The Obama delayed response to the oil le…

The Obama delayed response to the oil leak – Rush and others are overplaying this issue, forgetting the facts or not understanding the process.

When you drill in 5000 feet of water, you don’t have “legs” 5000 feet long that the drilling equipment is standing on. The rig floats on the surface and uses thrusters, anchors and cables and other techniques to keep the rig relatively stationary. There is then 5000 feet of pipe to the wellhead and another 18000 feet (in this case) below the surface.

They were in the process of capping this well. It was not to produce oil, but to confirm there was oil. Pressure from 23,000 feet below started to exceed the weight of the drilling mud in the shaft, pushing the mud back up the shaft. That was the warning to close the blowout valve, but there was equipment in the hole. There was a provision at the wellhead to cut things in the shaft but either they didn’t tell the cutter to cut or it didn’t work.

When the blowout happened, the piping was probably still intact. Oil was spewing out the top and most of that was burning off. The original small estimates were probably close to correct.

But a couple days later, things changed. The drilling platform sank. That left the 5000 feet of pipe connected to the ground, and no platform on top, and extinguished the burning oil (temporarily). The platform sinking undoubtedly did lots of damage on the way down and complicates getting the equipment down there.

Despite Fox News wanting to hype the story, in the end there will probably be relatively little environmental damage, and the government’s response hasn’t been that big of an issue.

Remember during the first Iraq war, almost every oil well in Kuwait was set on fire. It was going to take at least a year to put the fires out and there was going to be so much soot in the air all the animals were going to die and the global climate was going to be disrupted. None of that happened. Once the area was secured, the oil industry found a new way to put out oil fires using the thrust of a jet engine to blow the oil away from the flame. In a matter of a few weeks, all the fires were out.