This well, Deep Water Horizon, which has ruptured, is the single well that never wanted to be drilled. There are many stories from people who were on the rig saying this was the well that Mother Nature didn't want to give up. The earth was resisting and this is very clear now.
It's been confirmed from a number of sources, one of them is a friend and colleague of mine, Matthew Simmons, who was formerly the world's largest energy investment banker, that they were drilling on BP's orders without a casing. They were drilling some 12 to 16 thousand feet below the surface of the seabed. And the casing is probably the most critical thing because they were drilling at that depth into sedimentary sandstone, limestone rock that's quite soft and porous. So you need that casing in order to allow the drilled mud to circulate down through the drill bed and then bring up the debris to prevent the bore hole from collapsing on itself. And that is exactly what happened in this case.
Apparently, they had tried two or three drills earlier and this created, as it were, a pimple, an infection on Mother Earth's skin at that level. And without the casing, what happened? I pieced together from 70 to 80 sources from both the mainstream as well as professional journals, such as Oil and Gas and The Oil Drum, that when the bore hole collapsed on itself, it was a temporary plug, but it was a softer porous rock full of fissures that was only going to last for a short period of time. But what happened was that the oil, and especially the natural gas--the methane we are hearing about, which is very deadly--exerted enormous pressure and then spread out laterally over a number of square miles creating, if you will, a boil on the sea surface.
And this is where I'm very angry with President Obama, the government, the Coast Guard, and everybody involved. They are still leading people to believe that there's only one leak from a single wellhead when in fact we have a multitude of leaks. Several leaks, one three or four miles west, have been confirmed. So what happened is that this boil exploded and there is more than just the single leak from the wellhead. You have other leaks, and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida has asked about them. These are confirmed but nobody is addressing them.
There is little or no hope of containing all the oil. And what's particularly offensive to me is that apparently the White House has caved in and when President Obama recently made his speech he basically confirmed peak oil without saying the words. He said we're running out of reserves on land--that's the classic definition of peak oil. Everything that's happening in the Gulf now is designed to capture oil so that they can sell as much of that oil as possible.
In the meantime I think a million gallons of Corexit has been used. It's a deadly substance banned in Europe. This dispersant when applied on the surface of warm water evaporates quickly into the atmosphere. It changes from a liquid into a gas, and we have many reports now and photographs showing up on the internet of unexplained crop damage. Leaves are wilting, turning colors all over the region as a result of the Corexit. So you have three separate toxins that are flooding into the Gulf. I and a few others were a month ahead of people saying this leak is not 5,000 barrels a day. It's closer to 100,000, and of course we finally confirmed that. So now you have the oil at an unknown rate, let's say 100,000 barrels which is safe at this point. You have methane. This is a very high volume methane well and methane at those depths deoxygenates the water. It reacts with the water and creates huge dead zones from seabed to sea surface killing all life because ocean life still needs oxygen to survive. And then you have the Corexit.
What's happening in the Gulf now Gary is that this is an environmental disaster that makes the WorldTradeCenter pollution pale in comparison, and by God that's hard for me to say because I saw some of the after effects and I've met some of the people from 911.
The US government should be providing protective gear and getting people out of the area. Every pregnant woman should be moved out of that region. We should be moving young children, the elderly and the infirm out because this is a catastrophe that is going to lead not only to dramatic ecological damage and the poisoning of people but to a total economic collapse for the region because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association charts now show very clearly this oil spill is going to continue. It might continue for as long as two years, and that whole region is dead economically.
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