New Oil Rig Explosion in Gulf…

Targeted???? ~jude

Afghanistan Finds 1.8 Billion-Barrel Oilfield…GEEZ!!! Wonder what all that Infranstructure building over there is for???…

We’ve talked before about the purposes of war and the fact that railroads and infranstructure has been being built by not only the US; but England, China and others interested in the wealth of minerals, poppy, and oil….Does anyone really think that this was a brand new discovery? Start connecting the dots…Most of these mineral “Tenders” have already been snagged by China~We provide the blood and they will provide the development moneys…This is your Hope and Change hard at work…

~jude

by Eltaf Najafizada (Updates with analyst quote in seventh paragraph.)

Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) — Afghanistan discovered an oilfield containing an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of crude in the north of the country, a Mines Ministry official said.

If proven, the resource would be more than ten times the size of the country’s oil reserves, assessed at more than 150 million barrels by the U.S. Geological Survey.

“A huge oil resource, which looks like a triangle, with an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of oil, has been discovered by Afghan geologists in cooperation with international geologists between Balkh and Sheberghan provinces,” Jawad Omar, a spokesman for the ministry, said in a phone interview today from the capital, Kabul.

The field is a new discovery and was not among those found by Russian exploration companies, Omar said. Further research will be carried out in the next six months and the field will be tendered once all investigations are completed, he said.

The U.S., which has spent $27 billion since 2002 training Afghan forces, is promoting development of Afghan resources in an attempt to stabilize President Hamid Karzai’s government, U.S. Deputy Under-Secretary of State Paul Brinkley said earlier this year. During an Aug. 13 video teleconference, U.S. President Barack Obama and Karzai discussed the need to jointly keep the pressure on the Taliban and to build Afghan capacity.

Tenders

The country itself lacks local knowledge to get the oil itself, according to Sayed Masood, an economics professor at the University of Kabul .

“Lack of capacity, lack of capital, lack of skilled people means that Afghanistan cannot extract the reserves itself,” Masood said in a phone interview today.

Afghanistan plans tenders for more than five mineral and energy projects by the end of 2011, including gold, copper, iron ore, gemstones, marble, lithium, oil and gas, Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani said in June. The nation’s mineral wealth may total $1 trillion to $3 trillion, he said. U.S. officials estimate there are untapped minerals worth about $1 trillion in the country, the New York Times reported on June 14.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-15/afghanistan-finds-1-8-billion-barrel-oilfield.html

BP’s Insidious Coverup and Propaganda Campaign: Out of Sight, Out of Mind…The Rest of the Story…

Dahr Jamail’s Dispatch

The rest of the story… hopefully you already read this …~jude

Since BP announced that CEO Tony Hayward would receive a multi-million dollar golden parachute and be replaced by Bob Dudley, we have witnessed an incredibly broad, and powerful, propaganda campaign. A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow themselves to be used to transfer the propaganda, like the New York Times, this message: “The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.”

The Times was accommodating enough to lead the story with a nice photo of a fishing boat motoring across clean water with several birds in the foreground.

This message was disseminated far and wide, via other mainstream media outlets like the AP and Reuters, effectively announcing to the masses that despite the Gulf of Mexico suffering the largest marine oil disaster in US history, most of the oil was simply “gone.”

Thus, it’s only what is on the surface that counts. If you can’t see it, there is not a problem.

This kind of government cover-up is nothing new, of course.

Death Gyre’ in the Gulf…The Corps Saga Continues…

It’s funny when one thinks about public perception, journalism, and pictures of disasters over the history of time. LIFE magazine and National Geographic used to do gruesome pictorials of dead bodies in whatever was the tragedy of the moment…I guess we got used to seeing dead bodies over the years; but I’m also guessing that masses of dead WHALES… well …that would be a whole different matter altogether…

Were we too focused on the amount of oil being leaked? I think that was the whole idea…

~jude

Firsthand accounts and leaked photos of a secret BP processing facility — possibly for dead animals — point to a massive cover-up in the Gulf. An exclusive report.

June 10th was a strange day. In a surprising move, the Coast Guard instituted a dramatic expansion of the “no-fly” zone over the Gulf, preventing major media outlets like the New York Times and even scientists with top government clearance from accessing the area. This caused a wave of journalistic uproar and bewilderment on the part of researchers like Edward E. Clark of the Wildlife Center (above) who had been invited to study the impacts just prior to the media blackout.

