Because it might reduce the corporations' profits by a buck or two.  Poor babies.

You don't understand --- nothing like this had ever happened before.  Therefore, it could never happen.  Therefore, the corp could cut all the corners it wanted.  What was important was saving a dime.  What was not important was drilling responsibly and safely.  And after all, regulators are not going to dive down and double check all is as it should be when it is obviously not leaking any more than any other well and the disaster plans on paper for one corp look like all the other disaster plans for all the other corps.

Having worked for corporate USA, my experience is that most upper management wants the corp to earn more money - at least on paper if not in actual fact.  Each CEO wants to put their stamp on the corp so as to earn bigger bonuses.  They are not interested in a corp that is healthy 10 years or even 5 years down the road because they intend to be long gone.

And not a single one believes that their actions will have any impact on the environment that could possibly affect them personally.  No more gulf shrimp?  Who cares?  We'll just buy it from elsewhere.  We can afford it.  All those shrimpers out of work?  Man that is real sad. 

And that is the extent of their concern.

Today I was in a train on my way home and some guy there had read newspaper.
He said, that Americans invented special a car that runs on water.
The only problem is, that the water must be from Mexico gulf.

Well, I already knew about the Ixtoc spill. It is after all on the list of largest spills on wikipedia.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the parallels are quite striking. So if it has happened before, then why did the government not pass regulations on blowout preventers already? Come on, it was huge. Probably the current spill will be closed down before it breaks the record that Ixtoc represents.

Strictly speaking, there have been two even larger ones but they were so different as to really be in other categories. Number two on the list was Kuwait after the first Gulf war. That hardly counts as preventable. Number one was called the Lake View gusher, which was on dry land in 1911. Again, too different to qualify.

But back to the blowout preventer. We know that they can fail. Ixtoc showed that and made what will possibly be a bigger mess than the Deep Water Horizon. I say that because I have been looking at what is going on and it looks like the relief wells are already about two thirds of the way down. It took the drillers in Ixtoc half a year to do that. That and the fact that lessons were learned in Ixtoc. More should have been learned but oh well.

In any case, given what we did learn, how damned hard would it be to make a rule that BOPs need to be tested in situ? Really, make a duplicate of what you intend to use, drop that on the ocean floor and let it work. You can fish it out later on for study but you will know for a fact that it is going to do the job. Depending on the details of how they work, I would imagine that they can be rebuilt so the same one could be used for testing and actual deployment.

These are the only references I can find with something vaguely resembling real numbers.

Let's see.....

19,000 barrels per day * 48 days ( Apr 22 to June 8 ) = 912,000 barrels

57,000 / 912,000 = 6.25% captured

If you prefer, we can go from when top cap was deployed, about May 28, 29?

19,000 * 10 days =  190,000

57,000 / 190,000 = 30%

Okay, 30% is not nothing, but I personally would say it was less than half-assed when desired would be closer to 0% leakage.  Ask the shrimpers and oyster men for their preferences. And, of course, the estimate for barrels of oil per day have increased by at least 2.  http://scienceblips.dailyradar.com/story/experts-double-estimated-rate-of-spill-in-gulf/

Do you have some better numbers?  I am not meaning to argue about whether or not the news report was accurate, as I think everyone has been exaggerating, from whichever view point.  But I am curious about what is at least an approximate rate of capture vs rate of loss.  Thanks.

It worked fine, Ken.  You get a gold star.  I don't know how likely this is - I'm not a geologist, and I wouldn't even pretend to be a 4+ miles under the surface of the ocean-petroleum-geologist.

But one of the scenarios I found the most terrifying about global climate change is the possibility of release of the methane gases already trapped under the oceans due to changing salinity from increasing temperature.  There is a theory that one of the ancient global extinctions was due to just the gases under the North Sea being released in a huge explosion.  I'm going to have nightmares now. 

I'm sure we will get a number of people posting how this is impossible now.  I sure hope they are right.

Depends on the video player.  Just post the link to the website instead.

People who go on about "if you drill it in the US, it should stay in the US" don't know about fungible commodities sold by international oil companies on the World Oil Market.  Many people don't understand about international companies, period.

This is not easy to change.  As long as congressmen are bought out by corporations, no laws will be enacted to change what is a very profitable system.  In the US, as long as corporations are considered legal individuals, they will have the right to freedom of speech.  As long as they have freedom of speech, we can not limit their campaign/PAC/lobbying contributions.  This was a Supreme Court decision.  Which means the congressmen in the US will stay bought.   Moveon.org ( yeah, I know it is left of Karl Marx <roll eyes> ) is getting up a campaign to do exactly this.  Take away the legal fiction that a corporation is a person.  It is no such thing, never was a person, is impossible to be a person.  Maybe then, we can get some decent limitations on corporate buy out of our representatives.  Do we really need endless hours of political advertisements funded by corporations?