter­mi­nated on Decem­ber 9, which he believes was in “retal­i­a­tion’ for his refusal to skew the data.

Tom Mueller, the Press offi­cer for BP Amer­ica Hous­ton denied the alle­ga­tions in an e-mail statement:

We do not believe that Mr. Walter’s alle­ga­tions have merit. We will inves­ti­gate the alle­ga­tions con­tained in his com­plaint, con­sis­tent with our per­son­nel poli­cies and Code of Con­duct. We believe we have demon­strated good faith in meet­ing our oblig­a­tions in the Gulf and are com­mit­ted to treat­ing our employ­ees fairly.

...

BP just had a nice day in court:

BP Won’t Face Some E-Mails in Gulf of Mex­ico Oil Spill Trial, Judge Says
Q
By Mar­garet Cronin Fisk — Feb 8, 2012 1:10 PM CT

Lawyers suing BP Plc (BP/) and other defen­dants over the 2010 Gulf of Mex­ico oil spill won’t be able to use sev­eral inter­nal e-mails in the trial over fault for the inci­dent, a judge said.

One e-mail includes a com­ment from a BP geol­o­gist two months before the April 2010 well blowout refer­ring to a “s—- y cement job” at the project. Hal­libur­ton Co. (HAL), which pro­vided cement­ing ser­vices, asked that the e-mail be barred from trial, say­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion was a joke and the geol­o­gist didn’t cre­ate it as a busi­ness activity.

The com­ment about the cement job isn’t a busi­ness record and “is not admis­si­ble,” U.S. Mag­is­trate Judge Sally Shushan said in a rul­ing today in New Orleans. “It must be demon­strated that the e-mail at issue was not sent or received casu­ally, nor was its cre­ation a mere iso­lated inci­dent.”

Shushan also excluded an e-mail from a Hal­libur­ton employee who called tests before the blowout unsuc­cess­ful. London-based BP and Transocean Ltd. (RIG), owner of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon rig that exploded, asked the judge to exclude the June 2010 e-mail, call­ing it hearsay.

In the e-mail, Ryan Haire of Hal­libur­ton told another com­pany employee: “I read some report that stated that the two neg­a­tive tests we did were con­sid­ered suc­cess­ful? I stated that I found them to unsuc­cess­ful and I was check­ing to see if maybe you knew why Transocean and BP were call­ing them suc­cess­ful?”
‘No Evidence’

“There is no evi­dence that Haire pos­sessed per­sonal knowl­edge that BP and Transocean called the two neg­a­tive pres­sure tests suc­cess­ful,” Shushan said today.

She also barred use of sev­eral e-mails between man­agers at Anadarko Petro­leum Corp. (APC), BP’s part­ner in the well, writ­ten in 2009 over storm dam­age to another deep­wa­ter drilling rig. The mate­r­ial “is hearsay, and it is not admis­si­ble,” Shushan said.

...

Let’s just hope Judge Shushan didn’t ban any of these emails because they sound “highly rel­e­vant”:

Judge: Lawyers suing BP can see engineer’s emails
POSTED: 03:48 PM Mon­day, March 28, 2011
BY: The Asso­ci­ated Press

Lead attor­neys for peo­ple suing BP over last year’s oil spill can view emails exchanged between a key engi­neer for the oil giant and his wife, a fed­eral mag­is­trate judge ruled today.

Judge Sally Shushan said the mar­i­tal priv­i­lege doc­trine does not pro­tect the emails Brian Morel exchanged with his wife, Jade.

Both were BP employ­ees at the time of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter, and they had exchanged the emails in ques­tion over the company’s inter­nal com­puter sys­tem. The plain­tiffs’ lawyers have argued that the con­tent of the emails are “highly rel­e­vant” to BP’s lia­bil­ity for the disaster.

Morel is the engi­neer who described BP’s blown-out well as a “night­mare well” six days before the rig explo­sion. In August, Morel asserted his Fifth Amend­ment right against self-incrimination and refused to tes­tify before a fed­eral panel inves­ti­gat­ing the April 20, 2010, disaster.

...

And BP scores again:

Part of share­holder suit against BP tossed

Reuters

3:11 p.m. CST, Feb­ru­ary 13, 2012
BP Plc on Mon­day won the dis­missal of part of a U.S. share­holder secu­ri­ties fraud law­suit seek­ing dam­ages related to the 2010 Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. Dis­trict Judge Keith Elli­son in Hous­ton dis­missed claims by pur­chasers of ordi­nary shares, as well as claims by pur­chasers of Amer­i­can deposi­tary shares, against sev­eral BP offi­cials, includ­ing cur­rent Chief Exec­u­tive Robert Dudley.