More distressing than the media blackout itself was a lingering question in my mind … what on earth could be so BAD that the U.S. government would risk losing credibility in the minds of journalists, the scientific community and the general public to ensure concealment? Was the sea floor cracking? Was a giant cloud of benzene going to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard? Had Godzilla emerged from the sea to wreak havoc upon us all? One thing was clear … we weren’t getting the story.

Since no one has yet been able to get this individual to go on record (and the Facebook post was eventually taken down) this can’t be taken as hard evidence, but it does beg the question … just how many animals have died because of the worst oil spill in U.S. history?

According to the latest count of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Daily Collection Report (PDF), only about 4,100 birds, 670 turtles,70 sea mammals, and 1snake have died in the Gulf since April 20 (assuming 50 percent mortality of live animals).

It’s an astonishingly low number, considering that one of the largest pods of sperm whales in the U.S. resided just miles from the site of the BP Macondo well (aka Deepwater Horizon), a region home to one of the most abundant and biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world.

Compare those small numbers with the Exxon Valdez spill … Best estimates put the toll of the far smaller oil spill in Alaska at more than 200,000 birds (including hundreds of eagles), more than 3,000 sea mammals, more than 20 whales, and billions of fish eggs. The accident permanently wiped out the herring population of this Alaskan Gulf region. And that was an accident 1/10th the size of the Deepwater Horizon.

The final tally of the BP oil spill is almost 5 million barrels of crude, compared to only about 500,000 barrels for Exxon Valdez — a 1:10 ratio. Yes the Alaska spill happened closer inland, but the oil was not fully integrated with the water column as in the BP gusher (a far more pervasive and deadly scenario) and neither were thousands of tons of highly toxic dispersants like Corexit, a chemical that has, ironically, been banned in Britain because of its impacts on wildlife and human health.

Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE – Largest Ever….

The area of hypoxia, or low oxygen, in the northern Gulf of Mexico west of the Mississippi River delta covered 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles) of the bottom and extended far into Texas waters. The relative size is almost that of Massachusetts. The critical value that defines hypoxia is 2 mg/L, or ppm, because trawlers cannot catch fish or shrimp on the bottom when oxygen falls lower.

Re: ShoreBank –The Change America Voted In / true but sad at the same time…

By: “A SOURCE”

As always I remind readers that this has been going on for quite some time under Presidents of BOTH parties… ~jude

So . . . you think you know quite a bit about Obama and his band of thieves.
You don’t know anything yet.  Read on all of this as it all comes together in the last part……..  a must read.

-
This is an interesting story put together from various articles and TV shows by the British Times paper.  It shows what Obama and his friends are really all about.  It’s not hope and change, it is money.

I warn you, the first part is a little boring, but stick with it. The
second part connects all the dots for you (it will open your eyes). The end explains how Obama and all his cronies will end up as
multi-billionaires.  (It’s definitely worth the read.  You will not be disappointed).

Green light: Chinese oil spill, British seas and BP’s Photoshop faux pas…

• Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 July 2010 17.48 BST

Oil washes ashore in the port of Dalian, China, 20 July 2010. Photograph: Jiang He/Greenpeace /EPA

Chinese authorities stepped up their efforts to disperse a major oil slick in the Yellow Sea yesterday by mobilising 800 fishing boats to help the clean-up operation.

The flotilla will join the 24 specialist ships that have been spraying dispersal agents, soaking up crude with panels of absorbent felt and using a floating barrage to prevent the slick from contaminating the beaches near Dalian.

Investigators have also launched a probe into the pipeline explosion that caused the seepage on Friday night and has subsequently forced the authorities to restrict access to Dalian Xingang oil terminal.

A 300,000-tonne crude oil tanker, owned by Singapore Pacific Petroleum which was unloading its cargo at the time of the accident, has been held for checks.

The domestic media said there have been safety concerns at the port for some time.

An environmental protection bureau study on the petrochemical industry in 2006 identified five projects at the Dalian Xingang Port as potential risks, according to Global Times.

Economic activity in the north-eastern port has been seriously disrupted. Six “very large crude carriers”, with about 12m barrels of oil, were expected to be diverted, possibly to South Korea or other terminals in China with the capacity for such large vessels. Ships carrying imported corn have also been forced to dock elsewhere.

Thousands of firefighters have doused the flames and port engineers have staunched the leak, but the clean-up mission will take at least four more days, according to the domestic media.

Officials said the dispersal operation was making progress despite rough seas. Considerably smaller in scale than the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the slick has reportedly shrunk by more than a third from its peak of 50 square kilometres.

But local reporters said the crude was evident on nearby beaches, where patches of sand and rocks were coated in a layer of oil.

