Posted on 05/31/2010 2:38:39 PM PDT by omega4179
That was what I was thinking.
IP
I’ll be working out of town next week trying to pay the rent.
Might have internet access late at night from the motel room.
Y’all ping me if anything exciting happens!
I’ve been watching Viking Poseidon - ROV 1 for over an hour trying to place a 1” air impact wrench on a bolt and now it finally got it on the bolt but it will not turn.....Watching paint dry comes to mind.
Did anybody else catch the ROV’s arm using what looked like a $2 wood-handled wire brush on a nut and bolt?
Earlier in the day yesterday the operator was slow and methodical and just couldn’t get it to work. Last evening I swear they had a 20 year old who’d just finished 5 expressos who was literally throwing the tools at the bolt. He did everything he could to mangle the nut and strip the threads.
I’m not sure what they got done but at one time yesterday they had 11 ROVs in the water. I believe they are trying to hook up additional lines to direct oil from the BOP to the ships. They’ve actually started putting brief descriptors on the screens of some of them so you know what they are working on.
Gasket. Typically a copper crush.
Release date: 07 June 2010
BP today provided an update on developments in the response to the MC252 oil well incident in the Gulf of Mexico.
Subsea Source Control and Containment
The lower marine riser package (LMRP) containment cap, installed on June 3, continues to collect oil and gas flowing from the well and transport them to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship on the surface. On June 5, a total of 10,500 barrels of oil was collected and 22 million standard cubic feet of natural gas was flared. From June 3 through June 5, the volume of oil collected was 16,600 barrels and 32.7 million standard cubic feet of natural gas was flared.
Optimization continues and improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days. It will be a few days before an assessment can be made as to the success of this containment effort.
This is a complex operation, involving risks and uncertainties, being carried out 5,000 feet under water. The LMRP containment cap never before has been deployed at these depths and conditions, and its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured.
The volume of oil captured and gas flared is being updated daily on BP’s website, www.bp.com
Preparations for additional planned enhancements to the LMRP cap containment system continue to progress.
The first planned addition will use the hoses and manifold that were deployed for the “top kill” operation to take oil and gas from the failed Deepwater Horizon blow-out preventer (BOP) through a separate riser to the Q4000 vessel on the surface, in addition to the LMRP cap system. This system is intended to increase the overall efficiency of the containment operation by possibly increasing the amount of oil and gas that can be captured from the well and is currently expected to be available for deployment in mid-June.
The second planned addition is intended to provide a more permanent LMRP containment cap system by directing the oil and gas to a new free-floating riser ending approximately 300 feet below sea level. A flexible hose then will be attached to a containment vessel. This long-term containment option is designed to permit more effective disconnection and reconnection of the riser to provide the greatest flexibility for operations during a hurricane and is expected to be implemented in early July.
In the meantime, work on the first relief well, which started May 2, continues and has currently reached a depth of 12,956 feet. The second relief well, which started May 16, is at 8,576 feet, and testing of the BOP is continuing. Both wells are still estimated to take approximately three months to complete from commencement of drilling.
Surface Spill Response and Containment
Work continues to collect and disperse oil that has reached the surface of the sea, to protect the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, and to collect and clean up any oil that has reached shore.
More than 2,600 vessels are now involved in the response effort, including skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels. Operations to skim oil from the surface of the water now have recovered, in total, approximately 368,000 barrels (15.5 million gallons) of oily liquid.
The total length of containment boom deployed as part of efforts to prevent oil from reaching the coast is now over 2.2 million feet, and an additional 2.4 million feet of sorbent boom also has been deployed.
To date, approximately 37,000 claims have been submitted and more than 18,000 payments already have been made, totalling approximately $48 million. BP has received more than 152,000 calls into its help lines.
Additional information
The cost of the response to date amounts to approximately $1,250 million, including the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf states, claims paid, and federal costs. This excludes the $360 million in funds for the Louisiana barrier islands construction project. It is too early to quantify other potential costs and liabilities associated with the incident.
Thanks. :-)
Do you or anyone else know if they were successful in getting the socket on the nut and removing it? Why wouldn’t they have tried flaring out the bottom of the socket? I was also concerned they were going to screw up their chances by messing up the threads or the flats. It almost looked like they didn’t have enough clearance between the pipe wall and the inside of the nut for the thickness of the socket or the size of the drill was getting in the way!
They got the socket on, but I don’t think they had enough umph to turn it. I’m not sure what plan B is. It looked like they were planning on using part of that pipe for the additional relief as BP discussed in the press release I posted above.
What’s going on now?
I wonder what the possibility is that they weren’t actually trying to remove the bolt just yet, but testing to see if their tools can get into place to efficiently remove it. I mean, it might be that they don’t know how well they can remove the bolts if they decide to unbolt the flange at the riser for more radical options further down the road, esp as the cap they have on now will eventually no longer be of interest to anyone and they will have to do something radically different anyway to give the illusion they are being proactive. The impatient viewing public and socialist government will be demanding it.
That said, if they were trying to remove the pipe and could not, that is yet another potential big issue to get past. Maybe they have plans like backup pipes or hoses of different kinds to attach at other places on BoP instead to relieve pressure. This could be yet another worrisome situation, but then again, anyone really paying close attention can see that the mechanics in charge, so to speak, have done surprisingly well in adapting to problematic situations so far. SO yet again, more prayer needed.
The first planned addition will use the hoses and manifold that were deployed for the “top kill” operation to take oil and gas from the failed Deepwater Horizon blow-out preventer (BOP) through a separate riser to the Q4000 vessel on the surface, in addition to the LMRP cap system. This system is intended to increase the overall efficiency of the containment operation by possibly increasing the amount of oil and gas that can be captured from the well and is currently expected to be available for deployment in mid-June.
The second planned addition is intended to provide a more permanent LMRP containment cap system by directing the oil and gas to a new free-floating riser ending approximately 300 feet below sea level. A flexible hose then will be attached to a containment vessel. This long-term containment option is designed to permit more effective disconnection and reconnection of the riser to provide the greatest flexibility for operations during a hurricane and is expected to be implemented in early July.
It looks like they are rigging up more pipes to the surface to get oil out of more ports. If you look right now one of the ROVs is looking at another containment cap that they just lowered to the bottom.
Thanks for letting me know. Hopefully they have other ways to get the pipes on the BoP other than unbolting that system if they need to.
I don;t have access to the live feed so I was wondering, can you tell yet if the bolt was stuck and that they were trying to unbolt that part to get a pipe on or something or if it was just practice ? If the bolt is stuck it may mean they can’t get a pipe out to relieve pressure so they need to find another waty to get pressure relieved, perhaps using those hoses you mentioned, before they can collect more of the oil. I also wasn’t sure if the bolt was on the actual BoP or somewhere way up on the riser pipe. It seems to get harder to tell exactly what it is they are even trying to do now, and with no live feed it compounds it.
Thanks
Thanks for the info. It looks like two more caps are standing by!
5000 posts! Any interest in this story?
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