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On Face the Nation two days ago, CBS News correspondent John Dickerson asked the following question of BP Managing Director Bob Dudley:

There's been some talk about bringing supertankers in to help with the cleanup effort. Is that something BP is considering to vacuum off the oil?

Here's how Dudley responded:

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We have looked at that. It's a — we have looked at that. It's an interesting, interesting idea. Those have you — been used in the — in the Arabian Sea in the Gulf over there for spills. What we're finding with this oil, it's — it's light, it's relatively volatile. And with the use of dispersants, it tends to string out a number of miles long but very narrow. And so, as we look at this, it's — it's not the same concept to be able to work. And — and our spill responses at the surface now are being very, very effective.

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Surely about as convoluted as English can be. (One has to wonder at this point if BP's convolutions aren't purposeful.)

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Forget the president's latest Friday-afternoon jaunt to Louisiana. Here's the news that really got buried headed into the weekend: Former Shell Oil President John Hofmeister had his first substantive and detailed talk yesterday with Coast Guard officials in Louisiana regarding the viability and importance of deploying supertankers to the Gulf in an effort to recover the oil in the water before it ruins any more coastline.

Hofmeister has been extraordinarily tenacious in pursuit of this idea, and hopefully this breakthrough signifies serious movement toward action.

After all, it is not as if BP would have trouble finding supertankers to clean up the Gulf.

In all the world, there are 538 VLCC's, or Very Large Crude Carriers. The English, especially those in the shipping trade, sneer at the term "supertanker" that we Americans have popularized for these massive vessels. "It's a bad tag," a wise young tanker broker in London told me this morning. They prefer instead to describe the ship's line and its DWT, or dead weight tonnage, because those things convey more useful information. Pardon me, but I prefer the term supertanker, because in the Gulf of Mexico we've got a super problem. Anyway, VLCC is a little dry.

In any case, as of this morning, of these 538 supertankers dotting the oceans of the world, 47 were basically inert, being used for something the young English broker called "floating storage." That is, they were full of crude oil, going nowhere. And half of these are full of Iranian heavy crude, which for various reasons no one seems to want. The point of this being that we've got a glut of crude on the market at the moment, and it is cheaper to store the oil on 47 of these tankers than sell it. This phenomenon is what is known in the petroleum business as a "contango," where the delivery price exceeds the market price that you can get for the oil.

Which is all to say that were BP to get supertankers into the Gulf of Mexico to pursue a suck-and-salvage strategy (which The Politics Blog has written about extensively) to get the oil out of the water before the worst of it comes ashore — or before it contaminates the sea floor — it is not as if the company would have a difficult time finding tankers. In fact, it's not as if it would even have to divert tankers from its own fleet, and remove them from their regular runs picking up and delivering oil. Yes, diverting a tanker from commerce to cleanup will cost BP a premium, but that cost is nothing compared to the ruination of vital coastline and of whole economies.

So for argument's (and BP's) sake, let's say that when BP charters the necessary tankers (and they will have to, eventually), the tanker broker makes them a deal for $450,000 a day. And let's say that BP orders up six tankers, and for a problem the size of the one they've created, these supertankers and their pumping and storage capacity are needed for six months.

At that rate, six supertankers for six months comes to $494,100,000. Round up and call it a half-billion dollars. We are here to say that that will be the best half-billion BP every spent.


And, gentlemen, that just accounts for supertankers. There are thousands and thousands of smaller-capacity tankers that are certainly more plentiful and might even save BP a buck. Or if they get more ambitious about cleaning up the Gulf, there are even a handful of ULCC's, or Ultra-Large Crude Carriers, on earth. At 400,000 metric tons, they're even bigger than the supertankers.

But what becomes clearer by the day is that this solution, which would be difficult under the best of circumstances, gets harder as the oil in the water migrates and changes in character (thanks to environmental conditions and a million gallons of dispersant).

There is no time for further study or more data. Enough smart people think this idea is feasible and is not technically that challenging to merit trying it immediately. Unless someone comes forward with a better idea, now, the only alternative to the tanker solution is to watch the worst of the oil come ashore, and say goodbye to so much.