But Elli­son refused to dis­miss claims by the ADS investors against the London-based com­pany and for­mer Chief Exec­u­tive Anthony Hay­ward, say­ing the investors had ade­quately pleaded vio­la­tions of U.S. secu­ri­ties law.

Investors led by sev­eral New York and Ohio pub­lic pen­sion funds had accused BP of mis­lead­ing them about its safety record before the April 20, 2010, explo­sion of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon drilling rig.

The dis­as­ter killed 11 peo­ple, caused the largest off­shore oil spill in U.S. his­tory and led to BP set­ting aside more than $40 bil­lion for related costs.

...

The law­suit is sep­a­rate from one sched­uled to go to trial Feb. 27 in a New Orleans fed­eral court to assess blame for the oil spill.

...

And with two year anniver­sary of the Gulf dis­as­ter approach­ing, we learn that the worst-case sce­nario (of an unstop­pable leak on the sea floor) might be reality:

AlJazeera
BP set­tles while Macondo ‘seeps’
As BP pays bil­lions in set­tle­ments, sci­en­tists are con­cerned about a per­sis­tent oil seep near the Macondo 252 well.
Dahr Jamail Last Mod­i­fied: 04 Mar 2012 12:50

New Orleans, LA — As BP set­tles out of court for the first phase of thou­sands of law­suits that could cost the com­pany tens of bil­lions of dol­lars, Al Jazeera has spot­ted a large oil sheen near the infa­mous Macondo 252 well.

In Sep­tem­ber 2011, Al Jazeera spot­ted a large swath of sil­very oil sheen located roughly 19km north­east of the now-capped well.

But now, on Feb­ru­ary 29, Al Jazeera con­ducted another over-flight of the area and found a larger area of sea cov­ered in oil sheen in the same location.

Oil track­ers with the organ­i­sa­tion On Wings of Care, who have been mon­i­tor­ing the new oil since mid-August 2011, have for months found rainbow-tinted slicks and thick sil­very globs of oil con­sis­tently vis­i­ble in the area.

“This is the same cres­cent shaped area of oil and sheen I’ve been see­ing here since the mid­dle of last August,” Bonny Schu­maker, pres­i­dent and pilot of On Wings of Care, told Al Jazeera while fly­ing over the oil.

...

Schu­maker, a career physi­cist with NASA who retired in 2011, is deeply con­cerned because she has spot­ted oil in the same loca­tion now at least 15 times since last August.

Edward Over­ton, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at Louisiana State University’s envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences depart­ment, exam­ined data from oil sam­ples taken from this area last Sep­tem­ber and con­firmed that the oil is from the Macondo reservoir.

Experts believe the oil is likely to be from a seep in the seabed, but there is debate about what caused the seep, as many believe it may well have been caused by BP’s blowout well and the failed attempts to cap it dur­ing spring 2010.

‘Dead ringer’

Over­ton, who is also a National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA) con­trac­tor, told Al Jazeera in Sep­tem­ber, “After exam­in­ing the data, I think it’s a dead ringer for the MC252 [Macondo Well] oil, as good a match as I’ve seen.”

He explained that the sam­ples were analysed and com­pared to “the known Macondo oil fin­ger­print, and it was a very, very close match”.

While not rul­ing out the pos­si­bil­ity that oil could be seep­ing out of the giant reser­voir, which would be the worst-case sce­nario, Over­ton believed the oil cur­rently reach­ing the sur­face was prob­a­bly from oil that was trapped in the dam­aged rig­ging on the seafloor.

How­ever, given the fact that the oil sheen has existed in this area since at least as early as August 2010 and is con­tin­u­ing, the like­li­hood of it being resid­ual oil from the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon or dam­aged rig­ging is now slim.

Other sci­en­tists remain con­cerned that the new oil could be com­ing from a seep from the same reser­voir the Macondo well was drilled into. The oil­field, located 64km off the coast of Louisiana, is believed to hold as much 50 mil­lion bar­rels of pro­ducible oil reserves.

...

Shrimpers and oys­ter fish­er­men have seen their catches drop dra­mat­i­cally, and in some areas entire oys­ter pop­u­la­tions have been annihilated.

...

New Orleans attor­ney Stu­art Smith, who lit­i­gates against major oil com­pa­nies, believes the bur­den of proof about where the oil is com­ing from lies on BP.

