Chu-Done-It?

Obama Minion Chu Told BP to Proceed With Dangerous 'Top-Kill'

Energy Secretary (and, of course, Winner of the Nobel Prize) Steven Chu told The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach that he was responsible for convincing BP that the well had NOT lost integrity.

The Post reported Chu said, “BP engineers had assumed, after the ‘top kill’ failed, that the well had a loss of ‘integrity’ somewhere down below the wellhead, with breaches that let the mud from the operation surge into the rock formation instead of straight down the well.”

According to the article, Chu said, “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, there’s another scenario,’” after which he suggested, “They could close the well and see what happened.”

Chu added, “The worst-case scenario is you create a fissure that doesn’t heal, and the entire reservoir empties.”

“By choking the flow at the top, the pressures could build to such high levels that the oil and gas could explode laterally, through the well casing. The hydrocarbons might flow into the surrounding formations and then work their way up, into the gulf,” reported Achenbach.

What have we here? I've been concentrating on demonizing BP for screwing up at every juncture in the Gulf oil disaster. I had only been criticizing the Soetorobama administration for doing nothing nothing to help and for stalling any meaningful cleanup and any proper investigation. Now I know why they are reluctant to let the truth come out. It's worse than I thought.

Steven Chu, who serves under Dear Leader Soetoro as head of the Department of Energy, encouraged BP to continue the very dangerous "top-kill" operation, even after BP engineers voiced their concerns that doing so could fracture the sea floor, making an already terrible disaster very much worse. Mr. Chu's bizarre reply, before telling them to go ahead and pump even more mud and cement under pressure into the rock formation:

“The worst-case scenario is you create a fissure that doesn’t heal, and the entire reservoir empties.”

Allow me to translate the situation for you. BP said to Soetorobama that they did not want to proceed with the second "top-kill," after the first attempt failed entirely. Barry told his minion Chu to do everything he could to make the Gulf oil disaster story go away before the November elections, so the brilliant Nobel Prize Winner rolled the dice and told BP to continue.

As the engineers feared, and as Chu and his boss hoped wouldn't but knew might happen, that high-pressure pumping indeed fractured the well casing to an even greater extent than had been done by the initial kick that doomed Deepwater Horizon, and the oil and gas from that giant petroleum reservoir is indeed leaking out through the sea floor at countless locations up to 20 miles away from the well sites.

Now we know why the government are cooperating with BP in trying to lie to the public that 76% of the oil magically disappeared. It was the government that all but ordered BP to continue the top-kill. And that procedure, while allowing the outward appearance of a neatly capped well with nice, clean water around it, caused something much worse than even the gushing well before its cap -- as Mr. Chu predicted, fissures have been created which will not heal. And the entire reservoir will not empty -- I must hold him to task since I'm a mere college graduate with a degree in hard science and he received the Nobel Prize...

Unless the sea floor breaks up entirely, in one massive, simultaneous shattering event, not all the oil and methane will get out. Just most of it. Because of the pressure of the water sitting on top of the reservoir, it will continue its slow leaks until such time as the pressure in the petroleum deposit equalizes with that of the water. But that's bad enough. Maybe Mr. Chu should go back to school and stop meddling in affairs in which he has no special education. It may have been his enlightened advice to BP which will end up meaning the Gulf states enjoying years and years of oil to come.