Posted on 01/10/2005 3:48:45 PM PST by TexasCowboy
These are pictures of a blow-out in West Texas last week.
They were drilling for Nuevo Energy.
That's all I know at present. I'm trying to track down information.
Y'all heard anything about this?
That's a nightmare. Did all the hands make it to safety?
Prayers. I lost a good friend from HS in a rig fire.
Wow, pretty spectacular, and frightening.
Didn't Red just die this last year?
where's John Wayne when you need him?
I just got the pictures with the info I've posted.
I've requested more info, but it seems to be tight right now.
Mud related? I found nothing in a quick search of Yahoo news and google news.....
There are areas of West Texas where we have some H2S, but it's not as prevalent as in some areas in Mississippi.
First I've heard of it. Hope all are well, but methinks that's the last well that rig will drill.
Calling Red Adair, we need you.
Yep. I saw a special on i think the history channel a while back about him and his history fighting oil fires.
Read about his long life Here.
My granddad was a Wildcatter back in the day. Many were the horror stories he told us.
There's a bunch of hydrogen sulfide up in the overthrust belt too.
If you do get more info, maybe they hit a gas pocket, if you don't, it could be the lawyers are involved... mud pressures, hardware failure, whatever.
Would you be kind enough to ping me when you find more on it?
Some things we can learn from these pictures:
That's probably a twenty thousand foot rig, not that means a lot is today's scarcity of rigs. A twenty thousand foot rig might be drilling a ten thousand foot well.
We can also see three bulk barite tanks from the flare. That means they were probably using fourteen pound or better mud weights, which in West Texas means they were drilling through the Pennsylvanian which in the Permian Basin is around 12,000' to 15,000'.
Now to throw a kink in all of that, the Yates comes in around 3000', and it can be charged from lower zones and need at least eighteen pound mud to hold.
You can see from the first picture that the biggest explosion is under the rig floor. That means either the BOPs failed or the casing ruptured.
In the case of a casing rupture, there should have been time enough while the pressure was climbing to get everyone to safety.
If the BOPs failed, it might have been a sudden catastrophe.
When I find out more, I'll let you know.
Sometimes the true story of what happened is not known for months. The people who are writing about it don't know what they're talking about, and the attorneys don't let out a lot of information.
If there were people killed, the information will be tighter than Dick's hat band.
When fire hits them, though, they crater in a hurry.
I'll bet the time sequence we're looking at here is less than ten minutes.
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