Archived material Access restricted Article
Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Sun 05/30/2010 View Sat 05/29/2010 View Fri 05/28/2010 View Thu 05/27/2010 View Wed 05/26/2010 View Tue 05/25/2010 View Mon 05/24/2010
1
2010-05-30 Economy
Oil spills unimpeded after 40 days
Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.
Posted by Fred 2010-05-30 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11129 views ]  Top

#1  BP has admitted 'Top Kill' has failed. BP engineers will try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place. BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August. If the new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the wellhead and has not functioned.

But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill was the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but was still at least a month away.
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-05-30 01:59||   2010-05-30 01:59|| Front Page Top

#2 40 days....so it's a Grim Milestone then?
Posted by Classer 2010-05-30 08:26||   2010-05-30 08:26|| Front Page Top

#3 The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP.

Ya better wait until you're sure it's fixed, before you try to take "control".
Posted by Bobby 2010-05-30 10:38||   2010-05-30 10:38|| Front Page Top

#4 OK, so Obama is not addressing issues related to the the Gulf oil spill, at least his golf score is improving.
Posted by DMFD 2010-05-30 12:03||   2010-05-30 12:03|| Front Page Top

#5 50,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil is leaking into the ocean each day. So far that equals 10 Valdez tanker spills. What was BP doing running the fire fighting operations that sunk the rig, breaking off the pipe at the ocean floor. When your house is on fire, you do not run out and tell the fire department how to fight the fire. It may be your house but fire fighting is not your expertise. BP also ignored a warning from Transocean crews hours before the explosion. And now top kill failed. Obama's is not the man to lead in this especially after saying BP's problem and recently saying he is now in charge and then leaving on vacation???

Put 5,000 feet of pipe from the floor to the surface NOW to get control of this oil. There are pipe yards all over Texas and Louisana that they can get that pipe from. There are people all over Texas, Louisana and Alaska that can put that pipe line together with anchoring flanges, valves and manifolds and there are tons of off shore people who can put it in place in a few days. THe pipe and manifold allows the oil to be routed to barges keeping pressure at the base of the pipe low while it is being sealed to the ocean floor.

When the pipe flange on the floor is sealed, close a valve in the pipe just above the ocean floor and remove the rest of the pipe from the valve to the ocean surface leaving a stub on the ocean floor. The well is sealed. This is not rocket science, people.
Posted by Plug The D@mn Hole??? 2010-05-30 13:17||   2010-05-30 13:17|| Front Page Top

#6 PTDH, I wish it was that easy. A variant on what you suggest is a considered option. It requires cutting the old riser off just above the BOP, but that would have to be a clean cut leaving a round (not oval or crimped) cross section and enough of a stub looking up to get a seal onto. Further complication is no one knows how much the kinked riser is restricting the flow - once it is cut, whatever restriction that was providing will be gone until the intended new pipe is mated onto the stub - will it be triple whatever the current (unknown) flow is? And what if the high risk attempt to mate the new pipe on fails? Now you have triple the volume coming out, and no way to slow it down.
As I understand it, they plan to try to cut the riser and pull it out of the way, and set a new 'cap' - think upside-down funnel - over it, like the first thing that clogged with clathrates, but with an anti-freeze injection line and a closer fit to allow less water into the thing. Perhaps 90% of the flow could then be directed into surface tankers. That leaves perhaps 10% loose - and it's 10% of a new, larger (unknown) volume. Given the risk of total failure and the unknown volumes and capture efficiency, this was not the preferred option.
Keep in mind that the best fix all along has been a relief well, and that one has been drilling (along with a 'spare') since as soon as they could move a rig into the area. That takes time to drill (60 days maybe). You can't just sit and watch, so you keep trying other stuff that might work - but you do need to avoid making it even worse. And as bad as it is, it can become a lot worse.
Posted by Glenmore 2010-05-30 13:40||   2010-05-30 13:40|| Front Page Top

#7 Damn 10 million barrels a day and Bushitler and the Chaney gang ar..... umm.... I'll get back to 'ye.


But it's bad.... real...... damn bad. Worser that Operation Drumbeat. There's little chance any of us on the coast will get out alive. I will buy you out cheaply.

Again.

Posted by Shipman 2010-05-30 14:11||   2010-05-30 14:11|| Front Page Top

#8 Glenmore,

I failed to mention above you go down with large diameter pipe large enough to encompass the flow. You do not mate with existing hardware in the ocean floor. You do not use drill casing. Too complicated. Keep it simple.

You seal the 36" to 48" large diameter pipe currently used to carry oil in Alaska and water to many municipalities to the newly poured cement around the leaks. Cement may need to be leveled off. Your solution and BP's solution requires all cement just poured to be busted out. Too time consuming. A relief well may not work as planned either. Methane gas pressure may be too great for one relief well to handle. By then the entire eco-system along the southern US coast will be toast. Entire fishing industries and related enterprises will be belly up.
Posted by Plug The D@mn Hole??? 2010-05-30 14:19||   2010-05-30 14:19|| Front Page Top

