Deepwater Oil Spill - A Longer Term Problem (Worst Case Scenario)

OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in the GOM. As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there...

First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...

TOP KILL - FAILS: This was probably our best and only chance to kill this well from the top down. This "kill mud" is a tried and true method of killing wells and usually has a very good chance of success. The depth of this well presented some logistical challenges, but it really should not of presented any functional obstructions. The pumping capacity was there and it would have worked, should have worked, but it didn't.

It didn't work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working.

When a well is "Killed" using this method heavy drill fluid "Mud" is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are "behind" the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the "choke and Kill lines" which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the "behind" portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that "solid" flow of mud is established at the leak "behind" the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps...the well is killed...it can no longer flow.

Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all...it must happen quickly. There is no "trickle some mud in" because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was "It will take days to know whether it worked"...."Top kill might take 48 hours to complete"...the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some "test fires" to test integrity of the entire system. The actual "kill" can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the "behind" portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best.

Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser "plume" area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder.

We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren't told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then...I'm sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the "behind" leaks...it was leaking out of someplace forward...and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before...and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion...the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking "down hole"

They tried the "Junk shot"...the "bridging materials" which also failed and likely made things worse in regards to the ruptured well casings.

"Despite successfully pumping a total of over 30,000 barrels of heavy mud, in three attempts at rates of up to 80 barrels a minute, and deploying a wide range of different bridging materials, the operation did not overcome the flow from the well." http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7062487

80 Barrels per minute is over 200,000 gallons per hour, over 115,000 barrels per day...did we seen an increase over and above what was already leaking out of 115k bpd?....we did not...it would have been a massive increase in order of multiples and this did not happen.

And here is just one of the many reasons why dougr is not considered a rational source.

And you don't even have to be an oil drilling expert. Just a normal human being who has, once in their lives, used a water hose.

Imagine you want to plug up your water hose with mud. So, you take your hose, mix up a bunch of mud, and try to pour it into the hose. Unfortunately, the hose is very small, your mud is pretty thick, and the pouring is hard.

So, you get yourself a big suction machine, hook it to one end of your hose, stick the other end in the mud, and maybe it works if your mud is wet enough; but probably you have to get a pump and push the mud into the hose.

But wait, I forgot. I need you to fill the hose with mud WHILE WATER IS RUNNING THROUGH IT.

So, being an industrious and obedient soul, you try shoveling the mud into the hose while water is coming out. Once in a while you manage to get just a bit in, which then blows out into your face.

Eventually, you crimp the hose to stop the water, and thsn jam mud down the hole -- that's cheating. But it's the only way you'll succeed.

But wait -- you have a great idea. What if you get one of those hose y-adapters. Now you hook your mud pump into the one adapter output, while the water is still running out the other.

Now, your job is easy. You turn on the mud pump, and the mud runs into the hose, pushing back against the water.....

And promptly flies out the end of the hose with the water.

And no matter how quickly you pump the mud in, since the opening with the water is as large as your opening, and there is water pressure on the 3rd pipe, all your mud is just going to turn around and come out the hose.

So, how could you ever make this work? Well, if you were doing normal well-drilling, that other part of the hose, where the water was coming out, wouldn't be wide-open, allowing as much mud to come out as go in. It would be mostly closed, with just a little leaking.

That way, while SOME of your mud would squeeze out, so long as your mud pump had more pressure than the water line, you'd be able to push the mud back into the hose.

BTW, this is a real danger to our public water systems, to the point where you are not allowed to hook a pump into a hose like this, lest you seal off the end, and pump some pollutant back into the water system. But I digress.

Unfortunately, with the BP well, they hoped that because of the bent-up riser pipe connected to the top of the BOP, the square-inch opening of that pipe would be less than the opening of the smaller pipe they were using to pump the mud into the well. It turned out that there was just too much of a leak.

Now, why not cheat and pinch off that pipe? Well, assuming you didn't buy the whole "well must be compromised and there's way too much pressure", there's still the problem that in order to push mud back down the pipe, you need to apply a lot more pressure than the oil coming up the pipe.

They already knew the BOP could take the pressure that was exerted by the crimps in the broken riser. They had no way to test if it could take more pressure from more crimping. If it could, pumping the mud woudln't cause trouble, and if it did they'd just stop pumping. But a crimp couldn't be undone. If the crimp cause the BOP to break, or to snap off at the ocean floor, we'd be screwed.

So in the end, the risk of the possibility of damage from the collapsing riser pipe compromising the BOP was too great to put any pressure on the system that couldn't be easily removed (like stopping the pumping of the mud).

This is why the mud didn't work, and why it was stopped. Not because there's some huge underground series of cracks where the mud was going all over the place causing irreparable damage.

If the well casing was cracked, we'd see oil seeping around the outside of the casing where it comes out under the BOP. If oil could seep 20 miles away, it could seep 1 foot away, up the existing bored hole that is bigger than and more irregular than the casing, and sealed with concrete which if the pipe cracked wouldn't form a seal anymore.

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