Posted on 05/22/2010 6:51:24 AM PDT by valkyry1
There remains a distinct possibility that the leak will continue for several months. There is a greater than zero probability that the situation will actually worsen - despite or perhaps even because of the best efforts to stem the flow.
I am not very optimistic in BP being able to solve this in 2-3 more months of drilling. Hurricane season is approaching. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this effort taking the rest of this year. In which case, the gulf states are in serious trouble. I live in Mobile and can see the very real possibility of desperate times ahead for those of us here.
The current well spent slightly more than twice the scheduled days of active drilling that were originally planned, and it did not have to mill through steel in the final foot.
It seems like now the main issue is how can we get this gusher stopped, and 60-90 days is not liveable for those who are affected and the seashore, marshes, wildlife, etc.
The nuclear device would be far underground.......Not much radiation from that
I have to ask just how much oil industry experience you have. You make drilling a few precisely spaced holes around the wellhead sound simple, but that isn't. You make placing explosives in those holes sound simple, but that isn't.
No industry experience but I see diagrams of the two relief wells intercepting the gusher well at a few thousand feet down? Do you know the depth of interception? Should be fun actually finding and drilling through the steel pipe down there. If this can be done then 3-4 deep holes could be drilled close to the well casing for explosives to be placed
You make it sound as if this is going to fix the problem, but that may not be so, even if you can get four explosive charges to flawlessly detonate simultaneously when one BOP would not function with two sets of double redudancies, and have it happen the very first try.
The US military can advise on the explosives
There are some crazy numbers flying around out there, going from 42000 gallons a day to now 50,000 barrels and up. There are people calling for 'nuking the well' (which, frankly will guarantee no more gulf seafood for me--ever). There are the usual spin doctors out there screaming this is The End Of The World As We Know It (Hey, they have to do something now that the last end of the world has been exposed as a fraud.)
It's been a fraud from day one calling this spill in gallons instead of barrels.
If I had a dollar for every line of misinformation, disinformation, hyperbole, outright error and lies on the internet over this oil spill, I could pay off the national debt and have plenty to live comfortably.
So let's take a step back from the keyboard, take a deep breath, and logically examine the situation.
There have been blowouts before, there have been (much) larger spills.
Mexico had one. That's their business and water to contaminate, plus you think you'll get honest information from PEMEX on environmental damage?? Forget it!
That hasn't killed off the oceans, and the last time I checked the map the Gulf of Mexico is still 'connected'.
You are aware the Gulf is a semi-confined area. Deep water drilling for oil off the Brazilian coast is in the open ocean
More oil is 'spilled' into the environment annually by nature (natural seeps) than human activity.
I am aware of that but these seeps are dispersed all over the world. We are talking about a runaway oil well in one specific spot
That is nonsense. The world's oceans will not be killed off but you can render the gulf pretty sterile in the next two months of gushing before the two relief wells hopefully end this nightmare
Oil may be considered toxic because we can't drink it, but it is a natural and organic substance. It will break down, evaporate, be eaten by bacteria, and be dispersed by natural processes.
Oil is organic....people use petroleum jelly on their skin so how toxic is that. But oil and it's by products can be toxic. Breathe gasoline fumes all day long and you will be very ill.
The Ixtoc blowout in 1979, the 'big' one which went on for nine months, was in the Bay of Campeche. Check out where that is on the map. It might have been Mexico's problem, but those Mexican waters are the southern bight of the Gulf of Mexico.
We don't need no steenkin' PEMEX data on what happened to the Gulf of Mexico from that, we have our own.
As I have said, it is the coastal wetlands which need protection the most, the beaches can be cleaned up later, the marshes are the spawning areas, the real rookeries of nearshore life, not the stretches of sand the tourists frequent.
Now that may conflict with some heavy economic interests, and I guess we'll see what the (government) priorities are.
At the present, BP is doing what they can to intercept as much oil as possible before it even reaches the surface, put dispersants on the oil that is there, and get the well under control.
When the Ixtoc blew out, who did they call? Americans. In this case, the best in the world are on the problem (and I'm not talking about the government agencies who have not held up their part of the emergency plan and who are mostly finger-pointing and posturing).
I'm not really sure why the fetish for using a nuke on a well that has only been blowing out a month--especially when all else has NOT failed, and the conventional means of getting the well under control (while in progress) take a little time and are in progress. In fact, of all the offshore blowouts, this one has an unprecedented amount of oil being recovered from the collapsed riser, before it gets to the surface, up to 5000 bbl/day.
Is anyone putting this into perspective?
Nope.
Instead people are acting like there has never been a submarine blowout or a wild well before, and they are going straight to the nuclear option.
