Tag Archive for BP

| July 23, 2015
Comments Off on British Petroleum Connects Oil Rigs to Internet

British Petroleum Connects Oil Rigs to Internet

British Petroleum Connects Oil Rigs to InternetIn one of the stupidest moves outside of the U.S. gooberment lately, British Petroleum (BP) has connected 650 of its oil wells to the “Industrial Internet.” The same BP that spilled 4.9 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, now plans to connect 4000 oil rigs around the world to the Internet, via the Internet of Things.

BP oil spill pelicanAn article at FierceBigData says that by connecting its wells to the Internet of Things (IoT), BP engineers will gain real-time access to common machine and operational data sets. The aim is to use the data to make better decisions, improve efficiency, prevent failures and reduce costly downtime.

Kate Johnson, General Electric (GE) Intelligent Platforms Software CEO and GE Chief Commercial Officer who is running the project for British Petroleum said in a statement to the press.

… our strategy is simple: Get Connected. Get Insights. Get Optimized. By connecting BP’s oil wells around the world, we’re giving them access to better insights that can ultimately drive new efficiencies in their oil fields and increase oil production.

Apparently, GE’s software will allow BP to capture, store, contextualize and visualize data in real-time.

Internet of ThingsThe author clarifies that “Industrial Internet” is a term GE dubbed for Internet, there are just more things connecting to it. And many of the same problems will grow as a result, namely security issues and data breaches galore. Here’s hoping BP and GE are careful to build security in from the ground up and not an add-ons afterthought. Hopefully, there were lessons learned from the Internet’s earlier days.

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The latest IoT insecurity is that Chrysler cars with U-Connect can be cyber-tagged from miles away. I have covered IoT insecurity issues for a while here, here, and here. With all of that in mind..…

Like the author says, hopefully, GE gets it right, because BP’s track record is abysmal. IF they don’t get it right, economic terrorists could use flaws in the IoT to cut off oil production from these wells to drive up the cost of oil from other wells in the middle-east. Ecological terrorists could use these same flaws to blow up oil rigs like what happened at Deep Water Horizon in 2010 and contaminate all the Gull of Mexico or the Alaska North Slope or Africa or Saudi Arabia. What would happen if they were able to blow up all 4,000 wells due to weaknesses in the IoT stack? 

 

Related articles
  • BP to pay $18.7 billion for 2010 oil spill (cinewsnow.com)

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| April 11, 2011
Comments Off on Earth Worth $4,800 Trillion

Earth Worth $4,800 Trillion

SEarth Worth $4,800 Trillionome people believe – everything in this world has a price. Now the world has a price as well. Earth is worth $4,800 trillion according to UC-Santa Cruz Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin. Professor Laughlin developed the value for NASA to evaluate the discoveries made by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. He came up with the figure by calculating the sum of the planet’s age, size, temperature, mass and other vital statistics.

What planets are worth studying

Professor Laughlin told the UK’s Daily Mail , “I’ve just always thought that the concept of an ‘Earth-like planet in the habitable zone’ was pretty vaguely defined, and I wanted a metric that I could plug a planet into to see whether its value was high enough to warrant media hype.” The professor’s equation shows whether planets are worth studying, anything worth less than $97 million just isn’t worth the hassle. The astrophysicist told the Daily Mail, “The formula makes you realize just how precious Earth is and I hope it will help us as a society safeguard what we have.”

Earth’s competition

There are about 1,235 known similar planets in the universe. Most planets weren’t given a high price tag because of their inhospitable climates. The Daily Mail says Mars is worth only $16,361 and Venus is worth less than a penny. Prior to Dr. Laughlin’s work, the most Earth-like world known to scientists, was the exoplanet Gilese 581 c. However, the professor’s equation valued it at just $160.

The next Earth-ly object, KOI 326.01 is worth $223,099.93 (KOI stands for “Kepler Object of Interest”). “This is just a way for me to be able to quantify how excited I should be about any particular planet,” he told TechEye.

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I wonder if the professor discounted the value of planet Earth as damaged goods as British Petroleum destroys the Gulf of Mexico and nuclear reactors melt-down in Japan, etc..

What do you think?