“Our worst fears have proven true,” Smith said of the seep. “We have a chronic leak sce­nario caused by the Macondo well, and it is time for the feds and BP to come clean and tell the Amer­i­can pub­lic the truth. Unless/until the gov­ern­ment and BP explain in a ver­i­fi­able man­ner what the source of this oil is, in my opin­ion any thoughts of set­tle­ment are way premature.”

Nat­ural seep

BP has denied that the oil is com­ing from their well.

When reports sur­faced last August that a large swath of oil sheen was reported near the site of the oil dis­as­ter, BP offi­cials, in coor­di­na­tion with the US Coast Guard, deployed two sub­mersibles to inves­ti­gate the site.

BP said their visual inspec­tion con­firmed there wasn’t any oil released from the Macondo well.

The Coast Guard also deployed a boat to the area and con­ducted an aer­ial sur­vey of the site by helicopter.

“Both observed noth­ing,” Coast Guard Cap­tain Jonathan Bur­ton, who is based in Mor­gan City, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera in at inter­view at his office.

Cap­tain Bur­ton said after see­ing footage from the sub­mersible of BP’s cap, he does not believe the Macondo well, or the relief wells BP drilled to stop it, are leak­ing, and he feels the oil is from nat­ural seepage.

“Research shows the Macondo area is ripe for seeps, and I think that’s what we’re look­ing at here, and it’s com­ing from the same reser­voir,” Bur­ton said.

Bur­ton is also the Fed­eral On-Scene Coor­di­na­tor for this region of the Gulf of Mex­ico that includes the Macondo area.

Bur­ton, who was some­what defen­sive for BP, added that he thinks that “the seep was there all along”, and “doesn’t know why BP has been silent on it.”

...

Dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber over flight of the oil, Al Jazeera spot­ted two BP research ves­sels in the area in question.

“These ves­sels are con­duct­ing research on nat­ural oil seeps as part of the Nat­ural Resources Dam­age Assess­ment [NRDA] process,” Tom Mueller, a press offi­cer with BP Amer­ica, told Al Jazeera. “They were parked over a known nat­ural seep on the bot­tom of the Gulf, col­lect­ing sam­ples and doc­u­ment­ing the nat­ural seep activ­ity in that area using a remote oper­ated sub­ma­rine and acoustic sens­ing equipment.”

Accord­ing to Mueller, the intent of the NRDA study is to learn more about the loca­tions of nat­ural seeps and test sam­ples taken from them.

“We can tell you that we recently sent a remote oper­ated sub­ma­rine down to inspect the Macondo well cap and the relief well cap,” Mueller, added, “Both are intact and show no evi­dence of any oil leak. So no oil is leak­ing from the Macondo well.”

But experts believe that is exactly the prob­lem, since the work BP con­ducted to cap the gush­ing well could have caused oil to begin seep­ing from the reser­voir in an area away from the capped well.

Anthro­pogenic seeps

Leifer remains con­cerned that the seep, given its prox­im­ity to the Macondo well, could be oil in the reser­voir that entered a layer of mud and has migrated into a nat­ural path­way that leads to the seabed.

“I see these new obser­va­tions [of the seep] as the canary in the coal mine that indi­cates some­thing could be chang­ing at the seabed and should not be ignored and hope it goes away,” he said.

Given Overton’s find­ings that the oil does appear to be from Macondo, Leifer added, “It’s not nec­es­sary to be alarmist, but this is some­thing that deserves set­ting an alarm off to investigate”.

Of Cap­tain Burton’s com­ments about the oil com­ing from the Macondo reser­voir, Smith had this to say:

“What is sig­nif­i­cant in my mind, as an attor­ney, is that a US gov­ern­ment offi­cial admit­ted this is Macondo oil, and to me, absent BP pro­duc­ing evi­dence this seep existed prior to their drilling, they there­fore must have caused it.”

Leifer’s con­cerns are that if the seep increases in vol­ume, “It could be a per­sis­tent, sig­nif­i­cant, con­tin­u­ous oil spill again, and that would require BP to go back and re-drill, and block off the pipeline even deeper than they already did, or else they would be liable for what­ever the emis­sions are, for­ever, because it’s not going to stop for a very long time”.

...

Dou­ble Whoops! That was the wrong link! Here’s the CORRECT link to the above article.

