Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico - Historic Disaster

[RobertSmalls]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

This is an epic disaster. Some people are predicting that the oil cannot be stopped, and it will continue to gush until the oil/gas is depleted, OR until the pressures are equalized! By BP's own estimate, that would mean that about 50 MILLION BARRELS in total will be in the water.

That is 2,100,000,000 GALLONS of oil, and who knows how much methane....

There's no way the entire field is going to bleed out for decades until it's dry. The relief wells will be completed by the end of summer, and the experts' consensus is that that will be just about the end of the oil spill.

Assuming a million gallons a day all summer, you're looking at roughly a cube 270ft on each edge.

Originally Posted by redyaris

The price is always right... when some one else is made to pay!

BP will be made to pay $1100-4300/bbl per the Clean Water Act. The fine per barrel depends on whether or not they are found to be "grossly negligent". That will be a $5 billion to $20 billion fine, on top of any liability claims they're made to pay, plus cost of the cleanup, lost revenue from the oil that's spreading across the Gulf unsold, and the loss of the $0.5 billion Deepwater Horizon.

BP doesn't have many friends right now, and I don't think they'll be able to talk their way out of any fine that the government wishes to hand them.

[Piwoslaw]

I remember when BP started buying out RE companies it said it's no longer British Petroleum but is now Beyond Petroleum.

[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Not to worry.
The invisible hand will take care of everything.

Or just flip us the bird...

[redyaris]

The problem of course is that any billion $ fine that BP pays we pay when we buy fuel and oil. Fortunatly for many of us on this site we pay disproportionately less. Let me tell you a storey about years of legal rangeling about billion $ fines which take up enough time for BP to earn all the money they need for the original fines and the legal costs... how long will that take? 2 years or 5 years? you be the judge...
I am always amused by people who complain about the price of fuel and want the government to step in to keep the price down so they can keep driving there gas guzzeling vehicle. For my part; like so many of you, desided long ago to reduce my need for the stuff. Does that make me a tree huger, an economist, or just an other ecomodder...?

[trikkonceptz]

To me it looks like the fines are mearly gestures to appease the masses. Why? Because as soon as this goes down the price of gas will take a jump which will undoubtedly repay the oil companies for this disaster.

Why not freeze the price of gas and reduce it every week this continues? Make the companies take real loses that cannot be recovered in the next quarter? Or make part of their fine an agreement to invest agressively into alternative fuels to reduce our exposure to these mistakes.

Seems like our gov has no teeth rearding the oil business, I say push the auto manufacturers to create alternative energy vehicles and pass the bill for R&D directly to the oil companies as a result.

Ahhh to dream ...

[jkp1187]

Originally Posted by trikkonceptz

To me it looks like the fines are mearly gestures to appease the masses. Why? Because as soon as this goes down the price of gas will take a jump which will undoubtedly repay the oil companies for this disaster.

Why not freeze the price of gas and reduce it every week this continues? Make the companies take real loses that cannot be recovered in the next quarter? Or make part of their fine an agreement to invest agressively into alternative fuels to reduce our exposure to these mistakes.

Seems like our gov has no teeth rearding the oil business, I say push the auto manufacturers to create alternative energy vehicles and pass the bill for R&D directly to the oil companies as a result.

Ahhh to dream ...

Why on earth would you penalize companies that didn't have a hand in this disaster?

And, of course, the real result of price controls is SHORTAGES, which will effect us poor folk far more than the fat cats who own the oil companies. Although since our entire economy is dependent on oil, this would be a good way to bring harm to, literally, everyone who directly or indirectly uses it.

If you want real retribution, the lawsuits forthcoming (there was a plaintiffs' attorney conference last week,) will hit BP, and hit it hard. But I'm not much on railing against Big Oil in the abstract, because the truth is Big Oil only has the power we give it, and as long as we're burning oil for energy, using oil for lubrication, buying stuff made of plastics, or using any one of a number of petroleum by-products, Big Oil is US.

[dcb]

Judge orders Exxon oil spill payouts: Oil | adn.com

It took 20 years for the fishermen to get penny 1 from the exxon incident. It was a 5 billion dollar penalty, but all they paid was 151 million so far. The fishermen got $5k apiece.

[ShadeTreeMech]

This is from the wiki article on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The BP wellhead had been fitted with a blowout preventer (BOP), but it was not fitted with remote-control or acoustically-activated triggers for use in case of an emergency requiring a platform to be evacuated. It did have a dead man's switch designed to automatically cut the pipe and seal the well if communication from the platform is lost, but it was unknown whether the switch activated.[59] Regulators in both Norway and Brazil generally require acoustically-activated triggers on all offshore platforms, but when the Minerals Management Service considered requiring the remote device, a report commissioned by the agency as well as drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness.[59] In 2003, the agency determined that the device would not be required because drilling rigs had other back-up systems to cut off a well.[59][60]

What that tells me is that the morons in our gov't are more directly responsible than initially thought. Shouldn't they have required this remote device, as other countries had?

[dremd]

I'm with you shadetree, but I think the root cause is in essentially letting the industry become the government regulators and then having corruption on top of that.

[dcb]

BP, the operator, failed to stop the oil. Bush was an "oil man" and regulation went to hell. We all use ridiculous amounts of the stuff.

Exxon gets fined 5 billion, the gubment lets them pay 151 million 20 years later. Consumers are stupid.