"RBM" wrote in news:4bddbca0$0$22544$ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:
He's right;you saw awhile back how high gas prices drove up costs for much of our everyday usage items and affected peoples lives.
It seems the way we "deal with it" is to enact more laws and restrictions on the citizenry,instead of PRODUCING more energy ourselves.
and losing our freedom in the process.
Drill,drill,drill. and build more nukes,ASAP.
aemeijers wrote in news:fpidnXzVZ4beR0DWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
I wasn't aware Louisiana HAD beaches.... ;-)
Some commentator on the radio said this spill would cost between $5 and $15 billion dollars. I don't have a lot of faith in that number, nobody can really know at this point. But to put it in perspective, BP had $13 billion in cash and short term investments at the end of the quarter. They have a net worth (assets minus liabilities) of $104 billion with very low debt. So they have enormous borrowing capacities.
The Financial Times estimates insurers are going to lose about $1.5 billion from this.
Transocean (the rig operator) and Halliburton (the contractor cementing the well when the blowup occurred) have deep pockets, too. Not as deep as BP, but deep none the less. Transocean has $1.3 billion cash and short term investments, Halliburton, $3.4 billion.
As for tanking the economy, think it through. Where is the clean up money going to be spent? In the economy. It is going to buy equipment, supplies, and labor. For the short term (the next couple of quarters) it is likely to contribute slightly (less than .1%) to GDP growth. For the longer term, it will hurt slightly because the money is being spent for cleanup instead of being invested in more productive uses like more drilling.
-- Doug
You're asking the wrong guy, but it seems likely to me there will be uncompensated damages. Here's an article that says Federal law, passed after the Exxon Valdez incident, limits BP liability for other damages to $75 million.
I know this spill will be hard on lots of people. It will also be a boon to others. The radio was just saying they are hiring clean up people at $48 an hour.
No, and I'm skeptical. When I was at Prince William Sound in 1993, the active clean up was finished and the fishing industry was booming again. There are still some lingering effects from the spill, but scientists are debating how significant they are.
Don't misunderstand me. This is a disaster of biblical proportions. Although it is not yet as bad as the Valdez spill. That one dropped 250,000 barrels of oil. At the current rate of 5,000 barrels a day, it will take 50 days to equal the Valdez.
But it is not going to tank the economy and probably not isn't going to bankrupt BP.
-- Doug
Well, Katrina/Rita did make a lot of them go bye-bye for awhile (along with a couple of beach towns that flat disappeared), but the corps of engineers and mother nature have been replenishing them. I saw some aerial shots of beaches I have walked, right after the hurricanes. The waves were lapping up onto the marshes. Not really beaches as we usually think of them- more like a shallow ridge between the shallow mudflats and the marshes where the ducks live. In western LA, you can walk out straight from the shoreline far enough that it is hard to recognize people, and still only be chest-deep in water. It is beyond flat there.
Published by the MIT Review:
.."The Deepwater Horizon's BOP is a 450-ton set of hydraulic rams that straddles the wellhead, just above the seabed. When the well blew out last month, sending oil and natural gas up the well, signaling from the rig operators or loss of communication with the surface should have automatically released pneumatic pressure stored in the BOP's tanks, driving it to mechanically crimp or shear off the well pipe and close off the well."
..."BP is planning to drill through 18,000 feet of rock to reach down close to the bottom of the leaking well."
"Andy Radford, a petroleum engineer and senior policy advisor for offshore issues at the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group, says BP needs to drill deep to create a relief well with sufficient mass to counteract the force of flowing oil. "You have pressure coming up the well from the producing formation. It's thousands of pounds per square inch coming up the hole. You need to be able to overcome that pressure with the kill fluids. The deeper you intersect, the less pump pressure you need to overcome the pressure of the well coming up," says Radford.
In a worst-case scenario, the force of one relief wells will prove insufficient, requiring drilling of a second, adding further delay."
Yup. And the first order of business should be to kick BP out of all US operations. One plant explosion in Houston, now this. They have the worse safety record in the business.
Let them drill/refine elsewhere, how about hmmmm... Britain?
Huh? It's @ 10% now, and expected go lower by 1% both in 2011 and again in
2012.
Have they come up with any serious solutions? All I've heard is 1) send robots down to try the shutoff valve
2) drill at an angle, hope to get close to the oil bearing fissure that the original well tapped, and pump in concrete.Wouldn't a humoungous load explosives at the surface close the gusher?
The official unemployment rate is slightly less than 10% but "unemployment" is defined as "those looking for work."
When you add people who have given up looking for work and those who are grossly under-employed, i.e., a PhD in Chemical Engineering compounding Slurpees at a Stop & Rob, the number is in the 20% range.
Or, more likely, open it further.
It wasn't "expected" to go above 8%. Obummer said so, remember?
There are two (well more than that) numbers in play here. The so called "U3" number is the one that is usually talked about. This is the number of people actively looking for work (just under 10%, currently). The "U6" number is the number of people who have given up or are "underemployed". This "U6" number is now about 17%.
Here is a (fair?) comparison over the last century:
Nature will find a way to clean it up in a few years.
Meanwhile the lawers will haggle for about 10 years before anyone has to write any substantial compensation checks. In that time the accountants at BP will get this future expense on the books and real losses will be reflected into the stock price as earnings are reported, etc. In the end a few lawers will make out like bandits but most of the folks affected will get undercut on their real losses.
The only thing we really have to fear is the govt stepping in and trying to make it "better".
Today BP got its first, of many more to come, insurance payments,
401,000,000.00 million. BP has netted about 5 Billion a year, each year, in 08-09. BP is probably worth 100s of Billions and you think so stupidly they will fail. No they will pay the US people their profit, for many years and contimue to pump oil.
"Substantial"? "Compensation"? In my personal experience, no one will have to write any checks, period. I'm still waiting for my "reimbursement" for the $3k+ I spent treating my two cats who were poisoned by Chinese gluten/melamine in the Iams cat food I fed them. I'm part of the suit, sent in all the paperwork, and supposedly the suit has been settled. HowEVER, since there are still "motions" pending, it will be months, years, or never until I see any money. They "say" that we can get "up to 100%" of our out-of-pocket expenses, but I figure the lawyers will get paid in full and I'll be lucky to get $5 per cat. That almost pays for the cost of photocopying the paperwork and the postage to mail it. Almost. Doesn't compensate me for the loss of my 16 year old cat who was on track to live another 4-6 years (based on my other cats' typical live expectancy). My 11 year old has already turned completely white in the muzzle and the vet doesn't expect her to live more than 5 years, given her on-going medical problems. So, shorten a cat's life expectancy by more than 5 years and you don't even have to pay the medical expenses. Typical.
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