BP Oil Disaster: "Matthew Simmons Interview Transcript"

"Matthew Simmons Interview Transcript, 6/28/10"

Transcript by Zephyr

This is a partial transcription of a June 28, 2010 interview with 30-year oil industry expert Matthew Simmons. It contains information you will not hear on the main stream media. "The following is the Bits that were transcripted by Zephyr. Thanks giving the play by play for those that have not the ability to listen."

1st bit to file:
"10 miles away from the riser are fumes coming out from an open hole that most of the scientists now agree by the size of the oil leak has to be at least 120,000 barrels a day."

2nd bit:
Matt: The govt. has no idea what to do, they are relying on BP who is lying.
Rick: You said there is a second leak about 10 miles away?
Matt: It is not a 2nd LEAK, it is the BLOW OUT...
Rick: That's the blowout? Then what are they showing on TV?
Matt: They are showing us a 22" pipe with a crack that are some fumes going about 3 to 4 feet high, and they cleverly hired all the ROV's to hang right around that thing. Then the slimy globs started showing up on beaches and the govt said, something is not right. NOAA went out and started seeing huge oil plumes.

3rd Bit:
Matt: ...hired the Thomas Jefferson to go out and inspect the plumes which were so extensive they concluded that the open hole basically has no casing left... At 4500 feet water depth which means we have about a 400-500 foot lake of toxic oil and gases that are coming out that are so lethal, it is methane, butane and is worse than mustard gas.
Rick: Then what are we looking at on tv?
Matt: We are looking at a small leak on the riser, like a leak in your radiator in your car.

4th bit:
Matt: BP created the illusion that they were the only ones with the technology to know how to solve this and the govt believed them until it became obvious there were huge plumes of oil. Govt. called them to DC.

5th bit:
Matt: BP has pulled off an amazing public relations job. I give a lot credit to the media who has given me more airtime in the last 60 days than in my lifetime to get this message out.

CNN sent the first crew out to be on the Thomas Jefferson, then they sent a crew to the ROV center in LA. So I get a call from the person directing this saying our TV crew is actually at the ROV center and BP saying "There is the BOP do have the idea that we don't know where the BOP is? Well you are looking at it." She said do you believe this? Will you ask your crew to ask BP do they really believe this little box on this 22" riser weighs 325 tons and is 5 stories high, they said well, that is confidential information.

6th bit:
Rick: So you are saying we are dealing with an open hole 10 miles away with no casing?
Matt: Yes, exactly, and the only way to deal with an open hole in the seabed of this magnitude is to do what the Russians did 5 times successfully in the 70's. They created a small low grade nuclear device and they inserted it right down the wellbore and it fused the rock to glass and it shut it in. If we don't do that we will never shut this in.

7th bit:
Matt: BP puts out press release everyday saying we have captured 22,000 brl of oil, well most of that is actually water.

8th bit:
Matt: BP believed it was a 25 billion barrel oil field and they were going for broke.
Matt: I believe unfortunately by now that basically 50% of the GOM is now a dead sea, there is no option left. 40% of the GOM is now covered with oil 4500 ft below the surface, so all we are seeing is less than 1% showing up so far.

Pray the hurricane ends but it is not going to. It is going to bring to shore the toxic oil that we have only seen 1% of and what worries me the most is that stuff is so poisonous that we should be passing out gas masks like crazy. I am told all the oceanographic people on these research vessels are now wearing gas masks.

Zephyr comments> I know this to be true as I stated above I saw a worker for a couple of seconds via an on deck camera, he was wearing a respirator mask.

9th bit:
Matt: NY times reported there has been more methane released from this than in the history of the world. Methane stuff in your lungs is worse than mustard gas, this is Saddam Hussen stuff squared. If a hurricane brings this stuff to shore, I keep saying we need to have an evacuation plan in place to evacuate the citizens of the gulf coast. This is concerning the methane that is ALREADY THERE.
Rick: You mean it is already there?
Matt: Yes, if this 400-500 ft lake gets tossed up to the surface then it could be the greatest nightmare we have ever seen, worse than any war we have ever had.

10th bit:
Rick: Is there a possibility this methane could ignite and blow up the seabed?
Matt: Actually this would be a good thing, the problem is people breathing in this methane and dying.
Rick: You mean asphyxiating them?
Matt: Yes, because it replaces the oxygen in the air.

