Just got back from the Cameron R&D tour. One of the engineers recognized me, walked up to me, and asked, “so, Joy: are you packing today?”
“No,” I answered. “Just my business cards. Why? Are they messing up the line of my jacket?” Then I smiled at him. “You really did your homework, checking our websites out like that.”
“Well,” he replied, “when I give a presentation, I like to know who the audience is going to be. I could kind of understand where the others were coming from. I had a harder time figuring your blog out.”
“That would make two of us,” I told him. “But you’re aware I’m from California, so you know what I’m going to ask you.”
“You want to know about environmental impact,” he responded. “What are we doing to avoid oil spills, and how do you, the consumer, know that the wells won’t have an adverse impact on marine life? Above all, how can you trust us to avoid a disaster like the one in Santa Barbara?”
“Bingo. That’s what I asked the people at Halliburton yesterday, and they’re preparing to send me a video of a whale rubbing its back against a pipe. I’m committed to deep-tissue massage for sea mammals, you know. Though I was either seven years old at the time of the Santa Barbara spill, or maybe being born. It’s all kind of a blur; I don’t remember it too well.”
“Understood. I think you’ll be happy when you see the stress tests we use for the subsea systems here,” he told me.
In point of fact, I was. The level of testing they put into any subsea system—right down to each valve, seam, and seal—is truly remarkable, and I think seeing the thought that goes into all these components would allay a lot of the concerns people have about potentially adverse effects in offshore drilling.
* * *
More on underwater drilling later; in the meantime, I’m going to sleep until dinnertime, or tomorrow morning, or whatever seems good.
No, I wasn’t able to get a cable to charge my cell phone today, but I will at least use the landline here to pick up my voice mails from the cell phone line when I get up. And I’ll get the charger tomorrow latest.
Wednesday I’ll actually work my way systematically over the convention floor, and then I’ll likely have dinner and/or drinks with bloggers and a reader or two (or three). It looks like Bruce and I will be holding court at a local pub—potentially with the other bloggers on this mini-junket.
To sleep, to dream . . . if I’m lucky, about deep-sea drilling. But not in the Arctic. No.
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