Video: Author Matthew Simmons with Spitzer & Dylan Ratigan -- May 26, 2010
Watch the entire clip if your time allows. Otherwise start at 6:30 or so, when Simmons begins. He estimates that if BP's top kill fails, and no other alternative is found, that the ruptured well could leak for 9,000 days (24 years).
At the start of my career I was an oil & gas analyst for Alex Brown (now part of Deutsche Bank). I still follow the industry and have been emailing a few old drillers about solutions. I've been advocating, and shown in a second clip (inside), the solution is to drop a bomb down into the pipe that is big enough to collapse the sea floor and smother the leak. The Russians have done it at least 6 and possibly as many as 9 times, and they did it with nuclear weapons. Simmons advocates for the same.
It might sound radical, but so does 9,000 days of gushing oil. After top kill, the next option is firing golf balls and debris into the leak. After golf balls and tire shreads fail, there is no other option besides collasping the sea bed. And that will require that a nuclear bomb be detonated beneath the ocean floor.
And Obama must be aware of it as an option, as he sent an advance team of nuclear scientists to the Gulf a few days ago.
Simmons also mentions a Purdue analysis showing possibly as much as 120,000 barrells leaking daily, just a tad higher than BP's marketing lie of 5,000.
Great interview.
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Video: Nuke the leak and collapse the sea bad
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