How do you value planet Earth?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , ,
| April 6, 2011
Comments Off on BP Data Spill

BP Data Spill

Data breachNational Public Radio (NPR) reports that British Petroleum‘s (BP) problems in the U.S. now include a data spill as well as the oil spill. BP is paying compensation amounting to $4,000,000,000 to victims of its mishap incident disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Now BP has lost the personally identifiable information (PII)  on approx. 13,000 of its victims are seeking compensation for oil spill damages. NPR reports that names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers, were lost opening these people to identity theft.

BP Gulf of Mexico oil spillBP spokesman Curtis Thomas told NPR that the oil giant mailed letters to roughly 13,000 people whose data was stored on the missing computer, notifying them about the potential data security breach and offering to pay for their credit to be monitored. The company also reported the missing laptop to law enforcement, he said. The laptop was password-protected, but the information was not encrypted, Mr. Thomas said.

The employee lost the laptop on March 1 during “routine business travel,” said BP’s Thomas, who declined to elaborate on the circumstances. “If it was stolen, we think it was a crime of opportunity, but it was initially lost,” Thomas said. Asked why nearly a month elapsed before BP notified residents about the missing laptop, Mr. Thomas said, “We were doing our due diligence and investigating.”

Matt O’Brien, the part-owner of Tiger Pass Seafood, a shrimp dock in Venice, La., who said he had filed a claim with BP, told an AP reporter this was the first he had heard about the possible compromise of his personal information by BP. “That’s like it’s par for the course for them.” Mr. O’Brien said of BP, “They can’t seem to do nothing right.”

Once again, 13,000 lives are disrupted because a single laptop that was not encrypted, was lost or stolen “during routine business travel.” Sophos‘ Naked Security blog pointed out in 2008 that laptops are easy to lose. The security vendor cited a survey that found that 12,000 laptops are lost every week at U.S. airports alone.

In that 2008 survey, almost three years ago now, 53% of people said that their laptops contained confidential business information, with two-thirds having taken no measures to secure their data. Clearly, some companies still aren’t taking proper measures.

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As BP again has demonstrated, we all need to lift our game, As Sophos says, even if your organization is willing to take risks with your own data, firms have a clear moral duty not to take risks with data you keep about other people.

During these economic times, many organizations are saving a few pennies by doing as little as possible about encryption-related security. Why not consider the value of encryption to your business, instead of considering only the cost?

What do you think?

Oil spills, Data spills, Outrageous gas prices – Is BP out to get the U.S.?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Data protection | Tags: , , , , ,
| December 27, 2010
Comments Off on GM Recycles BP Gulf Oil Spill Waste Into Volt

GM Recycles BP Gulf Oil Spill Waste Into Volt

General MotorsGM Recycles BP Gulf Oil Spill Waste Into Volt (NYSE: GM) has intercepted 100 miles of used oil control booms from the BP Gulf of Mexico mega oil spill, (which I wrote about here, here, here, and here) preventing them from going into landfills. Instead, TheDetroitBureau.com reports that oil-soaked booms are transformed into plastic parts for the Chevy Volt.

chevy_volt_logoMike Robinson, GM vice president of Environment, Energy and Safety policy explained to TheDetroitBureau that the automaker has been able to recycle the polypropylene plastics used in the oil booms set out to contain and capture the oil spilled by a runaway British Petroleum (BP) well. GM and its suppliers are turning the recycled material into plastic parts used in the Volt, such as a shroud for the radiator according to GM. “Creative recycling is one extension of GM’s overall strategy to reduce its environmental impact,” Mr. Robinson said, the Detroit-based automaker already finds ways to cut landfilling at 76 of its facilities. The recycling of Gulf oil booms, he added, “is a good example of using this expertise and applying it to a greater magnitude.”

In the article, Chris Miller vice president of sales and market for GDC Inc. says the old booms are mixed with other recycled material, including used tires, and processed to yield a plastic resin which can be shaped into a variety of plastic parts. “The recycled resin is a lot less expensive than virgin resin,” he said. In fact, GM’s Robinson described the overall process as “cost-neutral,” meaning the final parts and components cost the same as those produced by more conventional processes.

