[zombiejimmorrison]

^^

Quote:

Released the crew as part of a presidential pardon after 100 days of detention. The Arctic Sunrise itself was released from Russian detainment in June 2014

Harsh but they deserved it. Trying to board an oil rig. Sanctimonious activists really get on my nerves.

[RedPillUK]

The story in that video is pretty crazy.

The French secret service blew up a ship that was protesting French nuclear bomb testing in the south pacific.

Do you think they deserve that and the French should be allowed to blow up islands in peace? I don't think they're all a bunch of lame SJW's after watching that video now.

[Mekorig]

Greenpeace is a very big scam, they leech on morons who think they are "helping the planet" with their donations, while they only help GP board pockets.

[komatiite]

Scotian, I can understand your apathy towards “Big Oil.” I don’t think that the playing field is fair in Alberta for example – the majors such as CNRL, Suncor can basically run amuck without regard for the Alberta Energy Regulator’s rules for things like surface casing vent flow, gas migration, casing gas venting, flaring, etcetera. What the hell is the AER going to do if they threaten enforcement? Murray Edwards will just say he will fire a bunch of people to finance proper mitigation. 

Another thing that I am quite appalled by is the current mess of suspended wells in the province. Check out this CBC article from a couple weeks ago: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/al...-1.3032434 .

The article is inaccurate because there is a difference between a suspended well and an abandoned well. An abandoned well has been plugged downhole with cement and the upper casing string is cut off, capped with a vent and buried. Abandoned wells are good – they have been dealt with and are a minimal risk to the public. However, a suspended well is just a shut-in well with the wellhead still sitting on a pad that is overgrown with weeds and rarely, if ever, checked by field personnel. There are often still engine shacks on the lease and the pump is still downhole. They are supposed to be chained up and monitored for things like surface casing vent flow but it’s difficult to enforce, and still leaves us with potential downhole fluid flow risks. What if the casing of the well was cemented poorly? Microannuli form between the casing and cement or the casing and borehole during poor cement jobs (ie, when drilling mud wasn’t flushed out with spacers and flushers prior to pumping cement), forming poor bonds with the rock. This allows non-biogenic gas at depth to migrate to surface and biogenic gas formed by microbial action near the surface to be released into the atmosphere. This is especially dangerous in sour areas, and are extremely expensive to fix. You have to drop down a perforating gun to the depth you believe gas migration is occurring, and squeeze cement into the new perfs. But how can you determine the depth? You can run cement bond logs to isolate zones with poor cement bonds, but is the gas even coming from that depth? It’s not like there is a database of the distinct chemical signatures of various gasses sourced from all of Alberta’s rock formations. Here’s a pic of a cement bond log, it uses an acoustic tool to determine where you may have poor cementing:



Companies prefer to just let the wells sit as shut-ins because they all hold on to hope that one day someone will buy them out, but what if they go bankrupt before? Then the Orphan Well Association is stuck with them, and although industry funds it (which is bullshit because why should a good operator who plays by the rules have to deal with the mistakes of their completion?), with the growing number of wells that are becoming orphans, at some point the taxpayer will get stuck with the bill, which is also very fucked up. Not a very good way to build trust and transparency between industry and a public that just voted in the vitriolic anti-oil NDP party. Immediate action needs to be taken to ensure all wells are abandoned if certain production parameters are not met or if the well has not been active for a certain duration of time. It’s not an insurmountable problem by any means, but a lot of headaches will be eliminated by educating operators on the importance of sound well integrity engineering – standards need to be set by the AER that are much more stringent on abandonments and suspensions. Some operators don’t even run casing centralizers when running casing – look at this pic:


Look how lopsided that casing job is- no doubt that well experienced some sort of gas flow up the poor cementing between the both the production string & intermediate string, and the intermediate & surface strings. Centralizers just make sure those strings are centered so you get even cementing across the entire circumference of the casing pipes… but they aren’t legally required by the regulator. Most companies are really starting to focus on it now, but we still have thousands of wells from the 20th century that didn’t even know about issues like this when they drilled wells.

