The American people expect your companies to have a technological response to this disaster on par with the Apollo Project, not Project Runway.
That’s Rep Edward Markey in the BP congressional hearing last week.
I’ve been fascinated by this oil spill and the lack of solutions to stop it. You can watch the recently released videos of oil and natural gas just spewing out of a big hole in a pipe on the ocean floor. An estimate of 200,000 gallons are leaking each day. And they don’t know how to stop it? It seems unfathomable, doesn’t it.
And meanwhile we have all involved parties blaming the other. The reason for the spill was an accident - a well blowout which caused an explosion. There is a “blowout preventer” that is supposed to clamp down and cut off spilling oil in the event of such an accident. BP’s internal documents show their blowout preventer was broken - there were at least four significant problems on a device that can have 260 possible failure spots. How is there no backup plan for a device with 260 possible failure spots? So now BP is blaming the manufacturer of the device, Cameron, and Cameron is likewise blaming BP. More props to Obama here - he was angry at this blame game, stating “I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else.” Right on.
So how is it that there is no solution? BP’s plans to stop the leak have proven unsuccessful - a huge dome to cover the leak, a smaller top hat to capture escaping oil and siphon it to a ship, heavy chemicals to break up the oil. They’ve come up with a “junk shot” of golf balls or old tires, or a pipe inserted within the broken pipe to divert the oil backwards. They even have a suggestion box, and have received 60,000 calls and over 10,000 tips, 700 of which have moved on “to the next phase.” One of which was a project backed by Kevin Costner, who since 1989 has been funding a project led by his scientist brother to create a centrifuge that separates oil from water. BP just yesterday agreed to test six centrifuges. If you build it..
