Blowout

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All “A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”—The New York Times Book Review In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Vladimir Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

A long weekend in the Poconos is cut short when Sherlock and Savich are helicoptered back to Washington to lead the investigation into the brutal murder of a Supreme Court justice. Savich allows Callie Markham, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, to partner with local Metro Police liaison Ben Raven since she's got the inside track--she's the stepdaughter of the murdered justice. Despite Detective Raven's unwillingness to have a civilian along, Callie Markham ends up riding shotgun to help look for her stepfather's murderer.

As with his 1994 book, Advanced Blowout and Well Control, Grace offers a book that presents tested practices and procedures for well control, all based on solid engineering principles and his own more than 25 years of hands-on field experience. Specific situations are reviewed along with detailed procedures to analyze alternatives and tackle problems. The use of fluid dynamics in well control, which the author pioneered, is given careful treatment, along with many other topics such as relief well operations, underground blowouts, slim hole drilling problems, and special services such as fire fighting, capping, and snubbing. In addition, case histories are presented, analyzed, and discussed. Provides new techniques for blowout containment, never before published, first used in the Gulf War Provides the most up-to-date techniques and tools for blowout and well control New case histories include the Kuwait fires that were set by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War

In March 1968, thousands of Chicano students walked out of their East Los Angeles high schools and middle schools to protest decades of inferior and discriminatory education in the so-called "Mexican Schools." During these historic walkouts, or "blowouts," the students were led by Sal Castro, a courageous and charismatic Mexican American teacher who encouraged the students to make their grievances public after school administrators and school board members failed to listen to them. The resulting blowouts sparked the beginning of the urban Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the largest and most widespread civil rights protests by Mexican Americans in U.S. history. This fascinating testimonio, or oral history, transcribed and presented in Castro's voice by historian Mario T. Garcia, is a compelling, highly readable narrative of a young boy growing up in Los Angeles who made history by his leadership in the blowouts and in his career as a dedicated and committed teacher. Blowout! fills a major void in the history of the civil rights and Chicano movements of the 1960s, particularly the struggle for educational justice.

The story of how a chain of failures, missteps, and bad decisions led to America's biggest environmental disaster. On April 20, 2010, the gigantic drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven crew members and causing a massive eruption of oil from BP's Macondo well. For months, oil gushed into the Gulf, spreading death and destruction. Americans watched real-time video of the huge column of oil and gas spewing from the obviously failed “blowout preventer.” What was missing, though, was the larger story of this disaster. In Blowout in the Gulf, energy experts William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling explain both the disaster and the decisions that led up to it. Blowout in the Gulf weaves a fascinating narrative of failures, missteps, and bad decisions, explaining why this oil spill was a disaster waiting to happen—and how making better energy choices will help prevent others like it.

The discovery of tens of billions of barrels of oil in fields far off the coast of Rio de Janeiro was billed as one of the biggest finds of this century when it was announced in 2006. Many hoped it would deliver a bonanza for education and health and make Brazil one of the worlds major economies. What happened? On February, 14, 2014, at 5: 30 AM during the final phases of drilling the exploratory well at Foz do Amazonas (Mouth of Amazon River), Poseidon, a $ 400 million oil rig suffered a catastrophic blowout, a geyser of seawater erupted from the marine riser onto the rig, shooting 480 ft into the air. This was soon followed by the eruption of a slushy combination of drilling mud, methane gas, and water. All 110 workers were presumed killed in the initial explosion. After approximately 5 hours, Poseidon sank. Was it a sabotage? Or, an accident? What began as an investigation into the causes of the destruction of Poseidon, quickly turned into something much greater, bribery, kickbacks and money laundering involving staggering sums of money, uncovering a vast and intricate web of political and corporate racketeering. The case would go on to discover illegal payments of more than $20bn to company executives and political parties, put billionaires in jail, drag a president into court and cause irreparable damage to the finances and reputations of some of the worlds biggest companies. It would also expose a culture of systemic graft in Brazilian politics, and provoke a backlash from the establishment fierce enough to impeach one president and convict another for organized crime. At the center of the bribery, kickbacks and money laundering criminal is a cartel operated by two passionate uninhibited Brazilian women, a Wall Street High-Frequency Trader, an Environment Protection Agency Administrator, and a reckless thrill-seeker young American offshore oil rig engineer, in a torrid love triangle. Action filled romance, intrigue, and betrayal of two women by a thrill-seeking man. Sex does not happen in a tranquil world. Love, sex, money and betrayal make for excellent storytelling. Who won? On September 6, Its 5 AM in Rio de Janeiro. A salmon pink dawn draped the horizon, and the police helicopter hovered under patches of pale blue sky. There appeared to be police activity bear a villa in Avenida Visconde de Albuquerque, Leblon, Rio de Janeiro. Motorcycle officers, followed by police cars with sirens blaring and lights flashing, rushed to a big villa in Leblon, where they found a mans body floating face down in an infinity edge swimming pool. Who killed him and why? A murder has been reported from one of those big houses in the three hundred blocks. A financial superstar master of the universe is involvedone of the biggest. The body of a young man was found floating in the pool of his mansionwith bullet holes in his back and one in his stomach. Close to the swimming pool, there is the dried carcass of an exotic multicolored lizard. No one has explained what the lizard was seeking at that pool deck. The multi-colored lesbian lizard is a native of Sonora Desert in Mexico. The story reveals all, eventually. The story will eventually end with us getting all answers to why this guy ended up dead in the pool, and what the lizard was looking for at the pool deck

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A blowout, defined as the uncontrolled flow of formation fluids from a well bore, is one of the most dramatic of all oilfield events. Fortunately, blowouts are rare occurrences today. This report summarizes the history of oil and gas-well blowouts in California between 1950 and 1990. Tables provide information such as the ratio of blowouts to wells drilled, and tabulations of wells drilled and producing in California. Blowout information includes: date, operator, field, well and cause, fire, substance, injuries, and the causes of the blowouts. Glossary of terms.