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Hippie Operative Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off


To our President: “Mr. President, you're a god damn, mother fucking liar. Fuck you, you cock sucking community activist piece of shit.... oh, go fuck yourself, Mr. President” ...Raptor

To Anthony, unquestionably the most civil person on this forum: “Go fuck yourself. On this matter, make no mistake. I want you to go fuck yourself long and hard, as well as anyone who agrees with you. I got no use for you. ...Raptor

To Frem: “You miserable piece of shit.” ...Raptor

To Niki: “My guess is it won't just be your ugly face you dislike.....Well, it's true......if you had a soul.” ...Raptor

...Remember, remember, the ugliest member...

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The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?

The idea has gained fans with each failed attempt to stem the leak and each new setback — on Wednesday, the latest rescue effort stalled when a wire saw being used to slice through the riser pipe got stuck.

“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, told Bloomberg News on Friday, attributing the nuclear idea to “all the best scientists.”

Or as the CNN reporter John Roberts suggested last week, “Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”

This week, with the failure of the “top kill” attempt, the buzz had grown loud enough that federal officials felt compelled to respond.

Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.

“It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

Government and private nuclear experts agreed that using a nuclear bomb would be risky technically, with unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation.

In theory, the nuclear option seems attractive because the extreme heat might create a tough seal. An exploding atom bomb generates temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and, detonated underground, can turn acres of porous rock into a glassy plug, much like a huge stopper in a leaky bottle.

Michael E. Webber, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote to Dot Earth, a New York Times blog, in early May that he had surprised himself by considering what once seemed unthinkable. “Seafloor nuclear detonation,” he wrote, “is starting to sound surprisingly feasible and appropriate.”

Much of the enthusiasm for an atomic approach is based on reports that the Soviet Union succeeded in using nuclear blasts to seal off gas wells. Milo D. Nordyke, in a 2000 technical paper for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., described five Soviet blasts from 1966 to 1981.

All but the last blast were successful. The 1966 explosion put out a gas well fire that had raged uncontrolled for three years. But the last blast of the series, Mr. Nordyke wrote, “did not seal the well,” perhaps because the nuclear engineers had poor geological data on the exact location of the borehole.

Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian, noted that all the Soviet blasts were on land and never involved oil.

A senior Los Alamos scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because his comments were unauthorized, ridiculed the idea of using a nuclear blast to solve the crisis in the gulf.

“It’s not going to happen,” he said. “Technically, it would be exploring new ground in the midst of a disaster — and you might make it worse.”

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Hippie Operative Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off


To our President: “Mr. President, you're a god damn, mother fucking liar. Fuck you, you cock sucking community activist piece of shit.... oh, go fuck yourself, Mr. President” ...Raptor

To Anthony, unquestionably the most civil person on this forum: “Go fuck yourself. On this matter, make no mistake. I want you to go fuck yourself long and hard, as well as anyone who agrees with you. I got no use for you. ...Raptor

To Frem: “You miserable piece of shit.” ...Raptor

To Niki: “My guess is it won't just be your ugly face you dislike.....Well, it's true......if you had a soul.” ...Raptor

...Remember, remember, the ugliest member...

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His parents ? Like so many other American citizens ?
If his PARENTS were American citizens......
(see where I'm going w/ this ? )

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Hippie Operative Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off


To our President: “Mr. President, you're a god damn, mother fucking liar. Fuck you, you cock sucking community activist piece of shit.... oh, go fuck yourself, Mr. President” ...Raptor

To Anthony, unquestionably the most civil person on this forum: “Go fuck yourself. On this matter, make no mistake. I want you to go fuck yourself long and hard, as well as anyone who agrees with you. I got no use for you. ...Raptor

To Frem: “You miserable piece of shit.” ...Raptor

To Niki: “My guess is it won't just be your ugly face you dislike.....Well, it's true......if you had a soul.” ...Raptor

...Remember, remember, the ugliest member...