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Live Video Streams of the Deepwater Horizon Well Integrity Test

After a 24 hour delay, BP has begun testing the integrity of its upgraded cap at the site of the Deepwater Horizon well blowout.

I have gathered a number of live feeds showing the subsea operation. To view them, you’ll need a recent version of Flash installed on your computer (and a browser with a Flash plugin). Unlike many of the official BP channels, which are distributed in Windows Media format, these feeds should work on most desktop operating systems — including Linux.

Testing of the 75-ton cap assembly resumed late Wednesday after a government review concluded that the operation wasn’t likely to damage the well bore, an event which would make the permanent closure of the well more difficult. If engineers are satisfied with pressure measurements, a system of rams would remain permanently closed, effectively containing the flow of oil until relief wells are completed.

The feeds appear below. Feed quality and availability depends on their sources.

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Latest ESA satellite images show spreading oil slick

Images captured over the weekend by the European Space Agency show a rapidly spreading oil slick advancing toward landfall on the northern Gulf Coast.

In the smaller detail — an optical image resolved Sunday by ESA’s  Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer — dense oil swirls near and immediately north of the wrecked Deepwater Horizon site. Darker bands of thinner oil spread northeast of the main slick, paralleling the Alabama and Florida barrier islands. A sharp white band of clouds from a spring storm system approaches from the west.

The black and white image below was also captured Sunday by Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). Unlike visible photography, ASAR images are capable of 24-hour operation, even through cloud structures. The radar imaging is particularly effective at resolving the smoother ocean surface of an oil spill area.

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In the time it takes to read this sentence

In the time it takes to read this short sentence, another 20 gallons of crude oil will have escaped from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Signs of the times: An oil sheen forecast with your local weather

Pity it comes to this. NOLA.com, which is affiliated with the Time-Picayune newspaper, is now running an “oil sheen forecast” side-by-side with the weather.

I’m not happy to see the slick approaching my own beaches here in Pensacola. Local emergency management officials expect its arrival Tuesday or Wednesday. Meanwhile, hundred of volunteers turned up on Pensacola Beach this afternoon to do a pre-spill cleanup (which should make it easier to clear oil later). I’m proud to live in this community.

Hat tip to Andy Revkin and his always-excellent Dot Earth Blog at NYT.

Hoax of the Day: The Deepwater Horizon was destroyed by a North Korean mini-sub

No, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform wasn’t destroyed by a North Korean minisub, and there is no “press blackout” keeping this story from the American people. Because it’s a hoax.

It seems a pity to debunk such a preposterous tale. But the story is already being reported as fact on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s really no more outlandish than the persistent rumor that “eco-terrorists” somehow had a hand in the biggest environmental disaster of recent memory. That hasn’t stopped the conspiratorially minded from embarrassing themselves all over the web. Or Rush Limbaugh, who also couldn’t help himself.

This hoax begins like many others …

…With an unverifiable source and allegations of a sinister cover-up:

A grim report circulating in the Kremlin today written by Russia’s Northern Fleet is reporting that the United States has ordered a complete media blackout over North Korea’s torpedoing of the giant Deepwater Horizon oil platform owned by the World’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean that was built and financed by South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. Ltd., that has caused great loss of life, untold billions in economic damage to the South Korean economy, and an environmental catastrophe to the United States.

Ah, yes: Russia’s Northern Fleet. Not exactly the sort of chaps you can phone-up to source a story. That didn’t prevent the EU Times from running it. They’re a bit like those tabloids you can’t help browsing in the supermarket checkout line — only a bit less reputable.

Within this ponderously run-on sentence, there are a few grains of truth. It has been speculated (though by no means proven) that some sort of crude NK mini-sub might be responsible for the March sinking of the South Korean patrol vessel Cheonan. The Deepwater Horizon was also constructed in a South Korean shipyard, and the Gulf spill is, indeed, an environmental catastrophe.

Then it gets weirder

The story goes on to claim that a North Korean cargo vessel bound from Havana to a port in Venezuela deployed a min-sub, which then torpedoed the BP-operated platform. As a grand finale, it blew itself up beneath the flaming rig two days later, sending the Deepwater Horizon to the bottom and provoking a possible nuclear retaliation by the United States.

Offered as corroborating proof: President Obama dispatched SWAT security units Wednesday to Gulf oil platforms. This is true, though it’s difficult to imagine what small arms teams would do about a mystery fleet of mini-subs.