#9 Even 48" pipe won't clear the BOP, so you'd have to try to cut/blast that free of the existing drive pipe - further increasing the flow rate while you clear the site and try to set and drive the new pipe around the old, all the while trying not to sink your drill ship due to decreased water density with all that gas coming at you. Then, I don't know that you could run big pipe to the surface - tensile strength of the string? draw works strength? And if you don't, it could plug up with clathrate like the cap did. Then you still have to work inside the new pipe to grab the old drill pipe stub and try to fish some of that out of the way - or sting into it. Only if all that works can you pump kill mud down deep enough to counterbalance the pressure and allow you to pump cement on top of it. Can't just pump cement from the surface as the flowing oil & gas will just blow it back in your face like it did with the top kill effort.
It's not that the relief well can't handle the methane pressure - with appropriate mud weight in the hole, and enough in the tanks to fill the old well from the bottom up, it can. The risks are that you will not hit the first well on the first (or second) try, or that the relief well will encounter drilling problems of its own - lost circulation zone going into or out of the salt layer, getting stuck, hitting an unknown gas zone and taking a kick and having to shut new BOP to get control, etc. - so they are drilling a second relief well even before the first encounters problems. And I think considering a third, if a ship is available.
And all these actions require government approval - I don't see the government allowing BP to blast off the BOP and increase the flow a lot (hopefully temporarily, but.....) until other options have failed. For that matter, it's possible that blasting off the BOP would unchoke the well so far and fast that the rock formation would collapse and bridge over (kind of what they were hoping the junk shots would do, but with rock instead of golf balls and shredded tires). Then again, it might not bridge over - could it flow 150,000 BOPD? Don't know. And for how long? Don't know.
I'm not a drilling enginer, but I have dealt with them enough, including on problems not unlike this, to know there are not simple, sure answers - at any price.
Yep, fishing industry and seaside recreation industry may disappear from the Gulf - or even the Atlantic coast - for years. Might even do that if the spill stopped today. Could confiscate and redistribute the assets of every oil company and still not make people 'whole' - but maybe spreading the pain is a less unfair path.
Posted by Glenmore 2010-05-30 15:21||   2010-05-30 15:21|| Front Page Top

#10 Ixtoc 1 was as bad as this, and there's still an ecosystem here in the Gulf.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-05-30 15:21||   2010-05-30 15:21|| Front Page Top

#11 We don't really know if Ixtoc was as bad as this - or how much worse this will get.
I don't know how badly Ixtoc damaged the environment or what kind of environment - this one is hitting the marshes, which are the nurseries for most seafood, and we don't know how badly they will be damaged or how quickly they will recover. (Sandy beaches, where the big recreational money is, are less damagable and more readily cleaned.)
I drove along the LA-MS coast the other day - saw boom across every visible tidal channel, but no oil - yet. Lots of oil not far offshore working back and forth through my field with the tides & weather.
Posted by Glenmore 2010-05-30 15:45||   2010-05-30 15:45|| Front Page Top

#12 From The Michael Stopa For Congress Website Position Paper on the matter:
Ixtoc 1 is the second largest oil spill in history, eclipsed only by the intentional oil spill by Saddam Hussein's army as it retreated from Kuwait in 1991. Estimate of Ixtoc 1 volume is 150M gallons of oil. Iraqi deliberate oil spill: 400M gallons. Current, and obviously rough, estimates of Deepwater Horizon oil spill: 20M gallons of oil. Exxon Valdez: 10M gallons.
I think it's important not to lose perspective in this sort of thing because as you can see, those who have lost perspective are psyching themselves up to playing the lottery and trying solutions that'll make the spill as bad as they say it is now.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-05-30 16:05||   2010-05-30 16:05|| Front Page Top

#13 Good points, Snow Thing.
Posted by Glenmore 2010-05-30 16:19||   2010-05-30 16:19|| Front Page Top

#14 a crisis is a terrible thing to waste

/Rahm "Princess" Emanuel
Posted by Frank G 2010-05-30 16:25||   2010-05-30 16:25|| Front Page Top

#15 If Long John Silvers closes because of this, I am definitely impacted.
Posted by Boss Joluth7350 2010-05-30 16:47||   2010-05-30 16:47|| Front Page Top

#16 FAILED = FAILING? the TEST FOR "GLOBALISM/OWG-NWO" in 2010.

COMET APOPHIS + Earth-Guam visible Explosions of the Moon, ala 2030???

Heck, its only 2010 + both US Congress-, Global-Critters = Pols have indic that RELIABLE SPACE DEFENCE WILL BE [seriously] PROBLEMATIC IN LT THANX TO THE US-GLOBAL RECESSION/DEPRESSION [SSSSHHHHHH + eveything in between???
Posted by JosephMendiola 2010-05-30 23:44||   2010-05-30 23:44|| Front Page Top

00:00 lex
23:56 Poison Reverse
23:55 Pappy
23:44 JosephMendiola
23:35 Frangipani
23:30 Barbara Skolaut
23:22 Frank G
23:19 lex
23:11 lotp
23:07 gorb
22:56 Mike
22:54 Barbara Skolaut
22:47 Mike Hunt
21:43 Procopius2k
21:41 Slurt Dark Lord of the Hatfields1866
21:32 Spot
21:30 European Conservative
21:20 Nimble Spemble
21:01 European Conservative
20:58 bigjim-CA
20:57 Barbara Skolaut
20:47 Barbara Skolaut
20:33 Deacon Blues
20:32 Barbara Skolaut









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com