The Bay of Rigs.

I knew Obama's Oval Office Speech was going to be a progressive propaganda piece, but I didn't think he would be stupid enough to say that they were drilling in mile deep water because we are running out of easy oil. Boy was I wrong! After weeks of pundits talking about the reason why they were drilling out that deep was because the Feds were forbidding them to drill where the easily accessible oil is, it's now obvious for someone as clever as he is he thinks that he can pull the wool over the Americans eyes he is a fool.

The BP Oil Derrick Violations.

I have heard a few people and groups talking about violations of the BP Oil Derrick that exploded and sank on April 20th, well I looked somethings up and found out that the Derrick was inspected in February, March and on April 1 that turned up no violations at the Deepwater Horizon. You can find the original AP report here.

While trying to find a list of the Violations I found these, the list and information comes from Ordons News;
MMS Records Show BP Has Previous Deepwater Violations;

"MMS slapped BP with $41,000 in fines in October 2007 after a series of violations related to a near-blowout five years earlier. In November 2002, the Ocean King rig, operated by Diamond Offshore Drilling, in the Gulf had to evacuate all 65 of its workers for nearly two days after operators detected a dangerous rise in gas pressure. The rig, which had been drilling at a depth of more than 5,000 feet, didn't resume work for nearly a week, according to the MMS report."

"Unlike last week's disaster, workers were able to keep the well from leaking by using cement and mud to plug the well. The same subcontractor, Diamond Offshore, was also used when BP was fined $25,000 in 2004 for bypassing a gas detection system while drilling. A BP spokesman in London says the company still uses Diamond Offshore as a contractor."

"In the 2002 incident, the MMS said that BP and Diamond Offshore were unaware that some of the key safety procedures they used to initially stop the dangerous rise in pressure could have contributed to a blowout. The MMS cited BP for what it called "no formal procedures" and "no written guidelines" to follow in case of an emergency. MMS also cited BP and contract workers in the incident for what they said was a "lack of knowledge of the system, and lack of pre-event planning and procedures."

"In separate incidents, BP was also fined $75,000 in 2003 for not having adequate water pressure on one rig's fire protection system as well as another $80,000 fine for bypassing safety alarms that could have indicated dangerously high pressure, similar to what caused the near-blowout in 2002, according to MMS data."

"Fines for serious incidents, like blowouts, can often total millions of dollars. In 2008, Pogo Producing Company was fined more than a half million dollars for a November 2006 blowout. In that incident, oil was blown out of the flare boom and covered the rig in crude, leaving an oil slick 16 miles long and close to a mile wide."

Also the rig had a couple of safety awards;
"Ironically, MMS recognized BP in 2009 and 2010 as a finalist for "outstanding safety and pollution prevention" in an industry "SAFE" award ceremony scheduled next month. MMS figures show OCS drilling operators paid about $919,000 in fines for safety violations in 2009, down from $2.2 million in 2008 and $3.1 million in 2007, when record oil prices led to higher demand for rigs and drilling workers. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, many of those employees received inadequate training before working offshore on a oil drilling platform."

As you can see the serious violations are somewhat easily found but the others aren't, I have heard there are almost 400 violations, but I can't find a full list and I suspect that if I found the full list most of those violations might be silly ones such as a loose toilet site that hardly seem as serious as the others.

Solomon

The Oil Company Profits and the Truth Bill O’Reilly Ignores.

First I know someone, or more then one, is asking what is your issue with O’Reilly? I don’t have a problem with O’Reilly exactly, I have a problem when he spouts liberal, progressive, and populist ideas. I will go in-depth on that in a separate article.
Now to the point of this, first some quick numbers we use 200 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually, if we were to multiply that number with the average profit per gallon of gasoline, $0.10, we would only get 20 billion dollars, so where does the oil company’s big profits come from? First is the misunderstanding of what a barrel of crude oil produces many seem to think you take a barrel of crude oil and turn it into a barrel of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and kerosene and then you mark up the price and claim a barrel of excuses of why it costs so much. The truth is far more extensive.
Here is a percentage brake down of a barrel of crude oil, approximately 45 percent of all crude oil is refined into gasoline, 7 percent is refined into diesel fuel, and another 7 percent into jet fuel. Fuels for heating and energy production account for approximately 26 percent of all refined petroleum. 13 percent of petroleum proportions serve as raw materials in manufacturing, these "petrochemicals" are used in manufacturing cosmetics, detergents, drugs, fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, synthetic fibers, and hundreds of other products in the marketplace. And such products as lubricants and specialized industrial oils account for the last 2 percent of petroleum production. Also by-products of petroleum refining are also used as raw materials in certain industries, these by-products include asphalt, the chief road building material, and
wax, an essential ingredient in such products as candles, milk cartons, and furniture polish. As you can see removing oil from our modern civilization and society right now, as those on the environmentalist’s side want, would have disastrous results.
The problem is that the oil companies don’t defend themselves, for whatever reasons they have, my suspicions are, based from when I talked to O’Reilly on his now defunct Radio Factor show and how he has treated Neil Cavuto and other conservative economists, the probably look at it from a lose-lose point of view. If they were to go on with him he would brow beat them, dismiss any points they try to make, and claim things like profit margins are smoke and mirrors.
Here are the profit margins for some big well known companies, Microsoft’s is almost 30%, eBay follows at 21%, Google’s is approximately 19.5%, which is followed by McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer all around 18%, Apple comes in at 15% (this might go down if the iPad falls on its face), Disney comes in at 12%, AT&T 11%, GE 10%, Nike 9%, and the Health Care industry sits around 3.3% so where do the oil companies sit in this list? With Nike at 9%, Exxon Mobil and Chevron both have a profit margin of 9%, which means for every dollar they pull in only $0.09 of every dollar is profit, now how’s that for gouging?
So how do you get the profit margin of a company? First you take a company’s profit, lets say Joe’s Book Store has a profit of $255,932, you divide that by the total dollars the store takes in, lets say that Joe’s Book Store pulls in a total of one million dollars this year, that would be $255,932 divided by one million which would equal 0.255932, move the decimal over to the right by two spaces and you get the profit margin percentage, Joe’s Book Store would have a profit margin of 25.56%. As you can see its fairly simple especially with a calculator.
So why don’t you hear these things from the mainstream media? Simple, they are made up of liberals, progressives, and populists, in addition to believing that the oil companies are evil, greedy, and polluters that want to destroy the earth, they have an agenda the same one the original progressives and Marxists had over one hundred years ago, one where the socialists make the decisions what is good for you and if it "harms" you, society, or the planet you can’t have it, they might even ban it. The problem is they are elitists who use emotion as a weapon, if they say it’s bad, you are to march lockstep with them and if you don’t you get yelled down and called names to shut you up.
People like Bill O’Reilly are caught up in that emotion, they don’t stop to calm down and look at the facts. They let the liberals, progressives, and populists use them without knowing it, thinking like O’Reilly does they are protecting the people from the greedy. The solution to this problem is simple, we need to get these people to calm down and look at the real numbers & facts so they will realize that they are being used.

Solomon.

Ethanol - The Gas Substitute that Can’t. And Other Options.

So why am I doing this now, you are probably asking, well the other day I found my old notes on Ethanol when I was calling into the Radio Factor when O’Reilly believed, I think he still believes it, that Ethanol could solve the problem of high gas prices, which it can’t. His "winning" argument for Ethanol was "well Brazil is doing it."