“Recycling the booms will result in the production of more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin for the vehicle components,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts, eliminating an equal amount of waste that would otherwise have been incinerated or sent to landfills. “This was purely a matter of helping out,”  Mr. Bradburn told TheDetroitBureau. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience” Mr. Bradburn added.

bp_oil_spill_booms

GM’s Bradburn says the project demonstrates the booms, which are also widely used around construction projects and limited spills, don’t have to be buried or burned but can be recycled. He also noted it should encourage the manufacturers of the booms to make them easier to recycle.

TheDetroitBureau says besides GDC, GM worked with several partners throughout the recovery and development processes. Heritage Environmental managed the collection of boom materials along the Louisiana coast. Mobile Fluid Recovery stepped in next, using a massive high-speed drum that spun the booms until dry and eliminated all the absorbed oil and wastewater. Lucent Polymers used its process to then manipulate the material into the physical state necessary for plastic die-mold production.

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Hmm- something must be changing at GM, when I worked at the GM tech center in the 1990s there were not many green efforts. Even if this is a marketing ploy to beef up the Volt’s green-cred’s, it is a good step. Let’s hope they keep up the imaginative thinking.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| October 2, 2010
Comments Off on BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf

BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf

BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf Greenpeace has found traces of oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of 3,200 feet and up to 300 miles from the spill site, according to a report from AFP. A team of scientists aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise reported the results. After 10 days of sampling around areas affected by the worst oil spill in history. “From the measurements we’ve taken, we see clear signs of oxygen deficiency on a large transect starting at the Macondo wellhead, all the way 300 miles to the west,” said Rainer Amon, a Texas A&M scientist who participated in the research in the AFP article. “How much of oil and gas components are still in the water is something that we need to now investigate in the laboratory.”

The expedition had four points plotted to the west of the well to investigate the main path of oil after the April accident that led to a massive release of crude oil. They concluded that the dissolved oxygen level was not as low as scientists would have expected if a greater proportion of oil and gas had dissolved in the water.

This suggests that oil has not “disappeared” some have suggested and that as much as three to four million barrels of crude from the disaster have still not been accounted for. “Despite everything that BP and the government would like us to think, the truth is, the oil spill’s impact is not over,” said Greenpeace US research director Kert Davies. “Scientists know better, fishermen know better, the people of the Gulf and certainly the clean-up crews endlessly picking up tar balls know better. The government and BP need to be honest with everyone about the extent of the damage.”

Pelican is seen on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on June 3, 2010.

Charlie Riedel/AP

The researchers conducted a parallel study of sealift and obtained samples of sediment on the ocean floor at a depth of 4,20 feet, five miles from the disaster site. The article says that some of the samples contained visible amounts of oil with a strong smell said Greenpeace in the AFP article. The samples have been sent to an independent laboratory for study and to determine the presence of chemical dispersants.

“When we’ve analyzed all the samples we’ve collected for our work and that of our colleagues, we hope to come up with a pretty good estimate of how much of the oil and gas was put into the system. Hopefully, we can then come up with good ideas of where that missing oil and gas has gone” Texas A&M’s Amon says in the AFP article.

Some 205 million gallons of oil flowed into the Gulf after the April 20 explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig, impacting the crucial fishing and tourism industries and destroying hundreds of miles of the region’s fragile coastal ecosystems.

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The rest of us will have to live with the long-lasting impact, but not BP. Politico reports

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

For their $77K investment, BP is now getting special treatment according to CBS News. CBS has reported

A dead bird covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, June 2010

Charlie Riedel/AP

BP and the Obama administration are discussing a possible settlement over fines for the company’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill in an effort to avoid a costly legal fight  ….  Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.,  said the goal of the talks between BP PLC and the government is to reach a deal instead of having to fight it out in court.

CBS News further reports that BP faces penalties and fines under a variety of environmental protection laws, including fines of up to $1,100 under the Clean Water Act for each barrel of oil spilled. If BP were found to have committed gross negligence or willful misconduct, the fine could be up to $4,300 per barrel.  That means that based on the 4.9 million barrels released from the Macondo well, BP could face civil fines under the Clean Water Act alone of between $5.4 billion and $21.1 billion.

Any reduction in fines that BP can leverage out of the administration would give a healthy return on investment for BP and will show the value of the environment to Washington.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Oil | Tags: , , , , , , ,
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