From TheOilDrum (keep trying, their servers are overloaded)
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
This is from an oil industry insider I consider quite credible. She was definitely right about everything in her last post. If she’s right about this one, we may finally start to get a true picture of what’s going on. —
There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10’s of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf.
We also set individual wells as satellites and pipe them back to existing platforms. These stand-alone wells are called caisson wells. 90% of those in the storm path are bent over, rendering them a total loss.
We utilize platforms as gathering hubs. Damage to a hub means everything going to the hub is offline indefinitely. There are +/- 15 HUBS missing. MISSING!! As in we cannot find them from the air.
Boats are usually brought into harbor to weather storms. We do not have a boat count yet, but from the initial reports, we may have lost or grounded 30% of the Gulf of Mexico fleet.
We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm.
YEARS, people. I know what this means – hope everyone else gets it too…
In the mid 70’s I roughnecked on land drilling rigs in West Texas. Roughnecks are the crew on a drilling rig. One day there was a serious screw up, the shift boss dropped the blocks, and 2,000 feet of drilling pipe broke off and went to the bottom of the 3,000 foot well. Getting it all out took specialized equipment and a couple of weeks. And this was on a little bitty land rig, not a monster offshore platform with 100 wells on it.
Many of those offshore rigs probably had crews on them too.