Sorcha Faal strikes again

Though the EU Times doesn’t attribute its source, a quick Google reveals the author to be Sorcha Faal, the well-know internet hoaxer. For perspective, some of Faal’s recent potboilers:

• Parliament Of Owls Gives ‘Final Warning’ To America
• US Quake Test Goes “Horribly Wrong”, Leaves 500,000 Dead In Haiti
• Ring Of Fire Eclipse Gives Grave Warning To World
• Norway Time Hole “Leak” Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos
• “Who Are They?” Russian Scientists Ask About Mysterious Objects Near Sun

Little green men, earthquake machines, and an accusatory congress of raptors. Entertaining stuff, but not a pedigree which lends much credence to the North Korean mini-sub story.

That this is an obvious hoax won’t spare your inbox a few weeks of ominous-sounding chain letters (no doubt punctuated by ginormous red headlines, yellow ribbons, and eye-searing animated American flags). But feel free to pass when asked to stand your turn on the coastal watch. The North Koreans aren’t coming.

Deepwater Horizon well may be leaking faster than expected

A troubling report via USA Today:

On Thursday, the size of the slick was about 1,150 square miles, but by Friday’s end it was in the range of 3,850 square miles, said Hans Graber, executive director of the university’s Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing. That suggests the oil has started spilling from the well more quickly, Graber said.

The official NOAA/US Coast Guard estimate is that about 1.6 million gallons of oil have spilled since the April 20th explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. But officials have been careful to point out that these numbers are simply an educated guess. The rate of the leak was upgraded by a factor of five Wednesday night.

Ian R. McDonald is a Florida State University professor and biological oceanographer who studies the ecology of deep-sea hydrocarbon seeps. His calculations indicate that the Deepwater Horizon blowout may be leaking at a much higher rate than officially stated. As of last Wednesday, McDonald said his read of Coast Guard data and satellite images would suggest 8 to 9 million gallons of crude had already been spilled. That’s about five times higher than the current NOAA/USCG estimates.

As of Saturday, oil was ashore near Venice, Louisiana. Mississippi and Alabama cleanup crews are readying for the slick to arrive over the weekend, pushed north by a strong storm system now over the central Gulf. Florida Governor Charlie Crist was in Pensacola today, checking on the state of local readiness. Oil could reach the Panhandle’s sugar-white beaches Monday or Tuesday.

Image: Oil approaches the Gulf Coast on Thursday, 29 April (ESA/Envisat)

Sarah Palin can still ‘believe’ in Drill, Baby, Drill

Say what you will about Sarah Palin: She’s consistent, even when she’s poisonously wrong.

As what will likely prove to be the defining disaster of the Oil Age creeps toward the beaches of the northern Gulf Coast, most of the “Drill, baby, drill!” crowd is unavailable for comment. But not Palin. In a rambling note on her Facebook page entitled Domestic Drilling: Why We Can Still Believe, the half-term Alaskan governor doubles down on her famous catchphrase:

I repeat the slogan “drill here, drill now” not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences.

So it is not naiveté or disregard for the obvious risks of a dying petroleum industry which fuels Palin’s drilling fervor, but hubris. Behold cultural self-immolation as an act of religious faith.

Jeff Rubin gets it, too

But, then, he always did:

If you’re wondering why we’re risking catastrophic environmental consequences by drilling wells miles below the ocean floor, the answer is simple enough. It’s the same answer to the question of why we’re pouring billions of dollars into the tar sands.

It’s all that’s left.

This is what I mean when I talk about the Minimalist Century. Things are changing, and we’ll change with them. It’s more a question of survival than ideology.

As the era of cheap oil squeaks to a halt, three things will happen:

1. We’re going to pay a lot more for essential energy-based products and services
2. We’ll abandon or reduce or consumption of non-essential energy based products and services
3. As it becomes obvious that there are fewer things in the first category and more things in the second than can be sustained with our current lifestyles, we’ll finally get on to the job of crafting a 21st century culture

Rubin is right: the reason we’re engaging in such dicey and expensive deep water drilling is simple desperation. Despite what the calendar says, we’re still living in the 20th century. We need the oil. Up to this point, we’ve accepted the petroleum industry’s assurance that modern technology minimizes the chance of incidents similar to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which dumped 80,000 barrels of crude on California beaches.

The Santa Barbara spill was a convulsive national event, often cited as the birth of the modern environmental movement. The Deepwater Horizon spill — vomiting 5,000 barrels of crude from almost a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico — is likely to be far worse. This will cause us to reassess offshore drilling’s calculus of risk. It might be that we decide the exchange is simply too expensive, both in terms of economics and ecology.

If so, Deepwater Horizon will prove a milestone on the road to the Minimalist Century — a tragic example for the next generation of environmentalists and policymakers.

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