Keep in mind, this whole topic just relates to Alberta – and we have the best regulatory standards in the world, far superior to any American entity like the Texas Railroad Commission! Imagine places like Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations where nobody gives a fuck about the environment or public safety… 

I just wish that instead of having a bunch of hippies hanging off bridges, an open dialogue could exist between people in the industry who actually give a shit about issues like this and the general public. I think I speak for the vast majority of oil industry people when I say we may be pretty conservative politically which can give us a bad reputation, but we love the outdoors and feel sick whenever pipeline spills or serious gas leaks occur which could harm the beautiful Canadian countryside, not to mention affect the livelihood or personal health of any person who may be exposed to any of this in rural areas. There are a few bad apples and greedy bastards in the industry who try to cut corners, but the vast majority try their best, because in a reputation-based industry like this, your “name is your name” in the words of Marlo! I always have to reiterate this -  other than uranium (which is demonized in its own right despite being emission free), there are NO viable and cheap alternatives to oil and gas. People get their panties in a knot over things like wind or solar energy, but there are serious downsides to these forms of energy people don’t realize. Check out neodymium extraction methods in China (Rare earth mining) for the supermagnets required in wind farms: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2...-pollution . There are also similar downsides to solar power… Not to mention the uncompetitive costs and government subsidies required to implement this technology. 

Anyways, that’s my take on Big Oil and all that jazz… 

PS: Anyone interested in Greenpeace history should check out the story of its founder, Patrick Moore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Mo...mentalist)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...roots.html
http://www.amazon.ca/Confessions-Greenpe...0986480827

[scotian]

^I really need to stop posting after I come home from the bar, as usual great info Komatiite, I know that you're passionate about the oil industry and I am too but I"m really starting lose faith in it. How pathetic is it that a newly installed pipe has spilled so much oil and may have been leaking for two weeks? I don't agree with Green Peace because they are too extreme and their tactics put themselves and others in danger but when I read about how incompetent oil companies can be sometimes it blows my mind. I'm not sure how the pipe leak occurred but I've worked on lots of piping systems in the oil sands and wouldn't be too surprised if Nexen cut back their inspection program to save money. Meanwhile Suncor released their second quarter results and their profits are up a whopping 30% but the big oil sands companies are putting pressure on unions to make major cut backs in our wage packages, we'll see what happens but as I mentioned above in my rant above, I"m making an exit plan to leave Alberta and the oil biz in the near future.

[komatiite]

^I can't even comment like a noob regarding pipelines, I have literally zero experience with them. I wish I could branch off into other industries but I doubled down on a skillset that is prone to volatility, I'm oil 4 life. I don't even know what else I'd be interested in. Maybe mining but I can already imagine how that would go. I'd become a Flin Flon lifer or something. Knock up some fat girl I'd meet at the Victoria Hotel on Karoke night and drink myself to death! Fuckin Christ.

Can't Greenpeace just leave the oil patch Alone? We are already up shit Creek with a turd for a paddle, we don't need any more bullshit!

[roberto]

(07-31-2015 07:19 AM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

^ Also true, some of the more 'hardcore' tree hugging groups have labelled greenpeace as sellouts. In logging greenpeace no longer does blockading of logging operations that is done by smaller more radical groups.

I also disagree that environmentalists like greenpeace are a necessary evil. A forestry example is that if you treating the forest like a garbage can you are 'poisoning the well' and will fuck up your future harvests the same way a farmer would by depleting their farm fields/soil. Medieval german forest managers figured this out and didn't need a bunch of hippies to travel back in time to tell them.

I also never see killing people as a necessary evil. The original tool of logging protestors were tree spikes...pieces of metal driven into trees that would destroy chainsaws or sawmill blades when they hit, killing and maiming loggers and mill workers.

In the UK we have the forestry commission which mandates that all felled woodlands must be replanted with suitable trees. Plans for restocking must be in place before felling can commence (felling license). Over here a landowner will have no problem getting a felling license to drop ten acres of 80 year old oaks. Once oaks get much past 100 years old they're no use for timber anyhow, too much shake (splits in the grain). The problem is, because the trees are older than the local people they can't see it for what it is- a harvest of a crop their forefathers took much time and effort establishing, after the last crop 80 years ago. Their houses were probably built with that last harvest ffs. But yuppies and city folk just don't get it.

The FC is actually a hangover from the days of the First World War, when wood was essential to Britain's war effort. These days it keeps the value of woodland lower than arable land, and prevents woodland from being converted to housing or farmland easily. Where you don't have these controls (destruction of rainforest to create grassland for example) is where the likes of Greenpeace should be focusing.

I'm not so sure logging spikes were designed to injure workers. It's very unlikely that a chainsaw chain breaks when hitting metal, and if it does there are multiple things on a saw to stop it from reaching the logger. What logging spikes will do is make the timber much less economical to harvest. A new chain for a large logging saw is £20 to £30. Consider that many loggers are self employed and paid piece rate on production (supplying their own saw and consumables) and you can see why they would want to smash the tree huggers.

[Kingsley Davis]

"The Environmental Protection Agency mistakenly released 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from an abandoned mine into Colorado's Animas River. That number is three times its original estimate."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/10/us/colorad...ver-spill/