Posted on 06/03/2010 10:33:54 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The well has been capped, more or less. BP engineers Thursday night guided a containment dome onto the hydrocarbon geyser shooting from the Gulf of Mexico oil well -- a desperate and iffy attempt to capture the leaking oil and funnel it to a ship on the surface.
It was not an elegant operation. Furious clouds of oil escaped the "top hat." Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the spill, called the development a positive step but said, "It will be sometime before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment."
It was a day crammed with engineering drama. First, BP used robotic vehicles and a pair of giant shears to cut a damaged pipe a mile below the gulf's surface. The result simplified the whole arrangement at the sea floor: Instead of spewing from multiple leaks in a tangle of bent pipes, the oil and natural gas surged in a single plume from what looked like a deep-sea smokestack.
Then came the dome, lowered by cables, guided by robots, illuminated by lamps in a world without natural light, and carrying with it the hopes of countless engineers and pretty much the entire Gulf Coast.
Nothing has gone according to plan in the subsea environment as, on the surface, the oil has hit more than 100 miles of Louisiana shoreline. After brushing a barrier island in Alabama, it is poised to tar the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle. The area of the gulf closed to fishing is now larger than the state of Florida.(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Marinated (form of the word “Marine”) with oil?
I hope Obama gets to make his “Thank God I stopped the leak” speech soon.
(Because let’s face it, we all know that’s exactly what he’s gonna do once BP finally fixes this.)
good thoughts history. Watergate was a complete joke when viewed against the crimes of muslim BOY hussein.
The ineptitude, ignorance, “I-don’t-know-what” is REALLY starting to piss me off. This article was written MAY 3rd, and talks about they hope to have several of these fire-proof booms ready to go so. Can burn 75,000 gallons of oil a day off the surface of the ocean.
I have not heard them doing this - ONE FRIGGIN MONTH LATER! I suppose Obama is concerned about the “air pollution” or having to pay Al some carbon credits.
Here what I know and it's been a while so things may have changed .....
BP engaged Halliburton to seal the well so that they could transition to production from drilling. This process can't be done with mud in the drill pipe, so they had to either push it down or get it out. After the process was done the rig operator wanted to put mud back in, but the concrete has to cure and it's OK in sea water but to my knowledge it does not cure properly in mud. (at least it did not back in the day) It would venture a guess that this is what the disagreement was all about and in this case you ask for a higher up to make the call based on the subcontractors recommendations.
They made the right call IMO, but the well blew out before the concrete could cure. Something happened down below to put the well out of it's measured pressure ranges. Something that had not happened before.
The rig was lost when the natural gas got into the air intakes for the generators. There are several and they are very big. They overran and went wild, finally disintegrating like bombs. Had there been only oil, this would not have happened.
The real fault for the end result belongs with the BOP or Blowout preventer. These things are supposed to be foolproof. I don't know that there has ever been a failure of a modern BOP. They have all sorts of fail-safes and for some reason, not yet understood, the BOP and all it's safety fail-safes failed miserably.
I have a theory......and I'll mention it for posterity. I think it was a load of bad drill pipe. There has been a rash of bad pipe of all kinds including electrical conduit, schedule 80, and 120 plumbing and industrial pipe and lord knows what else coming from China and other places in Asia.
The composition of pipe is standardized and is supposed to be exact. That is to say that all tools and devices are rated for this pipe or that pipe but not those pipes....and so forth. They are rated for strength ans hardness as well as workability or malleability for cutting and bending as well as resistance to corrosion.
I think the BOP could not crush or cut the pipe which is one of the ways it shuts of the flow in a blowout situation. It could also explain some of the problems they have had cutting the pipe rack apart to clear the area for capping.
If true, this was not BP's or Halliburtons or Cameron Co. the BOP maker's fault. They never would have caught this unless someone too a sample to a metallurgist and had it run through a spectrometer for content and shear tested for specs.
Just some thinking out loud.
Having cut the existing pipe, I would have thought the next step would be to cinch a slightly larger (and flexible) pipe tightly over it. Instead, the “top hat” seems to rely on a very close tolerance fit which was frustrated when the diamond saw jammed. Rednecks can fix toilet leaks with duct tape better than this. They are going to have to take the “top hat” back off to do it right, and Bummer will never allow that.
Ummmmmmm No.....Just #4 shot.
Bad drill pipe from China. I know about economizing, but gee whiz. So the pipe would have been too hard/stiff for the blowout preventer, which it passed through, to crimp shut. Why do I get the sense that even if this is the case, nobody in China will ever pay for this (unless it is a couple of symbolic executions of high muckety mucks).
How come it wouldn’t be visually different (1000 BPD vs. 5-6 thousand/BPD)?
Dubya was the last president America had. Now it has an emperor, and nobody cares that the emperor is not presidential.
“Something happened down below to put the well out of it’s measured pressure ranges. Something that had not happened before.”
The testimony said they had been battling over pressures, loss of drilling mud, etc. for several weeks (months?) on this hole. It was a problem hole.
And I’m pretty sure it was not going to be put into production, it was an exploration hole. They were finishing it off and after filling the hole with seawater they were going to put a concrete plug in it. I imagine that could/would be drilled out in the future.
Interesting about the concrete not curing well with the mud in the hole. So a bit of a balancing act there on how long do you keep the mud in. I suppose long enough for the concrete to have enough strength so the mud can be removed. There is speculation that much of the the concrete they did put in was lost to the formation like had happened to the mud while drilling. And of course the cement-bond-log was not run to confirm/deny this.
Also good thoughts about the poor quality of steel from China. I think I read where the BOP was also made in China.
Too bad they have to wait for one of the two relief wells to complete the well properly this time.
Someone else had posted on another thread that your first thought was the first option, before the diamond saw got stuck. The second option, and ready to go I might add, was the “top hat”. I think someone said there were a couple of other devices sitting on the seafloor ready to go as well as backups.
The relief wells with more SH*T from China?
The primary issue is the hydrates being formed by the super cold natural gas. It turns sea water into slush and blocks the suction lines on their caps. This one has a water jacket where they are pumping warm sea water through it to melt the hydrates they also installe a four inch vent for gas and chemical injection. The suction line is only four to six inches it has to be for suction. They put a boot on the bottom of the new cap knowing it would not seal off on the bottom. The 30 inch one inch thick BOP top has been distorted and twisted as well, even before they used the cutter.
If this works to suck up enough oil consistently, they will redesign it to seal better or use some other method.
Humm, so basically the line is covered with frost. That does complicate things.
Watergate was flat-dog stupid.
Oh.... Good point. I’m not sure if anyone else still makes it!?
I read where they will be pumping methanol(?) into the joint in an attempt to prevent the hydrates from forming.
You cannot expect to know what is less or more oil, or less or more flow any more than you could tell if the robot was in the ocean or a fish tank.
That is why....
BP will present some data as soon as they can as to how much oil they are pumping up and that will leave us the approximate amount escaping.
Or they will go to plan D.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.