11th bit:
Matt: If a hurricane basically comes on shore and stirs this stuff up(500 ft lake of toxic oil and gas) we are gonna paint the gulf unless it doesn't exist. Now, if BP is right this lake doesn't exist, (sarcasm), but the odds of them being right today is 0.
Rick: Or telling the truth.

12th bit:
Matt: One of the senior researchers on the TJ told me this plume is about 120 miles wide, and it starts at 4500 feet under surface of the GOM and is 400 feet in depth.
Rick: Okay, but with hurricane winds do you have any idea how far inland?
Matt: No, I don't have any idea, but at only 10 miles inland we have a disaster.
Matt: If it gets in through the bld strait then we poison the ship channel, if it gets into the intercoastal waters of LA it shuts that down.

13TH bit:
Matt: Fishermen on the east coast of florida are seeing species of fish they have never seen before they have fled the GOM.
Rick: So have we lost the GOM?
Matt: Well, I hope not, but I think the odds are pretty good that we have.

14th bit:
Matt: Look, lets take politics out of this, governments are not prepared to deal with a crisis such as this. You don't elect govt. to deal with crises unless you are in the middle of a war, there is not a wide body of people in Washington who understand this stuff.

15th bit:
Rick: If you lived on the gulf what would you be doing right now?
Matt: Either evacuating or getting a gas mask.
Rick: Wow those are two wonderful options.
Matt: Yeah, very sad, this is the saddest story I have ever even read about. This could make the civil war look like a trivial incident in US history.
Rick: This is pretty dramatic, Mr. Simmons, I mean really.
Matt: Well, you just have to add the facts up and and see how many people live along the Gulf Coast, I don't even know, 10 million, 20 million people? Because you are talking about Brownsville all the way down to the Florida Keys.

16th bit:
Matt: The real worry here is the hurricane, people are acting like Alex is the only hurricane that is going to hit this year. It is not, this is going to be a high hurricane season because of the temperatures in the GOM.
Rick: This is amazing, I am, um um, pondering this, what um this means for all of the people, we have a lot of listeners along the Gulf Coast, I am, um um...
Matt: I can't tell you how sympathetic I am, these are the pioneers of our fishing industry.

16th bit:
Matt: BP was really hoping the primary oil would be Louisanna Light which is the primary grade of those oil fields which is very high quality oil, what they actually unfortunately found was a really ugly form of crude laden with asperteens which is what asphalt comes from.
Rick: Um hmm.
Matt: If it had been LA light it all would have come to the surface. BP figured as long as we get dispersants we will spray them and put the whole thing out, they bought this banned dispersant for cheap because they thought it would get rid of the oil but it didn't, it can't, it just added to the toxicity.
Rick: What about the dispersants and the sea mist?
Matt: Don't worry about the dispersant, they are MINOR compared to the toxic crude.
Rick: I read several years ago, that scientists had discovered asphalt volcanos in the GOM, is there a possibility that BP drilled into a volcano?
Matt: They could have actually, not drilled into a volcano, but I was speaking at a dinner...(blah blah blah) I sat next to one of the top senior execs in the exploration program from Petrogras in Brazil, I said tell me about the Santos Basin, the Tupy field is that as big as they say it is? He said we don't know yet, that is the riskiest project that has ever been done, it is 300 km from Nshore bay, delivery of materials is a chore.

Drill bit goes down 7-8k feet of water and then it starts penetrating through the crust ,and then you go through 20k feet of salt, you get below the salt and you are nearing the center of the earth. He said the first 3 test wells at Tupy had an average temp of 900 degrees F, and what some of us are worried about did we actually penetrate the crust and if we do we will create the largest manmade island in the history of the world.

Rick: This is starting to turn into a sci-fi nightmare. Throughout this entire ordeal the thought of a volcano keeps in my mind.
Rick: Something inside of me says this is far worse than any of us realize right now, I keep thinking volcano.

zephyr comment> deepest well in US history was 35k feet in OK. Deep Horizon is 23,000 vertical.

Matt: When the crew of the Thomas Jefferson got within 1km of the blow out they were okay as long as they were up wind, once they got down wind within 20 minutes they were sick.
Matt: The cheapest insurance you can get for your family is gas masks, we have a lot of scientific history as to how lethal this stuff actually is.
Rick: There is not going to be any warning for the people?
Matt: Right on the rig they had 1 second.
Rick: We are on the east coast of Florida, do people on the east coast have anything to worry about?
Matt: I would think the east coast is spared.
Matt: I would love to come on and say boy I was wrong."

- http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1116630/pg1

6 part video interview is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAHyIn43iXo

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