The lat­est inno­va­tion in humanity’s end­less quest to cre­ate hell on earth: Scottland’s “Well From Hell”, an oil AND gas off­shore well. And it’s more like a gate­way to hell, with hydro­gen sul­phide and methane now bub­bling up from the sea floor so agres­sively that work­ers can on longer safely work at the rig. For­tu­nately, Total has some options ready for their way­ward rig. My favorite is the “do noth­ing and hope it fixes itself” option or, as Total calls it, the “Dream Option”:

‘Well from hell,’ leak­ing cloud of explo­sive nat­ural gas, forces evac­u­a­tion of Scot­tish coast

Reuters Mar 27, 2012 — 11:58 AM ET | Last Updated: Mar 27, 2012 9:11 PM ET

By Oleg Vuk­manovic and Gwla­dys Fouche

LONDON/OSLO — A cloud of explo­sive nat­ural gas boil­ing out of the North Sea from a leak at Total’s aban­doned Elgin plat­form forced wider evac­u­a­tions off the Scot­tish coast on Tues­day as the French firm warned it may take six months to halt the flow.

Dubbed “the well from hell” by a Nor­we­gian envi­ron­men­tal­ist who said the high pres­sure of the under­sea reser­voirs in the field made it espe­cially hard to shut off, a plume of gas was vis­i­ble over the plat­form, offi­cials said, and a sheen of oil, also pro­duced from the rig, was spread­ing over the water.

Offi­cials imposed an air and sea exclu­sion zone around the plat­form, which had been pump­ing 9 mil­lion cubic metres of gas per day or 3% of Britain’s nat­ural gas out­put, and lies some 240 km east of the city of Aberdeen.

A senior Total man­ager said the firm was look­ing at two main options — drilling a relief well, which could take six months, or the faster — poten­tially riskier — alter­na­tive of send­ing in engi­neers to “kill” the leak affect­ing a plat­form that also accounts for some 5.5% of Britain’s total oil production.

But, Total man­ager David Hainsworth added: “The well itself could die on its own. This is the dream option.”

Oth­er­wise, “There are two options for inter­ven­ing,” said Hainsworth, who is health, safety and envi­ron­ment man­ager at Total Explo­ration and Pro­duc­tion UK Ltd. “One is drilling a relief well which could take about six months. The other is a plat­form inter­ven­tion to kill the well,” he told Reuters.

“This would be a faster option,” he added, say­ing a deci­sion on how to tackle the prob­lem would be taken in the com­ing days.

...

OIL AND GAS

As well as gas, Total said Elgin also pro­duces 60,000 bar­rels per day (bpd) of light crude oil, exported via the BP-operated For­ties pipeline sys­tem. Britain’s total out­put last month was 1.09 mil­lion bpd.

Britain’s energy min­is­ter Charles Hendry played down the extent of leak­ing oil, which is a light form known as con­den­sate, spread­ing over the sur­face: “Some tonnes of con­den­sate have escaped,” he told Reuters. “The size of the sheen is one-sixteenth of the size of an Olympic swim­ming pool.”

“Any leak we take very seri­ously and I think the right mea­sures have been taken What we’ve iden­ti­fied, pro­ce­dures appear to have been fol­lowed properly.”

...

Hainsworth said that some weeks ago Total engi­neers had decided to pump in mud to pip­ing on a gas reser­voir that had been plugged about a year ago. This recent oper­a­tion appeared to have been resulted in the escape of gas: “We believe the leak is com­ing out of the outer cas­ing of the well,” Hainsworth said.

The leak­ing reser­voir is above the pro­duc­tion reser­voir, which lies 6,000 metres — nearly four miles — below the seabed.

“WELL FROM HELL”

British offi­cials said the gas, con­tain­ing poi­so­nous hydro­gen sul­phide — famil­iar from the smell of rot­ten eggs — should dis­perse in the atmos­phere. But it poses a risk to any­one close to the source, mak­ing cap­ping the well complex.

Poi­son in the gas could also threaten fish and other marine life nearby, although the rate at which it dis­si­pates in air and water meant it was not a sig­nif­i­cant threat to peo­ple on land.

Envi­ron­men­tal cam­paign­ers have been critical.

“This is the well from hell,” said the activist, Fred­eric Hauge, head of Bel­lona, a lead­ing Nor­we­gian group that closely mon­i­tors the oil indus­try. “This prob­lem is out of control.”

Plat­form staff had strug­gled for 14 hours to con­tain the leak before hav­ing to evac­u­ate early on Mon­day, said Hauge cit­ing anony­mous sources involved in the inci­dent whom he said Bel­lona had spo­ken to. “They saw the sea bub­bling with gas under the plat­form,” he said. “This is quite shocking.

“This sit­u­a­tion is only going to get big­ger and bigger.”

...

@Pterrafractyl: If that gas well explodes, there could be a Fukushima tsunami sit­u­a­tion all over again......

I not sure the shrimp are the only blind species talked about in this arti­cle.

Get your new and improved shrimp: Now with nat­ural lubricants!