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.
I’m supposed to know what is going to happen?
Well fitrst I hope in the next week or so they really capture 90% of the flow with the new cap.
Next, I hope BP kills teh leak far below ground via the relief well. The manager of that effort says he’s done 40 and all 40 worked.
After that despite the hype on tv I get the impression there is some bad oil effect but that in the enormity of the gulf it can be cleaned from beaches and will disperse relatively soon in the water. BP claims it can do cleanup in weeks once the flow stops.
Those are hopes.
“BP better be poking holes all over the area to produce the oil and reduce the pressure and flow volumes.....red”
I was thinking the same thing weeks ago. Declare a national emergency, commandeer all available rigs and drill baby drill!
Thanks.
You have all the qualifications to hold no job except president of the United States as current standards are applied.
The sky is not falling and I had chicken little fried for supper.
Put a condom on that prick and gather all that unwanted mess!
I don't see anything in your link about underwater detonations. You're like that congressman that thinks Guam will sink. There is earth under islands, you know, not ocean.
And wasn't Bikini Atoll uninhabitable and off limits for years?
LMAO indeed.
Add to this hurricane season helping to bring the oil and water aground and further inland.
All they gotta do is drill wells around the blowout and
lay another undersea pipeline to Port Fourchon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why Won’t They Do This?!?!?!?!?!
DUH,,,,,Because of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$,,,!!!
If all that oil and gas was dumped on the market it
would drop the price,,,DUH!!!...
Time will tell, Joe, and I think it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Either this thing gets under control fast, or it will get out of control fast. Either way, we are all on this train, and it ain’t stopping until it reaches its destination.
Someone speculated the crust would crack, but they don't realize that all we are drilling on offshore wells is the layers of sediment on top of the volcanic (albeit undersea volcanoes) rock that makes up the ocean crust. IOW, the crust isn't going to crack--not from this, anyway, nor will the ocean floor collapse because all that oil blew out.
The reservoir is supported by grains of rock, the oil is being forced from the spaces in between the grains by the pressure of the gas in the reservoir, some of which is dissolved in the oil.
When the oil is gone, the rock will remain, and while there may be some slight subsidence over time, it will be minor.
I questioned the 50,000 bbl figure because the record wells in the world (cited on the API website, iirc) were only about 45,000 BOPD. That would make this one very good property from a production standpoint, despite the need to control the well. It also heralds fine possibilities for development of the field.
It is entirely possible that the flow rates from the well have been incresing as the defective cement plug in the wellbore erodes over time, effectively opening the choke downhole that that channelized plug had provided.
Apparently BP is going to attempt to imcrease their recovery operations to handle 20,000 BOPd, so we'll see how that affects tha amount escaping the recovery efforts.
"How do we know this, if you don't mind my asking?"
Government Doubles BP Leak Estimate To 60,000 Barrels Per Day
ps
My comments were directed at the article NOT THE POSTER.
SpongeBob SquarePants lives in Bikini Bottom. Sheesh, could you please research these important details?
What do you think about running a pipeline from the surface ships to the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port. Maybe 50 to 60 miles but the port can handle millions of barrels and is able to store the oil in multiple salt dome facilities.
Good grief. Would you guys stop saying nuke it? I mean, Houston is bad enough considering the fact that it’s subsiding/sinking about 2-3 ft a cemtury.
All we need now is for some oil idiot to set off a nuke in the gulf. Hey...I can’t swim!!!
Nature didn't have a lot to do with this until the people who did the drilling made mistakes. If we lose, it is because of the stupidity of people giving waivers while busying themselves watching porn and smoking crack. The supervisor on the rig was warned that there was a problem. He overruled the advice, and thus, a world class catastrophe began. Obama knew very early what was happening and he did what we would expect of someone who was raised as a princling. He froze.
If we lose, it is because of human stupidity. Nature is neutral. Men caused the crisis, and if men suffer massive casualties, nature will eventually heal without men.
At some point, the nuclear option will be one of few options left. And at that point, it can’t possibly be as bad as the alternative of doing nothing. Otherwise, although it seems impossible, we’ll have to build a containment zone of filter netting around the entire area and siphon/filter the fouled water from within it for many years to come.
Ordinarily, as the pressure in the reservoir drops, the flow decreases, to the point that at some point the well has to be pumped (oil no longer reaches the surface on its own).
The oil industry is one of constant innovation and design, and the time needed to drill a well has been cut to 1/4 what it was just 30 years ago, not to mention that we have the ability to drill (and steer as we go) directionally and horizontally as well.
A wrecked wellhead is a wrecked wellhead, and those wells had the casing integrity to be capped.
If need be, the sea bottom can be excavated and a new wellhead attached.
It is unlikely however, with an apparently compromised casing string, that that would be effective.
The best bet in this instance is the relief wells being drilled. It should be possible, if the casing program in the relief wells is right, to frac into the old wellbore from close proximity, to kill the well from the relief well(s)--and plug off the producing zone.
We set plugs in open hole all the time, no casing is required. Even if the casing in the hole has 'mechanical problems', the kill mud and cement are liquid and will go anywhere the oil would in the wellbore (and beyond if the casing is compromised).
The question is one of giving the rigs drilling the two relief wells time to get the job done. In the meantime, BP is recovering unprecedented amounts of oil from the well, before it gets away in the gulf.
While the BP disaster is a disaster, I think these guys talking of collapsing bubbles, tsunamis, etc. are over-the-top. These types of large leaks have occured before. The Ixtoc 1 spill in the Gulf is the obvious one. I have another article with marine biologists from American universities saying things about the Ixtoc spill like “We went out a year later to monitor the devastation on the shrimp grounds. We were amazed to find very little - after only one year. We were baffled. However, the types of oil and other products are all a factor, so this BP spill may take years to clean up, we just don’t know”.
Here’s some basic information on some other huge blowouts:
http://www.first-draft.com/2010/05/the-ixtoc-1-spill.html
Excerpt:
It Came From Mexico: The Ixtoc I Oil Spill
We in the United States of Amnesia have short memories:
The exploratory oil well two miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico exploded in a ball of fire, spurting millions of gallons of crude into the sea. As weeks turned to months, oil executives grappled with capping the well. The growing slick turned into an immediate ecological nightmare.
The year was 1979. The blowout of the Ixtoc I, drilled by the Mexican-run Pemex, retains the dubious record of causing the world’s largest accidental oil spill, dumping an estimated 138 million gallons over nine months. Eventually, Pemex cut off Ixtoc I with two relief wells and a cement seal.
With top BP executives, scientists and Obama administration officials searching for a solution to capping the Deepwater Horizon blowout off the Louisiana coast, perhaps they could find a blueprint in the Ixtoc I experience, observers say. They also may find lessons from the Montara oil spill last August off the northern coast of Australia, where it took five tries and nearly three months to stop the flow of as many as 84,000 gallons a day into the Timor Sea.
If some scientists, who say BP and the U.S. Coast Guard are underestimating how much oil is leaking now, are right, the current gusher could easily eclipse the demise of Ixtoc I in the Bay of Campeche. By their count, instead of the 210,000 gallons leaking per day, it’s more like 4 million ``Everybody keeps saying the spill in the Gulf is unprecedented,’’ said geologist John Amos, president and founder of SkyTruth, a nonprofit that investigates environmental issues using satellite images. ``That is such bull——t. We had perfect precedence.’’
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