The leak is likely to add to persistent calls for tighter environmental regulation in China. The need for improved standards was also highlighted by a toxic spill from a copper mine in Fujian month that poisoned a major river, killed countless fish and threatened the drinking supplies of downstream communities.

The director of the Environmental Inspection Office, Zou Zhimin, told the local media that the state council – China’s cabinet – have arranged inspections of safety standards at petrochemical sites across the country.”

BP accused of ignoring internal report of Deepwater leak

Just as nightmare appears over, and cap on leaking well is holding, British firm’s official gives damaging testimony

Should a hurricane strike the Gulf of Mexico this weekend, work on cleaning up the oil slick and blocking the well would be disrupted. Photograph: Dave Martin/AP

BP came under fresh attack last night amid accusations that it had ignored internal safety reports of a leak on the Deepwater Horizon rig and had not used industry best practice for avoiding oil spills.

The news comes just as BP officials were hoping that their long nightmare was starting to be over as the new cap on the leaking oil well appeared to be holding firm and working well.

There had been concerns that the cap might damage the stricken well and allow oil to burst out of the seabed. However, BP officials said there was no evidence of oil from the damaged well forcing its way through cracks in the seabed. “We do not have any anomalies or evidence that we do not have integrity [of the well],” BP’s senior vice-president, Kent Wells, told reporters.

But, while the capping of the well may be going well, developments onshore continued to prove what an enormous task BP faces in trying to repair its public image. In Louisiana an investigative hearing into the leak heard testimony from a BP official who said the firm had ignored warnings ahead of the disaster.

Ronald Sepulvado, a BP well site leader, said he had reported a leak on a critical safety device at the rig to more senior company officials, but it seemed his warnings had not been passed on to the government regulating body, the Minerals Management Service.

“I assumed everything was OK, because I reported it to the team leader and he should have reported it to the MMS,” he told the hearing. The leak was on a control pod connected to the blowout preventer on the rig, whose failure proved critical in causing the disaster.

A congressional committee in Washington heard testimony from Gale Norton, interior secretary under former president George W Bush. Norton said BP had ignored rules put in place in 2003. “If regulations on the books and industry best practices had been followed properly, there might not have been a blowout,” she said. “It appears that BP violated all those regulations that were on the books.”

BP officials know that their best hopes lie in permanently sealing the well. A relief well being dug alongside is almost finished. “The relief well is exactly where we want it,” said Wells. The relief well is set to intercept the damaged well at the end of July.

But before then BP will attempt to shoot drilling mud into the damaged blowout preventer, to seal the well from the top. A previous attempt using this method failed. Wells said that the company was seeking permission to make the effort, possibly this week.

However, bad weather is building in the Caribbean and over the Atlantic, which could become a violent storm by the weekend, meteorologists said. A storm in the Gulf of Mexico could disrupt all efforts. “We certainly are going to keep a very close eye on this system,” said Dan Kottlowski, a hurricane expert at the website Accuweather.

Finally plugging the well would go some way to ending the damage to BP’s reputation globally. But this respite is unlikely to come soon. Mother Jones, a leftwing magazine, reported an unlisted BP phone number for politicians in California to ring for tickets to sporting events and music concerts.

The magazine said that BP had given away more than $300,000 (£196,000) worth of tickets in 10 years

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/20/bp-oil-spill-cleanup-threatened-tropical-storms

Seep found near BP’s capped well: official…URGENT!! BP CONFIRM OIL/METHANE SEEPING FROM SEA FLOOR !!

Scientists are concerned about a seep and possible methane near BP’s capped oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, a federal official said Sunday.

Both could be signs of leaks in the well that has now been plugged for three days.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because an announcement about the next steps had not yet been made.

The official, who is familiar with the spill oversight, would not say what is seeping near the well. The official said BP is not complying with the government’s demand for more monitoring.

Thad Allen, the retired U.S. Coast Guard admiral in charge of the administration’s spill response, demanded BP provide results of further testing of the seabed by Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.

“When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours,” Allen said in a letter to BP managing director Bob Dudley.

“I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed.”

Earlier, BP spokesman Mark Salt declined to comment on the allegation, but said “we continue to work very closely with all government scientists on this.”

How deep were they drilling?…

The Russians first discovered that at very deep depths [actually below fossil formation] that there is plenty of renewable oil..refer here: http://projectworldawareness.com/2010/07/gulf-of-mexico-chronology-of-a-catastrophe/   http://projectworldawareness.com/2010/06/uk-backing-loans-for-risky-offshore-oil-drilling-in-brazil/

http://projectworldawareness.com/2010/06/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-bp-death-clouds-already-on-shore-giant-wave-14/