Posted on 05/30/2010 4:31:55 PM PDT by Hojczyk
Not enough travel in the BOP to get enough heavy mud on top of the oil and drive it back down. Waste of time from the start.
I’m somewhat familiar with directional boring, but the idea that they can hit a 1 foot target 10,000 feet below the sea floor seems fantastic..and dare I say, maybe impossible.
Maybe they should try to freeze it some how.
Continued:
MSNBC had Matt Simmons & some guy with a pipeline consulting firm. Both have enough knowledge to be dangerous. One is a journalist and the other an MBA, in short neither has ever drilled a well or been on a location and handled a kick and I'm sure neither has taken differential equations.
Somebody asked why they displaced the mud in the riser with seawater. They were about to temporarily abandon the well & disconnect the riser so they didn't want to dump the mud in the ocean. They didn't know that this 5000' of mud was the only thing saving them from disaster.
The explosions were set off when gas hit the rig floor and the carburators of the diesel engines sucked up natural gas and ran away. Put your car in park & floor the accelerator, it will finally blow the engine. Do this with 2000 hp diesel engine and the effect is devastating.
A cement bond log is used to evaluate whether there is cement behind the pipe. I would be flabbergasted if they did not intend to run the log at some point, but it blew out before they had a chance. CBL's are pretty good at establishing if you don't have a good cement job, but are not completely dependable to establish that you do.
I am as frustrated by BP as anybody, because these kind of disasters effect everyone in the business. Like any large corporation, I am sure thay are very bureacratic and back to the opening paragraph their technical people are still mired in trying to save money. They are finally reporting that they are going to cut the riser out of the way. I really don't understand why this wasn't step one. With the riser gone at least they have a clean opening to work with and the spill is not spread over a mile in three parts of the riser. I'm not sure that if they just close the blow out preventers the casing is strong enough to withstand without bursting. If they can get vessels to float near enough to the wellbore, I'd get a coil tubing unit with a tubing conveyed perforating gun and stab into the well, go in to 15,000' & shoot holes in the 7" and start pumping mud to do a bottom kill. Sounds too simple so there must be something I'm missing that prohibits this far under the ocean or the lack of buoyancy of the ocean doesn't allow them to get close enough to the wellhead.
The links are shown in the posts...but I wanted to share such a remarkably intelligent explanation from somebody who obviously knows WTF is going on down there and what likely happened.
I have since added his secondary contribution to that thread here for everybody's convenience.
Cheers!
>> I would think the oil may be a higher temperature than the sea water and thus prevent any freezing.
Perhaps, but the higher temperature could possibly be offset by a high enough rate of cold slush. You just need to be on the right side of the curve - the slower the flow of oil, the cooler it becomes (though, there would likely be additional heat from the pressure differential cause by the slush/ice blockage.)
The factors might be such that the pressure and heat of the oil source would overcome any type of cold injection save the instantaneous block of ice I envision seeing inside the breach. But once frozen, the oil is not flowing, and the heat factor is mitigated.
And once the riser is frozen, drill an injection port for the cement.
(disclaimer: I know the freezing idea sounds idiotic, but maybe one crazy idea might spawn a better one that could help to solve the problem.)
"...If there are 6 degrees of separation in the world there are only 2 in the oilfield. The "field" rumor is they had tools in the 7" that prevented the shear rams from working. Shear rams are steel designed to cut off anything in the blowout preventer and close.
What no one has talked about are the pipe rams. I'd bet money that they didn't change out the pipe rams to the diameter of the casing. If this is the case it doesn't matter what closing actuator you use.... electronic, hydraulic, mechanical or acoustic."
Nuke it.
Low yield tactical nuke pressure wave to collapse the well.
I saw one illustration that showed that it was possible that a drill pipe COUPLER ended up exactly at the shear ram location, thus preventing it from operating properly.
So Obama is claiming the solution as his to devise?
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