White House Halts 'New Drilling' Until Cause Identified

[Capt Brian]

http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=91971

[Jemplayer]

Just freaking great, as things start to finely pick back up the White House has to go and throw a wrench in the works. Granted this is a game changer and things will change because of it, but this is a knee jerk reaction just like the TWIC cards were to 9/11.

I hope Oboma dosen't bow down to the people who will use this as an excuse to limit or even completely stop drilling. Sadly though I doubt that will be the case.

I'm tired of seeing us import so much oil and export so much of our wealth when we have all the oil we need right underneath us. Sorry for the bad pun but this is the only problem that we CAN dig ourselves out of as we develop the technology needed to get us off this fossil fuel addiction. Also the jobs created by drilling and then the associated production are sorely needed right now help put this country on the right track economical.

[Marc0]

According to the news this morning, this is "the largest spill in US history." I have no idea if that's true or not. It doesn't really matter. The headline on CNN.com is "Disaster Feared on Gulf Coast."

There will defintiely be major changes coming.

[PMC]

I would hardly call this a knee-jerk reaction. A rig catches on fire and sinks in 5,000 feet of water. THe spill is gigantic and still growing. There is no proven solution for shutting down the leaking oil. And the oil is washing ashore threatening the environment and the economy. I would bet that a week ago, the drilling industry would have collectively said: "Nah, that could not happen".

[AXXX9]

...more likely the industry is saying "we wish this wouldn't have happened."

[TxKingfisher]

I would hardly call this a knee-jerk reaction. A rig catches on fire and sinks in 5,000 feet of water. THe spill is gigantic and still growing. There is no proven solution for shutting down the leaking oil. And the oil is washing ashore threatening the environment and the economy. I would bet that a week ago, the drilling industry would have collectively said: "Nah, that could not happen".

There was no proven solution before the incident either, but that didnt stop any drilling!!! This was a failure that was ENTIRELY withing the scope of concievability and had happened before (i.e. the one that went down off the west coast of Mexico and went uncontrolled for over a year) but THAT didnt stop any drilling! This is ABSOLUTELY a knee jerk reaction. There are easy solutions that could be put in place right now to greatly improve the safety of drilling.

Here's a few that I have come up with and I'm not a smart man..... just imagine what the massive brainstorming power of the government could come up with if they tried (that last part was sarcasm folks)

1) How about a 2 BOP's separated by a spool piece 2X the length od the tool joints. That way if one BOP lands on a joint, the other one wont and we wont have the kind of failure that is so far the most popular theory about the failure of the BOP in this case.

2) Train commercial fishermen on the gulf coast to be first responder vessels for spill response like is done in alaska. MSRC is doing all they can, but a handfull of MSRC boats skimming is a complete load of bullshit! Imagine what a few thousand shrimp, oyster, longline, and other types of fishing boats could have done.

3) Have a plan and equipment in place for an uncontrolled well like this. A way to cut the drill string (broco on an ROV?) and grab it with a grappling hook and drag it out of the way leaving the wellhead clear (reasonably clear anyway) of debris, then have a big ass coffer dam / diving bell looking thing, like they are building right now for this incident, already built and ready to go so they can drop it over the top of the wellhead and pipe the oil and gas safely to a barge or storage facility on the surface.

I know this is monday morning quarterbacking, but MMS and the Coast Guard have had all of eternity to come up with a resonse plan for a failure of this magnitude and they obviously did a horrible job.