Posted on 08/01/2010 10:31:06 PM PDT by NoLibZone
NEW ORLEANS
The only thing keeping millions more gallons of oil out of the Gulf of Mexico right now is a rush job: an experimental cap that has held for more than two weeks but was never meant to be permanent. As soon as this week, crews will be pumping in some insurance.
Engineers are preparing to launch a so-called static kill as early as Monday evening, shoving mud and perhaps cement into the blown-out well to make it easier to plug the gusher up forever and end the Summer of the Spill.
The effort carries no certainty, and BP PLC engineers still plan to follow it up days later by sending a stream of mud and cement into the bottom of the mile-deep underground reservoir through a relief well they've been digging for months.
But the oil giant's engineers and petroleum experts say it's the clearest path yet to choke the blown-out well and make it even easier for the crews drilling the relief well to ensure oil can never again erupt from the deep-sea well, which has spewed as much as 184 million gallons since the rig connected to it blew up in April and killed 11 workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
This is quite a post you’ve posted. Clear. Readable. Properly formatted. Links in place. This is great. Good job.
a ‘rush job’? Not quite. The first cap was a rush job. They had a lot more time with the second cap.
The cap would probably hold the well just fine for decades.
I have to wonder where they got that number. Diameter of the pipe * the unkown flow rate/ratio of gas to oil?
Given the state of the media, I expect the number may be overstated.
/johnny
>>> Engineers are preparing to launch a so-called static kill as early as Monday evening, shoving mud and perhaps cement into the blown-out well to make it easier to plug the gusher up forever and end the Summer of the Spill. <<<<
Poor quality article.
Presumably they are going to first try to remove the gas and oil from the well pipe by replacing it with mud.
Then if all goes well, they would then seek to replace the mud with concrete and be done with it.
Although perhaps the article intends to say that they prefer to inject the concrete from the bottom of the well.
Poor quality article.Yes, the quality is poor, and you specify where you believe the article is incomplete in its details about the operation to cap the well permanently, so the article was not so much poor in quality as under-realized in concrete detail, which means that the writer erred on the side of brevity over clarity in the sense of an exhaustive catalog of operations, a catalog that would have been lost on a non-technical reader such as me.
This is sure to disappoint all the folks that wanted to nuke it...
Everything I’ve read indicates that this is complementary to the relief well not in place of it. They still plan to complete the RW, starting as soon as the end of this week.
And the crews worked on anyway.
What does Barry have to say about this?
It is leaking real bad right now. Catastrophic failure is a certainty some time in the near future. Probably days to weeks. Wish them all the luck in the world. Here are some videos of its current leak rate. They have to clean the crude from the leak every hour or two now.
July 30th 2010 11:19 PM PST Skandi 1
Cleaning the 3 Ram Stack Seal Leak (3 minutes)
July 31st 2010 0:38 AM PST Skandi 1
3 Ram Stack Fast Leak Rate (35 seconds)
July 31st 2010 1:23 AM PST Skandi 1
3 Ram Stack Fast Leak Rate Closeup (2 minutes)
184,000,000 divided by 42, divided by 53,000, divided by number of days, or something like that. Looks like they’re using BP’s estimates for total flow, and excluding the oil that was captured, processed, and/or flared off.
I still want to nuke the entire site. From orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
There is no guarantee at all this is going to work. That is why they are calling it a test.
In fact on blown out wells (as this one is), the static and/or top kill method has never worked.
But this this method in conjunction with the relief well and bottom kill may yet be successful & stop the well, and then I hope they fill it from bottom to top with concrete. If they want to produce they can drill another well later.
Certainly looks like it. I am surprised that the entire system has held together for as long as it has.
Obviously then I would not fall into the camp of those who keep declaring early success and that no damage has been done to the GOM yada yada yada.
You Sir are correct ....
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