“Some scientist at a university studied a sample of the oil and determined that it isn’t light crude.”
Something still seems amiss here: why would they need to take a sample after-the-fact to determine what type of crude is coming from the individual wells, when the EIA has supposedly been keeping track of all of the relevant data on crude sent to refineries for ages? I would think from a pricing standpoint alone, if the crude wasn’t light crude that this should’ve been known before.
And as I said in an earlier comment, it looks like the Coast Guard is trying a new skimming method- hope for the folks in the Gulf that it works.
Something still seems amiss here: why would they need to take a sample after-the-fact to determine what type of crude is coming from the individual wells, when the EIA has supposedly been keeping track of all of the relevant data on crude sent to refineries for ages? I would think from a pricing standpoint alone, if the crude wasn’t light crude that this should’ve been known before.
Bingo!
Good points. One thing is this wasn’t a production well. It was an exploratory well (though they planned on pumping it later). So maybe the EIA hadn’t been tracking it or something. Or, maybe BP and the EIA knew it was heavy crude and that the skimmers would be ineffective. Maybe that’s why they declined the offer of the skimmers.