BBC: Concrete 'to stem Java mud flow' ~~ An attempt to stop flow of Mud from deep underground ...

BBC ^ | Friday, 2 February 2007, 15:10 GMT | BBC Staff

[mewzilla]

Indonesia's second city of Surabaya, is thought to have been triggered by the drilling work of gas prospectors PT Lapindo Brantas.

But those guys will be easier to sure than Mother Earth...

[mewzilla]

sure=sue

[Darksheare]

True, they would be easier to sue than the planet itself.
Though if we found enough Gaia worshipping lawyers, they could go down to the mudhole and try..
That might plug it up.

[mewzilla]

I'm wondering if the mudcano is in anyway related not to drilling, but to the lingering effects of the massive quake they had there "a year or three" back.

From this link...

NGOs threaten lawsuit over mudflow

...Legal and environmental activists grouped in the Sidoarjo Mudflow Victims Advocacy Committee are threatening to sue the government and Lapindo Brantas Inc. unless they improve the way they deal with the problem and provide assistance to the victims, writes the Jakarta Post, Jakarta, National News - October 21, 2006 at http://www.thejakartapost.com/.

[kinoxi]

It looks like a mess. I don't see the logic in attempting to block the flow from the surface as the aquifer that was initially broken is reportedly 9300 feet below the surface. If they succeed at ground level it will almost certainly find alternate paths to the surface and increase the affected area.

[SpaceBar]

They won't stop these things anymore than tape on the outside of a tire will fix a flat. Their best hope is to cap them and pipe the mud to a health resort for its "curative" properties.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Dang. :O)

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

ROFLMAO!

[Darksheare]

"improve the way they deal with the problem and provide assistance to the victims"???

Something about that sounds odd to me, but I'm kinda fuzzy in the noggin at the moment.
That, as it sounds, would be like those living by Mt. Etna suing the government for making the volcano erupt.

[ozzymandus]

I just finished reading a book about Krakatoa. Plugging up a venting volcano seems pretty stupid to me.

[DB]

No casing, all mud.

Good luck with that...

[TexasTransplant]

My Wife is from the Philippines and her immediate reaction was "Can't they sell the mud?"
It is Virgin mud from deep in the Earth untouched by Man, thousands and thousands of years old, free of any pesticides or man made contaminants. Surely there would be a Market for it with the Enviroweanies to grow their "natural food" in.

(This from the same women that watched "Survivor Man" stuck on a Tropical Island to survive for a week. She said if you stick a Filipino there for a week they would have already opened a SARI SARI Store and would have been putting messages in bottles to advertise it's location)

I'm a lucky guy

TT

[Grizzled Bear]

The event has forced many thousand from their homes. The mud leak has submerged several villages. But on a positive note; their skin looks great!

[TexasTransplant]

Addendum

It is a lot cheaper to mine this "product" if Mother Nature does the digging for you.

TT

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

The stuff wants to get out. Wouldn't it just pop out somewhere else?

[Dog Gone]

The geothermal component?

No, that's not it. We routinely deal with wells where the downhole temperatures are in excess of 500 degrees.

There's a mechanical problem here, because otherwise this would have been fixed long ago.

[Dog Gone]

If they drilled to 9300 feet without setting casing, then that's crazy.

[Dog Gone]

Well, not really. The pressurized zone where this was coming from was doing just fine until it found an escape route.

Plug up that route, and everything is back to normal. If anything, after spewing this stuff to the surface it's less pressurised now.

The question is how to secure the hole, set some pipe into it, and then plug the hole. Ideally, you want make sure there is cement at the depth where this mud is coming from.

I don't know if that's at 9,300' below the surface or somewhere more shallow.

[DB]

I don't know that they didn't set casing.

Put from the story the implication is that it has become a large hole with a continuous stream of mud oozing out of it. If it had casing it wouldn't have been as nearly a big a deal. And if there were a casing the volume of flow could have been plumbed elsewhere if not literally turned off.

[Dog Gone]

I'lI have to guess that if casing were set, it's no longer there, having fallen down thousands of feet to the mud reservoir. Otherwise, it should have been a fairly simple matter to fix.


If this is essentially an open hole to surface, there's probably no way to kill it now. Chains might slow the flow enough to set new casing and control the hole, but that seems like a long shot.

The chains would have to be heavy enough to get down against the flow of mud without being too heavy to simply disappear at the bottom of the mud flow reservoir.