Ernest_at_the_Beach posted an account of what went wrong, and it shows a diagram of the wellbore. Your conventional explosives would have to collapse up to eight casing strings and the cement holding those in place to seal off the well, plus seal off the places where the explosives were set off. Wells have been known to blow chunks of rock out of the wellbore as large as would pass through the casing, and to merely ooze against the pressure of the seawater above the wellhead, the fluid has to be coming out at more than 2200 psi. If 16.8 ppg drilling fluid would just hold the formation back, you are looking at about 4400 psi.
In a nutshell, and even acknowledging the ability of some to work with explosives, you are not going to seal this off by blowing anything up down there.
Put your best powder monkey on the problem, if you want. you have as many as eight layers of casing, some with water in between, some with cement, and you have to seal them and the annular spaces and the space the explosives were in as well against fluid at 4400 psi. and do it from a wellbore which starts a mile under water.
Not happening.
You may end up redefining the problem as more complicated, with more---and less controllable--leaks.
The relief wells are making progress. One is past 8000 ft, which is nearly half way to the 18000 ft. target depth.
We routinely (when a few feet laterally do not matter) drill 9500 ft. sideways in the Bakken in a four foot thick zone in a week to ten days. It would take longer to hit a smaller target, but then survey data from the existing wellbore tells the directional drillers where they need to be, and they likely have the 'next' generation of steering tools which permit greater precision than the ones we are using. We 'steer' from roughly 50 ft. behind the bit, the newest tools are surveying from only a couple feet back and steer while rotating.
There are a number of casing strings whick will have to be cemented in place in the relief wells, which enable the drilling company to use heavy enough mud to keep the deeper formations under control without losing that mud into the less consolidated shallower rock layers. That is why there are so many different strings of casing in the wellbore now. Considering one of the wells has been drilling for just over two weeks, and the delays for running casing, they are doing quite well.
The nuclear device would be far underground.......Not much radiation from that
You think the Mexicans lie to you about the oil coming out of the Ixtoc, but think the Russians have been completely forthcoming on radiation leakage from nuked subsea wellbores? At least we could see the effects of the PEMEX well on the Gulf. We know what to expect, more or less. With the detonation of a nuke, you may very well end up with just as much oil in the Gulf, and the problem of that fluid bringing up daughter products from the explosion as well. Even the Russians did not get 100% results.
Maybe that option would be worth consideration if all else had failed, but all else hasn't even had time to work, and some of it hasn't been invented yet.
As a professional geologist with over 30 years experience in the industry, I'll go on record right here and now as saying that not only do I think nuking the wellbore is folly, it is likely to cause far greater damage to the Gulf ecosystem in the long run than controlling the wellbore with conventional means.
I grew up in a tidewater region, lived on the water, and understand the importance of salt marshes to the ecosystem, which is why the preeminent efforts should be placed on protecting those areas.
Years of washing invert mud off drilled samples on wellsite indicate to me that the larger particles on a beach are far easier to clean than the much finer sediment in the marshes, and that the tourist beaches should be lower on the priority list for protection than the far more complex coastal marsh and wetland areas.
While you are here pushing the nuclear option, maybe you could take the up the standard of protecting the ecosystem more than the beach bunny industry, and help ensure the recovery is faster by protecting the most fragile part of the Gulf ecology.
Keep in mind that the underground nuke tests in Nevada were conducted under very controlled conditions, the wellbores used to emplace the nukes were well sealed, and they still had leaks to the surface.
You are proposing setting off a nuke next to a complex and unsealed wellbore, with yet another wellbore to emplace the nuke, which more than doubles the risk of leakage to the surface of the oil under pressure, and creates the risk of those fluids taking radioactive products of the explosion to the surface. Even the smallest fractures can have a darcy or more of permeability, and it is likely the fluid would only escape more quickly with time. At that point, no one is going to want to drill into a nuked reservoir to produce oil or gas that is likely to contain radioactive materials to lessen the reservoir pressure, so you would only have a bigger mess.
Your posts are very informative but you are the one obsessing about nukes. You mention it ten times more than I do. If an underground nuke would seal off this well I would not hesitate. It would be a small nuke and the radioactivity would be buried. And no, I don’t trust a few internet sites about Russian success or failure using nuclear weapons on runaway oil wells.
Since nuking it does not seem to be a way to end it....then don’t use one.
You are the one who repeatedly suggested them.
My 'obsession' about them is that they would be a dangerous, unsure, and most probably ineffective misapplication of technology, especially when there is a known, effective, and better way.
Yea ,...let’s widen the Hole...ROFL!
Informative post, thanks.
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