BP battling cracks & told Feds in Feb: Bloomberg

lost circulation zones (the "cracks" described in the title) are a part of drilling. there are times when too mud mudweight (or additional pressure on top of the mudweight) can break the rock near the wellbore, resulting in a fracture. there are also naturally occurring fractures as well.

once the fracture has formed, there are a variety of mud additives that can be used to seal it, w/ an ultimate solution being cement. having to execute multiple cement squeezes is not necessarily an indication of using "the wrong kind of cement" as stated in the article. synthentic based mud (which they were using) itself acts as a cement retarder, or the cement volumes pumped may not have been sufficient on earlier attempts.

furthermore, the comparison between the Blackbeard well and this well are really not apt. Stating "they damn near blew up the rig" because they without additional information as to the kick they would have taken is also really not appropriate. Just because you went to the MMS and explained you were having a well control situation, does not in and of itself mean you are on the verge of an imminent disaster, as is implied in the article.

Not trying to schill for BP, just trying to provide some context. well control situations and lost circulation zones are a fact of life in drilling operations, and are handled safely and responsible everyday. all of us in the industry are anxious to understand exactly how this got so unbelievably out of hand.

Alright then. Here's Foxnews covering it.

Attack them as being liberal Democrats if you wish. It's your credibility...

News is news no matter how much you would like to deny it.

Foxnews -- Known Conservative News Source Points Out that Government and BP knew

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In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February. Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."

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Here's another non-liberal source reporting financial shenanigans:

Constitutional Republican Party

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Firm’s stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment The brokerage firm that’s faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP. According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter. If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman’s holdings — meaning that Goldman’s remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.

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Why was Heyward selling some of his stock prior to the explosion? Probably just a coincidence.

Insider trading?

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Tony Hayward cashed in about a third of his holding in the company one month before a well on the Deepwater Horizon rig burst, causing an environmental disaster. Mr Hayward, whose pay package is £4 million a year, then paid off the mortgage on his family’s mansion in Kent, which is estimated to be valued at more than £1.2 million.

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And finally, Karl Denninger does a nice write on the above stories, connecting the dots if you will. Check it out... BTW Karl is ANYTHING but a liberal. Thanks.

God's Work?

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Again:

Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig." So here are my questions, which I believe we all deserve answers to:

1. Did Goldman or Mr. Hayward know this?

2. Did they sell stock with knowledge of material inside information that had not been disseminated to the market?

Just curious, mind you....

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there are a bunch of kooks on almost every message board. Like this one for example. Between LSURYAN and TXTiger for example.