Posted on 06/15/2010 9:37:36 PM PDT by CWW
What BP and the Government Are Not Telling Us:
The Deepwater Horizon Well Is Going to Collapse Soon Resulting in an Uncontrollable Oilcano.
The recent failure of the Top Kill ("mud kill") attempt revealed that the well bore structure is compromised "Down hole", i.e., the well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. That's why the Top Kill procedure did not work.
What does this mean?
It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot. That sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kinds of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above. All they can do is relieve the pressure on it by opening it up (like a opening up a garden hose nozzle to slow a leak in the line). This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer's immense bulk of 450 ton.
What is likely to happen now?
Well...none of what is likely to happen is good. In fact, it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.
Eventually, even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the blow out preventer will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the blow out preventer, or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly, it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" -- The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. The very least damaging outcome, as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out a minimum of 150,000 barrels a day (about 6.75 million gallons) of raw oil or more.
All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens.
We are seeing the puny forces of man vs. the awesome forces of nature. We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win...and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will.
How do we know this, if you don't mind my asking?
One nice ironic twist is that, if these wells are successful, Der Oberfurher can't really ban oil production at that site.
marked
I have thought for weeks this thing is much bigger than we’ve been told—and we might even have cracked the crust of this area of earth. What happens if that part of the sea floor collapses?? I know at least a monster tidal wave—that has to be part of it. But what else happens??
Seems like I read somewhere this thing was spewing out at over 30,000, 40,000, etc, PSI...those safety values were only rated at 3,500 PSI. I wish I’d saved the link where I read this, but I’m no oil engineer and at the time I read this weeks ago, it didn’t ring a bell to me as it does now.
Cripes, and our “president” goes down there eating snow cones and getting tanked for lunch!
Thank you. There sure are a lot of misconceptions about oil, drilling, geology, etc. It doesn’t help that the press is just as ignorant of these things as so many people it seems. Sort of like with articles about firearms.
“A huge cache of machineguns and bullets was found, along with long range optical sighting devices, enough to kill hundreds of people!!!” is used when more than three semi-auto rifles are found, along with 10 boxes of ammunition and a pair of binoculars in some old guy’s house.
This is just a very big, messy, blowout.
If America is dying, part of the poison is in the White House, a slathering of it in the halls of Congress, but so much more in the faint hearts that quail at the first sign of trouble or hardship.
This problem will be overcome. The well will be plugged.
It will take some time. The Ixtoc 1 blew out in the Bay of Campeche in 1979 and took most of 10 months to plug. This probably will not take that long.
This story is garbage. It’s based on conjecture and a serious lack of facts. Every input I have seen from people who actually DRILL wells and know what’s out in the Gulf say this is simply fiction. Doomsday fiction. It’s been posted here umpteen times now. Please delete it and find something better and actually informative.
LMAO...yeah like they never tested nukes in the ocean before...
Bikini atol isnt just where sponge bob lives.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/
Imagine if we had an American President who would offer a helping hand instead of a law suit?
What a stupid D$%k we have in the oval office. If BP has been slowed down because they need to answer to law suits, and this thing blows open and soils the entire east coast, Obama will need to get the F out of this country and go back to Kenya.
I've heard that it's been done before by the Russians, but in a different type of "subsoil", and that the gulf is just mud. Seems like a nuke MIGHT just make everything worse.
How do we know its more like 50,000 barrels?
My point was the May 3 article discussed the leak being ten times worse than the at the time government estimate of up to 5,000 barrels.
Current estimates are around 50,000 barrels, so the old news in that article is not indicative of a huge blowout that will gush millions of barrels a day. That’s all I’m saying on that.
As to the posted article, I see some dumb statements in it, the biggest being that the effort to capture the oil can only mean they are trying to reduce pressure from oil leaking throgh the rocks. No, they are capturing the oil to capture the oil so it doesnt go into the gulf, and the method they are using to capture the oil is doing nothing to reduce the pressure of the leak elsewhere. They are merely taking it off the top as it flows out, if anything the cap installed could slightly INCREASE pressure below that point.
So I’m not convinced there is any volcano of oil on the way, at least not convinced by these articles.
I found an article about the Thunder Horse play (first deepwater site) and they talk about all the challenges to bring it online, all the new technology that had to be developed, etc.
In the article (from 2009) it said they commonly dealt with preasures of 18,000 psi, and each well was producing 50,000 barrels/day - with numerous production wells per platform. They also talked about water injection to increase the pressures/ flow though. Not sure if that comes into play when the well is still new, or after the natural flow goes down or not.
So sink a mothballed Carrier on top of it. There’s 5 sitting in Bremerton. Anything to slow the flow so we can drill some wells to pump that sucker dry.
We already know this....from others in the oil business...
Unknown author posted on fishing forum is now news?
Thanks for your encourging words, Joe!
I hope you are right.
I am not usually one to quail, but man, some of this stuff has been getting me down!
So what’s going to happen?
Those wells were on land, and there was a rather simple solution to cap them.
Massive gushers a mile beneath the sea are unprecedented.
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