How much pressure does it take to achieve a flow rate of thousands of barrels of oil a day against the bottom pressure of the ocean at a depth of 1 mile below the surface, and how can you tell just by looking?
Is it true that toxic gasses including hydrogen sulfide and volatile hydrocarbons including benzene and methylene chloride are known contaminants in addition to the light, sweet crude?
Is there any truth to the reports of rising plumes of oil coming from fissures up to 5 miles away from the blow-out site?
Is it possible that drilling a "super well" to a depth of around 20,000 below the ocean floor could drill into a geologic formation with those kinds of pressure?
I read that Iztoc 1 (? spelling) was drilled in about 750 ft of water to a depth of about 10,000 ft. and that blow out took about 8 months to bring under control.
I can find very little hard info on "super wells" on the net, except for references that the Russians have drilled a bunch of them (and on multiple occasions, used nucs to seal them off), and that Hugo Chavez is drilling a "super well" in Venezuela. And I understand what you are saying about fossil fuel, but on the other hand, I can't readily understand how "organic" oil deposits are formed or trapped at depths in the earth's mantle at depths of several miles. In short, I am no expert on this. My educational background is in chemistry, mathematics, and medicine -- not geology and geo-physics. I perceive that "the preacher" is grandstanding at least to some degree, and that he has a book he would like to sell, but neither of those facts is enough for me to dismiss the suggested possibility that BP drilled into something very unexpected and at higher pressures due to undgerground geologic forces than they were equipped to handle. And as far as I can tell, no one is putting any of those sorts of hard data out there for public consumption, if indeed they even have the hard data available.