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According to the Transocean website, the riser devices on the Deepwater Horizonwere manufactured by VetcoGray, a division of General Electric Oil & Gas. The specific designation is a "HMF-Class H, 21-inch outside diameter riser; 90 foot long joints with Choke & Kill, and booster and hydraulic supply lines."
Here's a photo of something similar. These are Vetco risers sections that I saw on another vessel, the Transocean Discoverer Inspiration, when I visited that ship last month:
The different color stripes on the risers indicate differing amounts of buoyancy. The idea is to put heavy riser pipe down at the bottom, connected to more buoyant risers above. The buoyancy
keeps the entire riser system in more or less neutral buoyancy, so that the drill ship doesn't have to somehow hoist up the huge weight of all that pipe.
As you can see, there's a large-diameter pipe in the middle of each riser. That pipe is then encased in a buoyant foam substance. The risers are bolted together at the flange sections. The bolts are about as big as the arm of a very strong man. The nuts, which tighten things down, are the size of paint cans.
After the risers are assembled and hanging down from the drilling vessel, the drilling personnel lower and raise drilling pipe through the large-diameter center riser pipe. All the drilling mud stays inside the drill pipe on the way down hole, and inside the riser pipe on the return.
On the side of the riser sections, you can see smaller-diameter pipes. These are choke & kill, booster and hydraulic pipe components. The pipes run parallel to the large-diameter inner pipe. These pipe systems run down to the blowout preventer on the seafloor.
The idea is to keep the drilling process an enclosed system. All the "drilling stuff" -- the drill-pipe, drilling-mud and drill-cutting returns -- stays inside the large-diameter pipe. The smaller pipes
hold fluid to transmit hydraulic power and help control drilling. In particular, the pipes on the side aid in communicating with and controlling the blowout preventer.
Technical Specs
Ideally, when the risers are working as intended, nothing leaks out into the sea. Then again, you're not supposed to twist and bend the riser sections like a pretzel. So how strong is a riser
system? Extremely strong, actually.
According to technical literature from GE Oil & Gas, the riser equipment is "designed for use in
high-pressure, critical service and deep-water drilling and production applications." The pressure-containing components are rated for working pressures of 15,000 psi. That's the same as the Cameron blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon. The materials used in risers have
exceptional tensile and bending load characteristics.
According to Vetco paperwork that I've seen, the Class H riser sections have a 3.5 million pound
load-carrying capacity. That's the equivalent weight of about four fully fueled
Boeing 747s. These risers are super strong.
Still, it's not just any one single piece of riser section that does it all. These sections all get bolted
together, for 5,000 feet in this case. The riser sections all have to work together as a system. The whole string is only as strong as the weakest spot. And yes, even the strongest steel will break if you apply enough stress.
It all has to work together. You've got the riser sections, along with things called HMF flanged riser connectors. Then there are HMF riser joints; flex joints; telescopic joints; and, near the top, things called "fluid-bearing, nonintegral tensioner rings." Together, these all comprise the marine riser system.
In general, the riser components compensate for heave, surge, sway, offset and torque of the drilling vessel as the ship bounces around on the sea surface. The bottom line is to maintain a tight seal -- what's called "integrity" -- between the subsea blowout preventer stack and the surface
during drilling operations.
Down at the bottom, at the seafloor, the risers are connected to the blowout preventer by a connector device. The GE-Vetco spec is for a device that accommodates 7 million foot-pounds of bending
load capacity. That's about eight fully fueled Boeing 747s.
What's the idea? You want a secure connection between the high-pressure wellhead system and
the subsea blowout preventer stack. That's where mankind's best steel meets Mother Nature's high pressures.
High pressures? You had better believe it. And in this case, Mother Nature won. So looking forward, there's going to be a lot of forensic engineering on the well design and how things got monitored
during drilling. Transocean drilled the well, but BP designed it. So the key question is how did the down-hole pressures get away like they did?