Posted on 04/22/2010 7:36:09 AM PDT by metmom
No fire in Indonesia - just mud, lots of mud... Still flowing nonstop. Google Lapindo Mud Volcano... Lapindo (owned by 1st or 2nd richest family in Indonesia)blamed it on an earthquake a few days before but it was the fault of the drilling crew who lost the well. Probably could have been stopped but they wouldn’t listen to “western experts” and wanted to try to control the well “on the cheap” and lost it forever... They even tried to drop in concrete “cannon balls” on chains to stop it but with no success...
“At this link, you might notice that in 2007 and 2008, the rig utilization actually drops in the fall and winter and the peak is in the summer.”
Yes, that is what I said.
That might be the case on conventional platforms that have legs extending to the sea floor and perhaps a downhole shutoff valve, but now that I think about it a deepwater drilling rig is probably different. Blowout prevention is more difficult in deepwater.
No it’s not; it’s the market place at work. .
If dairy farmers are losing money to produce milk; do you offer to pay extra at the grocery store when you buy milk?
No.
Should someone offer more than market price for a home if the seller is in financial distress and will lose money?
No.
Is it wrong to sell stock in a company if you think something bad is going to happen to that company?
No.
Let the marketplace work.
Coast Guard video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K-DEl42CTs
You cannot imagine the sound of a blowout, one of my first trips out the rig was doing a controlled vent of gas from its flare porch. From a mile away it sounded like standing next to a jet engine.
You will note the supply boats spraying water on the fire. Must be pretty toasty where they are!
Frgds,
3/M
Its doing it now.
Having to pay high prices for the product to the producers is bad enough, but having a legion of scalpers intrude themselves as middle-men in the form of speculators is despicable.
These are the kind of people who would be involved the black market and war profiteering under other circumstances.
Equating them with honest businessmen, capitalists, etc, who create jobs and wealth is an error.
They produce nothing but misery and I despise them.
Rust - BOP was rated at 15K and the gas bubble that migrated through the wet cement was a freak occurrence.
ALL OTHERS!
I WISH ALL THE HATEFUL RHETORIC, that this is a PLOT, to artifically increase the price of gasoline would SHUT THE HELL UP!
Your CONSPIRACY crap, is not needed.
These men were setting the pipe and plugs and getting this well ready for future production
LOST THEIR LIVES
GOOD FLIPPING GRAVY!
Keep the conspiracy shit to a minimum...
Talk is the gas came up through the cement and would NOT have been contained by the BOP.
BOPs = Blow out Preventer. They come in various configurations, but they will have various chambers and mechanisms that “grab” the pipe or tubing.
You set them up in a stack that do different things -— rams, different sizes to grab different sizes of pipe, diverters, even ones that cut the pipe and shut it down.
When you are underbalanced (when the well is coming to see you due to lack of head pressure or a gas bubble or somesuch) the BOP should stop this or be able to divert it somewhere where it can be flared relatively safely (on land, over the pit or something).
Anyway, there are a host of different ways BOPS can be closed or a well diverted, just depends on what happened and your set up.
Here, they will probably send in underwater robots (again, depending on location of the BOP) to close it off.
Thank you very much! I’m happy to learn something every day.
The speculators that you don't like; were on the other side of those trades and lost their rear ends.
Their money on the other side, allowed SouthWest to execute it's fuel hedging strategy.
Same with a farmer planting a corn crop right now. Or Ford Motor locking up input prices.
Or a mortgage lender offering mortgages to customers today; but that won't close for 3 months.
Illiquid markers make these things hard to do.
Hey! Who do you work for? I’m a derrick designer with WCI. We do a lot of TransOcean rigs, although not this particular one.
I understand what you are saying. But won’t their actions drive energy costs so high that at the current time, it will further wreck the economy?
The real solution is to incresae supplies by allowing drilling off shore and on the Alaskan Slope and allowing oil shale production, as well as increasing nuclear energy plants, natural gas usage and start using coal again.
But the leftists who run the government are unlikely to do this regardless of the need. Even Bush waited too long to lift his father’s moratorium on North Slope drilling.
When gas prices were going up during Bush’s last term the media gave us day-by-day accounts of the increases. Today they seem to be ignoring it.
My point came across incorrectly - from October 07 to October 08 the jack-up trend was upward including the winter of 08. The rig barge utilization rate was also flat with no seasonal decreases. “Seasonal” has nothing to do with it as you imply when it comes to rig utilization (other than those areas mentioned before). It’s all about the economics, not seasons. You do see seasonal increases and decreases in gas pump prices but these fluctuations are due to demand and the blends (i.e. summer blend gasoline) the refineries are required to produce do not affect the rig utilization as many of the offshore rigs are committed to long-term/multiple well contracts.
It’s worth every penny you paid for it.
I second the motion to stop the nonsense about a “plot.”
I own a drilling company (land) and this stuff just happens, especially when drilling high pressure or intentionally underbalanced.
Not sure about gas coming up through cement. I can’t say I haven’t seen it, but cement is heavy and even a big bubble should have been easily controlled.
IMHO (and speculating like mad here), I would propose they were drilling underbalanced on purpose to prevent formation damage, counting on their BOP to do its job, and it didn’t do its job.
A 15,000 BOP should have a margin of safety to 30,000 or more. (Indeed, that would be what the factory tested it to and should stand, if assembled correctly.)
I never let third-parties assemble my BOPS on high pressure or intentionally underbalanced wells.
this is insane...when did the boat tie up with the survivors...like 12 hours ago...and a search is STILL in progress....sheeeesh
I thank you for your informative post, but I think it’s in response to somebody else. Still, I tend to lean against ‘plots’ because life is so risky one is wasting one’s time formulating one. The timing is bad, to be sure, but it could have been worse, and in one way is good: it takes the focus off the Wall Street speech. If industry types are agile, they could be using mike time to explain all that this thread has been pointing out and getting the jump on the leftist crisis-mongers.
I’m not in a position to see what the TV meme is right now.
Since we are working offshore and the ATM of pressure that comes with deep water would account for a catastrophic gas bubble at surface.
A small bubble at depth when it rises would EXPAND to huge proportions.
The talk has been that the cement was not set, gas came up through the cement and when it neared surface expanded to a huge FLASH.
The only thing that can be said for the missing men, is that it hit so hard and fast, they never knew what happened.
Prayers to all who work in and around a wellhead, whether it is on the surface of 5000 feet below the surface of water.
IT IS NATURE, it is something that man has tried to tame, control, collect and distribute.
As for the BOPS, it is easy to think it was the expendables that gave way, but from some investigations of BOP failure, many other things have to be considered. If the BOPS had seen a bunch of H2S on other jobs, the BOP may have been pitted (damaged internal or structurally) and wouldn’t have made it self apparent during a 7 minute HOLD test in a shop. That test looks for obvious leaks.
It will be interesting to find out:
Where the BOPS third party rentals? The last intrinsic test performed, and whether or not the BOPs had seen too much H2S?
Also will be curious as to the last time the rams had been replaced.
This well was being P&A.
Plugged and Abandoned, HOW could anyone associate a P&A with a cut in production?
Deep water is still new to the industry, and the associated risks are huge.
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