Posted on 06/18/2010 12:09:08 PM PDT by fso301
Offer a cash reward of $250mil to any party that actually plugs the hole. Also offer them zero liability for trying.
Establish a panel of PETROLEUM ENGINEERS to select the 5 entities that get to try...and have them present their plan.
There should be 1 or 2 who actually have a viable plan.
The government's, and by extension BP's problem is they are more concerned with political damage than they are with fixing it. They lack the necessary imagination and are risk adverse.
Won't work. They'll stick to the first ferromagnetic point they hit, which, given the circuitous route into the BOP that has to be used to "inject" anything at all (i.e. the former "top kill" injection lines, is well away from the leak point(s).
That cheered me up.
They couldn’t “destroy the well”.
Drilling other wells into the zone is pretty easy, once they’ve done it once. In fact, reports are that one of the two relief wells is within 200 feet of it’s target now.
Their first attempt was to seal the well using the BOP. That failed. Their second attempt to seal the well was by pushing mud into the well against the pressure. That failed.
The next attempt to seal the well will be pumping mud into the relief wells.
When that is done, and they concrete the well from the bottom, they will be able to re-drill when they want to start production, but my guess is if they are actually worried about damage to the casing, they’ll just do another well.
I don’t have an opinion on whether the casing is actually compromised, I know others have reported their speculation on this point.
Yep, another group, the "totally clueless". Most of them are Dems.
:}
Yeah I know the Curie point. The oil isn’t terribly hot however, from what I’m hearing. By the time the natural gas part gets out it is freezing cold. I’d think they would have to shoot each individual little magnet, or at most small clumps of them, down alone, through a narrow nonmagnetic tube, while somehow dealing with the oil that will be coming back up the tube. In clumps they would be hopeless.
Can’t stick a narrow nonmagnetic hose down past the BOP to the trouble spot? If the hose has a sufficiently slippery inner lining, the magnet could be made to slide down the hose and out the end. Or maybe building electromagnetic coils into the hose would facilitate helping each magnet along to its final destination.
I think you'd play hell keeping it from being attracted to the iron sides of the well casing, given the magnetic forces involved. You'd need something very rigid, nonmagnetic, and some way to keep it in the center of the well bore. And then you've got to somehow snake it past the obstructions in the BOP (those stuck pieces of drill pipe that were sheared off and can be seen in the photos of the cut end that was removed).
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